American Psycho
Jim Gunson
Was he living off family money ? or did he have a real job at P&P ?
Why did he not carve up Evelyn or his secretary, as he did Bethany ?
Loved the scene late in the book where he returns to Paul Allen's (?)
apartment (where he had sliced and diced two victims and left the
place a complete mess) and the estate agents are showing people
around.
Any other opinions ?
Jim Gunson
Kesh
a lunatic? How long did he get away with it?
Kesh
"Jim Gunson" <j...@gunson.junglelink.co.uk> wrote in message
news:9ig0uk$ivc$1...@news6.svr.pol.co.uk...
> Just finished "American Psycho" by Brett Easton Ellis.
> Why did he not carve up Evelyn or his secretary, as he did Bethany ?
I don't think he carved up anyone.
M J Carley
>As a Brit I'd like to know when did Americans realize that
>Sen. McCarthy was a lunatic? How long did he get away with it?
It was all over once he tried it on with the Army.
--
`Let me say before I go any further that I forgive nobody ...'
j del col
> Just found this in a Paris Review interview with Lilian Hellman.
> Hammet was being grilled by the House Committee on Unamerican
> Activities:
>
> Joe McCarthy: "Put yourself in our position; would you allow your
> books in any US libraries?"
>
> Hammet: "Senator, if I was you, I wouldn't allow any libraries."
You trust Lillian "The Liar" Hellman?
Did McCarthy and Hammett ever square off?
I think he was grilled by HUAC (House Committee on Un-american Activities) not
Senator McCarthy.
J. Del Col
j del col
> Just found this in a Paris Review interview with Lilian Hellman.
> Hammet was being grilled by the House Committee on Unamerican
> Activities:
>
> Joe McCarthy: "Put yourself in our position; would you allow your
> books in any US libraries?"
>
> Hammet: "Senator, if I was you, I wouldn't allow any libraries."
>
Why would Senator McCarthy have been on a House committee?
He had his own circus somewhat later and was primarily interested in
the State Department and the Army, not Hollywood.
Martin Dies was the power behind HUAC.
J. Del Col
j del col
> As a Brit I'd like to know when did Americans realize that Sen. McCarthy was
> a lunatic? How long did he get away with it?
McCarthy was a cynical would be demagogue and a drunkard, not a
lunatic.
He began his crusade in February 1950 with a speech in Wheeling, WV in
which he claimed there were dozens--or hundreds-- nobody knows the
exact number-- of communists in the State Dept.
He exploited the fear of communism that was rife following the
disclosures
of the activities of the Rosenbergs and other
Soviet agents such as Alger Hiss (BTW, he had nothing whatever to do
with either case) McCarthy benefited from the fact that the State
Dept.
really had been infiltrated by Soviet agents, a fact recently
confirmed by the
release of the Venona decrypts. The State Dept and the gov't in
general took steps to tighten security screening, steps that
coincided with McCarthy's
rantings and accusations.
He got away with it until he tangled with the Army in early 1954. The
televised Army-McCarthy hearings were a disaster for McCarthy.
He was censured by the Senate in December 1954 and
dropped off the scene quite quickly after that. He died of
alcoholism in 1957.
He was a thug and a liar, but he wasn't crazy.
J. Del Col
Francis Muir
And Booby Kennedy was a very visible member of his Committee staff. Also
not to forget his, Macarthy's, NY lawyer friend. I guess that America's
most famous cross-dresser was also an ally. Persons not American should
also understand that senators are elected for six years and that Senate
Committee chairmen are very, very powerful people. The senate does not
lightly censure its own. The newspapers were also mostly square behind
the senator.
Francis Muir
Kesh
> disclosures
> of the activities of the Rosenbergs and other
> Soviet agents such as Alger Hiss
Thought Hiss was done for perjury, not spying.
Kesh
"j del col" <del...@ab.edu> wrote in message
news:4dc68fdd.01071...@posting.google.com...
> "Kesh" <ke...@rmharrison.fsnet.co.uk> wrote in message
news:<9ig0cg$r5a$1...@news8.svr.pol.co.uk>...
> > As a Brit I'd like to know when did Americans realize that Sen. McCarthy
was
> > a lunatic? How long did he get away with it?
>
> McCarthy was a cynical would be demagogue and a drunkard, not a
> lunatic.
> He began his crusade in February 1950 with a speech in Wheeling, WV in
> which he claimed there were dozens--or hundreds-- nobody knows the
> exact number-- of communists in the State Dept.
>
> He exploited the fear of communism that was rife following the
> disclosures
> of the activities of the Rosenbergs and other
> Soviet agents such as Alger Hiss (BTW, he had nothing whatever to do
> with either case) McCarthy benefited from the fact that the State
> Dept.
> really had been infiltrated by Soviet agents, a fact recently
> confirmed by the
> release of the Venona decrypts. The State Dept and the gov't in
> general took steps to tighten security screening, steps that
> coincided with McCarthy's
> rantings and accusations.
So why are his attacks on the Arts, in particular Hollywood, the best known
of his activities outside the USA. Don't you have an article in your
constitution against this kind of thing? How come (what seems to me) govt
tyrrany over individuals beliefs prevailed in a country constituted to
prevent such things happening?
Tess
I think you missed a few key points in the book Jim, there are one or two
'clangers' that point to the fact he didn't actually do anything, he just
had a sick imagination, it's kinda the point of the story ;-) If you're
honestly not sure and want to discuss it more (ie why you thought he did do
all that grisly stuff) drop me an e mail, I'd love to talk about it.
Tess
"Jim Gunson" <j...@gunson.junglelink.co.uk> wrote in message
news:9ig0uk$ivc$1...@news6.svr.pol.co.uk...
Kesh
> So why are his attacks on the Arts, in particular Hollywood, the best
known
> of his activities outside the USA. Don't you have an article in your
> constitution against this kind of thing? How come (what seems to me) govt
> tyrrany over individuals beliefs prevailed in a country constituted to
> prevent such things happening?
Whoops. Another poster tells us he didn't attack the arts. Confusing
McCarthy and McCartyism though.
Heather Henderson
ke...@rmharrison.fsnet.co.uk says...
HUAC did go after people in the arts, Pete Seeger and Yip Harburg, for
example. Perhaps your correspondent meant that McCarthy himself wasn't
responsible for the investigation of the Hollywood Ten, the blacklist,
etc. That mess was made before he came on the scene. HUAC had been
around since the late '30s.
Heather Henderson
hea...@scc.net
http://www.scc.net/~heather
j del col
Let's get this straight. McCarthy didn't care about Hollywood. He
never investigated it. His targets were the State Dept. and the Army.
Why is he known for attacking the arts and
Hollywood? Because people are ignorant of what he really did,
and they confuse his activities with those of HUAC which conducted hearings
in the late 1940's
into communist influence in Hollywood that led to several convictions
for contempt of Congress.
Hammett never met McCarthy. By the time McCarthy got going in the spring
of 1950, Hammett had already been convicted for contempt of Congress
and either was serving or had finished his one year sentence. He then
moved to Mexico where he led a comfortable life writing movie scripts
under assumed names. If Hellman claimed that Hammett confronted McCarthy,
she was lying. Hellman was a chronic liar, particularly about her
political activities. She not only embroidered her reputation, she wove
the whole cloth.
The influence of HUAC and McCarthy have been vastly overblown. Outside of
the movies and television, there was no blacklist, and the blacklists were
privately maintained, had no government sanction. There was never any
federal censorship of journalists or publishers.
McCarthy's biggest influence was on the gov't, particularly the State Dept.
J. Del Col
j del col
Hiss was tried for perjury because the statute of limitations for
espionage had run out. If it hadn't, he would have tried as a spy--
which he most certainly was.
J. Del Col
Heather Henderson
del...@ab.edu says...
>
> Let's get this straight. McCarthy didn't care about Hollywood. He
> never investigated it. His targets were the State Dept. and the Army.
>
> Why is he known for attacking the arts and
> Hollywood? Because people are ignorant of what he really did,
> and they confuse his activities with those of HUAC which conducted hearings
> in the late 1940's
> into communist influence in Hollywood that led to several convictions
> for contempt of Congress.
So fucking what? Do you want to defend HUAC? Go ahead, give us a good
laugh. Tell us about the evils of the Communist influence in Hollywood.
> Hammett never met McCarthy. By the time McCarthy got going in the spring
> of 1950, Hammett had already been convicted for contempt of Congress
> and either was serving or had finished his one year sentence.
Would you care to explain the basis of his "contempt of Congress"?
He then
> moved to Mexico where he led a comfortable life writing movie scripts
> under assumed names. If Hellman claimed that Hammett confronted McCarthy,
> she was lying. Hellman was a chronic liar, particularly about her
> political activities. She not only embroidered her reputation, she wove
> the whole cloth.
>
> The influence of HUAC and McCarthy have been vastly overblown. Outside of
> the movies and television, there was no blacklist,
So movies and television don't count? Explain that to me.
> and the blacklists were
> privately maintained, had no government sanction. There was never any
> federal censorship of journalists or publishers.
What is that supposed to mean? That it's OK to attack people in the film
business because they're not "journalists or publishers"?
Kesh
> which he most certainly was.
>
> J. Del Col
As he wasn't tried how do we know this? Did he admit it? Is there a
consensus among historians?
Kesh
Eden R.
Its been quite a while since I read "American Psycho" and I thought he did
exactly what he described
(though there are instances where he questions the reality of those events)
and that it was the lack of reaction by
those around him and society in general which was its main satirical focus
(along with consumerism, Greed is good etc)
For instance, the real estate agent incident in which he questions whether
the events in Allen's apartment occurred,
to me, highlighted the lack of community of the people in the book and more
importantly, that murder was secondary to
making a sale.
I would like to hear the opposing view for one (might have to put it back in
the 'to read' pile)
Eden R.
Tess <tes...@yahoo.co.uk> wrote in message
news:9iifvk$isrcm$1...@ID-68298.news.dfncis.de...
Charles Blair
>Hammett never met McCarthy. By the time McCarthy got going in the spring
>of 1950, Hammett had already been convicted for contempt of Congress
>and either was serving or had finished his one year sentence.
The Library of America collection of Hammett's novels includes
a chronology. Paraphrase of parts:
1951 Refuses to testify in US District Court about wherabouts
of subpoenaed trustees of Civil Rights Congress bail fund. Sentenced
to six months for contempt of court.
1953 Subpoenaed by McCarthy questioned about purchase of H's books
for libraries, and whether he ever donated royalties to Communist Party.
Says ``If I were fighting Communism, I don't think I would do it by
giving people any books at all.
j del col
> In article <4dc68fdd.01071...@posting.google.com>,
> del...@ab.edu says...
> >
> > Let's get this straight. McCarthy didn't care about Hollywood. He
> > never investigated it. His targets were the State Dept. and the Army.
> >
> > Why is he known for attacking the arts and
> > Hollywood? Because people are ignorant of what he really did,
> > and they confuse his activities with those of HUAC which conducted hearings
> > in the late 1940's
> > into communist influence in Hollywood that led to several convictions
> > for contempt of Congress.
>
> So fucking what? Do you want to defend HUAC? Go ahead, give us a good
> laugh. Tell us about the evils of the Communist influence in Hollywood.
>
Who is defending HUAC? It was a statement of fact.
> > Hammett never met McCarthy. By the time McCarthy got going in the spring
> > of 1950, Hammett had already been convicted for contempt of Congress
> > and either was serving or had finished his one year sentence.
>
> Would you care to explain the basis of his "contempt of Congress"?
>
He refused to answer questions when subpoenaed to testify
Congress has the power to investigate and subpoena witnesses to
testify. It is part of the implied powers of any government and the
basis for any civilized
judicial system. Witnesses who did say "Yeah, I'm a communist, so
what?" suffered no consequences.
> So movies and television don't count? Explain that to me.
>
> > and the blacklists were
> > privately maintained, had no government sanction. There was never any
> > federal censorship of journalists or publishers.
>
> What is that supposed to mean? That it's OK to attack people in the film
> business because they're not "journalists or publishers"?
What it means is that there was no gov't blacklist or censorship.
j del col
Hiss never admitted it. However, the Venona Project decrypts that
were published a couple of years ago leave no reasonable doubt at all
that Hiss was a Soviet agent. Venona was a US cryptanalysis project
that broke Soviet codes. The decrypts identified dozens of Soviet agents
in the US gov't, including Hiss.
J. Del Col
j del col
Let me make a correction here. Hammett spent his remaining
days suffering from writer's block, putting up with Hellman and
dying from a combination of TB and alcoholism.
The guy who went to Mexico and wrote scripts was Dalton Trumbo.
Mea culpa.
J. Del Col
Kesh
> He refused to answer questions when subpoenaed to testify
> Congress has the power to investigate and subpoena witnesses to
> testify. It is part of the implied powers of any government and the
> basis for any civilized
> judicial system. Witnesses who did say "Yeah, I'm a communist, so
> what?" suffered no consequences.
No consequences or no legal consequences? If the first how come the UK film
industry was so invigorated at this time by US pinkos fleeing to these
shores. They also had to say "Yeah I'm a communist and so is ...". I suppose
anyone they ratted on suffered no consequences.
> What it means is that there was no gov't blacklist or censorship.
There was no covert encouragement? No pressure brought by anyone in any
position of power? Even if not (which is ridiculous) the knowledge that the
blacklist was there served the comittee's purposes and was used by the
comittee.
Heather is correct you are defending this, but in a sneaky way by presenting
only part of the story. Are you a lawyer?
Kesh
PF
<del...@ab.edu> wrote:
You may want to check out your facts a little more carefully. Hammett
went to jail for five months in 1951 for refusing to squeal on four
fugitive members of the Civil Rights Congress who had been convicted of
conspiracy and then jumped bail before their sentences were to begin.
(Hammett was the chairman of the CRC legal defense fund.) He later
(1953) appeared before McCarthy's Internal Security Senate
Subcommittee, which appearance may be the inspiration for the "quote".
--
PF
j del col
something about the State Dept. buying his books for libraries abroad.
He went to jail for 6 months in 1951 for contempt of court, not contempt
of Congress.
My apologies to all. I had him confused with Dalton Trumbo.
I guess I'll just have to endure Ms Henderson's howls of derisive laughter.
Mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa.
Meanwhile, I'm off to England next week to visit my daughter who
now resides in a London suburb.
Mmm... that crow sure was tasty!
Ob corvid reference: this morning's NPR piece about the plague of crows
in Tokyo. Tokyo's mayor has seriously suggested that people eat them.
J. Del Col
David J. Loftus
> Let me make a correction here. Hammett spent his remaining
> days suffering from writer's block, putting up with Hellman and
> dying from a combination of TB and alcoholism.
>
> The guy who went to Mexico and wrote scripts was Dalton Trumbo.
Searching for Ambrose Bierce, no doubt.
Or was he commiserating with Lowry?
David Loftus
Francis Muir
j del col wrote:
>
> I stand corrected. Hammett was indeed called to testify before McCarthy,
> something about the State Dept. buying his books for libraries abroad.
>
> He went to jail for 6 months in 1951 for contempt of court, not contempt
> of Congress.
>
> My apologies to all. I had him confused with Dalton Trumbo.
>
> I guess I'll just have to endure Ms Henderson's howls of derisive laughter.
>
> Mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa.
>
> Meanwhile, I'm off to England next week to visit my daughter who
> now resides in a London suburb.
Which 'burb?
> Mmm... that crow sure was tasty!
>
> Ob corvid reference: this morning's NPR piece about the plague of crows
> in Tokyo. Tokyo's mayor has seriously suggested that people eat them.
They -- crows, not Jap mayors -- make seriously good pies.
Heather Henderson
del...@ab.edu says...
> Heather Henderson <hea...@scc.net> wrote in message news:<MPG.15b6c8e23...@news.scc.net>...
> > In article <4dc68fdd.01071...@posting.google.com>,
> > del...@ab.edu says...
> > > privately maintained, had no government sanction. There was never any
> > > federal censorship of journalists or publishers.
> >
> > What is that supposed to mean? That it's OK to attack people in the film
> > business because they're not "journalists or publishers"?
>
> What it means is that there was no gov't blacklist or censorship.
Bullshit. The explicit reason they were harassing Hollywood was to
censor the content of their product, eliminating anything that was
unacceptably leftist.
Heather Henderson
> something about the State Dept. buying his books for libraries abroad.
