NARRATOR: In December 1921, after two years, Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman left Russia. They vowed to tell the rest of the world of the Bolshevik terror.posted by homunculus at 6:14 PM on May 7, 2004
BARRY PATEMAN: She did something that many of us find damned hard to do. She realizes she's been a fool. She realizes she's been wrong. She's realized she's made an error. Not just a casual error, but an error of huge awful magnitude to support the Bolsheviks. And she turns and she accepts that. She accepts it totally.
NARRATOR: Revealing the truth about the Bolshevik regime became a crusade for Goldman and Berkman. Their old enemies on the Right praised their analysis of a revolution gone wrong. Old comrades on the Left condemned them.
ORLANDO FIGES: So there must have been a sense of frustration. Hell, we've seen it but we can't convince but we can't convince people of how it really is and we can't uphold any real belief in socialism anymore. And that's a very tragic situation to be in I think. When you both lose everything you believe in and yet have no where else to go.
I think the distinction is this: Third Reich propaganda extolled what almost any sane person would consider to be an objective evil. Communist propaganda extolled virtues (such as labor for the common good, solidarity and community) which are not objectively evil... the problem being that they did not practice them. ...The horror of Nazism is that it was exactly what it aspired to be. The horror of so-called Communism is that it wasn't.Alas, it's not true; but it does touch on a truth. There was plenty of Nazi propaganda that extolled the pursuit of noble virtues, and plenty that fronted outrageous lies.
Not a single document of the hundreds that I inspected gave any hint of Lenin's idealistic propensities: on the contrary, they confirmed his utter indifference to human lives and human suffering, and his all-consuming concern with holding on to and expanding his power.From a completely different political perspective, here's an anarchist discussion of the question. There's lots more out there. I hope you will disabuse yourself of this illusion.
A few examples must suffice. One receives a jolt reading a report from late 1920 to Lenin from Dzerzhinsky, the head of the Cheka, an establishment not known for compassion, that tens of thousands of White prisoners of war as well as Cossacks who had been expelled from their homelands and confined to internment camps in Ekaterinburg were living in "inhuman" conditions. Dzerzhinsky requested that steps be taken to imprve their lot. In the margin stands Lenin's terse "Into the Archive." On another occasion, when Dzerzhinsky suggested that the sailors and soldiers taken prisoner after the suppression of the Kronstadt mutiny in March 1921 be interned in the Crimea and Caucasus, Lenin told him that "it would be more convenient" to have them sent north. In accord with his wishes, the Cheka incarcerated the prisoners in concentration camps in the barren wastes of the White Sea, from which few ever returned. In no unpublished document did I find a trace of humanity except where Lenin's own family and close associates were concerned.
The same callousness is revealed in Lenin's attitude toward the victims of anti-Jewish pogroms. That he did not react to the massacres of Jews in the Ukraine by White Cossacks can be justified... by his inability to do anything about them. But how can one justify his indifference to similar atrocities committed by the Red Cossacks? The archive contains an urgent appeal to Lenin from the Jewish Section of the Communist Party's Central Committee (Evsektsiia), dated July 1920, informing him that on its retreat from Poland Budenny's cavalry was "systematically exterminating" Belorussian Jews. The Evsektsiia requested that local workers be allowed to arm themselves. On the margin of this document stands Lenin's dismissive "Into the Archive of the Central Committee."...
The preoccupation with power, the pervasive fear of subversion, the tendency to see everywhere hidden enemies, afflicted Lenin with something akin to political paranoia. It expressed itself in a police mentality similar to but even more intense than the obsessive concern with security prevalent among officials of the tsarist regime.
One of the most striking documents I found at ROsKhIDNI was an undated memorandum of Lenin's to N.N. Krestinskii, the secretary of the Central Committee, ordering the immediate launching of a campaign of terror... While it is difficult to date it with any certainty, the document most likely was written early in September 1918... This was the time when the government, in reprisal for the assault on Lenin, formally launched the Red Terror, which was to claim the lives of thousands of people, a high proportion of them hostages.
The sheer size of an election in India, with all its chaos and exuberance, is a magnificent and humbling spectacle, which rightly commands respect across the world. As the phased general election now rolls towards its finish on May 10, there are some fascinating signs that Indians - hundreds of millions of whom have in their vote their only sliver of power - will have commanded the attention of their rulers.cheers!
Pre-electoral polls suggested that the ruling Bharatiya Janata party (BJP), which heads a 23-party coalition, would easily increase its majority against the opposition Congress party. The Hindu revivalist BJP has, for the moment, curbed its sectarian and xenophobic tendencies, and pushed through some genuinely liberal economic reforms. Congress, by contrast, the party of Nehru and the Gandhis, appeared rudderless and demoralised, occasionally dipping into the same well of Hindu nationalism as the BJP... Yet exit polls suggest the BJP-led coalition will lose its majority.
Why should this be?
Very simply, about 1m Indians work in air-conditioned software campuses and call centres; but more than 600m live in villages, over half of them without access to clean water, electricity or even a road. In Andhra, for instance, there have been hundreds of suicides among farmers, in despair because of drought and hunger, and food procurement prices skewed towards rich farmers that have filled state granaries with rotting rice and wheat.
India's tiny industrial base - even with vigorous (part monsoon-fuelled) growth - cannot create the millions of jobs needed to provide such people with a living, and will not be able to unless the country opens up much more to foreign manufacturers.
Part of the message from voters, therefore, seems to be a demand for attention to rural India - via investment in infrastructure such as roads, wells and irrigation, and above all via land reform.
Those who would rule India could usefully steal a leaf from West Bengal, the only state to have carried out a thorough land reform - resulting in the re-election of the Communists six times in 27 years. The obvious limitations of their rule have shown why this is insufficient. But their electoral success has shown why it is so necessary - as India's raucous voters seem to be signalling to all their rulers.
EDGAR DOCTOROW: The idea of nationalism appalled her. She thought nationalism was a big scam. Her point of view was that these wars were a matter of the property interests of the upper classes that were sending the working classes out to fight for them. And that didn't make sense for a butcher's assistant in Hamburg to fight a butcher's assistant in London.so like: "Constant revolutionizing of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones. All fixed, fast frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his real condition of life and his relations with his kind." -marx & engels, 1848
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posted by quonsar at 5:30 PM on May 7, 2004