>
> Just why do we need this now? Why this ceaseless harping on the gulag?
> GItmo seems a tad more urgent right now.
>
> Doug
It's the (ex?) Catholic in me. Penance. Stalinism was the self-inflicted set of practices and ideological crudities/binaries/crimes against the Left by members of our extended family. Harry Truman or JFK or the Dulles Brothers didn't torture Bukharin and put a pickaxe in LDT's skull. Cynics who betrayed a great revolution did.Who killed more Communists, Hitler or Stalin? JVS did. The painful soul searching of Communists and ex-CPUSA and Comintern cadre, like John Gates, Junius Scales, Joseph Starobin, Dorothy Healy, Al Richmond, James Weinstein, Fernando Claudin, Joe Clark (whose daughter joined the Weather Underground, negating what her Dad had learned) , from which the New Left thought they could agnostically ignore as the tired schisms of the Old Left, had their payback scant 7 yrs. after the Port Huron Statement in PLP vs. RYM I, and RYM II, Praxis Axis vs.
Action Faction, Weatherman and the alphabet of M-L groups of the 70's that recapped the whole tragectory/tragedy of Stalinism, Trotskyism, Lovestoneite, Oehlerite and all that from the 30's.
As Aronowitz who can't tuck in his shirt relates in the autobiographical portion of , "Roll Over Beethoven, " about his Popular Front upbringing, and as I can relate from my Italian and Polish-American relatives, class conscious to a tee, but also ferocious anti-communists and George Wallace voters in '68 and '72, there are/were masses of American workers that in the 30's and 40's that were more than happy to accept the cadre of the CPUSA to build their unions against the Ford Motor goons but, when it came to believing the Communist ideology and replicating 1917, they were more than skeptical. And having relatives back in Eastern and Central Europe that in letters could tell of repression by Communists of fellow Communists, they wanted none of that. And, as a Trot friend, then in the SWP, can relate the middle class intellectuals that "colonized" and "industrialized" factories in the 70's and tried to bore from within, brought little concrete benefit to working class struggles. And as Dave, my Trot pal tells, when they approached picket lines (PLP in the most piquant example he tells) they got they petty-bourgeois ass kicked.
And this, "only work on pressuring/struggling against the USG boot on our/everyone else in the world's back/neck" line, and this isn't the time to harp/carp on the past (which some of us have never thought through) mistakes of the Left because after all aren't we just so much more moral (as Dwight Macdonald in Politics skewered a column by James Cannon, "The Only Moral People in the Universe.") than liberals and socdem sellouts and finks, while, 3-4.7 million have been killed or died of prevatable disdeases in the DRC in the last decade or as I just read in, "The Bridge Betrayed: Religion and Genocide in Bosnia, " U.C. Press by Michael Sells (who doesn't let the USG or NATO powers off the hook at all for Bosnian slaughter) that by '95 there were twice as many Bosnian Muslim refugees than in the Nakba of '48, then one can question the priorities of some sectors of the radical left.
I can read someone like Norman Finkelstein (who I shouldn't have rubbished a few yrs. ago, and whose revised edition of one of his Verso Books has a great critique of Michael Oren on the Six-Day War, taken from the just previous issue of thew Journal of Palestine Studies) or Avi Schlaim or the Electronic Intifada website and then I'll go to a pro- Palestine demo and see the most incendiary simplifications, imagery like Zionism = Nazism, leaflets being passed out citing Holocaust Revisionist neo-fascist shit, and then talk w/the kaffiyeh wearing activists and bring up Finkelstein and they have a blank expression. There is such a disconnect between the acdemic left and the activists that even such as Joel Beinin that bridge that divide must be amazed at the types that attend too many of the rallies, as uniformed as the right-wing Zionists I talked to at a Likudnik rally here last yr.
And on Gitmo etc., didn't anyone else see the report by a division of the DoJ last week, saying that round-ups of immigrants by Ashcroft/Dept. of Homeland Security had been, shall we say, just as repressive as the 1919 Red Scare?
-- Michael Pugliese