[lbo-talk] Stalin, democrat

Michael Pugliese michael.098762001 at gmail.com
Sun Dec 4 05:29:07 PST 2005


On 12/3/05, andie nachgeborenen <andie_nachgeborenen at yahoo.com> wrote:Reminds me of H. Bruce Franklin's astounding preface to a (Doubleday? Signet?) anthology, which I am sure I still have somewhere, called The Essential Stalin, in which Franklin defends the purge trials of the 30s, denies or justifies the Stalin terror, and generally whitewashes the evil sonofabitch and his crimes. Don't know whether Franklin (who has written excellent stuff on Melville and on the POW/MIA cult, among other things) would still stand by those ravings.
> Well, in the Soviet days -- pre-Gorbachev, I mean --
> "democrat" didn't mean "kleptocrat," the way it does
> now, or even, "pro-capitalist neoliberal," way it did
> under Gorby. It meant behaving in a personally
> relatively egalitarian manner, not getting all
> high-hat, being the sort of person you would want to
> share a shot of vodka with -- or, this being the USSR,
> a bottle of vodka
>
> Of course Stalin was a cruel tyrant who, among hsi
> other defects, kept anyone even remotely near him in
> a state of terrified subservience, and often helped
> them to other sorts of shots, nine grams in the back
> of the head. But he was _perceived_ as "democratic" in
> the old Soviet sense, sort of the way that W is
> perceived as regular guy, man of the people, decent
> (and formerly) straight-talking fella. (And not as a
> privileged Yalie/Hahvahd grad from a multimillionaire
> family.)
>
> Actually, W is precisely "democratic" in the old
> Soviet sense. And every bit as mean as Stalin,
> personally, if nowhere near as smart, but, thanks to
> centuries of democratic (in the normal sense) struggle
> by ordinary folks here, comparatively constrained in
> how he can take it out on folks at least at home.
>
> Now, the article is utter nonsense. Reminds me of H.
> Bruce Franklin's astounding preface to a (Doubleday?
> Signet?) anthology, which I am sure I still have
> somewhere, called The Essential Stalin, in which
> Franklin defends the purge trials of the 30s, denies
> or justifies the Stalin terror, and generally
> whitewashes the evil sonofabitch and his crimes.
> Don't know whether Franklin (who has written excellent
> stuff on Melville and on the POW/MIA cult, among other
> things) would still stand by those ravings. Of course
> a lot of us said and thought foolish things in the old
> days. Anyone else know that silly preface? The
> anthology was quite useful for work on the USSR that I
> used to do.
>
> jks

Know of it, why, of coarse, I do ;-) Posted here on it a few yrs. ago,

A few months ago, after sending him <jbfranklins at compuserve.com> some ravings by a Korean War vet on the POW/MIA's I asked him if he still stood by that preface in the Doubleday/Anchor anthology.With a few quibbles he said, yes, by and large.Wish I'd saved the e-mail.Franklin in the early 70's wasn't a youngster. He is a Korean War vet himself.

http://mailman.lbo-talk.org/2002/2002-May/013651.html Re; Ho Chi minh and the '45 Declaration of Independence. See the book by OSS veteran Patti Archimedes Patterson from U.C. Press that the Noamster recommends. http://www.google.com/search?q=Archimedes+Vietnam+Ho+&btnG=Google+Search

Yoshie>...***** The Anti-War Movement We are Supposed to Forget

H. Bruce Franklin in the Chronicle of Higher Education

Betcha he'd like to forget this! http://www.owu.edu/~jawaldma//stalin1.html Introduction to The Essential Stalin: Major Theoretical Writings, 1905-52 by Bruce Franklin (Garden City, New York: Anchor Books, 1972), pp. 1-38.

I used to think of Joseph Stalin as a tyrant and butcher who jailed and killed millions, betrayed the Russian revolution, sold out liberation struggles around the world, and ended up a solitary madman, hated and feared by the people of the Soviet Union and the world. Even today I have trouble saying the name "Stalin" without feeling a bit sinister.

But, to about a billion people today, Stalin is the opposite of what we in the capitalist world have been programmed to believe. The people of China, Vietnam, Korea, and Albania consider Stalin one of the great heroes of modern history, a man who personally helped win their liberation. This belief could be dismissed as the product of an equally effective brainwashing from the other side, except that the workers and peasants of the Soviet Union, who knew Stalin best, share this view. For almost two decades the Soviet rulers have systematically attempted to make the Soviet people accept the capitalist world's view of Stalin, or at least to forget him. They expunged him from the history books, wiped out his memorials, and even removed his body from his tomb. Yet, according to all accounts, the great majority of the Soviet people still revere the memory of Stalin, and bit by bit they have forced concessions. First it was granted that Stalin had been a great military leader and the main anti-fascist strategist of World War II. Then it was conceded that he had made important contributions to the material progress of the Soviet people. Now a recent Soviet film shows Stalin, several years before his death, as a calm, rational, wise leader.

