I’ve been thinking that jihadism and narcoterrorism are the only alternatives to capitalism left for wanyone who chafes under the established order in a post-communist world. Capitalism triumphed a generation ago, communism is dead, but what remains is deeply unsatisfactory to much of the world, especially after the 2007-2008 economic collapse — yet there appears to be no alternative.
Yes, the Communist dream was embraced by all sorts of misfits, criminals, and losers. But let’s not worry about them too much. They will always find an excuse to continue being misfits, criminals, and losers.
Clarissa's Blog 
There are unfortunately an awful lot of people nostalgic for Uncle Joe, and many of them are two decades younger than me.
http://jpohl.blogspot.com/2009/09/survey-reports-that-majority-of-central.html
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It seems like you’re painting with a broad brush. Soviet politicians in 1950, Russian revolutionaries in 1906, Chinese party members in 1925, and New York writers in 1935 (say, Syd Hoff) aren’t that much like each other, and it’s hard to believe every single one of them matches your idea of a criminal, misfit, or loser. As would every communist who fought against Franco, every FARC guerrilla born during a long civil war, Paul Robeson, Albert Camus, some workers killed by police and the Klan in North Carolina, a decent number of rank-and-file voters in West Bengal, and who knows how many others.
People who embraced “the Communist dream” wanted different things for different reasons and weren’t a homogeneous group of mini-Stalins and Maos or interchangeable “losers.”
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I didn’t say there were only criminals, losers and misfits embracing this dream. There were also ignorant, silly but well-intentioned folks. Not that their good intentions make things easier for the victims, of course.
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\\ There were also ignorant, silly but well-intentioned folks.
I think one can’t say so about Nazism, but can – about Fascism? The former was made clear to everybody by Hitler’s book and speeches, while the latter was more amorphous?
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I’m only well familiar with the Spanish fascism and I can’t say anybody there could have been well-intentioned. It always begins with racial superiority, always.
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Fair enough, then. I still wouldn’t call Camus, Robeson, or Langston Hughes silly or ignorant (except in the sense of “not knowing everything then that we know now”), but I’m glad for the slightly more nuanced version.
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Oh, I’m sure these particular individuals knew extremely well what was being done to us in the USSR. They simply didn’t care. It was convenient to pretend everything was good. For many, it still is.
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I don’t think it’s correct, as a matter of empirical fact, to say that Paul Robeson in the 1930s could know as much about Stalin’s crimes as people know today.
Claiming Robeson and Hughes were indifferent to suffering in the USSR is as unfair as it would be to assume anti-Soviet dissidents approved of the lynching of African-Americans. It’s natural for people to feel the strongest about the oppression they’re closest to, and we don’t have to condemn them as callous.
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“I don’t think it’s correct, as a matter of empirical fact, to say that Paul Robeson in the 1930s could know as much about Stalin’s crimes as people know today.”
– Are you aware that Robeson traveled to the USSR more than once starting in 1934? He had many more opportunities to know what was happening because he was actually there. Neither you nor I can visit the USSR and see with our own eyes.
“Claiming Robeson and Hughes were indifferent to suffering in the USSR is as unfair as it would be to assume anti-Soviet dissidents approved of the lynching of African-Americans. ”
– If they met with the Klan leaders, shook their hands, smiled to them and praised them to the skies, and said that the lynchings were completely justified then it would be very safe to assume that they approved of the lynchings. Are you aware of the comments Robeson made about the executions in the USSR?
“It’s natural for people to feel the strongest about the oppression they’re closest to, and we don’t have to condemn them as callous.”
– And how natural is it to travel overseas and celebrate genocide and murder there? Do you know how many of the Leftie intellectuals in the 1930s traveled to the USSR, saw everything, recognized to their friends that the USSR was a horrifying place, yet refused to recognize publicly what they saw because they were afraid this would damage “the Great Cause”?
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One source of our disagreement is that I’m not confident Robeson learned much about what was really going on by traveling to the USSR, or that shaking hands with Klan leaders could have given anyone an accurate picture of Jim Crow. It’s not as if Robeson had perfect Russian and was interviewing people who’d been sent to labor camps and felt they could afford to be candid with him. His picture of the USSR must have been incomplete, and he could imagine better futures for the new country than the one that actually happened. I continue to think it’s natural for someone in Robeson’s position to side with people who were loudly against Franco and the Klan, even if we know better.
Maybe it’s comparable to émigrés like Merezhkovsky and Gippius, who hated the Soviet Union with complete moral certainty. Their clear views led Merezhkovsky to publicly support Mussolini, and Gippius to criticize Sweden for not supporting Hitler, and hope the Germans would soon liberate her Ukrainian friends from Stalin. We can say they’re terrible people for supporting evil politicians, or we can try to see how it must have looked to them, and try to understand why their anti-Bolshevik feelings trumped everything else.
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I don’t see what benefits will accrue to me personally if I waste my time on “trying to understand” people who are guilty precisely of not trying to understand and who never asked me for any understanding. If we go down this road of being unwaveringly understanding, we will arrive at the knowledge that Hitler was a victim of horrific childhood abuse and Stalin grew up in the family of a vicious, violent drunk and an insane religious fanatic. It’s all true, but so what? Why should we fear judging and condemning? Aside from observing and outdated religious tradition, I see no reason not to condemn anybody and anything as I see fit.
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I think judging and condemning huge swaths of people gives us a less accurate picture of the world. Everyone is, of course, free to condemn as many people as they like, with as little acknowledgement of their human complexity as they wish.
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When Paul Robeson cheered the executions of “anti-Soviet agitators”, their human complexity was of no interest to him. And even today these victims have not been recognized or acknowledged because it’s impossible to convince people to get over the compassion and understanding they feel towards the victimizers.
Ours is an enormous tragedy. Our collective trauma has not even begun to heal. And how can it if the understanding is always extended to those who caused our suffering and never to us?
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Robeson did do a hell of a job on the english anthem, we can all agree on that I’m sure.
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The far left really comes so close to siding with terrorism so long as it is symbolically (and not necessarily actually) against American imperialism. It gets so tiring having to listen to their faux radicalism.
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Does nonviolence always work and if not, how does one distinguish between self defense, strategic attack, and terrorism?
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We do not even need to leap to such a question in advance. We can simply recognise the violence and condemn it as a human rights violation, without befuddling ourselves with questions that most people — because of their lack of acumen, study and due consideration — have the ability to answer. All of these low grade thinkers posing as born ethicists…..
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Exactly. They are so pathetic in their obsession with Americans which blinds them to everything else.
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That is true. I even wrote on Facebook yesterday, “The West just has more awesome weapons…” and got a like or two.
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As an ignorant person and a communist, I’m just happy people are still mentioning communism. 🙂
I’m also “the far left”, of course I’d argue state terrorism is a form of terrorism often left unacknowledged by supporters of the western governments. I don’t support rebels or state actors when it comes to terrorist acts.
Really though, the term “terrorist” is thrown around so loosely these days that I’m tired of hearing and seeing it. Anyone and everyone’s adversaries (normally the ones with fewer guns but not always!) are “terrorists”. Some recent examples come to mind – The Syrian rebels, the fighters in Eastern Ukraine (Vladimir Putin! 😉 ), and the (formerly democratically elected) Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt to name but a few.
The reality is generally more of a grey area and not so black and white as evil terrorist or revolutionary/democratic/separatist resistance fighter. Some how these three I previously mentioned get compared to ISIS when clearly that’s absolutely a ridiculous comparison.
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