I support Soviets, the Bolsheviks destroyed them quite early on, Charles! ;-) Like 1920 or so, no? Your origins in Gus Hall Thought are showing. Anti-Soviet agitation was the catch all along charge (#175, if memory serves from the GULAG Archipeligo) with, "hooliganism, " in the fSU for making a joke about JVS. For more on Soviets see, Maurice Brinton pamphlet, "The Bolsheviks and Workers Control, " or Carmen Sirianni book from Verso on The Bolshies and Workers Control.
CB: Your commentary on this point too is an attempt to twist the basic pro-Jewish act of establishing a Jewish Autonomous Region in the SU, something that no other country did, into an anti-Jewish act. Your anti-Sovietism makes you try desparately to twist facts into their opposites.
Tell us more, if you know more than I, which is cursory as I said, about The Jewish Autonomus Zone. Was it part of Stalinist nationalities policies aimed at breaking up, for example, the territorial integrity of the restive, Chechen Republic?
>I say because of your anti-communism...
Anti-Stalinism, not anti-communism. I'd have fit in quite well into the PCI in the 70's or Rifoundiza Communista or Il Manifesto grouping. More I read you and your ilk, no matter how nice, in particlular compared to Lou or Carrol, the more I see self-deception and wishful thinking. Noam Chomsky blurbed a book you should read, "States of Denial, " by S. Cohen. On why, people of all political pesuasions, find it hard to admit that political regimes they identify with may find it impossible to see them as, like any human phenomenom, as full of contradiction, good and evil. As CLR James says below, the repression in the fSU I harp on to you and others that stubbornly keep on whingeing about "CIA provocations" is the other side of the outpouring of revolutionary, democratic energy unleashed in 1917, and smashed in the 30's by the Stalinist apparatus. And, not just against anti-Stalinists in the Party, but, alot of Stalinists too in the madness. ("Thus the Russian revolution, as it developed and declined, showed us the two most violent extremes that we have known in history. . .The creative power, the democratic desires, the expansion of human personality. . .called forth the violence, the atrocities, the state organised as Murder Incorporated. Only such violence could have repressed such democracy."
- CLR James)
Now, if you could get in touch again with the feelings that originally radicalized you and I and everyone else here, you might begin to see how much the official Communist movement, along with all the more than obvious CIA and Pentagon hot and cold and psywars against it, was fatally, destroyed from within, by the development, of what Polish and Serbian workers (or Maoists) called, the Red Bourgeoisie. What Shactman called, "bureaucratic collectivism, " Djilas and Max Nomad called, The New Class."
Final comment to my previous on this thread, was there in all this on Zionism, some poster on Harry Truman and the recognition of Israel which made parenthetical comments on teir perception of what Soviet motives in recognizing Israel were? Given, the anti-semitism, still quite virulent in the US then, and the undeniable, anti-semitism of Stalin, I can't see that fSU recognition was motivated by solicitude towards Jews esp. after the Holocaust. Real-politik, nothing more, nothing less, on both sides. When it comes down to it, Jews aren't very much liked by either the Soviets or the US...Used at times, as various here say as tools in US Power Projection, and most of the time, more headache than they are worth for all the moola and weaponry they get. Kinda like Cuban-Americans! Heh, cut off US AID To MIAMI! Michael Pugliese, now I'm really gonna get it!
Time to get a 40 ouncer at the corner store!