>
> He went to jail for 6 months in 1951 for contempt of court, not contempt
> of Congress.
>
> My apologies to all. I had him confused with Dalton Trumbo.
>
> I guess I'll just have to endure Ms Henderson's howls of derisive laughter.
>
> Mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa.
I don't mind that you mixed up Hammett and Trumbo, but you appear to be
ignorant of the more crucial details of the Hollywood witch hunt. Maybe
you should read up on it. Here's a good book to start with: "Tender
Comrades", a compilation of interviews of blacklisted showbiz people.
It's by Patrick McGilligan.
Michael Zeleny
>>>If it hadn't, he [Hiss] would have tried as a spy-- which he most
>>>certainly was.
>>As he wasn't tried how do we know this? Did he admit it? Is there a
>>consensus among historians?
>Hiss never admitted it. However, the Venona Project decrypts that
>were published a couple of years ago leave no reasonable doubt at all
>that Hiss was a Soviet agent. Venona was a US cryptanalysis project
>that broke Soviet codes. The decrypts identified dozens of Soviet
>agents in the US gov't, including Hiss.
I have in front of me Venona document No.1822, dated March
30, 1945. The message refers to an agent code-named "ALES,"
and in a footnote dated August 8, 1969, ALES is identified as
"probably Alger Hiss." On its face, this looks incriminatory,
although as I and others have noted, we are told neither who
wrote the footnote nor on what basis the anonymous footnote
writer made this judgment. Perhaps, in the twenty-four-year
interim, some new evidence had come to light. Perhaps it was
simply guesswork based on the similarity of the initials ALES
and the letters in Alger's name. Or perhaps the fact that Hiss
had served time did the trick, and the footnote was mere
speculation by an agent out to make points with his famously
and obsessively anti-Communist boss, J. Edgar Hoover. We have
no way of knowing. In another Venona cable, however, this one
a fragment that is otherwise incoherent, Hiss is mentioned by
his own name. Yet, in the world of Venona, spies are supposed
to be referred to only by their code names. Typically, Time,
along with a battalion of columnists like George Will and
Robert Novak and other media heavies who make no claim to
having done their own independent research, neglects to
mention this possibly exculpatory fact, concentrating instead
on the possibly incriminating one.
-- Victor Navasky
http://www.thenation.com/docPrint.mhtml?i=20010716&s=navasky
http://past.thenation.com/issue/971103/1103nava.htm
cordially
Mikhail Zel...@math.ucla.edu
"In this world, you must be oh so smart or oh so pleasant." Well,
for years I was smart. I recommend pleasant. And you may quote me.
M J Carley
>Bullshit. The explicit reason they were harassing Hollywood was to
>censor the content of their product, eliminating anything that was
>unacceptably leftist.
It is worth remembering that showing Russian children smiling was
considered evidence of Communism:
http://europe.cnn.com/SPECIALS/cold.war/episodes/06/documents/huac/rand.html
--
`Let me say before I go any further that I forgive nobody ...'
Francis Muir
M J Carley wrote:
>
> In the referenced article, Heather Henderson <hea...@scc.net> writes:
>
> >Bullshit. The explicit reason they were harassing Hollywood was to
> >censor the content of their product, eliminating anything that was
> >unacceptably leftist.
>
> It is worth remembering that showing Russian children smiling was
> considered evidence of Communism:
> http://europe.cnn.com/SPECIALS/cold.war/episodes/06/documents/huac/rand.html
In fact worse. One would be a ComSymp, and that was a fearful thing.
Heather Henderson
> In the referenced article, Heather Henderson <hea...@scc.net> writes:
>
> >Bullshit. The explicit reason they were harassing Hollywood was to
> >censor the content of their product, eliminating anything that was
> >unacceptably leftist.
>
> It is worth remembering that showing Russian children smiling was
> considered evidence of Communism:
> http://europe.cnn.com/SPECIALS/cold.war/episodes/06/documents/huac/rand.html
Incidentally, "Song of Russia", the movie Rand discusses, was indeed pro-
Russian - but it was made in 1943. It was one of the many wartime
propaganda movies that Hollywood churned out to boost stateside morale.
M J Carley
>Incidentally, "Song of Russia", the movie Rand discusses, was indeed pro-
>Russian - but it was made in 1943. It was one of the many wartime
>propaganda movies that Hollywood churned out to boost stateside morale.
`They were on our side but that's no reason for supporting them': the
dialectic in action.
j del col
Maybe you should read --Hollywood Party-- to get a view of what
the Stalinists in Hollywood were up to. In particular read Albert
Maltz's piece about the the duty of the artist, the rebuke administered to him
by Mike Gold, a party hack, and Maltz's groveling recantation.
J. Del Col
j del col
> j del col wrote:
> >
> > I stand corrected. Hammett was indeed called to testify before McCarthy,
> > something about the State Dept. buying his books for libraries abroad.
> >
> > He went to jail for 6 months in 1951 for contempt of court, not contempt
> > of Congress.
> >
> > My apologies to all. I had him confused with Dalton Trumbo.
> >
> > I guess I'll just have to endure Ms Henderson's howls of derisive laughter.
> >
> > Mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa.
> >
> > Meanwhile, I'm off to England next week to visit my daughter who
> > now resides in a London suburb.
>
> Which 'burb?
Kenton, right next to Harrow.
She currently works at the Public Records Office.
J. Del Col
j del col
The circumstances described in the decrypt regarding a visit to Moscow
and a meeting with Vishinsky fit only one member of the American
delegation in Russia at the time, Alger Hiss.
Hiss had been suspected of espionage in 1946 when he was found to
have documents --some of which concerned nuclear matters--
he was not cleared to handle.
He was also implicated as a soviet agent in material found in the Hungarian
secret police archives.
The "Pumpkin Papers" introduced by Whittaker Chambers were very
incriminating of Hiss as a soviet agent. The only reason the gov't
didn't try him for espionage was that the statute of limitations had
run out. Hiss was a spy and a perjurer. It's time --The Nation-- and
its ilk got over it.
Ob book: --Venona-- by Klehr and Haynes.
J. Del Col
Jim Gunson
"Tess" <tes...@yahoo.co.uk> wrote in message
news:9iifvk$isrcm$1...@ID-68298.news.dfncis.de...
> It was all a dream Auntie 'Em...............
>
> I think you missed a few key points in the book Jim, there are one or two
> 'clangers' that point to the fact he didn't actually do anything,
Really, I saw no 'clangers'. Please do tell.
On the contrary.
Late in the story a taxidriver recognized him as the murderer
of another taxidriver (Solly) from a mug shot at the taxi station.
> he just
> had a sick imagination, it's kinda the point of the story ;-)
Can you tell me what the point is, in that case ?
and why the smiley wink ?
>If you're honestly not sure and want to discuss it more
>(ie why you thought he did do all that grisly stuff) drop me
>an e mail, I'd love to talk about it.
I prefer to discuss books in this newsgroup, that is what it
is here for.
Jim Gunson
Heather Henderson
> Maybe you should read --Hollywood Party-- to get a view of what
> the Stalinists in Hollywood were up to. In particular read Albert
> Maltz's piece about the the duty of the artist, the rebuke administered to him
> by Mike Gold, a party hack, and Maltz's groveling recantation.
There weren't many Stalinists in Hollywood. That's a rightwing paranoid
fantasy. In any case, even if there were, the government had no business
persecuting them. It was never illegal to be a Communist.
David J. Loftus
> j del col wrote:
>
> >
> > Ob corvid reference: this morning's NPR piece about the plague of crows
> > in Tokyo. Tokyo's mayor has seriously suggested that people eat them.
>
> They -- crows, not Jap mayors -- make seriously good pies.
Is "crow" perhaps what the recipe really meant, rather than just
blackbirds?
And how do you get four and twenty into a single pie?
David Loftus
M J Carley
>Is "crow" perhaps what the recipe really meant, rather than just
>blackbirds?
>
>And how do you get four and twenty into a single pie?
Put the breasts in the pie and serve the wings on the side with an
aoili dip.
Michael Zeleny
Herb Enderton tells me that revealing his occupation as a logician
yields an automatic disqualification from jury duty. So much for
decrypts that "leave no reasonable doubt at all".
j del col
If you were in the CPUSA in the 1930's and '40's, you were a
stalinist; that's the way it was. The CPUSA was run from Moscow,
with Moscow's money. It's leadership was picked by Moscow, and
there is no evidence of its ever having disobeyed orders from Moscow.
It tolerated no deviation from the stalinist line.
Further more, the CPUSA was ,virtually from its inception,
essentially an organ of Soviet foreign policy that
recruited agents and acted as a conduit for espionage for the USSR.
The notion that the CPUSA was just another political party is a
liberal fairytale.
See --The Secret World of American Communism-- and --The Soviet World
of American Communism--.
These are collections of documents from Soviet archives.
Of particular interest are the items from the archives of the CPUSA,
which are stored in Moscow, BTW.
J. Del Col
Charles Blair
my source on Hammett is a chronology at the back of the Library
of America edition of Hammett's novels. The entry for 1941 says
``In accordance with Communist policy shift following Nazi-Soviet
pact, publicly opposes lend-lease policy of aid to Britain and
American entry into war. (Becomes a supporter of the war effort
following the shift in the Communist Party line after the German
attack on the Soviet Union in June)''
Michael S. Morris
Saturday, the 14th of July, 2001
J. Del Col:
[...] Further more, the CPUSA was, virtually from its
inception, essentially an organ of Soviet foreign policy
that recruited agents and acted as a conduit for espionage
for the USSR.
The notion that the CPUSA was just another political
party is a liberal fairytale.
I believe this, and believe it justifies US governmental
concern, investigation, and vigilance. However, acknowledging
that the CPUSA leadership took its marching orders from Stalin,
and that those marching orders were in fact aimed against
the constitution of the United States seems to me to dodge
the fact that many intellectuals in the 10's, 20's,
and 30's were attracted to the CPUSA and its adjuncts out
of misguided innocence---in exactly the same way intellectuals
follow this or that cause today out of (normally misguided)
innocence. In other words, I think to the vast majority of
CPUSA members or associates---who were not "the leadership"
and who were not taking orders directly from Moscow, it *was*
just another political party, and they *were* only exercising
their First Amendment liberty of conscience Rights (peacable
assembly, speech, press, religion) to belong to the Party.
For the government to persecute the membership---as the
government did, in fact, do far beyond its legitimate
concern, investigation, and vigilance---was a wholesale
violation of many people's Rights.
Mike Morris
(msmo...@netdirect.net)
Arthur Nelson
to why he joined the CPUSA with Will Geer. His answer, "to get laid. I
heard the girls in the CP were easy." I wonder how many other guys joined
for the same reason. Art
"Michael S. Morris" <msmo...@netdirect.net> wrote in message
news:3B506D9D...@netdirect.net...
j del col
>
> J. Del Col:
> [...] Further more, the CPUSA was, virtually from its
> inception, essentially an organ of Soviet foreign policy
> that recruited agents and acted as a conduit for espionage
> for the USSR.
>
> The notion that the CPUSA was just another political
> party is a liberal fairytale.
>
> I believe this, and believe it justifies US governmental
> concern, investigation, and vigilance. However, acknowledging
> that the CPUSA leadership took its marching orders from Stalin,
> and that those marching orders were in fact aimed against
> the constitution of the United States seems to me to dodge
> the fact that many intellectuals in the 10's, 20's,
> and 30's were attracted to the CPUSA and its adjuncts out
> of misguided innocence---in exactly the same way intellectuals
> follow this or that cause today out of (normally misguided)
> innocence. In other words, I think to the vast majority of
> CPUSA members or associates---who were not "the leadership"
> and who were not taking orders directly from Moscow, it *was*
Not really; that wasn't the nature of the CPUSA, and anybody who stayed
in it for very long understood that. If you weren't willing to accept
the Stalinist line, you were ostracized and execrated by the faithful.
If you wanted to stay in the party, you obeyed orders, and those orders
came from Moscow.
The party waged ferocious campaigns against -any- deviation, especially against
Trotskyites, even though the numbers and influence of trotsky's followers were
miniscule. Party members were expected to follow the Soviet practice of
periodic self-criticism as a means of ferreting out the unorthodox.
The party lost a lot of members over the Hitler/Stalin pact, but those
who stayed-- and that included a lot of folks in Hollywood, did so because
they were loyal to Stalin and the Party as a revolutionary force, not just
another political organization.
J. Del Col
j del col
And this irrelevancy is convincing because...?
J. Del Col
Francis Muir
j del col:
> zeleny:
> > j del col:
> > >The "Pumpkin Papers" introduced by Whittaker Chambers were very
> > >incriminating of Hiss as a soviet agent. The only reason the gov't
> > >didn't try him for espionage was that the statute of limitations had
> > >run out. Hiss was a spy and a perjurer. It's time --The Nation-- and
> > >its ilk got over it.
> > >
> > >
> > >Ob book: --Venona-- by Klehr and Haynes.
> > Herb Enderton tells me that revealing his occupation as a logician
> > yields an automatic disqualification from jury duty. So much for
> > decrypts that "leave no reasonable doubt at all".
> And this irrelevancy is convincing because...?
...RAB thrives on anecdote.
Michael Zeleny
General Dmitri Volkogonov, who enjoyed direct access to the relevant
KGB and military intelligence files, concluded that Hiss was never an
espionage agent for the Soviet Union. This conclusion was confirmed
by several high-ranking KGB veterans, including General Oleg Kalugin,
a former chief of the foreign intelligence department. As for the
tailor-made decrypt evidence, the agent covernamed ALES in the Venona
Soviet cablegrams actively spied throughout the years 1934 to 1945,
whereas Alger Hiss was accused of conducting espionage no later than
1938. Likewise, ALES was identified in the intercepted Soviet cables
as the leader of a group of espionage agents, whereas Hiss was accused
of acting on his own. Finally, ALES obtained only the U.S. military
information, whereas the papers used to convict Hiss of perjury were
copies of strictly civilian State Department documents. As for that
conviction, the FBI contrived to suppress evidence that the typewriter
allegedly used to type the incriminating copies of said documents and
presented in court as the Hisses' typewriter, was in fact not theirs.
In short, the historical record shows Del Col's mostest certainty to
be held together by the cottage cheese of his oblivious convictions.
j del col
In the 2,900 Venona messages there are references to about 350 Soviet
agents,
nearly half of whom are referred to by their real names by the
Soviets.
They include Ted Hall, the Los Alamos spy. There's nothing
exculpatory about the open reference to Hiss.
J. Del Col
M J Carley
>In other words, I think to the vast majority of
>CPUSA members or associates---who were not "the leadership"
>and who were not taking orders directly from Moscow, it *was*
>just another political party, and they *were* only exercising
>their First Amendment liberty of conscience Rights (peacable
>assembly, speech, press, religion) to belong to the Party.
Not to mention that the Party was on the right side. If you wanted to
oppose racism in the US or Fascism in Spain, the CPUSA was the place
to be.
Michael S. Morris
Monday, the 16th of July, 2001
M J Carley wrote:
Not to mention that the Party was on the
right side. If you wanted to oppose racism
in the US or Fascism in Spain, the CPUSA was
the place to be.
Opposition to racism in the US certainly was
not confined to the CPUSA, or even advanced
or advocated by the CPUSA in any degree of
efficacy. In fact, remembering _Invisible Man_,
it is unclear that the CPUSA ever had any other
intention than exacerbating racial tensions in order
to cause civil unrest. Hell, the Republican
Party in the United States has infinitely more
to pride itself on in opposition to racism.
As for Fascism in Spain, I am afraid that given the
equal atrocity and fascism of the "Republican" side,
and the correlation of this atrocity and fascism always
with the ascendancy of the communists in the "Republican"
side, I see no such thing at all as a "right" side in
the Spanish Civil War.
Mike Morris
(msmo...@netdirect.net)
j del col
People who joined the CPUSA did so because they weren't interested
in "just another political party."
J. Del Col
M J Carley
>Opposition to racism in the US certainly was not confined to the
>CPUSA, or even advanced or advocated by the CPUSA in any degree of
>efficacy. In fact, remembering _Invisible Man_, it is unclear that
>the CPUSA ever had any other intention than exacerbating racial
>tensions in order to cause civil unrest. Hell, the Republican Party
>in the United States has infinitely more to pride itself on in
>opposition to racism.
I didn't say it was confined to the CPUSA but it was certainly one of
the few organizations that openly fought against it. It was the CPUSA
that paid for the defence of the Scottsboro boys.
