from: Tomgram
In 1967, outraged by the course of the Vietnam War, as well as her country's role in prolonging and worsening it, Mary McCarthy, novelist, memoirist, and author of the bestseller The Group, went to Saigon, then the capital of South Vietnam, to judge the situation for herself. The next year, she went to the North Vietnamese capital, Hanoi. She wrote accounts of both journeys, published originally in pamphlet format as Vietnam (1967) and Hanoi (1968), and later gathered with her other writings on Vietnam as a book, The Seventeenth Degree (1974). As pamphlets, McCarthy's accounts sold poorly and passed into obscurity; deservedly so, some would say.
Those who'd say this, however, would be wrong. McCarthy brought a novelist's keen eye to America's activities and its rhetoric in Vietnam. By no means a military expert, not even an expert on Vietnam -- she only made a conscious decision to study the war in Vietnam after she returned from her trip to Saigon -- her impressionistic writings were nevertheless insightful precisely because she had long been a critical thinker beholden to no authority.
Her insights into our approach to war-fighting and to foreign cultures are as telling today as they were 40 years ago, so much so that President Obama and his advisors might do well to add her unconventional lessons to their all-too-conventional thinking on our spreading war in Afghanistan and Pakistan.
What were those lessons? Here are seven of them, each followed by questions that, four decades later, someone at President Obama's next press conference should consider asking him:
1. McCarthy's most fundamental objection was to the way, in Vietnam, the U.S. government decided to apply "technology and a superior power to a political situation that will not yield to this." At the very least, the United States was guilty of folly, but McCarthy went further. She condemned our technocentric and hegemonic form of warfare as "wicked" because of its "absolute indifference to the cost in human lives" to the Vietnamese people.
Even in 1967, the widespread, at times indiscriminate, nature of American killing was well known. For example, U.S. planes dropped roughly 7 million tons of bombs on Vietnam and parts of Laos and Cambodia during the war, nearly five times the tonnage used against Germany during World War II. The U.S. even waged war on the Vietnamese jungle and forest, which so effectively hid Vietnamese guerrilla forces, spraying roughly 20 million gallons of toxic herbicides (including the dioxin-contaminated Agent Orange) on it.
In her outrage, McCarthy dared to compare the seeming indifference of many of her fellow citizens toward the blunt-edged sword of technological destruction we had loosed on Vietnam to the moral obtuseness of ordinary Germans under Adolf Hitler.
Questions for President Obama: Aren't we once again relying on the destructive power of technology to "solve" complex political and religious struggles? Aren't we yet again showing indifference to the human costs of war, especially when borne by non-Americans? Even though we're using far fewer bombs in the Af-Pak highlands than we did in Vietnam, aren't we still morally culpable when these "precision-guided munitions" miss their targets and instead claim innocents, or hit suspected "terrorists" who suddenly morph into wedding parties? In those cases, do we not seek false comfort in the phrase, C'est la guerre, or at least that modern equivalent: unavoidable collateral damage?
2. As Richard Nixon campaigned for the presidency in 1968 by calling for "peace with honor" in Vietnam, McCarthy offered her own warning about the dangers that arose when the office of the presidency collided with an American desire never to be labeled a loser: "The American so-called free-enterprise system, highly competitive, investment-conscious, expansionist, repels a loser policy by instinctive defense movements centering in the ganglia of the presidency. No matter what direction the incumbent, as candidate, was pointing in, he slowly pivots once he assumes office."
Questions for President Obama: Have you, like Vietnam-era presidents, pivoted toward yet another surge simply to avoid the label of "loser" in Afghanistan? And if the cost of victory (however defined) is hundreds, or even thousands, more American military casualties, hundreds of billions of additional dollars spent, and extensive collateral damage and blowback, will this "victory" not be a pyrrhic one, achieved at a price so dear as to be indistinguishable from defeat?
3. Though critical of the U.S. military in Vietnam, McCarthy was even more critical of American civilian officials there. "On the whole," she wrote, they "behaved like a team of promoters with a dubious 'growth' stock they were brokering." At least military men were often more forthright than the civilians, if not necessarily more self-aware, McCarthy noted, because they were part of the war -- the product, so to speak -- not its salesmen.
Questions for President Obama: In promising to send a new "surge" of State Department personnel and other civilians into Afghanistan, are you prepared as well to parse their words? Are you braced in case they sell you a false bill of goods, even if the sellers themselves, in their eagerness to speak fairy tales to power, continually ignore the Fantasyland nature of their tale?
4. Well before Bush administration officials boasted about creating their own reality and new "facts on the ground" in Iraq, Mary McCarthy recognized the danger of another type of "fact": "The more troops and matériel committed to Vietnam, the more retreat appears to be cut off -- not by an enemy, but by our own numbers. To call for withdrawal in the face of that commitment... is to seem to argue not against a policy, but against facts, which by their very nature are unanswerable."
