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Edited on Sat Sep-27-08 11:22 PM by struggle4progress
would call themselves Marxists
In fact, your stereotypes about what people here believe are based on rightwing stereotypes handed down from decades earlier. If you do the arithmetic, you will find that almost no one alive today can actually remember Lenin (who died over eighty years ago) and only some older retired people are likely to remember much about Stalin. In regard to Stalin, I think I have once (many years ago) in my life met anyone who ever supported him -- and that person had stopped supporting Stalin fifty years prior to my conversation with her. The Soviet Union officially denounced Stalin so long ago that you can hardly find anyone who remembers the denunciation who is not already retired
No one, of course, has any difficulty finding quotes to support the thesis that Lenin could be ruthless towards his opposition -- but for a fuller historical perspective, one might note that the death toll in Lenin's era occurs in the context of decades of violence. The serfs had been freed only a half-century earlier due to the threat of a revolution, and the accomodation did not eliminate substantial discontent. Tsarists had been, for many years, consistently brutal towards anyone that opposed them, a fact clearly illustrated by the massacre of the 22 January 1905 petitioners in St Petersburg, which sparked the first revolution. Russia subsequently endured a large casualty list in the pointless Great War. The Russian revolution was followed by a civil war and foreign military efforts to undo the revolution. Lenin's period of active control essentially coincides with the civil war. Trotsky's article on Lenin in the 14th Encyclopedia Brittanica (1939) indicates that Lenin for health reasons did not work regularly after the beginning of 1922, and he died in early 1924. There appears to be no historical consensus about the actual toll of the Russian civil war between 1918 and 1922: numbers range from 800 000 to 9 000 000, depending not only on what one counts (starvation? disease?) but also on the political perspective of the person counting. Wars have often spread misery far beyond the battlefields, as one learns from (say) the 1918 influenza pandemic or the million-plus surplus deaths in Iraq associated with the current occupation: it is similarly credible that troops returning to Russia from the Great War brought back with them exotic variants of diseases that contributed to the local death toll. Russia was, at the time, one of the more backward countries involved in the world war, and widespread disease would have serious impacts on the predominantly agrarian economy
In regard to Mao, you are essentially wrong to claim that Mao killed "nearly all the intellectuals." The Maoist attack on the intellectuals took the form of the so-called "Cultural Revolution," which for a decade sent intellectuals to the countryside to labor with peasants. As a would-be intellectual myself, I can understand why there was significant opposition to this at the time -- but it was simply not identical with a wholesale slaughter of intellectuals. The number of deaths, which should be attributed to Mao, like those attributed to Lenin, depends greatly on what one counts as Mao's responsibility and what gross estimates one chooses, both of which again seem too often to depend on point of view: did the Great Leap Forward cost a million lives or forty million lives, for example? Such uncertainty suggests the figures are merely pulled from hats. One can, of course, make a remark about China, similar to the remark I earlier made about Russia: China, when its revolution finally succeeded, had been a desperately poor agrarian nation in a state of constant political violence for almost fifty years: foreigners suppressed the Boxer rebellion in 1901; Sun Zhong Shan, having failed to overthrow the imperial government in 1895, reunified the opposition in 1905 and succeeded in 1912 but failed to maintain control; by 1928, general Jiang Jie Shi was in partial control of the country but had not defeated the communists; this power struggle was interrupted by WWII and the Japanese invasion but resumed after that war ended. As far as I am concerned, you may take whatever point-of-view you like towards Mao Zedong -- but if you want to say anything useful about what we can learn from that history, your analysis must somehow reflect the fact that when Mao came to power, he was forced to deal with a society in which (for fifty years or more) politics had been synonymous with civil war, foreign invasion, warlordism, and coups
There is, of course, no question that the Khmer Rouge set out to exterminate Cambodians influenced by the West. This followed Nixon's illegal invasion of and air war against Cambodia, which produced massive social and economic disruptions, perhaps including a famine which here in the US we prefer to blame on the Khmer Rouge. That Pol Pot was able to gain power in Cambodia, might actually have been a consequence of anti-western sentiment after ninety years of French rule and the unprovoked violence Nixon unleashed against the country. But, of course, even if Nixon were responsible for the famine, and for bringing anti-western sentiments to a head, there's no question that Pol Pot was essentially crazy. I have never met anyone who supported Pol Pot, and it might be difficult even finding any serious written work supporting him. On the other hand, the Reagan and Bush I administrations did support the Khmer Rouge, after it lost power, simply because the Khmer Rouge was Vietnam's enemy: as documented in the Congressional Record, Congress repeatedly introduced legislation to stop such covert funding. In short, to my knowledge, the only Americans who ever supported the Khmer Rouge were a few rightwing Republicans.
My real point is simply this: to learn the lessons of history, one first ought to attempt to describe the historical facts correctly
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