>As for Fascism in Spain, I am afraid that given the equal atrocity
>and fascism of the "Republican" side, and the correlation of this
>atrocity and fascism always with the ascendancy of the communists in
>the "Republican" side, I see no such thing at all as a "right" side
>in the Spanish Civil War.
Let's see: a legitimately elected government is attacked by its own
armed forces which set about purging dissent from those parts of the
country they control, get the support of Nazi Germany and Fascist
Italy and bomb civilians and you can't see which is the right side.
I wish I was sophisticated.
Michael S. Morris
Monday, the 16th of July, 2001
M J Carley wrote:
I didn't say it was confined to the CPUSA but it was
certainly one of the few organizations that openly fought
against it. It was the CPUSA that paid for the defence of
the Scottsboro boys.
You know, "one of the few organizations that
openly fought against it" is just bullshit. All kinds
of organizations *openly* fought against it---try the
Republican Party, for one, try many of the churches
for another, and had been fighting against it since before
Karl Marx was a dream in his father's eye. The CPUSA quite
clandestinely fought against these other organizations,
and quite cynically "fought against" it.
I said:
As for Fascism in Spain, I am afraid that given the equal atrocity
and fascism of the "Republican" side, and the correlation of this
atrocity and fascism always with the ascendancy of the communists in
the "Republican" side, I see no such thing at all as a "right" side
in the Spanish Civil War.
MJ Carley:
Let's see: a legitimately elected government is attacked by its own
armed forces which set about purging dissent from those parts of the
country they control, get the support of Nazi Germany and Fascist
Italy and bomb civilians and you can't see which is the right side.
I wish I was sophisticated.
Great. Several million dead in wholesale civilian slaughter with the
guilt about equally distributed on both sides of the conflict, except that
the atrocities committed on the "Republican" side were almost all of them
the doing of the communists---who seized by stalinist terror tactics political
control of the anti-Franco forces---and, by God, you invoke Hitler's and
Mussolini's exercise of blitzkrieg and it must be by some sort of oversight
or somesuch you just forget to mention Stalin and Soviet communism in
back of the bloodbath of the innocent perpetrated by this "right" side.
Try reading Paul Johnson's _Modern Times_ for some numbers
of victims of the communists in Spain, or even Hemingway's
_For Whom the Bell Tolls_ (he volunteered with the Republicans, fer
chrissake) and *then* try and tell me about the innocence or rightness or
even try to assert the non-fascism of the communists. Yeah, it's an awful
kind of sophistication indeed to hate fascists whether they call themselves
Fascist or communist.
Mike Morris
(msmo...@netdirect.net)
j del col
> In the referenced article, "Michael S. Morris" <msmo...@netdirect.net> writes:
>
> >In other words, I think to the vast majority of
> >CPUSA members or associates---who were not "the leadership"
> >and who were not taking orders directly from Moscow, it *was*
> >just another political party, and they *were* only exercising
> >their First Amendment liberty of conscience Rights (peacable
> >assembly, speech, press, religion) to belong to the Party.
>
> Not to mention that the Party was on the right side. If you wanted to
> oppose racism in the US or Fascism in Spain, the CPUSA was the place
> to be.
Indeed, and to oppose fascism in Germany, but only
up to August 1939, and then Hitler was their friend, until he turned
treacherous and invaded the rodinya, and then they had to oppose
fascism all over again, except, of course in the USSR.
OB quote from those days--Lillian Hellman on the
German invasion of Russia "The motherland has
been violated!" Really, Lil? Whose motherland was that?
J. Del Col
Joan Marie Shields
>>As for Fascism in Spain, I am afraid that given the equal atrocity
>>and fascism of the "Republican" side, and the correlation of this
>>atrocity and fascism always with the ascendancy of the communists in
>>the "Republican" side, I see no such thing at all as a "right" side
>>in the Spanish Civil War.
M J Carley <ens...@bath.ac.uk> wrote:
>Let's see: a legitimately elected government is attacked by its own
>armed forces which set about purging dissent from those parts of the
>country they control, get the support of Nazi Germany and Fascist
>Italy and bomb civilians and you can't see which is the right side.
I'm not going to express an opinion - really, I'm not. I was reading
the LA Times Book Review section and there were a few books reviewed
which fit into this thread (or maybe not).:
"Orwell in Spain" By George Orwell; Edited by Peter Davison, Penguin, UK
- Christopher Hitchens reviewed it (to tie this to still another thread)
BTW, Kissinger is going to be signing his book "Does America Need a
Foreign Policy?" at the Richard Nixon Library in Yorba Linda. Should I
go?
"Spain Betrayed: The Soviet Union and the Spanish Civil War" Edited by
Ronald Radosh, Mary R. Habeck and Grigory Sevostianov, Yale University
Press
An essay by Bernard Knox: "Confessions of a 'Premature Anti-Fascist' "
www.calendarlive.com/top/1,1419,L-LATimes-Books-X!ArticleDetail-38404,00.html
Of course, can't forget Paco Ignacio Taibo II - "Leonardo's Bicycle" which
partially takes place during the Spanish Civil War.
yiwf,
joan
--
Joan Shields jshi...@uci.edu http://www.ags.uci.edu/~jshields
University of California - Irvine School of Social Ecology
Department of Environmental Analysis and Design
I do not purchase services or products from unsolicited e-mail advertisements.
Michael Zeleny
>>Opposition to racism in the US certainly was not confined to the
>>CPUSA, or even advanced or advocated by the CPUSA in any degree of
>>efficacy. In fact, remembering _Invisible Man_, it is unclear that
>>the CPUSA ever had any other intention than exacerbating racial
>>tensions in order to cause civil unrest. Hell, the Republican Party
>>in the United States has infinitely more to pride itself on in
>>opposition to racism.
>I didn't say it was confined to the CPUSA but it was certainly one of
>the few organizations that openly fought against it. It was the CPUSA
>that paid for the defence of the Scottsboro boys.
You wrote: "If you wanted to oppose racism in the US or Fascism in
Spain, the CPUSA was the place to be." On the standard interpretation
of definite descriptions, this claim entails that opposition to racism
in the US and Fascism in Spain was confined the CPUSA. Deal with it.
>>As for Fascism in Spain, I am afraid that given the equal atrocity
>>and fascism of the "Republican" side, and the correlation of this
>>atrocity and fascism always with the ascendancy of the communists in
>>the "Republican" side, I see no such thing at all as a "right" side
>>in the Spanish Civil War.
>Let's see: a legitimately elected government is attacked by its own
>armed forces which set about purging dissent from those parts of the
>country they control, get the support of Nazi Germany and Fascist
>Italy and bomb civilians and you can't see which is the right side.
When one thinks of the cruelty, squalor, and futility of
war... there is always the temptation to say: "One side is as
bad as the other. I am neutral." In practice, however, one
cannot be neutral.... The hatred which the Spanish Republic
excited in millionaires, dukes, cardinals, play-boys, Blimps
and what not would in itself be enough to show how the land
lay. In essence it was a class war. If it had been won, the
cause of the common people everywhere would have been
strengthened.
-- George Orwell, Looking Back on the Spanish War, 1943
>I wish I was sophisticated.
You do well with underhanded tergiversation.
Don Tuite
Shields) wrote:
. . .
>I'm not going to express an opinion - really, I'm not. I was reading
>the LA Times Book Review section and there were a few books reviewed
>which fit into this thread (or maybe not).:
>
>"Orwell in Spain" By George Orwell; Edited by Peter Davison, Penguin, UK
>- Christopher Hitchens reviewed it (to tie this to still another thread)
>BTW, Kissinger is going to be signing his book "Does America Need a
>Foreign Policy?" at the Richard Nixon Library in Yorba Linda. Should I
>go?
>
>"Spain Betrayed: The Soviet Union and the Spanish Civil War" Edited by
>Ronald Radosh, Mary R. Habeck and Grigory Sevostianov, Yale University
>Press
>
>An essay by Bernard Knox: "Confessions of a 'Premature Anti-Fascist' "
>www.calendarlive.com/top/1,1419,L-LATimes-Books-X!ArticleDetail-38404,00.html
>
>Of course, can't forget Paco Ignacio Taibo II - "Leonardo's Bicycle" which
>partially takes place during the Spanish Civil War.
Add Malraux, *Man's Hope"
I've mentioned here before that I'm irked by *Homage to Catalonia*:
Young idealist takes up somebody else's war so he can kill Facists,
installs wife in Barcelona hotel, discovers that syndicalists are bad
organizers, takes bullet in neck and goes home.
Don
j...@radidelmex.net
> I've mentioned here before that I'm irked by *Homage to Catalonia*:
> Young idealist takes up somebody else's war so he can kill Facists,
> installs wife in Barcelona hotel, discovers that syndicalists are bad
> organizers, takes bullet in neck and goes home.
You make poor George sound like a dilettante! He wasn't exactly young,
he was in his 30s, he fought on the front lines, and the bullet through
the neck paralyzed his arm, so he couldn't fight. Was it his fault his
leaders were idiots?
Now ... did he had a love affair with the Red Virgin, Simone Weil?
And did Florence Nightingale have syphilis?
Sayan Bhattacharyya
>
>MJ Carley:
> Let's see: a legitimately elected government is attacked by its own
> armed forces which set about purging dissent from those parts of the
> country they control, get the support of Nazi Germany and Fascist
> Italy and bomb civilians and you can't see which is the right side.
>
> I wish I was sophisticated.
>
>of victims of the communists in Spain, or even Hemingway's
>_For Whom the Bell Tolls_ (he volunteered with the Republicans, fer
>chrissake) and *then* try and tell me about the innocence or rightness or
>even try to assert the non-fascism of the communists.
Notice how Sen~or Morris cleverly sets up a straw man here by
saying "innocence or rightness" -- slipping in the word "innocence".
Carley was talking about the fact that there was demonstrably a
right side and a wrong side in the war, a consequence of the fact
that a legitimately elected government had been attacked by its
armed forces. Even if both sides were guilty of atrocities later,
that does not mean that there was not a right side or a wrong side.
Notice that Carley was *not* talking about innocence at all. No one
here was claiming that the spanish republicans were innocent of all
war crimes. He *was* talking about rightness. The way Sen~or Morris
conflates the two is, frankly, dishonest.
As a comparison, consider the Second World War. Both sides committed
atrocities (remember that the allies bombed Hiroshima). Yet, in spite
of the fact that neither side in the Second World War were innocent
of atrocities, it is evident that there was a right side and a wrong
side, and that the Allies were on the right side.
Similarly, and for similar reasons, there was a right side and a
wrong side in the Spanish Civil War, and the spanish republicans
were on the right side.
Don Tuite
>Don Tuite <don_...@kvo.com> wrote:
>
>> I've mentioned here before that I'm irked by *Homage to Catalonia*:
>> Young idealist takes up somebody else's war so he can kill Facists,
>> installs wife in Barcelona hotel, discovers that syndicalists are bad
>> organizers, takes bullet in neck and goes home.
>
>You make poor George sound like a dilettante! He wasn't exactly young,
>he was in his 30s, he fought on the front lines, and the bullet through
>the neck paralyzed his arm, so he couldn't fight. Was it his fault his
>leaders were idiots?
It's how he came across to me, via the book. I'm sure I read near the
beginning that he wanted a chance to kill people. The discovery that
anarchists are hard to organize shouldn't have come as a surprise,
either.
Don
Francis Muir
Sayan Bhattacharyya:
> Similarly, and for similar reasons, there was a right side and a
> wrong side in the Spanish Civil War, and the spanish republicans
> were on the right side.
I love it when persons not involved in any way
can determine right from wrong in the actions of
others. Such hypocrisy is a joy to behold. Keep
up the good work, Bhatti.
Michael S. Morris
Monday, the 16th of July, 2001
MJ Carley:
Let's see: a legitimately elected government is
attacked by its own armed forces which set about
purging dissent from those parts of the country
they control, get the support of Nazi Germany and
Fascist Italy and bomb civilians and you can't see
which is the right side.
I wish I was sophisticated.
I wrote:
Try reading Paul Johnson's _Modern Times_ for some
numbers of victims of the communists in Spain, or
even Hemingway's _For Whom the Bell Tolls_ (he
volunteered with the Republicans, fer chrissake)
and *then* try and tell me about the innocence or
rightness or even try to assert the non-fascism
of the communists.
Sayan:
Notice how Sen~or Morris cleverly sets up a
straw man here by saying "innocence or rightness" --
slipping in the word "innocence".
Notice how Sayan fails at logic here by missing
the word "or". I dare MJ Carley or you or anyone
to show me the Republicans were: Right, innocent
of purging dissent, the legitimate government of
Spain, *or* were non-fascist in any meaningful way.
Sayan:
Carley was talking about the fact that
there was demonstrably a right side and a
wrong side in the war,
No, I'm sorry, Sayan, but Carley said more than
just that the Republican side was the legitimately
elected government of Spain. He said, for instance,
that Fascists "purged dissent" behind their lines,
and that they used the military aid of the external
fascist dictators Hitler and Mussolini. Well, it turns
out there's a counter to *every* aspect of MJ Carleys
fond wishes about the Spanish Civil War. In fact,
consider the following variant on MJ Carley's paragraph:
Let's see: a legitimately elected government is
seized by communist agitators from outside the country
and proceeds to precipitate an anarchic rule-by-death-squads
against the wealthy, the church, the military, and the nobility.
Some of the armed forces rebel when the terror gets to be
too much, and rightfully resists the terrorist and murderous
government. The murderous government responds by wholesale
slaughter of innocents behind its lines, and various
internal purges and coups within its own organization.
by its own armed forces which set about and then, when
losing to patriots, bring in the support of the communist
Soviet Union, than which no more heinous regime the world
has known. And you can't see which is the right side.
It has the virtue of being *equally* true as Carley's
take. Since this newsgroup is about books,
let us sample some Paul Johnson (_Modern Times_, starting on
page 323-339):
Franco had hitherto opposed military risings and he continued to
do so. But he now saw Spain threatened by a foreign disease:
"The fronts are socialism, communism, and the other formulae
which attack civilization and replace it with barbarism." In
1935 he discovered that 25 percent of army conscripts belonged
to the Left parties, and that organizing and leafleting
them was the primary task of Left cadres. In August 1935,
at the seventh meeting of the Comintern, Dimitrov
introduced the "Popular Front" conception with the words:
"Comrades, you will remember the ancient tale of the capture
of Troy....The attacking army was unable to achieve victory
until, with the aid of the famous Trojan Horse, it managed
to penetrate into the very heart of the enemy camp." Franco
feared that once the army was divided or neutralized there
would be nothing to prevent a take-over by the extreme
Left, leading to all of the horrors of Lenin's Russia and,
not least, a Stalinist forced collectivization of the peasants.
[...]
When the Left took office after the elections, it proceeded
to confirm most of these fears. Although the Popular Front
parties won, they actually got less than 50 percent of the votes
cast. The Left improved its position by 1 million votes; but
the Right added an extra 750,000 votes too. These figures
dictated caution. Instead the Left brushed aside constitutional
niceties, such as waiting for the second-round run-off, and formed
a government the day after the first ballot. That night the
first burnings of churches and convents took place; in Orvieto
the gaol was opened. In parliament the Left began an immediate
campaign to deprive CEDA deputies of theirseats for alleged
"irregularities", and to attack the President, Alcala Zamora,
who was a perfectly decent republican.
The most alarming development was the rapidly growing influence
of the Communists. They had succeeded in electing only
seventeen deputies [...]
The forcing of a revolutionary programme through the Cortes
would not of itself have provoked a military uprising. The
determining factor was the failure of the Popular Front to
control its own militants or indeed any kind of stable
government. [...]
In May the anarchist and POUM strikers began to take over
the factories, the peasants to occupy large properties
(especially in Estremadura and Andalusia) and divide up the
land. The Civil Guard was confined to its barracks. Most of the
army was sent on leave. The new republican riot-police,
the Assault Guards, sometimes joined in the violence, or
stood watching while crops were burned. In June the violence
became worse. On 16 June, Robles, in a final warning, read out
to the Cortes a list of outrages and atrocities: 160 churches
burned, 269 (mainly) political murders, 1,287 cases of assault,
69 political offices wrecked, 113 "general strikes", 228
partial strikes, 10 newspaper offices sacked. [...] The last
straw came on 11 July when the body of the right-wing
parliamentarian, Calvo Sotelo, was discovered, murdered by
Assault Guards in reprisal for the killing of two of them
by a right-wing gang. Two days later Robles publicly accused
the government of responsibility. Civil war broke out on the
17 July and Robles, unwilling to be a party to a putsch,
went to France.