Questions for President Obama: If your surge in Afghanistan fails, will you be able to de-escalate as quickly as you escalated? Or will the fact that you've put more troops in harm's way (with all their equipment and all the money that will go into new base and airfield and road construction), and committed more of your prestige to prevailing, make it even harder to consider leaving?
5. A cursory reading of The Pentagon Papers, the famously secret government documents on Vietnam leaked to the New York Times by Daniel Ellsberg, reveals how skeptical America's top officials were, early on, in pursuing a military solution to the situation in South Vietnam. Nevertheless, knowing better, the "best and brightest," as journalist David Halberstam termed them in his famous, ironic book title, still talked themselves into it; and they did so, as McCarthy noted, because they set seemingly meaningful goals ("metrics" or "benchmarks," we'd say today), which they then convinced themselves they were actually achieving. When you trick yourself into believing that you're meeting your goals, as Halberstam noted, there's no reason to reexamine your course of action.
Questions for President Obama: Much has been written about an internal struggle within your administration over the wisdom of surging in Afghanistan. Now, you, too, have called for the setting of "benchmarks" for your new strategy's success. Are you wise enough to set them to capture the complexities of political realities on the ground rather than playing to American strengths? Are you capable of re-examining them, even when your advisors assure you that they are being achieved?
6. In her day, Mary McCarthy recognized the inequities of burden-sharing at home when it came to the war in Vietnam: "Casualty figures, still low [in 1967], seldom strike home outside rural and low-income groups -- the silent part of society. The absence of sacrifices [among the privileged classes] has had its effect on the opposition [to the war], which feels no need, on the whole, to turn away from its habitual standards and practices -- what for? We have not withdrawn our sympathy from American power and from the way of life that is tied to it -- a connection that is more evident to a low-grade G.I. in Vietnam than to most American intellectuals."
Questions for President Obama: Are you willing to listen to the common G.I. as well as to the generals who have your ear? Are you willing to insist on greater equity in burden-sharing, since once again most of the burden of Iraq and Afghanistan has fallen on "the silent part of society"? Are you able to recognize that the "best and brightest" in the corridors of power may not be the wisest exactly because they have so little to lose (and perhaps much to gain) from our "overseas contingency operations"?
7. McCarthy was remarkably perceptive when it came to the seductiveness of American technological prowess. Our technological superiority, she wrote, was a large part of "our willingness to get into Vietnam and stay there... The technological gap between us and the North Vietnamese constituted, we thought, an advantage which obliged us not to quit."
Questions for President Obama: Rather than providing us with a war-winning edge, might our robot drones, satellite imagery, and all our other gadgetry of war seduce us into believing that we can "prevail" at a reasonable and sustainable cost? Indeed, do we think we should prevail precisely because our high-tech military brags of "full spectrum dominance"?
One bonus lesson from Mary McCarthy before we take our leave of her: Even now, we speak too often of "Bush's war" or, more recently, "Obama's war." Before we start chattering mindlessly about Iraq and Afghanistan as American tragedies, we would do well to recall what McCarthy had to say about the war in Vietnam: "There is something distasteful," she wrote, "in the very notion of approaching [Vietnam] as an American tragedy, whose protagonist is a great suffering Texan [President Lyndon Baines Johnson]."
Yes, there is something distasteful about a media that blithely refers to Bush's or Obama's war as hundreds of thousands of Iraqis and Afghanis suffer. For American troops, after all, are not the only ones paying the ultimate price when the U.S. fights foreign wars for ill-considered reasons and misguided goals.
William J. Astore, a retired lieutenant colonel (USAF), taught for six years at the Air Force Academy. A TomDispatch regular, he currently teaches at the Pennsylvania College of Technology and is the author of Hindenburg: Icon of German Militarism (Potomac Press, 2005), among other works. He may be reached at wastore@pct.edu.
Is the Revolution in sight?
looks like the barge may be lifting off a sand bar...
April 17, 2009
April 16, 2009
Obama's Habeas Corpus Arch-Hypocrisy from Paul Street on Greenwald article
Obama's Habeas Corpus Arch-Hypocrisy
http://www.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/radio/2009/02/24/aclu/.
I had to read this twice just to take it in. The first time I went through it I had to stop to take a deep breath and a short walk around the block, repeating to myself the words, "holy freaking shit."
This is as bad as anything I've ever read about Obama.
Obama has actually turned out worse than I thought. He has out-done even my highly critical take on him from the left. His administration is completely nauseating. (I will explain some of this conclusion in the May issue of Z Magazine [ print - remember that?], in an article that went to press before I learned about the issue Greenwald discusses).
A brief summary of Greenwald's essay... Last February, the Obama administration filed a telling brief in federal court. In two sentences, this brief declared that the Obama Department of Justice essentially embraced the Bush administration's totalitarian position on (against) habeas corpus.
