ok what the fuck is happening in ukraine

even if it's just reflexive.

i was just thinking about that. is it just the consequence of a political ideology not sophisticated enough to distinguish categories beyond Western-Imperial hegemony and Other?

it isn't hysterical to write something like "America is not a fascist country, at least not yet."

it is hysterical, because the implication is that America was less fascist in the past and becoming more fascist now - and then you point to a bunch of examples of things that were actually *worse* in the past...

why do I bother, agree this argument is not worth having

xp

i find the residual soviet apologism among parts of the left kind of baffling.

tbf we're talking about a tiny tiny slice of people here

yeah, but the fact that /anyone/ who wasn't invested in it once upon a time would still have a kind of reflexive semi-apologist stance is weird. like why would some 30something writer for jacobin try to mince words about stalin?

idk those Int'l Socialist Organization people are just insane, is how I more or less break it down

once one of them told me I was "reading the wrong histories"

(tbf at the time he was defending Mao, not Stalin)

yeah, but the fact that /anyone/ who wasn't invested in it once upon a time would still have a kind of reflexive semi-apologist stance is weird. like why would some 30something writer for jacobin try to mince words about stalin?

― I dunno. (amateurist), Thursday, November 13, 2014 2:22 PM (8 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

zizek

If describing Stalin as a "bloody tyrant", a "super-tyrant" and a "monster" is mincing words then idk what the straight butter sauce, no marinara would be. The point is not that Stalin was anything other than a grotesque horror, it's that echoing the argument that the rise of Nazi ideology and, ultimately, the holocaust, was a response to the Soviet Union and not an organic German phenomenon is hugely loaded. It's a pretty popular argument on the German right and, as Lazare says, one that Snyder has constantly narrowly skirted around. It's not about excusing Stalinism, it;s about NOT excusing Fascism.

More importantly, Snyder's using his academic position to push a nonsensical and potentially dangerous position on the West's relationship with contemporary Russia.

Snyder's juvenile Stalin = Hitler = Putin = Lions = Tigers = Bears = oh my! argument which sees Putin as nostalgic for the Hitler / Stalin accord and aiming to push the idea that contemporary collaboration with European Fascists is on the cards is utterly absurd in the context of the mainstream Russian nationalism that Putin feeds off.

The Torbakov piece is absolutely correct in saying that Russia's view of its moral authority as a great nation stems from being the country that 'saved Europe from Fascism'. It's the single greatest cornerstone of Russian nationalism. It's not universally known as the "Great Patriotic War" for nothing. Focus on justifying the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact in a historical context isn't nostalgia, it's shoring up that idea that Russia bled for the rest of us when the time came to step up.

Putin has used anti-Fascism (cynically in most cases) as a justification for lots of Russia's domestic and foreign policy. Nashi - effectively the youth feeder group for United Russia - was supposedly set up as a bulwark against Fascist youth groups. More obviously, 75% of all the propaganda that Russia has been churning out about Ukraine is focused on the idea that they're a bunch of Neo-Nazis who worship Stepan Bandera. Bandera is one of the most loathed contemporary figures in Russia, not just because he fought against them but because he was a Nazi collaborator. It's pretty much literally the worst thing you can accuse anyone of being.

Putin is definitely trying to shape domestic and international views of Russian history to his own ends - not just in speeches to students but in the wholesale revision of Russian state textbooks but Synder's arguments would struggle to be more inaccurate if he was trying and only feed into the kneejerk leftist response that 'if the case against him is made in such a farcical way, it must be because he's sticking it to the west'. Bad political commentary about him discredits the good, negative coverage by association.

i got in no way from bloodlands the idea that stalin's behavior/actions ameliorated hitler's

It's not about ameliorating the actions themselves, it's framing where those actions stemmed from that's the issue. I'd agree that Snyder doesn't go fully down the Nolte route but it's not a million miles away.

Either way, agree or disagree, understanding his historical POV is important to understanding his writing on contemporary politics.

ShariVari, I complete agree that Snyder was misrepresenting the situation badly. but I also think that Jacobin publishes a lot of shrill and dubious stuff (in addition to some excellent stuff--sometimes in the same article!). those two positions are not incompatible.

i hate how these threads often seem to gravitate toward polarization, and when you say that you disagree with someone on one point it's assumed that you're disagreeing with every point they've made and have chosen a "side" in a debate. frankly it's the most annoying feature of ILX to me. maybe it's endemic to internet discussion boards; i wouldn't know since this is the only one I've really ever read.

I agree, and that whole post wasn't aimed at you. I was just taking issue with the idea that there was any apologism for Stalin in the Jacobin piece.

Apologism for Stalin on the hard left is more repellent yet makes more sense than apologism for Putin, a nationalist and social conservative.

I'm not sure many of the Putin fans on the left really care much about his domestic policies or pay attention to the increasing shift towards social conservatism and restrictions of the welfare state in Russia. His primary attraction is that he has sought to obstruct US imperialism by opposing the war in Iraq, the bombing of Syria, etc.

Those that are more involved in Russian politics would argue (correctly to some degree) that he also stands against the domestic political dominance of oligarchs and the domestic economic dominance of the IMF. Failing to do that without any recognition of the negatives is clearly NAGL though. I do think that, outside of Russia itself, the number of diehard Putin apologists is probably wildly overstated though.

The Putin apologists I know are almost exclusively also Maoists, and they'll defend him alongside the likes of Assad.

genocide is okay as long as you're an enemy of the western hegemony i guess

Life is obviously too short to argue with Maoists but idk how they square that with anti-left policies like cutting free healthcare and brutal treatment of undocumented migrants.