The Civil War occurred because the indecisive February
election reflected accurately a country which was almost
equally divided; foreign intervention prolonged the war
for two-and-a-half years. No episode in the 1930s has been more
lied about than this one, and only in recent years have
historians begun to dig it out from the mountains of
mendacity beneath which it has been buried for a generation.
What emerges is not a struggle between good and evil but a
general tragedy. The insurgent generals quickly established
control of the south and west. But they failed to take Madrid,
and the government continued to control most of the north
and east until well into 1938. Behind the lines thus established,
each side committed appalling atrocities against their opponents,
real or imaginary.
For the Republicans, teh Catholic Church was the chief object
hatred. This is curious. The clergy were anti-liberal and
anti-socialist; but they were no fascists. Most of them were
monarchists, if anything. Archbishop Pedro Segura of Toledo,
was anti-fascist; he was also pro-British. It is true there were
too many clergy: 20,000 monks, 60,000 nuns, 35,000 priests, out
of a population of 24.5 million. [...]
Most of the Republican atrocities were carried out by killer
gangs, formed from union militants, youth, political cadres,
and calling themselves [...] Eleven bishops, a fifth of the
total number, were murdered, 12 percent of the monks, 13 percent
of the priests. [...] Some 283 nuns were killed, a few raped
before execution, though assaults on women were rare in Republican
Spain. In the province of Ciudad Real, the mother of two Jesuits
was murdered by having a crucifix thrust down her throat. The
parish priest of Torrijos was scourged, crowned with thorns,
forced to drink vinegar and had a beam of wood strapped to his
back -- then shot, not crucified. [...]
The Republicans also murdered nationalist laity, chiefly the
Falange. In Ronda 512 people were flung into the gorge which
dramatically bisects the town, an episde used in Ernest
Hemingway's _For Whom the Bell Tolls_. Lenin was the mentor;
the Left murder-gangs were known as checas. But they used
Hollywood argot: dar un paseo was "Taking for a ride".
There were dozens of these gans in Madrid alone. The worst was
led bythe Communist youth boss, Garcia Attadell, who ran
the much feared "dawn-patrol" and murdered scores of people. He
lived in a palace, amassed quantities of loot, tried to make
off to Latin America with it, but was captured and garotted in
a Seville prison, after being recieved back into Mother
Church. many of these killers graduated into the Soviet-
imposed secret police organization in Barcelona. In all, the
Left appears to have murdered about 55,000 civilians (the
National Sanctuary at Valladolid lists 54,594), including
about 4000 women and several hundred children.
The Nationalist killings behind the lines were on a similar
scale, but army units carried them out for the most part.
[lots of details skipped] An authoritative modern estimate
of Nationalist killings lists about 8000 in the province
of Granada, 7-8000 in Navarre, 9000 in Seville, 9000 in
Valladolid, 2000 in Saragossa, 3000 in the Balearics. In
the first six months of the war the Nationalists killed
six generals and an admiral, virtually all the Popular
Front deputies they captured, governors, doctors, and
schoolmasters---about 50,000 in all. So, the killings on
both sides were roughly equal, and both were of a totalitarian
nature---that is, punishment was meted out on the basis of
class, status and occupation, not individual guilt.
Foreign intervention was important from the start. Without it
the military putsch would probably have failed. [government
has numerical superiority on land, navy has mutinied, preventing
army crossing over from Africa---Italian and German immediate
support saves Franco in getting men across the Straits---turned
the tide, but arrival of French and Russian aircraft in Madrid
plus Russian tanks there gives government superiority there,
stabilizes lines]
The outcome of the war, however, was not determined by great
power intervention, which cancelled itself out. [Germans:
10,000 men at any one time, 300 killed, 200 tanks, 600
aircraft plus "superb" 88mm antiaircraft guns. Italians:
40-50,000 men at any one time, 4000 killed, 150 tanks, 660
aircraft, 800 pieces of artillery. Russians: 1000 aircraft,
1000 pilots, 2000 specialists, 900 tanks, 300 armoured cars,
1550 pieces of artillery. French: 300 aircraft. Russian tanks
were the best, but were poorly used by the Republicans---many
were simply abandoned. 40,000 other foreigners fought for
the Republicans]
[foreign contribution cancels out---Franco was smarter---
poor Republican finance---stalinist terror in Barcelona
overshadowed in propaganda by bombing of Guernica---
communist propaganda efforts and effective censorship
of truth about purges]
[90,000 Nationalists killed in action, 110,000 Republicans,
a million crippled, 10,000 dead from air-raids, 25,000
from malnutrition, 130,000 murdered or shot between the
lines, 500,000 exiled, tens of thousands killed by Franco
after victory]
Sayan:
a consequence of the fact that a legitimately
elected government had been attacked by its
armed forces.
OK, you've read at least some of what I've read about it.
How dare you call such a government "legitimate"?
Sayan:
Even if both sides were guilty of
atrocities later, that does not mean
that there was not a right side or a wrong side.
No, but the fact that the government was (A) not
protecting the Rights of citizens, and (B) was
in fact violating the Rights of citizens does not
exactly puff up this notion of yours that winning
election were enough. I, too, would hope that I
would be quick to rebel against a government guilty
of what the Popular Front government was guilty of.
Sayan:
Notice that Carley was *not* talking about innocence
at all.
I noticed that Carley wasn't talking about innocence
when he mentioned legitimate-election. But I did
notice a bit about guilt and innocence where he
mentioned Nationalist purges, without saying a thing about
Republican purges.
Sayan:
No one here was claiming that the spanish
republicans were innocent of all
war crimes.
Sorry, Sayan, but if he didn't want to go into
the question of war crimes, then he needn't have
mentioned purges, which he did mention, indicating
to me he was talking about more things than just
the legitimacy-by-election of the "Republican"
government.
Sayan:
He *was* talking about rightness.
No, Sayan. This is just in error. He spoke
of more than one thing, in fact. I count
five:
1. The gov was legitimate by election.
2. The Nationalists were rebs.
3. The Nationalists committed purges.
4. The Nationalists got help from Fascist Italy and Germany.
5. In the course of the war, the Nationalists bombed Guernica,
which were innocent civilians.
*Then* he said the gov was the *right* side.
I.e. MJ Carley's "right" referred to all 5 points.
Well, fine, I counter with 5 equally valid points:
1. Any gov which does not protect Rights or even
violates them as this gov did is not legitimate,
regardless of the size of its democratic support.
A Right is never the subject of a vote.
2. The gov, well before the war, had been usurped by
the communists, acting in foreign agency.
3. The Republicans committed purges.
4. The Republicans got help from Communist Russia.
5. In the course of the war, the Republicans committed
many outrages against civilan non-combatants.
Sayan:
The way Sen~or Morris
conflates the two is, frankly, dishonest.
Bullshit, Sayan. Impeach my source (you could always
try dissing Paul Johnson as a right-wing propagandist),
or apologize. I have supported everything I've said
(except that where I said "millions" initially
I should have said "tens of thousands"), and I've
argued *directly* against every single one of Carley's
points.
Sayan:
As a comparison, consider the Second World War.
OK, let's.
Sayan:
Both sides committed atrocities (remember that the
allies bombed Hiroshima).
Thank you for playing, Sayan. You call Hiroshima
an atrocity, I don't. I think it was a legitimate military
target, and was completely necessary for saving some
half a million American servicemen and another 2 or 3
million Japanese in the invasion of the Japanese
homelands. Hiroshima was terrible and regrettable,
yes. An atrocity, no. Pearl Harbor was an atrocity.
Sayan:
Yet, in spite of the fact that neither side
in the Second World War were innocent of atrocities,
it is evident that there was a right side and a wrong
side, and that the Allies were on the right side.
I agree wholeheartedly with this statement, excepting
only the single Ally known as the Soviet Union
from any sort of inclusion on the right side.
The Soviets began the war right alongside Hitler
by attacking Poland, and Finland, too.
Sayan:
Similarly, and for similar reasons, there was a
right side and a wrong side in the Spanish Civil War,
and the spanish republicans were on the right side.
I believe I have just demonstrated why you are absolutely
wrong about this, and why it is precisely I believe both
sides in the Spanish Civil War were *the wrong side*.
I mean, I thought after Paul Johnson, I should
quote from Winston Churchill's chapter on the
war in Spain in his History of the Second World
War, and why it was the *right* thing for Britain
to do to support neither side---again, that both
sides were wrong and illegitimate. But, I'm tired
of typing at this point.
Mike Morris
(msmo...@netdirect.net)
M J Carley
>You know, "one of the few organizations that openly fought against
>it" is just bullshit. All kinds of organizations *openly* fought
>against it---try the Republican Party, for one, try many of the
>churches for another, and had been fighting against it since before
>Karl Marx was a dream in his father's eye. The CPUSA quite
>clandestinely fought against these other organizations, and quite
>cynically "fought against" it.
So no members of the CPUSA took any risks to fight against racism, the
CPUSA contributed nothing to fighting against racism and their
opposition to racism was all a fake. You really don't believe it
possible that people could have joined the CPUSA in good faith to
fight against racism and facism?
Incidentally, Marx was born in 1818. Who was openly, as a political
organization, fighting against racism (or slavery) at the time?
>Great. Several million dead in wholesale civilian slaughter with the
>guilt about equally distributed on both sides of the conflict, except that
>the atrocities committed on the "Republican" side were almost all of them
>the doing of the communists---who seized by stalinist terror tactics political
>control of the anti-Franco forces---and, by God, you invoke Hitler's and
>Mussolini's exercise of blitzkrieg and it must be by some sort of oversight
>or somesuch you just forget to mention Stalin and Soviet communism in
>back of the bloodbath of the innocent perpetrated by this "right" side.
But the actions of Stalin do not change the good faith of those who
joined the CP* to fight against facism. As Dennis Healey put it, a lot
of people joined over Spain and left over Finland. A lot of the
victims of Stalin were members of the CP.
>Try reading Paul Johnson's _Modern Times_ for some numbers
>of victims of the communists in Spain, or even Hemingway's
>_For Whom the Bell Tolls_ (he volunteered with the Republicans, fer
>chrissake) and *then* try and tell me about the innocence or rightness or
>even try to assert the non-fascism of the communists. Yeah, it's an awful
>kind of sophistication indeed to hate fascists whether they call themselves
>Fascist or communist.
Having read Paul Johnson once, I would not soil my hands with his
writing again.
M J Carley
>Notice how Sayan fails at logic here by missing
>the word "or". I dare MJ Carley or you or anyone
>to show me the Republicans were: Right, innocent
>of purging dissent, the legitimate government of
>Spain, *or* were non-fascist in any meaningful way.
You're playing games---there is a distinction between the CP (your
original target) and the Republicans. There can be no honest
disagreement about the legitimacy of the Republican government: they
were elected.
M J Carley
>M J Carley <ens...@bath.ac.uk> wrote:
>>I didn't say it was confined to the CPUSA but it was certainly one of
>>the few organizations that openly fought against it. It was the CPUSA
>>that paid for the defence of the Scottsboro boys.
>
>You wrote: "If you wanted to oppose racism in the US or Fascism in
>Spain, the CPUSA was the place to be." On the standard interpretation
>of definite descriptions, this claim entails that opposition to racism
>in the US and Fascism in Spain was confined the CPUSA. Deal with it.
So where else would you go? The Republicans weren't fighting fascism
(who was in the US at the time?). If you weren't religious the few
churches weren't an option. The CP looked like a good bet.
> When one thinks of the cruelty, squalor, and futility of
> war... there is always the temptation to say: "One side is as
> bad as the other. I am neutral." In practice, however, one
> cannot be neutral.... The hatred which the Spanish Republic
> excited in millionaires, dukes, cardinals, play-boys, Blimps
> and what not would in itself be enough to show how the land
> lay. In essence it was a class war. If it had been won, the
> cause of the common people everywhere would have been
> strengthened.
> -- George Orwell, Looking Back on the Spanish War, 1943
That makes sense to me. In Spain, the right side lost.
>>I wish I was sophisticated.
>
>You do well with underhanded tergiversation.
Is `underhanded tergiversation' not a tautology?
M J Carley
>ens...@bath.ac.uk (M J Carley) wrote in message news:<GGK3p0.76...@bath.ac.uk>...
>> In the referenced article, "Michael S. Morris" <msmo...@netdirect.net> writes:
>>
>> >In other words, I think to the vast majority of
>> >CPUSA members or associates---who were not "the leadership"
>> >and who were not taking orders directly from Moscow, it *was*
>> >just another political party, and they *were* only exercising
>> >their First Amendment liberty of conscience Rights (peacable
>> >assembly, speech, press, religion) to belong to the Party.
>>
>> Not to mention that the Party was on the right side. If you wanted to
>> oppose racism in the US or Fascism in Spain, the CPUSA was the place
>> to be.
>
>
>
>Indeed, and to oppose fascism in Germany, but only
>up to August 1939, and then Hitler was their friend, until he turned
>treacherous and invaded the rodinya, and then they had to oppose
>fascism all over again, except, of course in the USSR.
That's when a lot of people left the CP (although many didn't). Dennis
Healey (later thoroughly respectable politician) said he joined the CP
on Spain and left on Finland. That seems to me a perfectly honourable
position.
>OB quote from those days--Lillian Hellman on the
>German invasion of Russia "The motherland has
>been violated!" Really, Lil? Whose motherland was that?
Or the German communist who ran into a committee meeting in Moscow in
1940 and said `We've taken Paris.'
Michael Zeleny
>zel...@oak.math.ucla.edu (Michael Zeleny) writes:
>>M J Carley <ens...@bath.ac.uk> wrote:
>>>I didn't say it was confined to the CPUSA but it was certainly one of
>>>the few organizations that openly fought against it. It was the CPUSA
>>>that paid for the defence of the Scottsboro boys.
>>You wrote: "If you wanted to oppose racism in the US or Fascism in
>>Spain, the CPUSA was the place to be." On the standard interpretation
>>of definite descriptions, this claim entails that opposition to racism
>>in the US and Fascism in Spain was confined the CPUSA. Deal with it.
>So where else would you go? The Republicans weren't fighting fascism
>(who was in the US at the time?). If you weren't religious the few
>churches weren't an option. The CP looked like a good bet.
I gladly note your tacit retraction of arrogating the unique stateside
anti-racist stand to the CPUSA. As for its anti-fascist credentials,
in the first place, the Comintern bears the consummate responsibility
for the ascendancy of National Socialism, owing to its programmatic
opposition to Social Democrats on Stalin's personal orders. Secondly,
the selfsame Nazi support was made manifest between August 23, 1939
and June 22, 1941, by the infamous Molotov-Ribbentrop treaty. Between
these twin poles of red-brown collusion, the CPUSA could not but have
been the absolute worst basis for fighting fascism of any stripe.
For one consistently righteous political movement of the period, try
Surrealism.
>> When one thinks of the cruelty, squalor, and futility of
>> war... there is always the temptation to say: "One side is as
>> bad as the other. I am neutral." In practice, however, one
>> cannot be neutral.... The hatred which the Spanish Republic
>> excited in millionaires, dukes, cardinals, play-boys, Blimps
>> and what not would in itself be enough to show how the land
>> lay. In essence it was a class war. If it had been won, the
>> cause of the common people everywhere would have been
>> strengthened.
>> -- George Orwell, Looking Back on the Spanish War, 1943
>That makes sense to me. In Spain, the right side lost.
>>>I wish I was sophisticated.
>>You do well with underhanded tergiversation.
>Is `underhanded tergiversation' not a tautology?
Not even a pleonasm. Consider Galileo.
Michael Zeleny
>Incidentally, Marx was born in 1818. Who was openly, as a political
>organization, fighting against racism (or slavery) at the time?
The French republicans and Bonapartists, take your pick.
Michael Zeleny
>>>"Michael S. Morris" <msmo...@netdirect.net> writes:
>>>>In other words, I think to the vast majority of
>>>>CPUSA members or associates---who were not "the leadership"
>>>>and who were not taking orders directly from Moscow, it *was*
>>>>just another political party, and they *were* only exercising
>>>>their First Amendment liberty of conscience Rights (peacable
>>>>assembly, speech, press, religion) to belong to the Party.