After the Supreme Court ruled last June that Guantanamo detainees possess the right to a hearing to contest the charges against them, the Bush administration simply started sending so-called enemy combatants from around the world to the American prison camp in Bagram Air Force base in occupied Afghanistan. Since Afghanistan is a "war zone," the Bush White House argued, prisoners there have no constitutional rights. Never mind that these were not prisoners captured on a battlefield in Afghanistan but were people abducted from their homes and workplaces in other countries and flown in secret U.S. jets to Bagram.
In its February '09 brief, the Obama justice department defended this Orwellian policy, arguing that such prisoners can be locked up without any constitutional rights for an indefinite period of time just as long as they are incarcerated in Bagram instead of Guantanamo!
If anyone cares at this point, Obama the U.S. senator and presidential candidate and former law professor spoke eloquently against Guantanamo and on behalf of "rejecting a false choice between fighting terrorism and respecting habeas corpus."
As Greenwald puts it, "Barack Obama - the one trying to convince Democrats to make him their nominee and then their President - said that abducting people and imprisoning them without charge was (a) un-American; (b) tyrannical; (c) unnecessary to fight Terrorism; (d) a potent means for stoking anti-Americanism and fueling Terrorism; (e) a means of endangering captured American troops, Americans traveling abroad and Americans generally; and (f) a violent beyrayal of core, centuries-old Western principles of justice. But today's Barack Obama, safely ensconced in the White House, fights tooth and tail to preserve his power to do exactly that."
How incredibly grotesque. Such hypocrisy, I must say, truly stinks to high heaven.
Now, take a deep breath and walk out your front doo. Go around your block once, repeating after me, "holy shit, holy shit, holy shit..."
http://www.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/radio/2009/02/24/aclu/.
I had to read this twice just to take it in. The first time I went through it I had to stop to take a deep breath and a short walk around the block, repeating to myself the words, "holy freaking shit."
This is as bad as anything I've ever read about Obama.
Obama has actually turned out worse than I thought. He has out-done even my highly critical take on him from the left. His administration is completely nauseating. (I will explain some of this conclusion in the May issue of Z Magazine [ print - remember that?], in an article that went to press before I learned about the issue Greenwald discusses).
A brief summary of Greenwald's essay... Last February, the Obama administration filed a telling brief in federal court. In two sentences, this brief declared that the Obama Department of Justice essentially embraced the Bush administration's totalitarian position on (against) habeas corpus.
After the Supreme Court ruled last June that Guantanamo detainees possess the right to a hearing to contest the charges against them, the Bush administration simply started sending so-called enemy combatants from around the world to the American prison camp in Bagram Air Force base in occupied Afghanistan. Since Afghanistan is a "war zone," the Bush White House argued, prisoners there have no constitutional rights. Never mind that these were not prisoners captured on a battlefield in Afghanistan but were people abducted from their homes and workplaces in other countries and flown in secret U.S. jets to Bagram.
In its February '09 brief, the Obama justice department defended this Orwellian policy, arguing that such prisoners can be locked up without any constitutional rights for an indefinite period of time just as long as they are incarcerated in Bagram instead of Guantanamo!
If anyone cares at this point, Obama the U.S. senator and presidential candidate and former law professor spoke eloquently against Guantanamo and on behalf of "rejecting a false choice between fighting terrorism and respecting habeas corpus."
As Greenwald puts it, "Barack Obama - the one trying to convince Democrats to make him their nominee and then their President - said that abducting people and imprisoning them without charge was (a) un-American; (b) tyrannical; (c) unnecessary to fight Terrorism; (d) a potent means for stoking anti-Americanism and fueling Terrorism; (e) a means of endangering captured American troops, Americans traveling abroad and Americans generally; and (f) a violent beyrayal of core, centuries-old Western principles of justice. But today's Barack Obama, safely ensconced in the White House, fights tooth and tail to preserve his power to do exactly that."
How incredibly grotesque. Such hypocrisy, I must say, truly stinks to high heaven.
Now, take a deep breath and walk out your front doo. Go around your block once, repeating after me, "holy shit, holy shit, holy shit..."
Spies at work CSIS questioning of Canadian Muslims threatens their jobs, by Stefan Christoff
The Dominion - http://www.dominionpaper.ca
April 20, 2007
Spies at work
CSIS questioning of Canadian Muslims threatens their jobs
by Stefan Christoff
Visits from CSIS are an occupational hazard: Bassam Hussein
MONTREAL MIRROR--The Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS) is conducting regular interviews and interrogations with hundreds of Arabs and Muslims across Canada at their workplaces, homes and in the vicinity of local mosques, say national and Montreal-based Arab and Muslim community groups. The groups are reporting major increases in the numbers of calls from distressed community members concerning CSIS interventions. According to the Canadian Council on American-Islamic Relations in Canada (CAIR-Canada), CSIS intelligence-gathering activities have increased over the past year.
