G'day Chas,
It must seem like I follow you from list to list just to disagree with you
....
Conditions can be such, and usually have been just after insurrections, that
an ordinary man can become a'great' one in the historically influential
sense. Stalin, whom Zinoviev and Kamenev helped put in the chair at Leon's
expense, had it available to him to become what he was to become (and he was
already an experienced killer) - and he duly became an experienced killer
with Tsar-like powers. He became a mass murderer. Appeals to the murderous
excesses of the west and the tendentious exaggerations of western historians
don't cut it. People died, in their hundreds of thousands, who neither
needed nor deserved to die - not by accident, not as the collateral damage
('premature deaths') of imperfect policy, but as the victims of a 'great'
man - made 'great' by a system capable of making, indeed likely to make,
just such a man. They died because Stalin sat atop a totalitarian system.
*He* killed 'em, because a system many of his victims helped put there
(yeah, yeah, within particular historical constraints, an' all that) allowed
him to.
Never mind WW1 and imperialist conflicts between competing powers - never
mind that the bolsheviks under Lenin were constantly faced with ugly choices
that led to a political system amenable to gross and obscene distortions -
never mind S&K's pro-Stalin machinations - mind only that socialists today
have to reckon with the history of socialist revolutions. It's a history
that teaches anything is possible - that the people can make anything happen
in the most inhospitable of circumstances - that socialism has proven itself
a cause that has moved and transformed people just as Marx said it would -
*and that hitherto it has evinced fundamental and tragic flaws that
absolutely must be reckoned with here and now*.
I don't know enough about China to say a dickie-bird on that (but I'm with
Lord Acton on absolute power and the individual), but I reckon we gotta look
at the future without (as Marx has it in the 18th Brumaire) 'the tradition
of all the dead generations weigh[ing] like a nightmare on the brain of the
living'. We're not in the business of defending Stalin, we're in the
business of promoting socialism - which, as Zinoviev realised too late,
ain't anywhere near the same thing. To think otherwise is to put all of us
back - again and #!* again.
Nuff said.
Rob.