But the rulers of the Soviet Union still try to keep the people actually from reading Stalin. When they took over, one of their first acts was to ban his writings. They stopped the publication of his collected works, of which thirteen volumes had already appeared, covering the period only through 1934. This has made it difficult throughout the world to obtain Stalin's writings in the last two decades of his life. Recently the Hoover Institute of Stanford University, whose purpose, as stated by its founder, Herbert Hoover, is to "demonstrate the evils of the doctrines of Karl Marx," completed the final volumes in Russian so that they would be available to Stanford's team of émigré anti-Communists. (In preparing this volume, I was able to use the Hoover collection of writings by and about Stalin only by risking jail, directly violating my banishment by court injunction from this citadel of the Free World.)

The situation in the U.S. is not much different from that in the U.S.S.R. In fact the present volume represents the first time since 1955 that a major publishing house in either country has authorized the publication of Stalin's works. U.S. capitalist publishers have printed only Stalin's wartime diplomatic correspondence and occasional essays, usually much abridged, in anthologies. Meanwhile his enemies and critics are widely published. Since the early 1920s there have been basically two opposing lines claiming to represent Marxism- Leninism, one being Stalin's and the other Trotsky's. The works of Trotsky are readily available in many inexpensive editions. And hostile memoirs, such as those of Khrushchev and Svetlana Stalin, are actually serialized in popular magazines.

The suppression of Stalin's writings spreads the notion that he did not write anything worth reading. Yet Stalin is clearly one of the three most important historical figures of our century, his thought and deeds still affecting our daily lives, considered by hundreds of millions today as one of the leading political theorists of any time, his very name a strongly emotional household word throughout the world. Anyone familiar with the development of Marxist- Leninist theory in the past half century knows that Stalin was not merely a man of action. Mao names him "the greatest genius of our times," calls himself Stalin's disciple, and argues that Stalin's theoretical works are still the core of world Communist revolutionary strategy...

------- Forwarded message ------- From: "Michael Pugliese" <michael098762001 at earthlink.net> To: jbfranklins at compuserve.com Subject: Fwd: Re: H. Bruce Franklin -- M.I.A. or Mythmaking in America Date: Thu, 13 Oct 2005 19:46:11 -0600

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article10606.htm

------- Forwarded message ------- From: "The Old Dawg" <mgnc46 at yahoo.com> To: michael098762001 at earthlink.net Subject: Re: H. Bruce Franklin -- M.I.A. or Mythmaking in America Date: Thu, 13 Oct 2005 18:29:19 -0700 (PDT)

With all due respect, Sir, you are pissing up a rope with this claim. During my 30 years in the military I spent a tour at both NSA and the Pentagon. I have seen the classified documents that prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that we left POW's and MIA's behind in all three of the last major wars.

I would also remind you that there exists in academia a plethora of folks who receive huge grants to write "documentaries" that support the governments published positions in such manners.

Perhaps if you would study the record of one Robert Garwood, a Marine captured in Vietnam in 1965 and who was never returned as the other POW's were in 1973. Garwood was able to pass a note to a Swedish diplomat in Hanoi in 1978. This diplomat notified his ambassador who contacted the State dept. When this was made known to Hanoi, Garwood was immediately released. Because this occured after Nixon said "all the POW's were home" the Marine Corps had no choice but to try Garwood as a corroborator. They even claimed he molested a young girl while he was being detained at Paris Island---problem was---the day they said he molested the young girl---he was with his attorney, Mark Waple in Fayetteville, North Carolina. The government retracted it's story---in a very small story in the back of most newspapers when Waple contacted them with the truth. Beore his trial Garwood passed two different polygraph tests in which he testified to having seen 52 Americans still in captivity at the time of

his release from Hanoi. I have personally talked with Robert Garwood and found his story totally credible.

My wife's brother was an EWO (electronics warfare officer) as a rear seater in a F-105 Thunderchief. An honor graduate from the US Air Force Academy who was shot down over Hanoi in 1972. To this date my wife has received 43 different versions of what happened and where her brother was shot down. Therefore, you are going to have difficult time proving your theory on this end regardless of how many academic works you reference.

MG

Michael Pugliese <michael098762001 at earthlink.net> wrote:

-- Michael Pugliese



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