Comments on: Can we make a loud enough noise on Iran?

By: Jim Withey

Jim Withey — Sun, 14 May 2006 18:39:24 +0000

This is a hell of an impaww for the ruling slass”; that’s good to hear. I think that any society has to question and generally oppose its rulers, unless we reach a more benign state of affairs. Hwwever, opposing tyranny is a difficult problem to confront.
Confronting power that is bad or evil must be done with the understanding that such power will try to “keep tabs” on those who are working against their domination. It’s almost as if they are “reading your mind” to find out how the can stop yow and become more powerful and tyrannous. This goes for all governments heretofore known. The people must find ways to stop this and form more progressive societies.
I would think it clear to people who are paying close attention to events, that the U.S. power is quite ambitious and interested in achieving domination over the world, which includes its own population.
The important question involves how to go about first opposing this evil and then constructing something progressive in its place.
The Nationl Security state is expanding its powers to mine information on its population in order to undoubtedtly repress those forces of progress. It’s important for those people who consider the long term as well as their own self to be careful about the choices you make. Since the tendency is for evil to always accrue more power (and money, because power is used to acquire money and vice versa), one must consider the complexities of the situation.
Not everyone should be so careless with what they do, and their vocational choices matter as well. Many people who call themselves “left” or “progressive” aren’t really that way. They might be intelligence agents, or phoneys, or out for career advancement and so forth. It’s important to realize that not all rich people are bad and that many poor people are bad. Each person must use his judgment as to who they think is working for the greatest good and who isn’t.
As far as myself, I’ve gone down the path of open resistance to the tyranny of power, which may not be right in whole or part for others to do.
At this point, it’s probably a good idea for me to continue, albeit thoughtfully and carefully with my path of resistance and participation.
I’ve received notice from the library that a book I requested has arrived. It’s a book about the DuPont family by Gerard Colby called “DuPont Dynasty” (don’t “die nasty” by incautiously exposing yourself to political dangers.) As we should be aware, part of the Patriot Act concerns keeping tabs on library material that people check out. Anyone who believes that this is only done to “fight terrorists” is undoubtedly naive and/or stupid. Collecting information on people will be used to get them in trouble for all sorts of reasons, if the “collectors” have their way.
So, my record puts me aquarely against the right-wing power, as well as any authority which would do evil (left repression as well.) The book contains relevant information about the “MacGuire Affair” of 1934. This involved the plot to push Roosevelt aside and institute a right-wing fascist-type government. Noteworthy was that even though many were implicated in this skullduggery, Congress didn’t prosecute anyone.
If you Google this information, it will be recorded by ATT or Google or whomever. If you use a library or perhaps better ways of doing computer work, that seems like a good idea to me.
I see a steady drift or pull towards the right, and good people must carefully consider their situation, and how to contribute to the future, both short and long term. My computer that I use is being fixed by a guy named Matt, so I hope THAT goes ok. It’s not going to do ME much good to change my approach at this point, so I am going to use my home computer, and call talk shows from home (others considering this route should think about using phones that can’t be traced.) By the way, I’ve been arrested for falling asleep in a library. What was that that William Burroughs said about paranoia being just knowing all the facts? Know the facts, but just don’t ler it make you lose your cool.
Good luck from the Evergreen State. My name really ends with two e’s; spelling it this way will keep employers from rejecting me by google searches.

By: James M

James M — Fri, 05 May 2006 20:52:54 +0000

Thanks, Stan, you did my question justice and then some. The links to Deutscher, et al., are greatly appreciated, as the better part of scholarship is sometimes just knowing who to read.

By: eoin howe

eoin howe — Fri, 05 May 2006 13:51:32 +0000

MC- Just a random aside for the sake of accuracy: it was not Mary Wollstonecraft who wrote Frankenstein, but her daughter, Mary Godwin Shelley, wife of Percy Bysshe Shelley, the poet and pal of Lord Byron, who wrote “Ozymandias”- ‘hic semper tyrannis’.