>>>Not to mention that the Party was on the right side. If you wanted to
>>>oppose racism in the US or Fascism in Spain, the CPUSA was the place
>>>to be.
>>Indeed, and to oppose fascism in Germany, but only
>>up to August 1939, and then Hitler was their friend, until he turned
>>treacherous and invaded the rodinya, and then they had to oppose
>>fascism all over again, except, of course in the USSR.
>That's when a lot of people left the CP (although many didn't). Dennis
>Healey (later thoroughly respectable politician) said he joined the CP
>on Spain and left on Finland. That seems to me a perfectly honourable
>position.
Only provided that you can stomach Kronstadt.
My grandfather joined in 1905, left in 1920, was lucky to die in 1934.
>>OB quote from those days--Lillian Hellman on the
>>German invasion of Russia "The motherland has
>>been violated!" Really, Lil? Whose motherland was that?
>Or the German communist who ran into a committee meeting in Moscow in
>1940 and said `We've taken Paris.'
cordially
M J Carley
>
>>Incidentally, Marx was born in 1818. Who was openly, as a political
>>organization, fighting against racism (or slavery) at the time?
>
>The French republicans and Bonapartists, take your pick.
\begin{pedantic}
In the United States.
\end{pedantic}
M J Carley
>
>>That's when a lot of people left the CP (although many didn't). Dennis
>>Healey (later thoroughly respectable politician) said he joined the CP
>>on Spain and left on Finland. That seems to me a perfectly honourable
>>position.
>
>Only provided that you can stomach Kronstadt.
Assuming you'd ever known about it in the first place. People who
joined the CPUSA typically neither knew nor cared about the Soviet
Union except as `those guys who are supporting things we believe in'.
Honest, decent people joined because it was the place to be.
Richard Harter
wrote:
>In the referenced article, zel...@oak.math.ucla.edu (Michael Zeleny) writes:
>>M J Carley <ens...@bath.ac.uk> wrote:
>>
>>>Incidentally, Marx was born in 1818. Who was openly, as a political
>>>organization, fighting against racism (or slavery) at the time?
>>
>>The French republicans and Bonapartists, take your pick.
>
>\begin{pedantic}
> In the United States.
>\end{pedantic}
In 1818? The abolitionists.
In the early twentieth century? Quite a few. Incidentally,
Liebowitz, who defended the Scottsboro boys, found the CP to be a
major nuisance because the party was more interested in exploiting
their plight for political propaganda than in actually defending them.
Richard Harter, c...@tiac.net,
http://www.tiac.net/users/cri, http://www.varinoma.com
It is unfortunate that the dishonest politicians give
the remaining one percent of their profession a bad name.
Richard Harter
wrote:
>In the referenced article, zel...@oak.math.ucla.edu (Michael Zeleny) writes:
>>M J Carley <ens...@bath.ac.uk> wrote:
>>
>>>That's when a lot of people left the CP (although many didn't). Dennis
>>>Healey (later thoroughly respectable politician) said he joined the CP
>>>on Spain and left on Finland. That seems to me a perfectly honourable
>>>position.
>>
>>Only provided that you can stomach Kronstadt.
>
>Assuming you'd ever known about it in the first place. People who
>joined the CPUSA typically neither knew nor cared about the Soviet
>Union except as `those guys who are supporting things we believe in'.
>Honest, decent people joined because it was the place to be.
There is much to that provided you don't mean the only place by "the
place". There were a lot of movements going on in the 30's - it was
the time of the great depression and people were looking for answers.
The Party had a lot of bait out for honest, decent folks. Once you
got in deep enough to be under party discipline things were different
from the YCL and the public rallies. Lots of people flirted with the
CP, including a number of SF authors.
ObBook: _The Way The Future Was_ by Fred Pohl
Michael Zeleny
>zel...@oak.math.ucla.edu (Michael Zeleny) writes:
>>M J Carley <ens...@bath.ac.uk> wrote:
>>>That's when a lot of people left the CP (although many didn't). Dennis
>>>Healey (later thoroughly respectable politician) said he joined the CP
>>>on Spain and left on Finland. That seems to me a perfectly honourable
>>>position.
>>Only provided that you can stomach Kronstadt.
>Assuming you'd ever known about it in the first place. People who
>joined the CPUSA typically neither knew nor cared about the Soviet
>Union except as `those guys who are supporting things we believe in'.
>Honest, decent people joined because it was the place to be.
Not unlike the honest, decent people who joined the NSDAP because
it was the place to be, neither knowing nor caring about the Final
Solution.
Michael Zeleny
>zel...@oak.math.ucla.edu (Michael Zeleny) writes:
>>M J Carley <ens...@bath.ac.uk> wrote:
>>>Incidentally, Marx was born in 1818. Who was openly, as a political
>>>organization, fighting against racism (or slavery) at the time?
>>The French republicans and Bonapartists, take your pick.
>\begin{pedantic}
> In the United States.
>\end{pedantic}
The Pennsylvania Society for the Abolition of Slavery was formed
in 1775, a year before the establishment of the United States.
M J Carley
>In 1818? The abolitionists.
Thank you.
>In the early twentieth century? Quite a few. Incidentally,
>Liebowitz, who defended the Scottsboro boys, found the CP to be a
>major nuisance because the party was more interested in exploiting
>their plight for political propaganda than in actually defending them.
Of course, they did: they were a political party. On the other hand,
they paid him.
M J Carley
>>Assuming you'd ever known about it in the first place. People who
>>joined the CPUSA typically neither knew nor cared about the Soviet
>>Union except as `those guys who are supporting things we believe in'.
>>Honest, decent people joined because it was the place to be.
>
>There is much to that provided you don't mean the only place by "the
>place". There were a lot of movements going on in the 30's - it was
>the time of the great depression and people were looking for answers.
>The Party had a lot of bait out for honest, decent folks. Once you
>got in deep enough to be under party discipline things were different
>from the YCL and the public rallies. Lots of people flirted with the
>CP, including a number of SF authors.
I have the feeling that the division was between those who did not
know what Stalin was doing and didn't care as long as the CP was doing
its bit in the US, those who knew but didn't care and those who knew
and approved. Degrees of guilt are easily assigned.
M J Carley
>M J Carley <ens...@bath.ac.uk> wrote:
>>Assuming you'd ever known about it in the first place. People who
>>joined the CPUSA typically neither knew nor cared about the Soviet
>>Union except as `those guys who are supporting things we believe in'.
>>Honest, decent people joined because it was the place to be.
>
>Not unlike the honest, decent people who joined the NSDAP because
>it was the place to be, neither knowing nor caring about the Final
>Solution.
Your analogy isn't bad: there were people who joined Fascist or Nazi
organizations because they thought they were the only way out of
depression or poverty or whatever. The difference is that the CPUSA
never killed anyone.
Of course, you knew that.
Michael Zeleny
>zel...@oak.math.ucla.edu (Michael Zeleny) writes:
>>M J Carley <ens...@bath.ac.uk> wrote:
>>>Assuming you'd ever known about it in the first place. People who
>>>joined the CPUSA typically neither knew nor cared about the Soviet
>>>Union except as `those guys who are supporting things we believe in'.
>>>Honest, decent people joined because it was the place to be.
>>Not unlike the honest, decent people who joined the NSDAP because
>>it was the place to be, neither knowing nor caring about the Final
>>Solution.
>Your analogy isn't bad: there were people who joined Fascist or Nazi
>organizations because they thought they were the only way out of
>depression or poverty or whatever. The difference is that the CPUSA
>never killed anyone.
>
>Of course, you knew that.
By propounding your difference between the CPUSA and the NSDAP, you
are wilfully begging the original question of the putatively benign
CPUSA being an equiculpable proxy of the manifestly murderous CPSU.
I shall abstain from making conjectures about your knowledge that
petitio principii is a logical fallacy.
M J Carley
>The Pennsylvania Society for the Abolition of Slavery was formed
>in 1775, a year before the establishment of the United States.
I stand corrected.
Francis Muir
Michael Zeleny wrote:
>
> M J Carley <ens...@bath.ac.uk> wrote:
>
> >Incidentally, Marx was born in 1818. Who was openly, as a political
> >organization, fighting against racism (or slavery) at the time?
>
> The French republicans and Bonapartists, take your pick.
The Anti-Slavery Society and the Society of Friends in the UK, with
Wilberforce representing their positions in Parliament.
M J Carley
>M J Carley <ens...@bath.ac.uk> wrote:
>>Your analogy isn't bad: there were people who joined Fascist or Nazi
>>organizations because they thought they were the only way out of
>>depression or poverty or whatever. The difference is that the CPUSA
>>never killed anyone.
>>
>>Of course, you knew that.
>
>By propounding your difference between the CPUSA and the NSDAP, you
>are wilfully begging the original question of the putatively benign
>CPUSA being an equiculpable proxy of the manifestly murderous CPSU.
But the CPUSA was not as guilty as the CPSU. It did none of the things
for which the CPSU is rightly condemned.
One might of course argue, with some justification, that the real
difference between the CPUSA and the NSDAP is that the CPUSA never had
power.
>I shall abstain from making conjectures about your knowledge that
>petitio principii is a logical fallacy.
You do that.
Michael S. Morris
Tuesday, the 17th of July, 2001
I said:
Notice how Sayan fails at logic here by missing
the word "or". I dare MJ Carley or you or anyone
to show me the Republicans were: Right, innocent
of purging dissent, the legitimate government of
Spain, *or* were non-fascist in any meaningful way.
MJ Carley:
You're playing games---there is a distinction
between the CP (your original target) and the
Republicans.
No, Mr. Carley, you are playing the game here.
You are the one who asserted that the CPUSA
supported the *right* side in the Spanish Civil War.
I scoffed that the side the CPUSA supported
was not the right side---because, as I have now amply
supported---there was no *right* side in that war.
You are the one who introduced *two* terms---
the CPUSA and the side they supported during the
war. I.e., the Republicans.
MJ Carley:
There can be no honest disagreement about the
legitimacy of the Republican government: they were elected.
What is this idiocy that overtakes moderns about
democratic election and the legitimacy that it
supposedly confers? Do you understand, or do
you not, that you and I have a fundamental---and honest---
disagreement about democracy? *I* think Rights always
and everywhere---for all persons on this planet (I am
being quite evangelical about this)---trump the wishes
of any democratic majority. *I* think that the preservation
of Rights is the *reason* for the institution of government
in the first place (as it says in the American Declaration).
*I* think that a government, I don't care if it were
elected by a 99.9% majority, which fails to preserve
Rights to the point that a reign of terror ensues---as the
church burnings and death-squad activity
under the immediate Popular Front ascendancy (and before the
outbreak of the civil war, mind you) amply illustrates---
cannot claim to be a government, let alone *legitimate*.
I also think when the government itself not only fails
to preserve Rights, but actively violates them---as the factory
take overs, the land redistributions, and the extinguishing of
the political opposition in the Republican government
illustrates---then it deserves to be overthrown. And I finally
think, that when a revolutionary minority faction, operating
under orders from Moscow, proceeds by extra-constitutional
means and terror to take over control of a democratically elected
assembly, that one can no longer point to that assembly as the
*legitimate* elected government of the country. So, yeah, there
is every honest disagreement about the legitimacy---as well
as the rightness---of the Popular Front government in Spain.
Also, there is every indication that the leninist and stalinist
Communist Party in Spain was at the heart of everything that
was wrong and illegitimate with the Republican side. So the
CPUSA's support for the Republican side seems entirely wrong
to me. I'd be much more willing to applaud the non-communists
who volunteered to go fight for *either* side, than the CPUSA.
Mike Morris
(msmo...@netdirect.net)
Michael S. Morris
Tuesday, the 17th of July, 2001
I said:
You know, "one of the few organizations that openly fought against
it" is just bullshit. All kinds of organizations *openly* fought
against it---try the Republican Party, for one, try many of the
churches for another, and had been fighting against it since before
Karl Marx was a dream in his father's eye. The CPUSA quite
clandestinely fought against these other organizations, and quite
cynically "fought against" it.
MJ Carley:
So no members of the CPUSA took any risks to fight against
racism,
Huh? How do you manage to go from my statement that the CPUSA
was unimportant in the fight against racism in America to "no members
of the CPUSA took any risks to fight against racism"? Maybe if
you could explain your logic so we're on the same wavelength, we'd
do better.
MJ Carley:
the CPUSA contributed nothing to fighting against racism and their
opposition to racism was all a fake.
You understand that the Republican Party in the United States abolished
slavery, and passed constitutional amendments guaranteeing equal
protection under the law and equal voting rights to blacks following
the American Civil War? You understand that this constitutional moment
came out of agitation by abolitionists in churches in the United States and
in England, and that one can see this as an organized political movement
against slavery in the Quaker church, for instance, going back well into
the eigtheenth century? You also understand that if we move to the 1930's
northern American opposition to southern Jim Crow was everywhere
in the churches and centered in the Republican Party? You understand
that there were great numbers of black leaders who advocated and
wrote for a full realization of black civil rights without ever crossing
paths with the CPUSA? If we go to the 1950's, we see the Supreme
Court ordering an end to segregation and the Eisenhower administration
ordering in federal troops to enforce this. By the 1960's, we have
Kennedy and then LBJ leading the Democratic Party to the forefront
of the fight against racism. Where in the hell is the CPUSA in any of
this, except as a cynical exploiter of unrest of any kind? *You* said
that they were the only game in town to fight racism. That is appallingly
wrong.
MJ Carley:
You really don't believe it possible that people could have
joined the CPUSA in good faith to fight against racism and fascism?
This is not what I said. In fact, if you will have read what I
said, especially to Del Col, I said that I most certainly do
believe that Americans joined the CPUSA out of genuine
good faith in it as a political organization fighting for good causes.
However, this says nothing against Del Col's point that
the leadership was in fact taking its marching orders from
Moscow and was in fact quite cynically exploiting the good
faith of those who joined it, and that this leadership, in the United
States and in Moscow, had no intention of trying to eradicate
either racism or fascism, but every intention rather of exploiting
both for the sake of the territorial and political gain of the Soviet
Union. Again, I refer you to Ralph Ellison's _Invisible Man_
for a fictional portrayal from the point of view of one black man
who was so exploited.
MJ Carley:
Incidentally, Marx was born in 1818.
Thank you. I didn't know that per se, but given his adult activities
by 1848, I would have guessed he had been born somewhere
between 1810 and 1830, and wrote what I wrote accordingly.
MJ Carley:
Who was openly, as a political organization, fighting
against racism (or slavery) at the time?
The churches in America and in England. In fact, this
period of social consciousness and political activity on
the part of the churches brought real political reform into
the world and was done on a scale that makes the activity
of the CPUSA since its inception look like a joke.
I said:
Great. Several million dead in wholesale civilian slaughter with the
guilt about equally distributed on both sides of the conflict, except that
the atrocities committed on the "Republican" side were almost all of them
the doing of the communists---who seized by stalinist terror tactics political
control of the anti-Franco forces---and, by God, you invoke Hitler's and
Mussolini's exercise of blitzkrieg and it must be by some sort of oversight
or somesuch you just forget to mention Stalin and Soviet communism in
back of the bloodbath of the innocent perpetrated by this "right" side.
I misspoke. A million or so were dead as the result of the activities of
both sides, but in civilian slaughter it should read "Several tens of
thousands".
MJ Carley:
But the actions of Stalin do not change the good faith of those who
joined the CP* to fight against fascism. As Dennis Healey put it, a lot
of people joined over Spain and left over Finland. A lot of the
victims of Stalin were members of the CP.
Ditto for the actions of Hitler not changing the good faith of
those who joined Franco to oppose communism in Spain. So, why
did you mention Fascist Germany and Fascist Italy in the first place in
trying to assert that the Republican side was the *right* side?
I said:
Try reading Paul Johnson's _Modern Times_ for some numbers
of victims of the communists in Spain, or even Hemingway's
_For Whom the Bell Tolls_ (he volunteered with the Republicans, fer
chrissake) and *then* try and tell me about the innocence or rightness or
even try to assert the non-fascism of the communists. Yeah, it's an awful
kind of sophistication indeed to hate fascists whether they call themselves
Fascist or communist.
MJ Carley:
Having read Paul Johnson once, I would not soil my hands with his
writing again.