Uhhhhh Maoists still exist?

unfortunately

you want a treat? western maoists reviewing movies:

http://www.prisoncensorship.info/archive/etext/movies/

The thing about Maoists is that other leftists will spout similar rhetoric without ever thinking they're a Maoist.

Their attitude toward labor as "imperialist" is hateful and plays into the hands of everyone else who hates labor.

i once read a counterpunch article that argued without any ambiguity at all that the khmer rouge were good guys who had been wrongfully slandered by the evil western press. i know that website basically just consists of unedited rants by middle-aged leftist cranks but i still found that really shocking.

pointing and laughing is the only proper response to modern maoists

Badiou's position on Khmer Rouge was ambiguous until 2008 or so, as far as I know, although his major statement of support for the group (in Theory of Contradiction) was made in 1975, shortly after they'd taken Phnom Penh.
xp

I don't get present-day Maoists either, but I never really encounter them in the leftist circles I know.

there might be more maoists in hyde park in chicago than in beijing these days

we had a maoist teacher in my high school! she ran a club for students of west indian origin (there were many).

wasn't the khmer rouge fighting the north vietnamese, and therefore somewhat tolerated by the west?

That's not why Maoists like them. Maybe you only find Maoists in US colleges these days... and in Nepal.

Actually, I have to qualify my last post: Badiou's most extensive comment on Khmer Rouge was made in 1975, but apparently Badiou reiterated his support for the group in 1978, in the context of the Vietnamese invasion of Cambodia. In an interview with Eric Hazan in 2008 (http://kasamaproject.org/theory/799-31badiou-on-different-streams-within-french-maoism), Badiou took his distance both from the Khmer Rouge regime and the 'nouveaux philosophes' who made public statements of their anti-communism, and explained what he found useful in his own Maoist group of the late 60s:

There were three essential points of Maoist provenance that we practised: the first was that you always had to link up with the people, that politics for intellectuals was a journey into society and not a discussion in a closed room. Political work was defined as work in factories, housing estates, hostels. It was always a matter of setting up political organizations in the midst of people's actual life. The second was that you should not take part in the institutions of the bourgeois state: we were against the traditional trade unions and the electoral mechanism. No infiltration of the so-called workers' bureaucracies, no participation in elections; that distinguished us radically from the Trotskyists. The third point was that we should be in no hurry to call ourselves a party, to take up old forms of organization; we had to remain very close to actual political processes. As a result of all this, we found ourselves sharply opposed to the two other main currents [in French Maoism]. Our founding pamphlet attacked both the PCMLF on the right and the GP 'on the left'.

(...I'll reserve judgment on Badiou's formulation as a description of Maoism, and I'll stop here so as not to derail this thread.)

xx-post: Right, but I'm just saying. Today, the khmer rouge is among the worst of the worst, worse than apartheid or mao - and rightfully so. But liking them back in the seventies, as Badiou did, was something a bunch of people all over the political spectrum did.

so what? badiou et al were childish assholes; it's not as though the khmer rouge's crimes (or mao's crimes for that matter) were only rumors.

i mean there were enough people on the left at the time who saw mao and pol pot for who they were to make badiou's allegiances inexcusable. he can't claim ignorance, really, only bullheadedness.

Man, Badiou just gave an excellent analysis of the situation at the time in the ows-link, 'childish assholes' is so simplistic as to be laughable.

ha ha ha

You're an idiot. Wasting time on discussing with you is pointless.

http://www.salon.com/2014/12/04/new_york_times_propagandists_exposed_finally_the_truth_about_ukraine_and_putin_emerges/

You're an idiot. Wasting time on discussing with you is pointless.

― Frederik B, Tuesday, December 2, 2014 2:32 PM (2 days ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

sorry i'm not as concerned with you about the nuanced rationalizations of people who pledged allegiance to a tyrant who cultivated a cult of personality and -- through a combination of arrogance, ignorance, and venality -- wound up with the deaths of millions of chinese on his hands.

. it's not as though there weren't plenty of people on the left at the time who would have been happy to tell him he was full of shit.

sure, "childish assholes" is simplistic and rash, but i'm not too worked up about it.

one thing that's particularly grotesque that the height of (one segment of) the new left's fascination with mao was the mid-late 60s, the moment of the cultural revolution's worst excesses (which is far too polite a word to use in this context). while badiou et al were hoisting their little red books in parisian salons, chinese intellectuals were being assaulted and paraded through the streets for cooked-up "counter-revolutionary" crimes. that badiou et al couldn't know the full extent of the horrors of the cultural revolution isn't much of an excuse. enough was known.

I'm going to write this anyway since i can prob cp it into so many discussions with just small adjustments.

1) Being a maoist doesn't mean you 'pledge allegiance' to mao.

2) This was a time when politicians all over the spectrum cosied up to killers. Including Nixon and Mao for crissakes.

In conclusion, you're dumb, and you should read what Badiou says to get smarter. It's a good interview.

smh/lol @ one of ILX's arch liberal babies calling Badiou "a childish asshole"

reminder that the Black Panthers were Maoists, wonder if amateurist would call them "grotesque"

Patrick L. Smith article in Salon that Mordy posted is so poorly written I found it all but unreadable and gave up. As near as I could make out, the author seems to think that whatever Henry Kissinger says in an interview with a journalist is tantamount to the Voice of God speaking from a burning bush.

Tempted to say that every country gets the Seamus Milne it deserves.

i'm an "arch liberal baby"? what does that mean? what do you know of my politics?

fwiw i don't think badiou is childish /now/ -- i think even he'd admit to a bit of rash childishness at the time. he almost says as much in that interview.

btw are the black panthers beyond reproach now?