Stan- I had a quick glance through the book “Inside Delta Force” the other day, and saw the photo of you and your team after Grenada. You are the only one not looking at the camera. You look exhausted and pissed off. Having read your take on Grenada I can see why.

By: Jim Withey

Jim Withey — Fri, 05 May 2006 12:39:57 +0000

Addendum to my last submission on not being poor. I don’t want to overestimate the sexual aspect of the competition for money. But hierarchical systems, whether they be capitalist or socialist or communist or whatever restrict development because they’re concerned with control and domination.
Arundhati Roy has written to the effect that U.S. civil society is the most powerful force in the world. Another somewhat dated but relevant quote I’ve heard is “The American people can have anything they want, but they don’t want anything.” It’s not just Mexico and Latin America that have people desperate, or otherwise, that want to come to these not so United States. (The question of unity and homogenaity is a complex and difficult problem. Unity can contribute to a more direct and forceful advance of the principles of the unified body, but may be less adaptive to the “attacks of the the unknown exterior”. So the problem of promoting a benign, mostly happy existence for as much as life as possible into as far as the future will reach is about trying to to absorb the forces of the exterior into the (hopefully) relatively benign core without causing undue hardship.
As far as my last submission is concerned, I meant what I said. The world is in my opinion manipulated by the reigning powers who will acheive hierarchy any way they can. As far as my love of music for good (hopefully) or ill is concerned, I must expound on the George Thorogood song lyrics that I mentioned in my last submission. Unfortunately, a large segment of society seems to be caught up in the battle for sexual pleasure at the expense of a general and sustained contentment. I don’t think this is anything new or unique to our time, but is an ongoing element in the desire for what I call progress.
The pertinent element in Thorogood’s lyric which I think we must deal with is what we must be mature enough to admit. The song “That Same Thing” is by my estimation a quite evocative song. It deals with the potential of sexuality as good or bad (or however one wishes to interpret it). It’s mostly a powerful and by my estimation reasonably accurate representation of the sexual component of human interaction. (Both women and men have sexual desires which influence the society.) So for our immediate situation, I must state the lyrics that I believe are understated in our media and consciousness, that being ” Why do all of these men want to chase a big-legged woman down–must be the same old thing that makes a preacher lay his bible down. Oh that same thing–tell me who’s to blame, the whole world’s fightin’ about that same thing.”
So we must aknowledge that this is the reality we live in while we defend against its pernicious encroachment and build toward a future and to whatever extent possible a present life of benign progress.
I have something of an “Oswald” profile that I would like to say a couple of things about. Some of the best times I ever had were when I was homeless. I had a disability income which provided me enough sustenance to appreciate the positive side of life even though I slept on the ground. I had a strong sense of chivalry and an appreciation for life in general. There’s more to it than I can or should say at this time.
I’m going to conclude with a couple of remarks that may be of some use. I hope that the authorities or “Big Pharma” don’t end to soon my “pale parabola of joy”. When the ants biting me got to unnerving me when I was homeless in Chicago during the summer of 2001 I would stop by Pete’s Bar adjacent to the Sunshine Cafe on Elston and listen to what I’m listening to now. “I’m free to decide, and I’m not so suicidal at all, at all, at all.”
Best to all from the Evergreen State, my name ends with two e’s so I can enhance my chances of employment. (Employers google your name)