OK, so I've laid out at length my take on the Spanish Civil War as
it comes from Paul Johnson's _Modern Times_. Almost every sentence in
the book is footnoted with the sources. You don't want to read him
because of "soiling your hands". Fine, that's just about the level of
reason I ought to have expected. I, on the other hand, find what
Johnson writes completely consonant with what Churchill says,
and with what Hemingway and Orwell write, so I'm afraid I see
no reason to go chasing after encomiums of blinkered
praise to the communist party to find something you might like.
As far as I am concerned, communism and fascism are and have been
everywhere and everywhen in this last century indistinguishable
horrors, and that, though some Americans joined the CPUSA in
good faith in the 1930's, this is no different from the fact that some
Americans admired Hitler through the 1930's. They were misguided.
Mike Morris
(msmo...@netdirect.net)
M J Carley
>
>I said:
> Notice how Sayan fails at logic here by missing
> the word "or". I dare MJ Carley or you or anyone
> to show me the Republicans were: Right, innocent
> of purging dissent, the legitimate government of
> Spain, *or* were non-fascist in any meaningful way.
>MJ Carley:
> You're playing games---there is a distinction
> between the CP (your original target) and the
> Republicans.
>
>No, Mr. Carley, you are playing the game here.
>You are the one who asserted that the CPUSA
>supported the *right* side in the Spanish Civil War.
>I scoffed that the side the CPUSA supported
>was not the right side---because, as I have now amply
>supported---there was no *right* side in that war.
>You are the one who introduced *two* terms---
>the CPUSA and the side they supported during the
>war. I.e., the Republicans.
i/ The Republicans were the right side.
ii/ The CPUSA supported the Republicans.
iii/ The CPUSA and the Republicans were not identical.
>MJ Carley:
> There can be no honest disagreement about the
> legitimacy of the Republican government: they were elected.
>
>What is this idiocy that overtakes moderns about
>democratic election and the legitimacy that it
>supposedly confers? Do you understand, or do
>you not, that you and I have a fundamental---and honest---
>disagreement about democracy?
But that does not affect the legitimacy of the government: if
governments are to be chosen by election, then the legitimate
government is the one that is elected. That is why Labour are the
legitimate government of Britain, even though they were selected by a
minority of the population, and are destroying the things that that
population wants preserved.
>*I* think Rights always
>and everywhere---for all persons on this planet (I am
>being quite evangelical about this)---trump the wishes
>of any democratic majority.
So do I. That does not change the fact that the Republicans were the
right side.
>*I* think that the preservation
>of Rights is the *reason* for the institution of government
>in the first place (as it says in the American Declaration).
>*I* think that a government, I don't care if it were
>elected by a 99.9% majority, which fails to preserve
>Rights to the point that a reign of terror ensues---as the
>church burnings and death-squad activity
>under the immediate Popular Front ascendancy (and before the
>outbreak of the civil war, mind you) amply illustrates---
>cannot claim to be a government, let alone *legitimate*.
>I also think when the government itself not only fails
>to preserve Rights, but actively violates them---as the factory
>take overs, the land redistributions, and the extinguishing of
>the political opposition in the Republican government
>illustrates---then it deserves to be overthrown.
I think the factory takeovers and land redistribution are two of the
reasons for the legitimacy (in a deeper sense) of the Republican
government. I only wish they had gone further. The extinguishing of
political opposition was wrong and led to the Communist betrayal of
the republican cause.
>Also, there is every indication that the leninist and stalinist
>Communist Party in Spain was at the heart of everything that
>was wrong and illegitimate with the Republican side. So the
>CPUSA's support for the Republican side seems entirely wrong
>to me. I'd be much more willing to applaud the non-communists
>who volunteered to go fight for *either* side, than the CPUSA.
You are quite right about the Stalinist elements being at the heart of
much that was wrong about Republican Spain, but that does not say
anything about those who chose to fight in an International Brigade
rather than in some other force.
Francis Muir
M J Carley:
> You are quite right about the Stalinist elements being at the heart of
> much that was wrong about Republican Spain, but that does not say
> anything about those who chose to fight in an International Brigade
> rather than in some other force.
The ObBook here is Muriel Spark's *The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie* where
one of the more stupid girls goes out to Spain to join her brother and
gets killed. Stupid because she joined up on the wrong side, that is,
the side that her brother was not on. This to me nicely differentiated
"Right" from "Wrong" in case of the Spanish Civil War.
If you were young and idealistic and loathed anything Fascist you joined
the International brigade, while if you wre young and idealistic and
loathed the Godless Commies you joined Francisco Franco's mob. Better
still, if you were the latter you stayed at home, said tut-tut, and put
an extra sixpence in the collection plate for the Righteous.
Michael S. Morris
Tuesday, the 17th of July, 2001
M J Carley wrote:
i/ The Republicans were the right side.
ii/ The CPUSA supported the Republicans.
iii/ The CPUSA and the Republicans were not identical.
I agree with ii/ and iii/. I understood them
going in to the discussion. What I have done is
disagreed with i/. They were not the right side
by any measure I can think of. Therefore, I cannot
imagine why ii/ makes for any praise of the CPUSA at all.
****************************
MJ Carley:
There can be no honest disagreement about the
legitimacy of the Republican government: they were elected.
I said:
What is this idiocy that overtakes moderns about
democratic election and the legitimacy that it
supposedly confers? Do you understand, or do
you not, that you and I have a fundamental---and honest---
disagreement about democracy?
MJ Carley:
But that does not affect the legitimacy of the
government:
Huh? Did you just read what I wrote? The words of the
Declaration are:
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men
are created equal, that they are endowed by their
Creator with unalienable rights, that among these
are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. That
to secure these rights, governments are instituted
among men, deriving their just powers from the consent
of the governed. That whenever any form of government
becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of
people to alter or abolish it, and to institute new
government, laying its foundation on such principles
and organizing its powers in such form, as to them
shall seem most likely to effect their safety and happiness.
I am saying what the Declaration is saying---that when
a government becomes destructive of Creator-endowed Rights---
it is the right of people to rebel, it has lost its legitimacy
as a government.
Now, Paul Johnson says that this is exactly what happened
with the Popular Front government in Spain---that political
terror spun out of control while the government stood by
and watched *and* abetted it happening. This happened *before*
the civil war, before Franco took up arms. Of course the targeted
people rebelled. I would too were I targeted. Legitimacy was
utterly and hopelessly destroyed. You can't win an election
by even a 99.9% majority and then use the resulting government
to trample rights and then claim legitimacy (or rightness
for that matter) for that government.
MJ Carley:
if governments are to be chosen by election, then the legitimate
government is the one that is elected.
Do you understand how fundamentally anti-democratic Rights
doctrine is? Governments are *not* to be chosen by election,
in fact. They are to be chosen by election *only* insofar
as they do not become destructive of the end of securing
the Creator-endowed Rights. If they do become destructive
of that end, then they should be altered or abolished, which
is what the Nationalists set out to do (quickly becoming
destructive of those selfsame ends on their own).
MJ Carley:
That is why Labour are the legitimate government of
Britain, even though they were selected by a minority
of the population, and are destroying the things that that
population wants preserved.
Again, I am not quarreling with the fact that the Popular
Front came to power in Spain. I am saying that they abused
that power beyond legitimacy once they had it, and that is
what precipitated the civil war. Look, the same state applies
anywhere despotism is to be found in the world. If someone
wants to lead a successful rebellion against the Chinese
Communist Party today, I shall not call the recognized
government in Beijing the *right* side, howsomever wrong
and fascist or whatever the rebels may be.
I said:
*I* think Rights always
and everywhere---for all persons on this planet (I am
being quite evangelical about this)---trump the wishes
of any democratic majority.
MJ Carley:
So do I. That does not change the fact that the
Republicans were the right side.
Given that the Popular Front upon accession to power,
immediately used the government to trample Rights (note
well: I do not mean trample the *wishes* of one class, I
mean Rights), it certainly does mean that they were
the wrong side.
I said:
*I* think that the preservation
of Rights is the *reason* for the institution of government
in the first place (as it says in the American Declaration).
*I* think that a government, I don't care if it were
elected by a 99.9% majority, which fails to preserve
Rights to the point that a reign of terror ensues---as the
church burnings and death-squad activity
under the immediate Popular Front ascendancy (and before the
outbreak of the civil war, mind you) amply illustrates---
cannot claim to be a government, let alone *legitimate*.
I also think when the government itself not only fails
to preserve Rights, but actively violates them---as the factory
take overs, the land redistributions, and the extinguishing of
the political opposition in the Republican government
illustrates---then it deserves to be overthrown.
MJ Carley:
I think the factory takeovers and land redistribution
are two of the reasons for the legitimacy (in a deeper
sense) of the Republican government. I only wish they
had gone further.
OK, so you throw at least one of the absolute inalienable
Creator-endowed Rights of Man completely out the window
and permit the government, justified only by the democracy
of its election, to abridge property. And you call *wrong*
the man who takes up arms against such a government to defend
his right to property. I mean, even if it were *only* the
taking of my company from me---and not the murder of my family,
compatriots, and social class as it was in Spain---I would
feel justified in rebelling against a government which attempted
to do what the Popular Front government in Spain actually started
doing. You really don't understand that people have a *Natural
Right* to defend their property (not to mention their
lives) and that any attempt to take it from them instantly
de-legitimizes the taker? It is for this reason---assuming
that the forcible *taking* of property is contemplated by
communism---that no communist government, elected
by however great a majority, could be legitimate.
MJ Carley:
The extinguishing of political opposition was
wrong and led to the Communist betrayal of
the republican cause.
I don't understand "led to". How about just "was"?
Instantly, I mean, on the first day after the election
when the first opposition deputy was unseated by the
Popular Front, the republican cause was dead, betrayed
at that point.
I said:
Also, there is every indication that the leninist and stalinist
Communist Party in Spain was at the heart of everything that
was wrong and illegitimate with the Republican side. So the
CPUSA's support for the Republican side seems entirely wrong
to me. I'd be much more willing to applaud the non-communists
who volunteered to go fight for *either* side, than the CPUSA.
MJ Carley:
You are quite right about the Stalinist elements being
at the heart of much that was wrong about Republican Spain,
Note well: I didn't say just "Stalinist". I do not for
one second subscribe to the notion that communism was some
fine thing only perverted and betrayed by a singular monster
named Stalin. I believe it is inherently totalitarian, and
already was totalitarian, with an apparatus of state terror
instituted under Lenin. That Lenin and his use of political
terror was the instructor and instruction book of all
20th-century totalitarianism is the central thesis of
Paul Johnson's history of the 20th century, _Modern Times_.
Stalin, Hitler, Mussolini, the Japanese generals, Franco
*all* took Lenin as model. Ergo, not "Stalinist"
elements, but communist elements.
MJ Carley:
but that does not say anything about those who
chose to fight in an International Brigade
rather than in some other force.
Well, except it does say they weren't fighting for the
*right* side. The side they were fighting on wasn't right.
I'm not saying the other side was right, nor am I
saying a side has to be without sin to be right. I am
saying the Popular Front government in Spain was the
*wrong* side.
Besides, I was unaware that to be a member of the
Abraham Lincoln Brigade you had to be a member of CPUSA.
Mike Morris
(msmo...@netdirect.net)
Kesh
> People who joined the CPUSA did so because they weren't interested
> in "just another political party."
>
>
>
> J. Del Col
Yep, every last man jack of them.
M J Carley
>MJ Carley:
> So no members of the CPUSA took any risks to fight against
> racism,
>
>Huh? How do you manage to go from my statement that the CPUSA
>was unimportant in the fight against racism in America to "no members
>of the CPUSA took any risks to fight against racism"? Maybe if
>you could explain your logic so we're on the same wavelength, we'd
>do better.
You're saying that the CPUSA was unimportant (not true) and that it
clandestinely fought against other organizations which were working
against racism. If they were not really fighting against racism, but
against other anti-racist organizations, how do you explain the great
risks taken by many members of the CPUSA?
>MJ Carley:
> the CPUSA contributed nothing to fighting against racism and their
> opposition to racism was all a fake.
>
>You understand that the Republican Party in the United States abolished
>slavery, and passed constitutional amendments guaranteeing equal
>protection under the law and equal voting rights to blacks following
>the American Civil War? You understand that this constitutional moment
>came out of agitation by abolitionists in churches in the United States and
>in England, and that one can see this as an organized political movement
>against slavery in the Quaker church, for instance, going back well into
>the eigtheenth century? You also understand that if we move to the 1930's
>northern American opposition to southern Jim Crow was everywhere
>in the churches and centered in the Republican Party? You understand
>that there were great numbers of black leaders who advocated and
>wrote for a full realization of black civil rights without ever crossing
>paths with the CPUSA? If we go to the 1950's, we see the Supreme
>Court ordering an end to segregation and the Eisenhower administration
>ordering in federal troops to enforce this. By the 1960's, we have
>Kennedy and then LBJ leading the Democratic Party to the forefront
>of the fight against racism. Where in the hell is the CPUSA in any of
>this, except as a cynical exploiter of unrest of any kind? *You* said
>that they were the only game in town to fight racism. That is appallingly
>wrong.
I understand all of that. On the other hand, what Lincoln, Eisenhower
and Kennedy did is irrelevant to what the CPUSA was doing in the
twenties and thirties. Incidentally, Kennedy did nothing about racism
until he was forced to.
>MJ Carley:
> You really don't believe it possible that people could have
> joined the CPUSA in good faith to fight against racism and fascism?
>
>This is not what I said. In fact, if you will have read what I
>said, especially to Del Col, I said that I most certainly do
>believe that Americans joined the CPUSA out of genuine
>good faith in it as a political organization fighting for good causes.
Thank you.
>However, this says nothing against Del Col's point that
>the leadership was in fact taking its marching orders from
>Moscow and was in fact quite cynically exploiting the good
>faith of those who joined it, and that this leadership, in the United
>States and in Moscow, had no intention of trying to eradicate
>either racism or fascism, but every intention rather of exploiting
>both for the sake of the territorial and political gain of the Soviet
>Union. Again, I refer you to Ralph Ellison's _Invisible Man_
>for a fictional portrayal from the point of view of one black man
>who was so exploited.
I do not dispute the cynicism of the leadership at all. I am talking
about what the members of the CPUSA actually did.
>MJ Carley:
> Who was openly, as a political organization, fighting
> against racism (or slavery) at the time?
>
>The churches in America and in England. In fact, this
>period of social consciousness and political activity on
>the part of the churches brought real political reform into
>the world and was done on a scale that makes the activity
>of the CPUSA since its inception look like a joke.
Did it? Slavery was abolished as a side-effect of a civil war (Lincoln
said that he would have kept slavery to maintain the state) and racism
has still not been eliminated.
>MJ Carley:
> But the actions of Stalin do not change the good faith of those who
> joined the CP* to fight against fascism. As Dennis Healey put it, a lot
> of people joined over Spain and left over Finland. A lot of the
> victims of Stalin were members of the CP.
>
>Ditto for the actions of Hitler not changing the good faith of
>those who joined Franco to oppose communism in Spain. So, why
>did you mention Fascist Germany and Fascist Italy in the first place in
>trying to assert that the Republican side was the *right* side?
Because it was the right side: it was legitimately elected and it was
working to improve the lives of Spanish people.
> Having read Paul Johnson once, I would not soil my hands with his
> writing again.
>
>OK, so I've laid out at length my take on the Spanish Civil War as
>it comes from Paul Johnson's _Modern Times_. Almost every sentence in
>the book is footnoted with the sources. You don't want to read him
>because of "soiling your hands". Fine, that's just about the level of
>reason I ought to have expected.
Paul Johnson is a hypocrite who by his own standards should not be
taken seriously.
>I, on the other hand, find what
>Johnson writes completely consonant with what Churchill says,
>and with what Hemingway and Orwell write, so I'm afraid I see
>no reason to go chasing after encomiums of blinkered
>praise to the communist party to find something you might like.
I find that hard to believe: Orwell described himself as a socialist.
Why would Churchill's views be of any interest?
>As far as I am concerned, communism and fascism are and have been
>everywhere and everywhen in this last century indistinguishable
>horrors, and that, though some Americans joined the CPUSA in
>good faith in the 1930's, this is no different from the fact that some
>Americans admired Hitler through the 1930's. They were misguided.
With the difference that people who admired Hitler admired someone who
was openly racist, violent and preparing for genocide. Those who
admired Stalin admired someone who, on the surface, was working for a
better, fairer world.
