John Gulick wrote: > Julio, I probably owe you an apology for my (ADD-addled) selective reading > habits and denunciatory word choices, but if you closely inspect my posts > you will find that I'm not necessarily bashing the Dengists for their late > 1970's policy turns, but instead expressing my distaste for CPUSA-style > rhetorical gymnastics, which inevitably defend those policy turns using the > very same language and the very same rationales as the propaganda organs > of the party-state. To me it smacks of intellectual dishonesty, which I rather > detest. We're among fellow travelers here and don't have to prettify matters > for a hostile audience.
No hard feelings. > I know the folly of entertaining alternative historical scenarios, but I must > say > at some future date I would like to explore what could have been had the > USSR and the PRC not permitted the Sino-Soviet split to amount to such a > disabling schism... but to do so honestly would be such a monumental task, > involving the casting off (or at least rethinking and recombination) of a > dozen > or more sectarian Maoist-Stalinist-Trotskyist-etc-etc-etc interpretations. I don't think it's folly. It's one of the most fruitful exercises in historical analysis. There are many lessons to be absorbed from that experience. What would have entailed for China after Mao to resolve this satisfactorily with the Soviet Union? No doubt an early and serious settlement of the issues would have helped the international communist movement. At some point, they did normalize relations, although the normalization didn't avoid the invasion of Vietnam in 1979. The conflict had been breeding since the late 1950s or early 1960s. What was really at stake in the conflict? After Mao's death, was the CCP in a position to deny support to the Khmer Rouge or to stop the invasion of Vietnam in 1979? I know that Fidel tried to mediate. Ignacio Ramonet, in his long interview of Fidel, says so. Apparently, Fidel tried to marshal the non-aligned movement to push China and the Soviet Union to talk and settle. Marta Harnecker, in her "La izquierda en el umbral del siglo XXI", shows how in the 1960s and 1970s this conflict made it very hard for the left in Latin America to unite and become a significant political force in the region. _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