By: Jim W

Jim W — Fri, 05 May 2006 00:58:25 +0000

Appropos Nazi Germany a good question to ask is “Whatever became of the German bourgeoisie and petty bourgeoisie”? How many of these groups perished in the Dresden fire? What percentage of these groups (particularly the petits) ended up in the soldier ranks? The factories? How long after the war were they disposessed and to what degree?
People who find an interest in poker for good or ill know about “pot odds”; the weighing of risk against reward. This can be a class thing and it can also pertain to individuals. So an enterprising lad or lass could clue us in on how well these groups calculated their pot odds.
My general approach to politics is that it’s more important not to be poor than to be rich. I think if enough people had that perception, there could be greater aggregate abundance AND environmental health.
Let’s not ignore pop culture’s impact in this regard. Promotion of the “all or nothing” mentality tends to work well for those who have alot, not so well for everybody else.
Let’s be clear to the more inexperienced and innocent among us what the world is all about. The basics aren’t that hard to figure out but should be implanted by the good bass players in our world. The fight is mostly over money and that in turn is a major influence on the relationships, sexual and otherwise that one has. As George Thorogood said originally or otherwise: “Tell me whose to blame, the whole world’s fightin’ about that same thing.”
Someone who develops their imagination either with assistance or by themselves can get along pretty well in this world if they’re not poor and have good working conditions. There are many ways to enjoy yourself and others.

By: Neilcaff

Neilcaff — Thu, 04 May 2006 15:08:03 +0000

I think the starting point for what happened in the USSR has to be its poverty and isolation. When Lenin and the rest of the Bolsheviks initiated the revolution it was always on the perspective that it would be the spark for the uprisings in Western Europe. So for the Bolesheviks the idea was to hold the line in the old Tsarist empire to buy time until the European working class could overthrow capitalism and use the resources and technique of advanced capitalistism in the west to build socialism in the east. This did not happen for a number of reasons (although the working class in Germany came within a whisker of taking power) The upshot was that the Bolsheviks inheirited a country that had been destroyed by years of war and internal strife. Add to this Russia was invaded by 21 foreign armies and was ravaged by anti left Russian armies. A civil war of extreme cruelty on both sides was was fought. (In fairness to the Bolsheviks they tended to be lenient to people caught in anti revolutionary activity at the start of the war, releasing Tsarist officers if they swore never to take up arms against the revolutionary government, fat chance. It was only in responce to increased provocations in particular the burning alive of Red Army POW in the Caucuses that more harsh measures were taken against the opposition. It’s important to remember that democracy even under capitalist regimes, is difficult to maintain when a country is under attack. Very few people remark that there were no elections in the UK for eight years while the conflict with Hitler was fought out. So while the Red Army was victorious in the civil war the fact that it was poor and surrounded by hostile states ment the two basic ingredients for building genuine socialism were missing. a) the physiscal ability to raise the general standard of living for everyone, b) direct participatry democracy.
a) Here in the west we just love slapping our backs about the fact we can wear leather jackets, take hot showers and go to the cinema. This is proof of our superiority over the rest of the world. Most of us dont see that the skill and technique, the factories, methods of production, skilled workers is something that has been slowly developed over hundreds of years. The position the USSR found itself in by the late 20’s was one where the few skilled workers they had were either dead or on the verge of starvation, most of the factories had been damaged or were decaying from lack of spare parts and the general level of technical knowledge in the country needed to produce these skilled workers and factories was not present. What had taken the West at least over three hundred years to develop would have to be developed by the USSR BEFORE THE WESTERN POWERS COULD REARM AND RECOVER FROM WW1. Just think about how difficult that would be to do. Industrialise the largest country in the world where the wooden plough was still common to the level that it would be able to withstand a millitary attack from the most advanced countries in the world. in these conditions the ability to raise the general standard of living became almost impossible. However nationalising the economy did allow significant growth to take place but this was uneven. In these circumstances of poverty a new priviaged layer from the ranks of the ruling party was able to cream off the benifits of the nationalised economy.
This is why b) is so important. In order to ensure that any corruption in the planned economy is keept in check direct democratic control by the workers at all levels of the economy and government is vital for a socialist society. But remember the USSR suffered under constant internal sabotage as well as the permanent threat of invasion. If people say this was just evil commies showing their tru colours don’t forget the current regime in Washington have pretty much torn up the Constitution in responce to one terrorist attack whose casualties were the equivilant of one months fighting in the Russian civil War. So without democracy the growth of this bureaucratic elite accelerated although not without a ferocious struggle with those who remained loyal to the ideas of the Russian revolution. People should always remember Stalins oppression was mainly against the left in the USSR.
Finally establishment historians love to harp on about the brutality of Soviet industrialisation. While this is undoubtedly true these statements are crocodile tears. Check the books written by these historians. Do any of them write books detailing the destruction of countless civilisations by the Spanish, French, British et al in America, North & South America. Do they bemoan the fate of indigenous people forced to work in gold mines? Do they mention the slave trade? Do they show how these monstrosities were tjhe essential precondition for our privilaged capitalist civilisation in the West as much as collectivisation was in the USSR?
No chance.

