En relación a RE: [CrashList] KLA Attacks Everyone; Media Attac,
el 3 Mar 01, a las 22:30, Mark Jones dijo:
>
> > the
> > gap that the Soviet leadership had left wide open after Yalta
>
> eh? What gap?
Oh, Mark, the gap that Ho, Mao and Tito had to jump over in order to carry
their revolutions ahead in spite of opposition from Moscow.
>
> >and
> > the attempt
> > to bring some appeasement to the aggression from the West by way of
>
> eh? what appeasement?
The one they, obviously, could not get. But they _tried_. In my own opinion,
Stalin had arrived at the conclusion that the differences between Churchill and
Hitler were not only suprastructural, but that somehow these differences spelt
some structural difference between Germany and Britain. If I have to judge for
what the Argentinean Communists believed in those days, dear Mark, the portrait
I am offering is even rosy.
>
> >
> > It was an attempt to keep the revolution in the periphery going on
> > in spite of the reluctancy of Soviet leadership.
>
> Stalin said something like "The export of revolution is nonsense. Each country
> will make its own revolution if it wants to do so, and if it does not want to do
> so there will be no revolution." But this was in the context of scrambling to
> create the Soviet A-weapon in response to Hiroshima, and of a general assault,
> ideological and political, on imperialism. Not exporting revolution seems
> reasonable to me, in the circs. It was Lenin's policy since at least 1921. What
> *should* Stalin have done? Unoriginal dogmatic answers should be directed to Jim
> Hillier's list, not here. Lenin was the first Soviet leader to speak of
> "peaceful coexistence".
Thank hou for the qualification of "unoriginal dogmatic". Sorry to tell you you
are wrong. I was not speaking of a reluctance to export revolution. If this had
been the case, I would have been with Stalin. The problem was that the Soviet
Union exported wishy washy pacifism, what someone here defined as the "pink
Rooseveltianism" that replaced "red Leninism". And the leaders in the non-
alligned movement DID oppose this pacifism.
>
> > In fact, a good deal of the resources of
> > the imperialists were engaged in this struggle, resources that
> > would have been
> > directed against the USSR and China if this had not been the case.
>
> Yeah, yeah, whatever.
Why, Mark, will you deny the above? Britain was fighting even the Mau Maus by
the early / mid 50s, and the United States did not curb Philipino revolution
before late in the 40s. Wasn't this a concrete expression of support, objective
support, to the Soviet Union. Why should one play down each one's contribution
to the history of the revolution during the last century? Only because the
Soviet Union crashed? You know that I know how horrible a drama this has been,
but I am afraid you are carried away too easily on these issues.
> Now, about Tito and the "Non-aligned" movement. This, in
> your view, was, unlike the Soviet policy, a "non-reluctant" and truly
> revolutionary wave in the peripheries, eh? Don't think so. It was a Trojan
> horse.
No evidence supports your view. You are just asserting things (in the same way
you simply assert that J. Israel is some kind of a cheerleader of the SPS)
without proving them. You know I like you and I love you, but this does not
turn you into a God Almighty. There WAS a revolutionary wave, a wave that ran
counter the Soviet policies, but what is more serious, that ran FOR the Soviet
best interest. This is a bone of contention between you and me, and you know
this. So that, if we are going to have a debate on the issue we must present
evidence. So far, you have not. I presented some.
>
> >
> > Mark, probably, means that in the Non alligned movement there were
> > bourgeois
> > and non-bourgeois regimes sitting next to each other. How could it be
> > otherwise? It was a tragedy, a political tragedy (and thus _not_ an
> > unescapable
> > one), that the leadership of the USSR did not realize this.
>
> This flies in the face of *what actually happened* and what Soviet leaders
> said about Tito-ism. They rejected it because it was obviously and on its
> face, an accommodation with imperialism.
No, it was an independent way which took into account the fact that imperialism
existed. On this, Tito was nearer to Lenin than Stalin. And, please, don't
guess that I am a Titoist. In fact, I am just an Argentinean Marxist who knows
little of this world outside his own tiny country. But on the Yugoslav issue,
it is quite slanderous in my opinion to accuse Tito of being a wedge only
because he attempted to follow the path of Yugoslavs, not the tune of Russia.