“Community members who have been approached by CSIS across the country are calling our office on a weekly basis,” says Sameer Zuberi, CAIR-Canada’s communications co-ordinator. “This hike in CSIS visits is alarming to CAIR-Canada as it casts a blanket of fear and intimidation that is spread over our entire community.”
In response to increased CSIS activity, CAIR-Canada has shipped thousands of copies of a publication designed for Canadian Muslims dealing with CSIS and other Canadian authorities, entitled Know Your Rights Guide, to local mosques and community centres.
“I got a call from a CSIS agent a couple of months ago asking for a meeting at a café downtown on Peel street,” says former Concordia student Mohammed over the phone from Kuwait, where he is currently working as a mechanical engineer. He asked that his last name not be used due to fears of possible repercussions. “I was asked numerous questions concerning my own involvement in the Muslim community [and] was asked by the CSIS agent to not bring a lawyer to the meeting. The agents acknowledged that they had no specific incriminating evidence against me, but explained in a non-direct fashion that they simply wanted to gather information on our community, leading me to feel suspect in Canada simply because of my religion.”
“People are being targeted by CSIS for simply belonging to a certain ethnic group with certain religious beliefs without any obvious rationale for such targeting,” says Bassam Hussein of the Centre Communautaire Musulman de Montréal. “I was recently visited by a mother of four in Montreal who was seeking help due to CSIS harassment against her and her husband,” says Hussein. “CSIS went to her husband’s employer to inquire about him, the employer was terrified when CSIS contacted him and two weeks later, the employer let the husband go.”
The 2007 Conservative federal budget “earmarks new funding for CSIS,” according to the Ministry of Finance website, to the tune of $80 million over two years in addition to the approximately $200 million already allocated to Canada’s national spy agency. Media representatives from CSIS did not return repeated requests for an interview from the Mirror before deadline.
CAIR-Canada recently reported that approximately 30 per cent of all CSIS visits in the Muslim community are occurring at the workplace, often putting individuals’ careers in jeopardy.
“Community members feel that their civil liberties are being seriously compromised under the pretext of fighting terrorism,” says Hussein. “Community members who I know are being contacted by CSIS are simple people working hard to live in peace and raise their families.”
April 20, 2007
Spies at work
CSIS questioning of Canadian Muslims threatens their jobs
by Stefan Christoff
Visits from CSIS are an occupational hazard: Bassam Hussein
MONTREAL MIRROR--The Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS) is conducting regular interviews and interrogations with hundreds of Arabs and Muslims across Canada at their workplaces, homes and in the vicinity of local mosques, say national and Montreal-based Arab and Muslim community groups. The groups are reporting major increases in the numbers of calls from distressed community members concerning CSIS interventions. According to the Canadian Council on American-Islamic Relations in Canada (CAIR-Canada), CSIS intelligence-gathering activities have increased over the past year.
“Community members who have been approached by CSIS across the country are calling our office on a weekly basis,” says Sameer Zuberi, CAIR-Canada’s communications co-ordinator. “This hike in CSIS visits is alarming to CAIR-Canada as it casts a blanket of fear and intimidation that is spread over our entire community.”
In response to increased CSIS activity, CAIR-Canada has shipped thousands of copies of a publication designed for Canadian Muslims dealing with CSIS and other Canadian authorities, entitled Know Your Rights Guide, to local mosques and community centres.
“I got a call from a CSIS agent a couple of months ago asking for a meeting at a café downtown on Peel street,” says former Concordia student Mohammed over the phone from Kuwait, where he is currently working as a mechanical engineer. He asked that his last name not be used due to fears of possible repercussions. “I was asked numerous questions concerning my own involvement in the Muslim community [and] was asked by the CSIS agent to not bring a lawyer to the meeting. The agents acknowledged that they had no specific incriminating evidence against me, but explained in a non-direct fashion that they simply wanted to gather information on our community, leading me to feel suspect in Canada simply because of my religion.”
“People are being targeted by CSIS for simply belonging to a certain ethnic group with certain religious beliefs without any obvious rationale for such targeting,” says Bassam Hussein of the Centre Communautaire Musulman de Montréal. “I was recently visited by a mother of four in Montreal who was seeking help due to CSIS harassment against her and her husband,” says Hussein. “CSIS went to her husband’s employer to inquire about him, the employer was terrified when CSIS contacted him and two weeks later, the employer let the husband go.”
The 2007 Conservative federal budget “earmarks new funding for CSIS,” according to the Ministry of Finance website, to the tune of $80 million over two years in addition to the approximately $200 million already allocated to Canada’s national spy agency. Media representatives from CSIS did not return repeated requests for an interview from the Mirror before deadline.
