[lbo-talk] Amanpour on self-censorship

Charles Brown cbrown at michiganlegal.org
Tue Sep 16 11:00:07 PDT 2003


From: "Luke Weiger"


> CB: Actually, when the Mujuahaedeen were fighting the Soviets, the "NLF"
was
> the Afghan government.

You must take a rather dim view of the NLF, then--I haven't seen anyone attempt to argue that the Afghan communist regime was anything more than a Soviet puppet government with next to zero popular support.

-- Luke

^^^^^^

CB: On the contrary, I highly respect the NLF's. The NLF in Viet Nam was not "the" NLF. National Liberation Front was a general Marxist-Leninist tactic applied to many of the national liberation movements against imperialism in the period of a large number of colonial revolutionary struggles after WWII, right up through those in Afghanistan, Mozambique, El Salvador etc. NLF's were a Communist Party idea for leading and organizing socialist oriented anti-colonial ,nationalist , you know.

Perhaps you are still behind the iron curtain of anti-Soviet propaganda , and that is why you have never seen anyone argue successfully ( let alone attempt to argue) that the Afghan national liberation movement and government was an expression of mass opinion and interest in Afghanistan.. . For starters, 50 % of the population, women, probably favored throwing out many of the old male supremacist practices, being able to go to school , and the like. This was a highly democratic, programmatic element of the socialist oriented government. Overthrowing the king was, of course, generally, a very democratic measure, too ( cf, for example, the anti-monarchical principles of the American Revolution). There were a number of other popular changes and practices. Close to zero support is almost certainly way off, a U.S. media version of events there then.



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