By: Stan

Stan — Thu, 04 May 2006 12:40:55 +0000

On the Stalin, etc., question: I bow to no one in my refusal to be Stalin’s hagiographer. A signficant number of those Stalin had put to death were veterans of the Communist Party — and no, I don’t find that defensible. But it is also not insane, and it didn’t happen simply because Stalin was mean. There were, in fact, plenty of acts of subversion and sabotage — incited and supported from the outside — and the lethal combination of Russian backwardness and hostile encirclement, as well as the need for a forced march to industrialization to defend the USSR, created the conditions for the harshness of Stalin’s rule. This is why I object to making Stalin — one man whose mountain of crimes will sit alongside his mountain of accomplishments in history — the sole morally-failed source of the Soviet state’s militarization of an entire society. This withdrawal of historical context (read Mark Jones piece to get the feel of it) and consequent reduction of this epoch to the decisions of individual leaders forces history back into the bourgeois frame… it actually removes the masses from history.

It is easy for us to sit atop the present and gaze reflectively back into the valleys of the past, but they are shrouded with fog, and with each passing day the details that gave these events their truest character grow more dim. People nowadays have no real conception for what was afoot by 1936. Stalin told his party congress that there was a war at their doorstep that would end up costing 80 million lives and stretch through Eurasia. This was the context — the real context, no matter what we judge from here — for Stalin’s ruthless cruelty over the next two years.

At the end of that war, the cost to the Soviets to defeat Hitler was upwards of 25 million souls. Did the barracks-socialism of industrialization and collectivization end up being the pre-condition for delivering that defeat? The answer to that, at least, is clear. Yes. Hitler had already stated his intent to subject the Slavs to one choice: slavery or extermination. This is the context for the NKVD machine-gunners who shot their own people if they attempted to abandon the line in Stalingrad — which was where Hitler was actually and decisively defeated.

Deutscher has written as definitive a biography of Stalin as anyone might find — and he is no partisan of the dictator… in fact Isaac Deutscher counts himself a partisan of Stalin’s political nemesis, Leon Trotsky.

The history of the communist movement is still being written. It is being written here, today, by all of us who are still willing to pick up that bloody flag and move it forward again. It is being written in the continued scholarship about the whole of the last century. It is being written in Nepal and Cuba and - now - throughout Latin America; in the decay of the party in China, in the accounts of people here, like W. E. B. DuBois (who joined the Party at the end of his life), Harry Haywood, in Robin Kelley’s “Hammer and Hoe,” in the 1991 split of the CPUSA, or the split of my own tendency, in the struggle some of us have taken up to forge an alliance between this movement and feminism, in world systems theory, in the sectarian battles between left grouplets, in the anti-war movement, etc etc etc.

My main point re demonizaton was that the reduction of history to leaders hides the social forces; it simplifies reality into a Manichean struggle between abstracted good and evil; and the use of terms like oligarchy and totalitarianism — which become free-standing memes — serve to conceal class, gender, and national oppression, as self-reproducing SYSTEMS, as well as homogenize history to the point where we have no frame of reference except the most abstract (and ethnocentric, dehistoricized) morality as our frame of reference… where we can say Stalin and Hitler in the same breath as a way of making the imperfect struggle for socialism the same thing as Hitler fascism. That just shuts US up, doesn’t it? (No.)