CAIR-Canada recently reported that approximately 30 per cent of all CSIS visits in the Muslim community are occurring at the workplace, often putting individuals’ careers in jeopardy.
“Community members feel that their civil liberties are being seriously compromised under the pretext of fighting terrorism,” says Hussein. “Community members who I know are being contacted by CSIS are simple people working hard to live in peace and raise their families.”
Marx - Prophet of capitalism, Business Standard, V V / New Delhi, Apr 16, 2009
About fifteen years ago, after the collapse of communism in east Europe, there appeared a general impression that Marx was now irrelevant: he was dead, and buried for ever under the rubble of the Berlin Wall. No one need read him again. “What we are witnessing,” Francis Fukuyama proclaimed at the end of the Cold War, “is not just the passing of a particular period of post-war history, but the end of history as such: that is, the end point of mankind’s ideological evolution.” But history soon returned with a vengeance. First in August 1998, the economic meltdown in Russia, currency collapse in Asia and market panic around the world that made London’s Financial Times wonder if we had moved “from the triumph of global capitalism to its crisis in barely a decade.” The article was headlined, “Das Kapital Revisited.” The current financial crisis has reiterated the enduring relevance of Marx which has been ably presented for the common reader in Francis Wheen’s Marx’s ‘Das Kapital’: A Biography (Atlantic Books, $11.50).
Wheen tells us that the bourgeoisie has not died. But nor has Marx: his errors or unfulfilled prophecies about capitalism are eclipsed and transcended with a piercing analysis with which he revealed the nature of the beast.
“Constant revolutionising of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones. All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, were swept away, all new found ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air,” he wrote in the Communist Manifesto.
And not just in capitalism’s homelands: “The bourgeoisie, by the rapid improvement of all instruments of production, by the immensely facilitated means of communication, draws all, even the most barbarous nations, into civilisation.”
One reason why Marx has been dismissed as a ‘determinist’ and ‘an economic materialist’ is because Marxist thought has not been studied in depth or simply because its critics have deliberately twisted it for their own ends. Marx did not believe in an entity called the ‘economy’. The core of his thought and the reason why it survives which Wheen shows in clear, simple prose, is the conflict between the forces and relations of production. In the Manifesto Marx acknowledges the genius of the capitalist system, its inventive and creative nature and its scorn for tradition, custom and fetish.
But the menace occurs when it erects a thing beyond the control of its creators. Take ‘environment’. It is the common property of all human beings. Yet, as Marx put it, “At the same time as mankind masters nature, man seems to become enslaved to other men or to his own infamy.”
As Wheen shows, Marx had a love-hate relationship with capitalism and that is why he will be relevant as long as long as capitalism endures. Thus, the term ‘exploitation’ that our comrades use so often, does not mean starvation and misery (though in the capitalist world it may do so in these times), it signifies the extent to which the skills and abilities of those without capital are appropriated by those with it.
“Although every capitalist demands that workers should save, he means only his own workers, because they relate to him as workers. By no means does this apply to the remainder of workers, because they relate to him as consumers. In spite of all this pious talk of frugality he searches for all possible ways of stimulating them to consume, by making his commodities more attractive and by filling their ears with babble about new needs.”
How does the present financial crisis make Wheen’s Das Kapital especially relevant? You don’t need to read the newspapers for bailout packages or the frantic efforts by manufacturers/wholesalers to unload the vast surplus of unsold commodities that have accumulated since the present credit crisis hit us: just visit the shopping malls for bargain prices. The crisis of overproduction that we read in textbooks is for all to see. There is talk of American capitalism caught in a mangle to the extent that cars may cease to be made in Detroit as a consequence of the insane speculation in worthless paper ‘derivatives’.
The sad part of the story is that many financial experts had seen it coming. Meghnad Desai’s Marx’s Revenge and Jonathan Wolff’s Why Read Marx Today, both published some years ago, had advised that we go back to Marx to understand the workings of the capitalist system. George Soros said as far back as 2005 that “Marx… gave a very good analysis of the capitalist system 150 years ago, better in some ways than the equilibrium theory of classical economics…The danger this time (to the capitalist system) comes not from communism but from market fundamentalism.” Wheen’s Das Kapital explains why, in clear, simple language.
Wheen tells us that the bourgeoisie has not died. But nor has Marx: his errors or unfulfilled prophecies about capitalism are eclipsed and transcended with a piercing analysis with which he revealed the nature of the beast.
“Constant revolutionising of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones. All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, were swept away, all new found ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air,” he wrote in the Communist Manifesto.
And not just in capitalism’s homelands: “The bourgeoisie, by the rapid improvement of all instruments of production, by the immensely facilitated means of communication, draws all, even the most barbarous nations, into civilisation.”