M J Carley
>Huh? Did you just read what I wrote? The words of the
>Declaration are:
> We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men
> are created equal, that they are endowed by their
> Creator with unalienable rights, that among these
> are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. That
> to secure these rights, governments are instituted
> among men, deriving their just powers from the consent
> of the governed. That whenever any form of government
> becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of
> people to alter or abolish it, and to institute new
> government, laying its foundation on such principles
> and organizing its powers in such form, as to them
> shall seem most likely to effect their safety and happiness.
>I am saying what the Declaration is saying---that when
>a government becomes destructive of Creator-endowed Rights---
>it is the right of people to rebel, it has lost its legitimacy
>as a government.
There is no such thing as Creator-endowed rights. People do have a
right to rebel when their rights are destroyed but that is not what
happened in Spain. The legitimacy of the government comes from the
rules used to choose it, not what it does afterwards. Legitimate
governments have done terrible things.
>MJ Carley:
> if governments are to be chosen by election, then the legitimate
> government is the one that is elected.
>
>Do you understand how fundamentally anti-democratic Rights
>doctrine is? Governments are *not* to be chosen by election,
>in fact. They are to be chosen by election *only* insofar
>as they do not become destructive of the end of securing
>the Creator-endowed Rights. If they do become destructive
>of that end, then they should be altered or abolished, which
>is what the Nationalists set out to do (quickly becoming
>destructive of those selfsame ends on their own).
You are relying a little heavily on Creator-endowed rights, a
nonsense, but assuming such things exist, the function of a government
is to balance individual and general rights against power. If power is
disproportionately distributed, a government can quite legitimately
reallocate it, as the Spanish government did when it redistributed
land and allowed the factory councils to operate. Franco's mutiny was
about restoring the right to tell other people what to do.
>Again, I am not quarreling with the fact that the Popular
>Front came to power in Spain. I am saying that they abused
>that power beyond legitimacy once they had it, and that is
>what precipitated the civil war. Look, the same state applies
>anywhere despotism is to be found in the world. If someone
>wants to lead a successful rebellion against the Chinese
>Communist Party today, I shall not call the recognized
>government in Beijing the *right* side, howsomever wrong
>and fascist or whatever the rebels may be.
Neither would I. So what?
>Given that the Popular Front upon accession to power,
>immediately used the government to trample Rights (note
>well: I do not mean trample the *wishes* of one class, I
>mean Rights), it certainly does mean that they were
>the wrong side.
The rights they `trampled' were the rights of the powerful to abuse
the weak.
>OK, so you throw at least one of the absolute inalienable
>Creator-endowed Rights of Man completely out the window
>and permit the government, justified only by the democracy
>of its election, to abridge property.
I don't believe in Creator-given rights and I haven't said that I
believe in everything in the American Declaration of Independence.
I believe that the right to property should be limited: I can see no
justification for one person owning large areas of land and, through
that ownership, having the power to maintain in poverty many other
people.
>And you call *wrong*
>the man who takes up arms against such a government to defend
>his right to property. I mean, even if it were *only* the
>taking of my company from me---and not the murder of my family,
>compatriots, and social class as it was in Spain---I would
>feel justified in rebelling against a government which attempted
>to do what the Popular Front government in Spain actually started
>doing. You really don't understand that people have a *Natural
>Right* to defend their property (not to mention their
>lives) and that any attempt to take it from them instantly
>de-legitimizes the taker? It is for this reason---assuming
>that the forcible *taking* of property is contemplated by
>communism---that no communist government, elected
>by however great a majority, could be legitimate.
So in the end your real concern is property.
>I said:
> Also, there is every indication that the leninist and stalinist
> Communist Party in Spain was at the heart of everything that
> was wrong and illegitimate with the Republican side. So the
> CPUSA's support for the Republican side seems entirely wrong
> to me. I'd be much more willing to applaud the non-communists
> who volunteered to go fight for *either* side, than the CPUSA.
>MJ Carley:
> You are quite right about the Stalinist elements being
> at the heart of much that was wrong about Republican Spain,
>
>Note well: I didn't say just "Stalinist". I do not for
>one second subscribe to the notion that communism was some
>fine thing only perverted and betrayed by a singular monster
>named Stalin. I believe it is inherently totalitarian, and
>already was totalitarian, with an apparatus of state terror
>instituted under Lenin. That Lenin and his use of political
>terror was the instructor and instruction book of all
>20th-century totalitarianism is the central thesis of
>Paul Johnson's history of the 20th century, _Modern Times_.
>Stalin, Hitler, Mussolini, the Japanese generals, Franco
>*all* took Lenin as model. Ergo, not "Stalinist"
>elements, but communist elements.
You rely very heavily on Paul Johnson. You're also talking nonsense:
among those purged by Stalinist elements were followers of Trotsky and
anti-Bolshevik communists.
Michael S. Morris
Wednesday, the 18th of July, 2001
MJ Carley:
So no members of the CPUSA took any risks to fight against
racism,
MSM:
Huh? How do you manage to go from my statement that the
CPUSA was unimportant in the fight against racism in
America to "no members of the CPUSA took any risks to
fight against racism"? Maybe if you could explain your
logic so we're on the same wavelength, we'd do better.
MJC:
You're saying that the CPUSA was unimportant (not true)
Yes, true. I've just named you *huge* political organizations
stemming back to the eighteenth century in the US which
were *important* in the fight against racism. The
CPUSA was a tiny force in American politics even at the
height of its membership. Racism was perhaps the least of
its concerns (next to trade unionism, anti-fascism, and
recruitment). It had very little impact upon racism,
in fact. Perhaps, if anything, it had a negative impact---
by attempting to co-opt the good anti-racism into the
horrible communism, and thus tarnishing anti-racism for
perhaps a generation. And besides, we have at least two
instances (the lawyer in the Scottsboro case and Ralph
Ellison) where the actions of the CPUSA in respect of
racism were seen to be wholly cynical---i.e. not aimed
against racism at all, but aimed only to exploit racism
for its propaganda value.
MJC:
and that it clandestinely fought against other
organizations which were working
against racism.
Of course it did. Of course it was clandestinely
(by definition, given the rules of secrecy and
the hierarchical command structure) against churches,
the major political parties, non-communist advocacy
groups, and so on and so forth.
MJC:
If they were not really fighting against racism,
but against other anti-racist organizations, how
do you explain the great risks taken by many members
of the CPUSA?
I have no clue what you are referring to. I mean,
obviously Reds in the US were despised (for good
reason) for many years, starting before the 1920's,
and before I think even the Red betrayal of the Allied
cause during WWI, which really solidified anti-Red
hatred. So, again obviously, a person who joined
the CPUSA was willing to take "great risks" to do so.
It is certainly not obvious that many of
these great risks had anything with fighting racism
per se. So, what's to explain?
MJC:
the CPUSA contributed nothing to fighting
against racism and their opposition to racism
was all a fake.
MSM:
MJC:
I understand all of that. On the other hand, what
Lincoln, Eisenhower and Kennedy did is irrelevant
to what the CPUSA was doing in the twenties and
thirties.
What the hell did CPUSA do in the 20's and 30's that
was anything against racism at all?
I mean, compared with the Republican Party in the 20's and 30's,
or the northern churches, or black civil-rights activists
(such as Ida Tarbell), or Benny Goodman trying to integrate
his big band, fer cryin out loud?
MJC:
Incidentally, Kennedy did nothing about racism
until he was forced to.
He wasn't forced to. He made a good political move
away from the Dixiecrat tradition of the Democratic
Party, and at a time when Nixon wouldn't go there.
In any event, *Kennedy's* move, to call King, was
transfinitely more important to fighting racism ib
America than anything accomplished by the CPUSA in
50 years. Once again, the CPUSA is seen to be very low
on the list of political organizations to belong to
if you actually wanted to get anything done against racism
in America.
MJC:
You really don't believe it possible that
people could have joined the CPUSA in good
faith to fight against racism and fascism?
MSM:
This is not what I said. In fact, if you will have
read what I said, especially to Del Col, I said
that I most certainly do believe that Americans
joined the CPUSA out of genuine good faith in it
as a political organization fighting for good causes.
MJC:
Thank you.
You're welcome, but I'm afraid I don't see anything
in it against anything I have said. CPUSA was
a small force in America, and, because of its
communist nature, its course of action was cynical
and exploitative about accomplishing anything good in
America.
MSM:
However, this says nothing against Del Col's point
that the leadership was in fact taking its marching
orders from Moscow and was in fact quite cynically
exploiting the good faith of those who joined it,
and that this leadership, in the United States and
in Moscow, had no intention of trying to eradicate
either racism or fascism, but every intention rather
of exploiting both for the sake of the territorial
and political gain of the Soviet Union. Again, I refer
you to Ralph Ellison's _Invisible Man_ for a fictional
portrayal from the point of view of one black man
who was so exploited.
MJC:
I do not dispute the cynicism of the leadership at
all. I am talking about what the members of the
CPUSA actually did.
You made a statement that implied that the CPUSA was
the only game in town fighting racism. This was nonsense.
It was one of many games, and probably the least important
and effective of all of them. This is because, in spite
of the idealism and good intentions of many who
joined the organization in the 20's and 30's, the
organization itself was not so idealistic or good
intentioned. Now, if you want to acknowledge this
point---that the CPUSA was ineffective compared
with other political organizations in the United
States at fighting racism---then we can be done.
MJC:
Who was openly, as a political organization, fighting
against racism (or slavery) at the time?
MSM:
The churches in America and in England. In fact, this
period of social consciousness and political activity on
the part of the churches brought real political reform into
the world and was done on a scale that makes the activity
of the CPUSA since its inception look like a joke.
MJC:
Did it?
Of course it did. It brought about the abolition of
slavery in England, the abolition of slavery in states
north of Maryland, and it certainly laid the foundations
of the later abolition of slavery in all of the states.
Oh, by the way, it made the slave trade with Africa
a violation of federal law in 1808, the split second the
Constitution permitted the same.
MJC:
Slavery was abolished as a side-effect of
a civil war (Lincoln said that he would
have kept slavery to maintain the state)
You have zero understanding of the relation
between slavery and the civil war.
MJC:
and racism
has still not been eliminated.
Racism will never be eliminated. It isn't
and shouldn't be a political goal to eliminate
it, in fact. To reform the laws so that
racism shall not have the governmental power
to violate the rights of people is a fine
political goal. That was achieved in the United
States by the end of the 1960's. The rest
is so much puffery by the self-righteous.
MJC:
But the actions of Stalin do not change the
good faith of those who joined the CP* to
fight against fascism. As Dennis Healey put
it, a lot of people joined over Spain and
left over Finland. A lot of the victims of
Stalin were members of the CP.
MSM:
Ditto for the actions of Hitler not changing the
good faith of those who joined Franco to oppose
communism in Spain. So, why did you mention Fascist
Germany and Fascist Italy in the first place
in trying to assert that the Republican side was
the *right* side?
MJC:
Because it was the right side:
No, and the fact that Hitler and Mussolini supported
the other side has nothing to do with this judgment,
unless you count in exactly the same way the fact that
the other great monster of the age, Stalin, supported
the Republicans.
If Hitler and Mussolini's support in any way tarnishes
the rightness of the Nationalist side, then Stalin's
support *equally* tarnishes the rightness of the
Republican side. Period.
MJC:
it was legitimately elected and
it was working to improve the lives
of Spanish people.
By killing priests, burning churches, murdering
or unseating political opposition, and stealing
property from the wealthy. Yeah, great, Carley.
MJC:
Having read Paul Johnson once, I would not soil my hands
with his writing again.
MSM:
OK, so I've laid out at length my take on the Spanish
Civil War as it comes from Paul Johnson's _Modern Times_.
Almost every sentence in the book is footnoted with the
sources. You don't want to read him because of "soiling
your hands". Fine, that's just about the level of
reason I ought to have expected.
MJC:
Paul Johnson is a hypocrite who by his own
standards should not be taken seriously.
Is this the Party line? I mean, I understood he got
caught in a sex scandal, and that is reason enough
for you to dismiss what he says when he writes history
(he writes with the moral gravity of Tacitus, by the
way). I wonder how many other, say left-wing, writers
you are willing to dismiss on similar grounds?
MSM:
I, on the other hand, find what
Johnson writes completely consonant with what
Churchill says, and with what Hemingway and
Orwell write, so I'm afraid I see no reason to
go chasing after encomiums of blinkered praise
to the communist party to find something you might like.
MJC:
I find that hard to believe: Orwell described
himself as a socialist.
Yes, he was a socialist. But, all of _Animal Farm_
comes from his experience of the left in Spain.
MJC:
Why would Churchill's views be of any interest?
He was perhaps the singularly greatest man of the
twentieth century, supremely knowledgeable and well-read,
was a powerful British statesman during the time of
the Spanish Civil War, wrote a great history
of the Second World War---one of the great histories
ever written---, and the only one from the point
of view of a great war leader, and because he explains
precisely why the *right* attitude towards the
Spanish Civil War was neutrality towards both sides
as wrong. I.e. the attitude actually adopted by the UK
and by the US. I.e. not the attitude adopted by the CPUSA.
MSM:
As far as I am concerned, communism and fascism
are and have been everywhere and everywhen in this
last century indistinguishable horrors, and that,
though some Americans joined the CPUSA in good faith
in the 1930's, this is no different from the fact that
some Americans admired Hitler through the 1930's. They
were misguided.
MJC:
With the difference that people who admired
Hitler admired someone who was openly racist,
violent and preparing for genocide.
First off, no, Hitler wasn't made Time magazine's
Man of the Year whichever year it was because he was
perceived to be openly racist or preparing for genocide.
The fact is most Americans even in 1945 found the
evidence of genocide in the liberated camps an
unthinkable shock. Hitler very handily clothed
himself in the garb of a man who was kickstarting
Germany out of the Depression---who was genuinely
working for the good of the German people. Second,
Stalin may or may not have been racist, but he was
certainly violent, and had already killed millions.
MJC:
Those who admired Stalin admired someone who,
on the surface, was working for a better, fairer
world.
*Some* of those who admired Stalin thought this.
Others just wanted to steal the private property of
the wealthy, which was neither better nor fairer.
Mike Morris
(msmo...@netdirect.net)
M J Carley
>Yes, true. I've just named you *huge* political organizations
>stemming back to the eighteenth century in the US which
>were *important* in the fight against racism. The
>CPUSA was a tiny force in American politics even at the
>height of its membership. Racism was perhaps the least of
>its concerns (next to trade unionism, anti-fascism, and
>recruitment). It had very little impact upon racism,
>in fact. Perhaps, if anything, it had a negative impact---
>by attempting to co-opt the good anti-racism into the
>horrible communism, and thus tarnishing anti-racism for
>perhaps a generation. And besides, we have at least two
>instances (the lawyer in the Scottsboro case and Ralph
>Ellison) where the actions of the CPUSA in respect of
>racism were seen to be wholly cynical---i.e. not aimed
>against racism at all, but aimed only to exploit racism
>for its propaganda value.
That's interesting because according to
http://www.courttv.com/greatesttrials/scottsboro/trials.html
the NAACP didn't want to get involved in the Scottsboro trial.
>MJC:
> and that it clandestinely fought against other
> organizations which were working
> against racism.
>
>Of course it did. Of course it was clandestinely
>(by definition, given the rules of secrecy and
>the hierarchical command structure) against churches,
>the major political parties, non-communist advocacy
>groups, and so on and so forth.
I thought the secrecy (such as it was, the CPUSA was not a secret
organization) was because the government was trying to wipe it out.
[large circular argument cut]
>You made a statement that implied that the CPUSA was
>the only game in town fighting racism. This was nonsense.
>It was one of many games, and probably the least important
>and effective of all of them. This is because, in spite
>of the idealism and good intentions of many who
>joined the organization in the 20's and 30's, the
>organization itself was not so idealistic or good
>intentioned. Now, if you want to acknowledge this
>point---that the CPUSA was ineffective compared
>with other political organizations in the United
>States at fighting racism---then we can be done.
I think this has become a theological debate.
>MJC:
> Who was openly, as a political organization, fighting
> against racism (or slavery) at the time?
>MSM:
> The churches in America and in England. In fact, this
> period of social consciousness and political activity on
> the part of the churches brought real political reform into
> the world and was done on a scale that makes the activity
> of the CPUSA since its inception look like a joke.
>MJC:
> Did it?
