CB: Neither the Vietnamese , Eastern Europeans nor the Chinese termed
themselves "Stalinists". They were Marxist-Leninists. Your use of the
term slanders and disrepects them , and wrecks civil discussions on
these issues. It's a provocation.
To refer to people who don't consider themselves Stalinists as
Stalinists is none other than Trotskyist/petit bourgeois revolutionist
slander, childish namecalling, unworthy of this list.
The response to you should be to refer to by some similarly insulting
label.
==============================
I also winced when I saw the reference to "Stalinists", but the writer is
invariably fair-minded and I don't think in his case there was any malicious
intent. It's a hackneyed hangover from Trotskyist dogma which holds that the
parties which endorsed the Khruschev speech could not be absolved of their
"Stalinist" past so long as they did not repudiate popular fronts with
bourgeois liberals, "stages" theories of development, or fully rehabilitate
the Old Bosheviks, notably the Left Opposition. It was regarded as analysis
rather than an insult, notwithstanding that by these criteria most
socialists active in broad-based reform movements who necessarily find
themselves allying with liberals and favour the extension of such alliances
into the political arena could be tarred with the same brush.
Whatever the pretence at objectivity, many Trotskyists used "Stalinist" as
an epithet in much the same way CP'ers and their other political enemies
venomously referred to the "Trotskyites". Glad you refrained from replying
in kind. Political slurs, as you note, can be as destructive as ethnic
slurs, even when they're not conscious.
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