One reason why Marx has been dismissed as a ‘determinist’ and ‘an economic materialist’ is because Marxist thought has not been studied in depth or simply because its critics have deliberately twisted it for their own ends. Marx did not believe in an entity called the ‘economy’. The core of his thought and the reason why it survives which Wheen shows in clear, simple prose, is the conflict between the forces and relations of production. In the Manifesto Marx acknowledges the genius of the capitalist system, its inventive and creative nature and its scorn for tradition, custom and fetish.
But the menace occurs when it erects a thing beyond the control of its creators. Take ‘environment’. It is the common property of all human beings. Yet, as Marx put it, “At the same time as mankind masters nature, man seems to become enslaved to other men or to his own infamy.”
As Wheen shows, Marx had a love-hate relationship with capitalism and that is why he will be relevant as long as long as capitalism endures. Thus, the term ‘exploitation’ that our comrades use so often, does not mean starvation and misery (though in the capitalist world it may do so in these times), it signifies the extent to which the skills and abilities of those without capital are appropriated by those with it.
“Although every capitalist demands that workers should save, he means only his own workers, because they relate to him as workers. By no means does this apply to the remainder of workers, because they relate to him as consumers. In spite of all this pious talk of frugality he searches for all possible ways of stimulating them to consume, by making his commodities more attractive and by filling their ears with babble about new needs.”
How does the present financial crisis make Wheen’s Das Kapital especially relevant? You don’t need to read the newspapers for bailout packages or the frantic efforts by manufacturers/wholesalers to unload the vast surplus of unsold commodities that have accumulated since the present credit crisis hit us: just visit the shopping malls for bargain prices. The crisis of overproduction that we read in textbooks is for all to see. There is talk of American capitalism caught in a mangle to the extent that cars may cease to be made in Detroit as a consequence of the insane speculation in worthless paper ‘derivatives’.
The sad part of the story is that many financial experts had seen it coming. Meghnad Desai’s Marx’s Revenge and Jonathan Wolff’s Why Read Marx Today, both published some years ago, had advised that we go back to Marx to understand the workings of the capitalist system. George Soros said as far back as 2005 that “Marx… gave a very good analysis of the capitalist system 150 years ago, better in some ways than the equilibrium theory of classical economics…The danger this time (to the capitalist system) comes not from communism but from market fundamentalism.” Wheen’s Das Kapital explains why, in clear, simple language.
The real secret of Khrushchev's speech, by Tom Parfitt, The Guardian, 24 Feb 06
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2006/feb/24/russia.tomparfitt
Fifty years ago a Soviet leader dared to criticise Stalin. But was this bravery or a cynical ploy?
Many of those who were present recall the "deathly silence" that fell across the hall. It was the evening of February 25 1956. Unexpectedly, delegates at the 20th congress of the Communist party had been ushered into a final, closed session at central committee headquarters in Moscow. When the Soviet leader, Nikita Khrushchev, took the tribune and began to speak, some members of the audience fainted. Others clawed their heads in despair. Most could not believe their ears.
Without warning, Khrushchev had launched a fierce attack on his predecessor, the revered Joseph Stalin. The great vozhd (chief) who had guided the country through the second world war and died three years earlier was a "capricious and despotic character", Khrushchev said. In a four-hour indictment he condemned Stalin for creating a personality cult and unleashing "brutal violence" on anyone who stood in his way.
Uttered 50 years ago tomorrow, this was Khrushchev's secret speech: a coruscating indictment of Stalinism that would roll out across the world; the beginning of the "thaw" and the end of terror in a country where hundreds of thousands had been shot or sent to the gulags.
In the west, the speech has mostly been interpreted as a brave and moral step that changed the fate of the country. Earlier this month Khrushchev's granddaughter Nina, a lecturer who lives in the US, lauded him in the Washington Post for "outing Stalin as a monster".
Yet in Russia, amid muted celebrations of the anniversary, there is growing evidence that Khrushchev's speech was a cynical ploy to save his skin and that of his party cronies. "Khrushchev was trying to dump all the blame on Stalin when his own hands were drenched in blood," says Yuri Zhukov, a historian from the Russian Academy of Sciences who has studied newly declassified archives on the period.
The re-evaluation comes as critics accuse President Vladimir Putin of leading a drift towards an authoritarianism that resembles the rule of the communist strongmen who dominated the 20th century. New measures have included increased state control over broadcast media and the replacement of elected governors by appointees.
While he is not actively promoted by the Kremlin, Stalin remains hugely popular, with higher approval ratings than Khrushchev. Few politicians dare criticise his legacy despite pleas to do so from victims of his oppression. A survey by the All-Russia Centre for the Study of Public Opinion found that 50% of Russians believe Stalin played a positive role, up from 46% in 2003.
In 1956 Khrushchev's speech was certainly a rent with the past. Stalin, he said, had committed "serious and grave perversions of party principles" and triggered the "cruellest repression" by inventing the concept of the "enemy of the people". In 1937 and 1938, 98 of the 139 members of the central committee had been shot on Stalin's orders, Khrushchev revealed.