>
>Of course it did. It brought about the abolition of
>slavery in England, the abolition of slavery in states
>north of Maryland, and it certainly laid the foundations
>of the later abolition of slavery in all of the states.
>Oh, by the way, it made the slave trade with Africa
>a violation of federal law in 1808, the split second the
>Constitution permitted the same.
So it did not abolish slavery in the US.
>MJC:
> Slavery was abolished as a side-effect of
> a civil war (Lincoln said that he would
> have kept slavery to maintain the state)
>
>You have zero understanding of the relation
>between slavery and the civil war.
Why haven't you said that that statement is untrue?
>MJC:
> Because it was the right side:
>
>No, and the fact that Hitler and Mussolini supported
>the other side has nothing to do with this judgment,
>unless you count in exactly the same way the fact that
>the other great monster of the age, Stalin, supported
>the Republicans.
>
>If Hitler and Mussolini's support in any way tarnishes
>the rightness of the Nationalist side, then Stalin's
>support *equally* tarnishes the rightness of the
>Republican side. Period.
No it doesn't. Even if Hitler and Mussolini had not supported Franco,
the Republican side would have been the right one. As for Stalin's
support, if Hitler invaded hell, I might find a good word for Satan.
>MJC:
> it was legitimately elected and
> it was working to improve the lives
> of Spanish people.
>
>By killing priests, burning churches, murdering
>or unseating political opposition, and stealing
>property from the wealthy. Yeah, great, Carley.
Did the government kill priests and burn churches? Did the
`confiscation' of property not improve the lives of the people who
could now work their own land?
>MJC:
> Paul Johnson is a hypocrite who by his own
> standards should not be taken seriously.
>
>Is this the Party line? I mean, I understood he got
>caught in a sex scandal, and that is reason enough
>for you to dismiss what he says when he writes history
>(he writes with the moral gravity of Tacitus, by the
>way). I wonder how many other, say left-wing, writers
>you are willing to dismiss on similar grounds?
Paul Johnson wrote a book called `Intellectuals' in which he claimed
that a number of selected thinkers (leftish, on the whole) were not
fit to tell the rest of us how to live on the grounds that, for
example, their sexual lives were not in agreement with Paul Johnson's
moral views. By his own standards, having been taken in sin, he has no
right to preach to the rest of us. He is also an atrocious writer. For
comedy value, I reccomend his 1960s piece on the Beatles.
>MJC:
> I find that hard to believe: Orwell described
> himself as a socialist.
>
>Yes, he was a socialist. But, all of _Animal Farm_
>comes from his experience of the left in Spain.
Exactly, *all* of Animal Farm comes from that experience, as does
Homage to Catalonia, in which he draws quite clear distinctions
between different sections of the left. His attack on Stalin from the
left had him ostracized by the CP.
>MJC:
> Why would Churchill's views be of any interest?
>
>He was perhaps the singularly greatest man of the
>twentieth century, supremely knowledgeable and well-read,
>was a powerful British statesman during the time of
>the Spanish Civil War, wrote a great history
>of the Second World War---one of the great histories
>ever written---, and the only one from the point
>of view of a great war leader, and because he explains
>precisely why the *right* attitude towards the
>Spanish Civil War was neutrality towards both sides
>as wrong. I.e. the attitude actually adopted by the UK
>and by the US. I.e. not the attitude adopted by the CPUSA.
Serendipity is a wonderful thing. Today's Guardian has a brief article
on Churchill:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/g2/story/0,3604,523285,00.html
Did you know that `the singularly greatest man of the twentieth
century' described Herr Hitler as ``a cool, well-informed functionary
with an agreeable manner, and a subtle personal magnetism'' who made
speeches full of ``candour and moderation''.
If you take a look elsewhere you will find him advocating the use of
poison gas against uncivilized tribes. He was an opportunist who
happened to be on the right side. Once in his life, he was
right. Otherwise he was incompetent (Gallipoli, Dieppe) and a
supporter of terrorism (Black and Tans; shooting strikers).
>First off, no, Hitler wasn't made Time magazine's
>Man of the Year whichever year it was because he was
>perceived to be openly racist or preparing for genocide.
>The fact is most Americans even in 1945 found the
>evidence of genocide in the liberated camps an
>unthinkable shock. Hitler very handily clothed
>himself in the garb of a man who was kickstarting
>Germany out of the Depression---who was genuinely
>working for the good of the German people. Second,
>Stalin may or may not have been racist, but he was
>certainly violent, and had already killed millions.
So you will excuse those who admired Hitler because nobody knew (even
though he was quite open about what he wanted to do) but not those who
admired Stalin?
>MJC:
> Those who admired Stalin admired someone who,
> on the surface, was working for a better, fairer
> world.
>
>*Some* of those who admired Stalin thought this.
>Others just wanted to steal the private property of
>the wealthy, which was neither better nor fairer.
Always property.
Michael S. Morris
Wednesday, the 18th of July, 2001
I was saying::
I am saying what the Declaration is saying---that when
a government becomes destructive of Creator-endowed
Rights---it is the right of people to rebel, it has lost its legitimacy
as a government.
MJC:
There is no such thing as Creator-endowed rights.
Huh? You just got through what I thought was agreeing with me
about Rights trumping democracy, and then you dismiss the notion
of Rights. When I say Rights, I mean the full gamut of restrictions
on what government may do---the Free Speech, Press, Religion,
Assembly, Due Process, Keeping and Bearing Arms, Property,
Association, and so forth. All of these limit what government is permitted
to do, even if a majority think it may be for the good.
MJC:
People do have a right to rebel when their rights are destroyed
but that is not what happened in Spain.
But, it is exactly what happened in Spain. Half the population was
run roughshod over by a government elected by the other half, and
controlled by an evil, foreign-dominated, radical minority. Franco
didn't take up arms to crush democracy, he took up arms to stop
his friends from being killed. Pure and simple. Again, if I had been
in his shoes, I probably would have acted the same.
MJC:
The legitimacy of the government comes from the rules
used to choose it, not what it does afterwards.
And those rules inlcuded political assassination, and the
squelching of political opposition? Then, tell me how you
get from your amoral definition of "legitimate" to the moral
judgment of saying the Republican side was the "right" side.
MJC:
Legitimate governments have done terrible things.
Which often delegitimize them, and *always* put them in the wrong.
MJC:
if governments are to be chosen by election, then the legitimate
government is the one that is elected.
MSM:
Do you understand how fundamentally anti-democratic Rights
doctrine is? Governments are *not* to be chosen by election,
in fact. They are to be chosen by election *only* insofar
as they do not become destructive of the end of securing
the Creator-endowed Rights. If they do become destructive
of that end, then they should be altered or abolished, which
is what the Nationalists set out to do (quickly becoming
destructive of those selfsame ends on their own).
MJC:
You are relying a little heavily on Creator-endowed rights,
I am a classical liberal. I don't understand any political philosophy
as right that does not begin and end with Creator-endowed Rights.
Since I am approximately atheist, as well, my sense of "Creator-endowed"
is simply that the Rights are transfinitely above the wishes of any
majority. They (and the moral Natural Law which stands behind them)
are there like the Second Law of Thermodynamics is there. We do not
take a vote on them, or submit them to plebiscite.
MJC:
a nonsense,
Well, you may say nonsense all you like, but inalienable Rights doctrine
is in fact the *only* political philosophy in existence which says why
blacks in the South of America should not be held as slaves. As such,
it is the *only* political philosophy going which is truly anti-racist.
Communism is merely a justification for totalitarian dictatorship
and the enslavement of *everyone* to the state.
MJC:
but assuming such things exist, the function of a government
is to balance individual and general rights against power.
No, *assuming such things exist*, then there is no question
of "balance"---there is only an absolute limitation of government
to exercise certain powers that are forever reserved to individuals.
Now, if you assume such things do not exist, *then* you may
talk about balancing these rights against those, but, as I just
indicated on the issue of slavery, assuming that these Rights do
not exist entails consequences in the resulting political philosophy.
MJC:
If power is disproportionately distributed, a government can
quite legitimately reallocate it,
This is nonsense.
MJC:
as the Spanish government did when it redistributed
land and allowed the factory councils to operate.
It stole property. It also killed people.
MJC:
Franco's mutiny was about restoring the right to tell
other people what to do.
Yeah, like telling them not to murder people.
MSM:
Again, I am not quarreling with the fact that the Popular
Front came to power in Spain. I am saying that they abused
that power beyond legitimacy once they had it, and that is
what precipitated the civil war. Look, the same state applies
anywhere despotism is to be found in the world. If someone
wants to lead a successful rebellion against the Chinese
Communist Party today, I shall not call the recognized
government in Beijing the *right* side, howsomever wrong
and fascist or whatever the rebels may be.
MJC:
Neither would I. So what?
So, a government doing the kinds of things the Spanish
Popular Front government did---not only the theft of
private property, but *also* the violence, including the
destruction of the opposition press and the unseating of
the equally-legitimately-elected opposition in the government,
and the internal coup within the Popular
Front in which the minority communists seized control
from the majority socialists and republicans, and
not to mention the fact that these communists *were*
taking their marching orders from Moscow---foreign agency at
the highest levels of one's government is traditionally the
most deligitimizing condition of all, is not the *right* side
in a civil war in which half the country is rebelling against it.
The analogy with a rebellion against the Chinese government
now is perfect---the only thing missing is the length of time
that the Rights-violating regime has been in power.
I said:
Given that the Popular Front upon accession to power,
immediately used the government to trample Rights (note
well: I do not mean trample the *wishes* of one class, I
mean Rights), it certainly does mean that they were
the wrong side.
MJC:
The rights they `trampled' were the rights of the
powerful to abuse the weak.
Yeah, I can really see how burning down churches was
getting at the powerful abusers of the weak. Or stealing
land from landowners, or factories from factory-owners.
Property is to be equated with abuse, is that it?
MSM:
OK, so you throw at least one of the absolute inalienable
Creator-endowed Rights of Man completely out the window
and permit the government, justified only by the democracy
of its election, to abridge property.
MJC:
I don't believe in Creator-given rights and I haven't
said that I believe in everything in the American Declaration
of Independence.
Then you have no business calling the Republican side the right
side. You have no basis upon which to judge right from wrong.
MJC:
I believe that the right to property should be limited: I can see no
justification for one person owning large areas of land and, through
that ownership, having the power to maintain in poverty many other
people.
As I said, you have no basis for ethical judgment. All you have
is an impoverished ideology which equates property with theft,
ownership with exploitation, and a free market with wage slavery.
I call theft wrong, and the theft of property, no matter how intended
to help the poor, enough to delegitimize any government. I also
say that such *never* actually ends up helping the poor, but in
point of fact worsens their poverty every single time it is
attempted. It is only the respect for property which can,
and which does, lead the poor out of poverty.
MSM:
And you call *wrong* the man who takes up arms against
such a government to defend his right to property. I mean, even
if it were *only* the taking of my company from me---and not
the murder of my family, compatriots, and social class as it was
in Spain---I would feel justified in rebelling against a government
which attempted to do what the Popular Front government in
Spain actually started doing. You really don't understand that
people have a *Natural Right* to defend their property (not
to mention their lives) and that any attempt to take it from them
instantly de-legitimizes the taker? It is for this reason---assuming
that the forcible *taking* of property is contemplated by
communism---that no communist government, elected
by however great a majority, could be legitimate.
MJC:
So in the end your real concern is property.
No, my real concern is Rights, one of which is property.
I am saying here that violation of property were enough.
So were violation of the Right to Bear Arms. I would
feel justified in rebelling against a government which required
me to give up my firearms. Or free speech. As I've said
before, if the US government outlaws flag-burning, then I
will break that law, as I have done in the past by burning flags.
Yes, property is as important as any of these and more.
MSM:
Also, there is every indication that the leninist and stalinist
Communist Party in Spain was at the heart of everything that
was wrong and illegitimate with the Republican side. So the
CPUSA's support for the Republican side seems entirely wrong
to me. I'd be much more willing to applaud the non-communists
who volunteered to go fight for *either* side, than the CPUSA.
MJC:
You are quite right about the Stalinist elements being
at the heart of much that was wrong about Republican Spain,
MSM:
Note well: I didn't say just "Stalinist". I do not for
one second subscribe to the notion that communism was some
fine thing only perverted and betrayed by a singular monster
named Stalin. I believe it is inherently totalitarian, and
already was totalitarian, with an apparatus of state terror
instituted under Lenin. That Lenin and his use of political
terror was the instructor and instruction book of all
20th-century totalitarianism is the central thesis of
Paul Johnson's history of the 20th century, _Modern Times_.
Stalin, Hitler, Mussolini, the Japanese generals, Franco
*all* took Lenin as model. Ergo, not "Stalinist"
elements, but communist elements.
MJC:
You rely very heavily on Paul Johnson.
He is spot on about Lenin, and about communism.
*You* yourself have just got through telling me you
don't believe in inalienable Rights. *You* relativize
them. But why just property? Under your regime,
do I have any absolute guarantee of free speech,
or of my life or the lives of my wife and children?
The answer is no: The second you dispense with
inalienable Creator-endowed nature of Rights, you
make totalitarianism latent. And communism begins
in pooh-poohing the idea of Rights.
MJC:
You're also talking nonsense: among those purged by
Stalinist elements were followers of Trotsky and
anti-Bolshevik communists.
I fail to see how this absolves communism in
the slightest degree. As I said, it is a philosophy
which begins in the dismissal of liberalism's
Rights of Man. It is absolutely irrelevant that
there might be some fair-minded people who
are communists. The monsters *always* rise to
the top once the brakes are off. This is human
nature. Stalin was *inherent* in communism.
In exactly the same way fascism was inherent in
it, and nazism was inherent in both. You don't believe
in the brakes, and that is all it takes.
Mike Morris
(msmo...@netdirect.net)
Sayan Bhattacharyya
>
>
>Franco
>didn't take up arms to crush democracy, he took up arms to stop
>his friends from being killed.
>Pure and simple. Again, if I had been
>in his shoes, I probably would have acted the same.
Do you also advocate that friends of those in the USA who are
ill and without health insurance, and will die without proper
medical treatment, take up arms to stop their friends
from being thus killed? :-)
Sayan Bhattacharyya
> Do you understand how fundamentally anti-democratic Rights
> doctrine is? Governments are *not* to be chosen by election,
> in fact. They are to be chosen by election *only* insofar
> as they do not become destructive of the end of securing
> the Creator-endowed Rights. If they do become destructive
> of that end, then they should be altered or abolished, which
> is what the Nationalists set out to do (quickly becoming
> destructive of those selfsame ends on their own).
>MJC:
> You are relying a little heavily on Creator-endowed rights,
>
>I am a classical liberal. I don't understand any political philosophy
>as right that does not begin and end with Creator-endowed Rights.
>Since I am approximately atheist, as well, my sense of "Creator-endowed"
>is simply that the Rights are transfinitely above the wishes of any
>majority. They (and the moral Natural Law which stands behind them)
>are there like the Second Law of Thermodynamics is there. We do not
>take a vote on them, or submit them to plebiscite.
Who gets to decide what the set of these transfinite rights shall be?
Which rights will be included and which will not be? Since it is not
God ( as you are an atheist) who decides, then who is it that decides ?
I, for instance, suggest that property rights are manifestly not a
consequence of any natural law. When humans evolved, the land, air
and water did not belong to any individuals. Later, those who were
stronger and had bigger sticks, put a stake to pieces of land and
claimed them as `property'. How is it that such an institution is
"natural" ? It is highly unnatural.
So when Sayan says that property rights are not part of the set
of transfinite rights and Michael says they are, who gets to decide?
And how?
Michael S. Morris
Wednesday, the 18th of July, 2001
Sayan Bhattacharyya wrote:
Do you also advocate that friends of those
in the USA who are ill and without health
insurance, and will die without proper medical
treatment, take up arms to stop their friends
from being thus killed? :-)
You mean go to work, earn money, give the money
to their friends for medical treatment? Yeah, sure, I
advocate that.
But I was unaware that a person dieing from lack
of free assistance from someone else could be equated
with a person being murdered by someone else,
and what kinds of fantastic things might get justified if
we equate "failing to prevent someone from dieing" with
"murder" in this way. Whole corps of failed cancer researchers
could be up for execution in the state of Texas, I guess.
I kind of wonder about that, Sayan, but I'm also wondering
how you've gotten along in your
reading on the Spanish Civil War?
Mike Morris
(msmo...@netdirect.net)