Macdonald has said something on the consequences already. It is not a matter of
chance, as he points out, that it was precisely in Yugoslavia that the
socialist project lasted so much, and is still breathing.
>
> > What would Tito have had to do? He did not want to accept the leadership of
> > Russia, he wanted Yugoslavia to follow its own step towards socialism.
>
> If Tito thought the South Serbs, all 14 million of them, could create their own
> socialist utopia among the seaside resorts and mountains of the Adriatic, he
> must have been a raving idiot, which however, he wasn't. What he was, was
> convinced that the USSR would survive and that thus his own little evolutionary
> niche would be conserved. He was wrong on all counts.
Not more wrong the leaders of the USSR, who also believed that the USSR would
survive and outpace the West. The merit of Trotsky on all this is that he was
probably the only one who did not forget that the USSR might dissolve, that the
gains had not been strongly buttresed, that socialism in one country was a
nightmare in one planet. Tito simply adapted to the situation he found, and in
this he simply did what most leaders of backward countries did by the same
time.
> It would have served the
> Yugoclav peoples better if he'd taken a different long-term view, don't you
> think? There is a word for this kind of sell-out. The other word is predatory
> opportunism.
It would have served all of us beter if the people with longer-term views had
kept in power in the socialist countries. This, alas, did not happen. What we
had was a group of leaders who could hardly see farther than the length of
their extended arms. And some could only see their own armpits. Tito left
behind him something better, and more lasting, than any other socialist leader
in Europe. This should mean something to you, Mark, since you could personally
see what happened in the fSU (none the less!). Had the Russians been linked to
socialism the way the Serbians demonstrated to be, then we would be having a
very different world today.
And, by the way, Tito was not dreaming of 14 million Serbians. He was dreaming
of a Balkan Federation (which included the Greek and the Bulgarians), and if
this did not coallesce (Stalin, as you know, had something to do with all
this), then of a Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. Transforming Tito in a Serbian
hero (he, who was born in Croatia) is more or less the same as turning our
General San Martín into an Argentinean hero, or Bolívar into a Venezuelan one.
Leave that for the British imperialists, Mark. It is not worthy of you, not at
all.
>
> >He did
> > not want to surrender his arms, as the Greek communists had been
> > forced to do
> > under Soviet pressure,
>
> This is a hoary old Trot canard! What on earth are you dragging us into here?
Really a hoary old Trot canard? I guess you suppose Michel Raptis (Pablo) is a
liar. I don't. I heard the story from his very lips when he visited Buenos
Aires in 1974, and it sounded very convincing. Most important: the story he
told fit as a glove fits a hand our experience with domestic Stalinists.
>
> >he did not want to have his own country
> > become a piece
> > in the checkerboard of Europe drawn in Yalta. The Balkans were, as everyone
> > knows, "reserved" for Great Britain.
>
> No, they were not. On the contrary.
Britain could not get the whole chunk (didn't it include Poland? what had they
been supporting Anders for?). But this does not mean that Churchill did not
expect to rebuild British supremacy in the Balkans such as it had existed
between the two Great Wars.
>
> >Tito's reluctance to follow
> > this ruling
> > took him to independence from Moscow. After that, he (together with
> > Sukarno,
> > among others) tried to devise an independent road for the revolting
> > peoples in
> > the periphery.
>
> This is mythopoeising nonsense, old friend. You are a dear old pal and
> comrade, but you obviously have a sore tooth today.
That "mythopoesising nonsense" makes a lot of sense to me (and you are also a
dear old pal, which does not imply that we can't disagree strongly on some
issues: if I were not such an old pal, I would leave your comments unanswered).
And my teeth are in excellent condition today.
> >
> > Growling hugs,
>
> rebartatively likewise.
OK, then let us get at each other's throat (as you see, the wrestling contest
you imagined for the CrashList has at last got me!)
Anyway, a hug,
Néstor Miguel Gorojovsky
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
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