Many of the 1,400 people at the congress had only heard innuendo about such events and their shock was real; as was the fury of Stalin's supporters. "My impression was very negative," says Nikolai Baybakov, 94, then head of Gosplan, the Soviet central planning agency, and whose voice is still dark with fury at the insult meted out to his hero. "Yes, negative. Compared to Stalin, Khrushchev was a zero."
No debate was allowed, however, and the delegates went home in awe. Many were sunk in depression; two committed suicide within weeks.
Almost immediately, changes began. Although the full text of the speech was not published in the Soviet Union until the late 80s, excerpts were passed to local party officials and read at meetings. Political prisoners were rehabilitated, the press was given limited freedom and ties were re-established with foreign powers such as France and the US. Khrushchev's political enemies were sidelined, but they escaped the death sentence that would have been automatic under Stalin. Abroad, the speech sparked intense interest after it was leaked by foreign communists. The Observer devoted an entire issue to the 26,000-word text.
But while Khrushchev set unstoppable changes in motion, experts say he concealed his own role in bloody repressions. Only in the past five years has the full extent of his complicity in Stalin's terror become evident.
A telegram discovered in Politburo archives by Mr Zhukov shows that Khrushchev sent a request to Moscow to kill or imprison 30,000 people when he took over the leadership of Ukraine in 1938. A brutal purge of intellectuals and "hostile elements" was soon under way.
The year before, when he was party chief in the Moscow region, documents show Khrushchev asked permission to shoot 8,500 anti-Soviet "traitors" and dispatch almost 33,000 to camps. "These persecutions were real and they were carried out on Khrushchev's orders," Mr Zhukov says.
Dima Bykov, a young Russian intellectual, says Khrushchev was a willing servant of Stalin. "When I was a teacher I explained the 20th congress to my pupils using an analogy: imagine Himmler giving an anti-fascist speech at a Nazi congress after Hitler's death."
The limits of Khrushchev's thaw were evident a few months after the speech when he sent Soviet tanks to crush the Hungarian uprising. And while he allowed Alexander Solzhenitsyn to publish a novel about the gulags, he banned Boris Pasternak's Dr Zhivago for its unsympathetic portrait of the aftermath of the Bolshevik revolution.
Nikita Khrushchev, 46, a journalist who was named after his grandfather, admits the Soviet leader was not the hero he is often made out to be. "Of course, grandpa participated in the repressions," he says. "Of course, you can see his signatures on the lists of those to be dealt with. And, of course, many documents have yet to be released from the archives. But the fact that he dared to expose Stalin was his own courageous step. It was a real feat ... It meant he had overcome the Stalinist inside himself."
Mr Bykov says Khrushchev was a brave man who recognised his faults and attempted reform, but lacked the will to smash the system completely. "Khrushchev was half dictator, half liberal," he says. "Putin is just the same. The difference is that in Khrushchev's time the main movement was towards freedom. Now it is backwards. Krushchev initiated freedom. Putin is its graveyard."
Corncob Nikita
· Khrushchev was best known as "corncob Nikita" for his attempts to plant vast tracts of maize
· His Khrushchev's "secret speech" in 1956 took four hours to deliver and the full text - not published in the Soviet Union until 1989 - was 26,000 words long. In it, he said Josef Stalin had "practised brutal violence, not only towards everything which opposed him, but also towards that which seemed, to his capricious and despotic character, contrary to his concepts"
· The speech included details of a furious letter from Vladimir Lenin to Stalin in 1923 in which the former leader accused Stalin of insulting his wife
· Politburo archives show that Khrushchev concealed that he had requested permission to shoot or imprison about 70,000 people himself as a party boss in the late 1930s
Fifty years ago a Soviet leader dared to criticise Stalin. But was this bravery or a cynical ploy?
Many of those who were present recall the "deathly silence" that fell across the hall. It was the evening of February 25 1956. Unexpectedly, delegates at the 20th congress of the Communist party had been ushered into a final, closed session at central committee headquarters in Moscow. When the Soviet leader, Nikita Khrushchev, took the tribune and began to speak, some members of the audience fainted. Others clawed their heads in despair. Most could not believe their ears.
Without warning, Khrushchev had launched a fierce attack on his predecessor, the revered Joseph Stalin. The great vozhd (chief) who had guided the country through the second world war and died three years earlier was a "capricious and despotic character", Khrushchev said. In a four-hour indictment he condemned Stalin for creating a personality cult and unleashing "brutal violence" on anyone who stood in his way.
Uttered 50 years ago tomorrow, this was Khrushchev's secret speech: a coruscating indictment of Stalinism that would roll out across the world; the beginning of the "thaw" and the end of terror in a country where hundreds of thousands had been shot or sent to the gulags.
