>> >The general problem was the US bedding down with bad guys to do bad things,
>>
>>That's a huge problem, but generally not for the US. Where's the terrorist
>>"blowback" for US policy in Latin America or Indochina?
>
>As I said, it was bound to happen sooner or later with something. As
>for Indochina, remember they beat us, so they didn't have that
>reason to sulk. Besides, they, and formerly Latin American
>revolutionaries, were Marxists of some sort, and Marxists generally
>disapprove of terrorism.
In addition to counterposing the mass struggles of Social Democracy (Marxists) to individual terrors of anarchists, Narodnaya Volya, Social Revolutionaries, etc., Trotsky analyzed the social and cultural conditions that gave rise to the prevalence of terrorism under the Russian autocracy.
***** ...Before the very idea of destroying absolutism by mechanical means could acquire popularity, the state apparatus had to be seen as a purely external organ of coercion, having no roots in the social organisation itself. And this is precisely how the Russian autocracy appeared to the revolutionary intelligentsia.
This illusion had its own historical basis. Tsarism took shape under the pressure of the more culturally advanced states of the West. In order to hold its own in competition, it had to bleed the popular masses dry, and in doing so it cut the economic ground from under the feet of even the most privileged classes. And these classes were not able to raise themselves to the high political level attained by the privileged classes in the West.
To this, in the nineteenth century, was added the powerful pressure of the European stock exchange. The greater the sums it loaned to the tsarist regime, the less tsarism depended directly upon the economic relations within the country.
By means of European capital, it armed itself with European military technology, and it thus grew into a "self-sufficient" (in a relative sense, of course) organisation, elevating itself above all classes of society.
Such a situation could naturally give rise to the idea of blasting this extraneous superstructure into the air with dynamite....
<http://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/works/1909/tia09.htm> *****
With some changes, one can see the problem of the Gulf states in Trotsky's analysis of the Russian autocracy above.
Most of us in the USA and other rich nations know very little about the history and current social relations of nations in the Middle East. It makes sense to take a closer look at them. -- Yoshie
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