HTTP://WWW.STOPNATO.ORG.UK
---------------------------
Heather,
Though I agree with your position, I tend to try
and examine questions through a variety of paradigms and extract general
principles.
Class, alas, is the prime determinant. The
hyper-patriotic Yankee bourgeoisie have far more in common with the bourgeoisie
from across the globe than they do with their own laboring countrymen. If
'nationalism' were a reality, in a nation such as the US, with a super abundance
of everything, there would be no homeless, hopeless, jobless masses...but we all
know the grim reality.
Historically, unfortunately, freedom, equality and
anything vaguely resembling democracy are but fleeting. History tends to
show that brutality, repression and violence (especially on the 'state' level)
are by far the norm. And, just as Niemoeller so poignantly pointed out, it
is usually caused by good people simply turning a blind eye to the absolute evil
perpetrated in their name by the state, and usually for a pitiful few crumbs of
relative (but fleeting) safety.
Though the Soviet system (as practiced) was hardly
real socialism (the elite were the elite, just a different elite), it was by far
a more beneficial to the Russian rank and file than anything seen before.
Though huge and rich in raw materials, Russia never exploited its resources with
the endless greed exhibited in the West. However, with far fewer liquid
resources than the imperialist and exploitative West, Russia did far more in
terms of making more livable the lives of the laboring masses than the West has
to this day.
----- Original Message -----
Sent: Saturday, January 12, 2002
00:51
Subject: Re: Richard: On Latvia ( or: Why
I hate Gorby) [WWW.STOPNATO.ORG.UK]
HTTP://WWW.STOPNATO.ORG.UK
--------------------------- Richard,
They (before-Gorbachev leaders in the
USSR) were for socialism. Can you imagine them all taking money
today from the bourgeiosie and saying nothing about the death of socialism in
the USSR? I guess I can't.
I am passionately on the side of the
working class around the world. Those who oppose it or who lend themselves to
defending capitalism are the enemies of the children of the world, they are
the enemies of freedom and dignity.
I cannot imagine anyone who I
respect working consciously for the foundations and think tanks taking blood
money to live and "work," as Michial Gorbachev does. He is a class enemy. If
he were not, he'd be criticising everything; poverty, the wars in Yugoslavia,
Afghanistan, the World Bank, the IMF, WTO.
He's be organizing Russians
to take back their nation by force of arms from the felons who are destroying
it. He's be in the streets of Moscow and (I hate this name) St. Petersberg
(Leningrad, for goodness sake, LENINGRAD!!), with the workers, on strike,
looting the food stores, defying authorities. Organizing, fighting, agitating.
He'd be telling the world that the USSR came to the aid of the Marxist
government in Afghanistan because the US and Pakistan was supporting the
feudal brutal Mujahadeen. He'd be saying that that government gave women
freedom, educated the children, was trying to bring Afghanistan out of the 7th
century. And the US, in its most expensive CIA contra war EVER destroyed
it.supporting the Taliban and the Northern alliance and the heroin trade.
Gorbachev would talk truth. Silence. he is silent.
I don't know who
you are, Richard, but you must remember the part in John Reed's Ten Days
that Shook the World in which a revolutionary soldier stopped a bourgeois
group from promenading across a bridge and walking past the building that
housed the Bolshevik government. When they asked to pass, he refused them,
saying that either you were with the proleatiat or the bourgeoisie, and the
only people who could pass were with the proletariat.
Or do you know
the US labor song, Which Side Are you On?
That is what this is about.
This isn't about whether you think it was nice to have Glastnost or
Peristroika, it is about how these policies helped lead to the destruction of
the USSR and led to the wholesale death of the Soviet people. And the end of
revoulionary movements everywhere.
This temporary cessation of the
foward movement of the working class will have cost several hundred million
lives around the globe by the time the workers of the world finally organize
revolution.
Under socialism ,one can't afford to have well-intentioned
policies. One must fight agaisnt bourgeois tendencies and resist the
imperialists who are always going to try to annihilate socialism.
That
cretin Fukayama talked about an end to histroy. The Enlightenment was stopped.
Capitalism won, all was ducky for the rich. It was not; but in the 1980s and
1990s capitalism spread around the world like a terrible scourge and the
revolutionary immune system that was found WHILE THE USSR WAS STILL EXTANT was
destroyed.
Now that the capitalist system is globally tanking, now
that the overproduction in every nation is choking the economies, now that the
only real profits can be found in war, now the working class will be
waking up. In Argentina, the left has put aside their differences and is
talking and working together. In the US, young people are joining together to
fight for civil liberties and agaisnt war. These are small, but indicative
developments.
Are you familiar with the Turner Thesis? This is
the final appication of it. The US has rub out of frontiers, the capitalists
can't invest many more places, the system has really outlived its usefulness,
and Gorbachev isn't on the same page as those who know this. He
worries about pollution. That's nice. So does the Sierra Club and the
Boyscouts, but they aren't on the side of the working class, and neither does
that "great leader" you admire.
Heather
I will stop.
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