----- Original Message ----- From: "Michael Pugliese" <michael.098762001 at gmail.com> To: <lbo-talk at lbo-talk.org> Sent: Wednesday, October 25, 2006 12:45 PM Subject: Re: [lbo-talk] Feminism and the False Memory Syndrome
> On 10/25/06, Charles Brown <cbrown at michiganlegal.org> wrote:
>
> > CB: I lean to your side in believing Bettina Aptheker because of the
legal
> > evidentiary principle that it seems to be a statement against her own
> > interests. (And I have a fundamental bias to wish what B. Apthker says
is
> > not true in that Herbert Aptheker is one of my heroes, penpals.)
>
>
>
> ---------- Forwarded message ----------
> From: Editor-H-HOAC <haynes at mail.h-net.msu.edu>
> Date: Oct 25, 2006 6:41 AM
> Subject: CPUSA and 1956 Hungary (Schwartz)
> To: H-HOAC at h-net.msu.edu
>
>
> From: "Stephen Schwartz" <karastjepan at yahoo.com>
> To: "H-Net Network on American communism and anticommunism"
> <H-HOAC at H-NET.MSU.EDU>
> Sent: Tuesday, October 24, 2006 11:52 PM
> Subject: Re: CPUSA and 1956 Hungary
>
>
> In my view, what is interesting about Hungary, the impact of it on the
CPUSA,
> and the Aptheker book, is simple. Hungary's insurrection was the first
event
> televised around most of the non-Communist world. Even people in
Communist
> states knew what happened. Everyone in the CPUSA knew what happened.
>
> For Aptheker then to put his signature on a work of apologetics for the
Soviet
> massacres in Hungary represented an act of denial so colossal, in the face
of
> such total evidence, that I believe it exceeded anything any CP
intellectual had
> ever before attempted. It did not succeed. In my experience CP people in
> California considered the book embarrassing even 7 years later.
>
> Aptheker's THE TRUTH ABOUT HUNGARY demonstrates to me, more than any
other
> example, that for a few Stalinists there was no objective standard of
truth
> whatever. I saw this myself at the time of the Soviet invasion of former
> Czechoslovakia in 1968 when American CP liners argued with complete aplomb
that
> the invasion was necessary to prevent an incursion by then-West Germany.
>
> It does not seem to me useful to simply say that Stalinists were always
liars.
> Some lies were bigger than others, because the truth of the real situation
was
> so obvious to so many people. In reality, few people in the West had the
> context or information to comprehend that the Moscow defendants of 1936-38
were
> not spies and traitors, that the POUM and CNT in the Spanish war were not
> fascist elements, that the anti-CP trade union leaders in the U.S.
maritime
> industry were not company finks, even that the Soviet Yiddish writers were
> innocent martyrs. All such matters, with the notable exception of the
> Stalin-Hitler pact, were cloaked in deliberate obscurity, and the
burgeoning
> power of mass communications used to further confuse matters.
>
> But as I recall, although I was a child, the suppression of Budapest was
> carried out with such naked, open impunity that there was no questioning
what
> happened; CPs in the U.S. and elsewhere were shaken; Tito was horrified...
but
> somehow Herbert Aptheker considered all that irrelevant when it came to
> bestowing his signature.
>
> I would add that I don't know of any sustained work on the Spanish war,
on the
> assassination of Trotsky, in defense of the Hitler-Stalin pact, or on
Tito, the
> postwar purges, or the Yiddish writers, produced by the CPUSA milieu, that
would
> compare with the Aptheker volume on Hungary. The wretched Sayers and Kahn
books
> on the purges and the vast anti-Soviet conspiracy were apparently not even
> written by them.
>
> Stephen Schwartz
>
>
> --
> Michael Pugliese
>
>
> --
> Michael Pugliese
> ___________________________________
> http://mailman.lbo-talk.org/mailman/listinfo/lbo-talk