These tactics — very effective — are designed to leave key stories in place as articles of religious faith that can be dragged out any time we begin to ask the really dangerous questions, and reduce us to the equivalent of holocaust deniers. That’s why every time they want to bring the heavy lumber out in my case, they go for my defense of Milosevic. They know damn well that no one is going to take the trouble to question the Milosevic-as-Hitler narrative (it is now an article of faith), and very few are going to take the trouble to actually research his demonization, his kidnapping, or the kangaroo court in the Hague that now breathes a sigh of relief that he has died.

I must, finally, point out — as is my wont these days — that a similar demonization campaign has been waged here at home, and the participation of people on the left in this campaign of misrepresentation is a shameful mark on us all: that is the demonization of Andrea Dworkin, the radical feminist, which included counter-accusations that Dworkin herself “demonized” men, penises, etc.

I very much appreciate your question, James. I hope I have done it just a whiff of justice.

By: Neilcaff

Neilcaff — Thu, 04 May 2006 09:40:36 +0000

I’m confused Eric where exactly do left wingers deny individual agency of given members of a capitalist class in favour of an abstract class analysis? I’ll admit I haven’t read all of Chomsky’s books but I don’t think he makes those arguments. In general he tries to link individual acts of injustice by powerful people into a power system that gives them both the means and motive to do so. So while Iran-Contra was undoubtedly a criminal conspiracy by real people in the US government you have to see it in the context of super power rivalry, an imperial fear of an insurgent people etc. These things were bigger than Reagan, Ollie North and all the rest. They were able to get away with it (hell half of them are running the US govt again) because they were acting in the interests of the imperial ruling class by suppressing the Sandinista’s leftist nationalism and allowing the continuation of gobal capitalist dominance in Central America. Don’t forget what the out come of defeating the Sandanista’s was. A pro-US ‘democratic’ regime that accepted IMF structural adjustment programme allowing foreign capitalists to make a killing in Nicuragua. These profits could only have been guarenteed by US intervention. The individual capitalists themselves may have had very little to do with the slaughter in Nicuragua, they might even have deplored US methods but at the end of the day, they benifited. This is what leftists mean when we say such and such is acting in the interests of the ruling class. A ruling class operates through individuals and institutions that maintain their rights and privilages. While these people may have differing views on how to maintain their rule they do all agree that they must rule. It is this overarching goal which cohears disparate individuals into a class.

By: James M

James M — Thu, 04 May 2006 08:23:19 +0000

I want to ask a simple question, not to stir shit and not to score rhetorical points, but out of neutral curiosity:

Is Stalin’s execution of 727,271 people, in your mind, defensible as part of the “iron logic of war”, a necessary resort to exterminism under conditions of “barracks socialism”?

No moral presuppositions behind the question. I’m just one of those people who’s trying to educate myself on the real history of communism, to see behind the skewed caricature drawn by McCarthyite propaganda. Some of us *are* trying to get a better grasp of history, beyond what the History Channel would impart, and in the process acquire a better bullshit detector for judging events in the present. Please be patient with us.

By: m.c.

m.c. — Thu, 04 May 2006 04:15:31 +0000

I think Jimmy Carter pulled the plug on the Shah. Cyrus Vance maybe talked him into it & Brzezinski was probably against it. Read William Greider’s book, Secrets of the Temple. Paul Volker could have eased interest rates and helped the economy before the ‘80 election but Iran was Carter’s one big faux pax. He was a centrist/pro military spending dem(think Bill Clinton but a little more honest politically) but the maasters of the universe were not happy just like they weren’t happy with Nixon o.k.ing Kissinger with the green light for detente(sounds like two fags dancing)with China.

[m.c., this is from management. This hateful homophobic remark is left just so people will know why you will now post your bizarre ideations at someone else’s blog. The rules for this blog are quite clear. Zero tolerance. Bye. -Stan]