Should have have the same subject line as the mini-thread re-started by Yoshie's parenthetical supposition at the end of a recent post http://nuance.dhs.org/lbo-talk/current/0256.html that the US Merchant Marine mutinies of the coast of China and/or Vietnam, were led by those that had been active in or on the periphery of Popular Front Communism. I'd seen mention of it being more led by Trots from the SWP, like Fred Halstead, and the Schactmanites in the Workers Party. Think, the post after this one, I cited an article in the US SWP journal of the Barnesites, New International #7, by Mary Alice Waters (Mary not Alice!,Chez Panisse has a great expensive lunch upstairs!) on the "Send Us Home!" movement of radicals soldiers who both wanted to be demobilized and harbored sympathies for anti-colonialist mvmnts.
The ?'s on revolutionary defeatism, are of coarse, very germane. Sometimes though I prefer a more literary treatment, than say one of Ernest Mandel's last books, the one on WWII, that Norman Geras in NLR, had some critical comments on. . Try, the book by Spanish ex-Communist, J. Semprun, "Literature or Life, " about his time in the Nazi camps. One aspect of the camps, that writers like Eugen Kogon, remarked on and that Semprun brings up as well, is the use by the camp admin. at Auschwitz, etc. of the KPD political prisoners as enforcers on lower ranks of prisoners. See Wolfgang Sofsky, "The Order of Terror: The Concentration Camp, " Princeton Univ. Press, 1997, " for a more recent theorization. Jeffrey Herf, in his book on post-war narratives in East and West Germany on Nazism, also goes into this. And, now that I might have opened a flamefest(!) what about the Slansky trial in Czechoslovakia in '52? Arthur London wrote a book on this blurbed by Sartre, I have around here somewhere.Radosh and Milton posit that the Rosenbergs were ignored at first by the CPUSA, until the Slansky trial, made Eastern bloc paranoia about Titoite-Trotskyite-Zionists operative. (And, no Charles, I'm not saying there weren't CIA intrigues, a whole load of them, I used to know a former Voice of America employee from Austria that told me stories about the CIA and the Hungarian Revolt in '56. Two newish books on this are the Peter Grose, "Operation Rollback: America's secret War Behind the Iron Curtain, " Houghton Mifflin, 2000. And, "Undermining The Kremlin: America's Strategy to Subvert the Soviet Bloc, 1947-1956, " Cornel Univ. Press, 2000. Michael Pugliese