In the west, the speech has mostly been interpreted as a brave and moral step that changed the fate of the country. Earlier this month Khrushchev's granddaughter Nina, a lecturer who lives in the US, lauded him in the Washington Post for "outing Stalin as a monster".
Yet in Russia, amid muted celebrations of the anniversary, there is growing evidence that Khrushchev's speech was a cynical ploy to save his skin and that of his party cronies. "Khrushchev was trying to dump all the blame on Stalin when his own hands were drenched in blood," says Yuri Zhukov, a historian from the Russian Academy of Sciences who has studied newly declassified archives on the period.
The re-evaluation comes as critics accuse President Vladimir Putin of leading a drift towards an authoritarianism that resembles the rule of the communist strongmen who dominated the 20th century. New measures have included increased state control over broadcast media and the replacement of elected governors by appointees.
While he is not actively promoted by the Kremlin, Stalin remains hugely popular, with higher approval ratings than Khrushchev. Few politicians dare criticise his legacy despite pleas to do so from victims of his oppression. A survey by the All-Russia Centre for the Study of Public Opinion found that 50% of Russians believe Stalin played a positive role, up from 46% in 2003.
In 1956 Khrushchev's speech was certainly a rent with the past. Stalin, he said, had committed "serious and grave perversions of party principles" and triggered the "cruellest repression" by inventing the concept of the "enemy of the people". In 1937 and 1938, 98 of the 139 members of the central committee had been shot on Stalin's orders, Khrushchev revealed.
Many of the 1,400 people at the congress had only heard innuendo about such events and their shock was real; as was the fury of Stalin's supporters. "My impression was very negative," says Nikolai Baybakov, 94, then head of Gosplan, the Soviet central planning agency, and whose voice is still dark with fury at the insult meted out to his hero. "Yes, negative. Compared to Stalin, Khrushchev was a zero."
No debate was allowed, however, and the delegates went home in awe. Many were sunk in depression; two committed suicide within weeks.
Almost immediately, changes began. Although the full text of the speech was not published in the Soviet Union until the late 80s, excerpts were passed to local party officials and read at meetings. Political prisoners were rehabilitated, the press was given limited freedom and ties were re-established with foreign powers such as France and the US. Khrushchev's political enemies were sidelined, but they escaped the death sentence that would have been automatic under Stalin. Abroad, the speech sparked intense interest after it was leaked by foreign communists. The Observer devoted an entire issue to the 26,000-word text.
But while Khrushchev set unstoppable changes in motion, experts say he concealed his own role in bloody repressions. Only in the past five years has the full extent of his complicity in Stalin's terror become evident.
A telegram discovered in Politburo archives by Mr Zhukov shows that Khrushchev sent a request to Moscow to kill or imprison 30,000 people when he took over the leadership of Ukraine in 1938. A brutal purge of intellectuals and "hostile elements" was soon under way.
The year before, when he was party chief in the Moscow region, documents show Khrushchev asked permission to shoot 8,500 anti-Soviet "traitors" and dispatch almost 33,000 to camps. "These persecutions were real and they were carried out on Khrushchev's orders," Mr Zhukov says.
Dima Bykov, a young Russian intellectual, says Khrushchev was a willing servant of Stalin. "When I was a teacher I explained the 20th congress to my pupils using an analogy: imagine Himmler giving an anti-fascist speech at a Nazi congress after Hitler's death."
The limits of Khrushchev's thaw were evident a few months after the speech when he sent Soviet tanks to crush the Hungarian uprising. And while he allowed Alexander Solzhenitsyn to publish a novel about the gulags, he banned Boris Pasternak's Dr Zhivago for its unsympathetic portrait of the aftermath of the Bolshevik revolution.
Nikita Khrushchev, 46, a journalist who was named after his grandfather, admits the Soviet leader was not the hero he is often made out to be. "Of course, grandpa participated in the repressions," he says. "Of course, you can see his signatures on the lists of those to be dealt with. And, of course, many documents have yet to be released from the archives. But the fact that he dared to expose Stalin was his own courageous step. It was a real feat ... It meant he had overcome the Stalinist inside himself."
Mr Bykov says Khrushchev was a brave man who recognised his faults and attempted reform, but lacked the will to smash the system completely. "Khrushchev was half dictator, half liberal," he says. "Putin is just the same. The difference is that in Khrushchev's time the main movement was towards freedom. Now it is backwards. Krushchev initiated freedom. Putin is its graveyard."
Corncob Nikita
· Khrushchev was best known as "corncob Nikita" for his attempts to plant vast tracts of maize
· His Khrushchev's "secret speech" in 1956 took four hours to deliver and the full text - not published in the Soviet Union until 1989 - was 26,000 words long. In it, he said Josef Stalin had "practised brutal violence, not only towards everything which opposed him, but also towards that which seemed, to his capricious and despotic character, contrary to his concepts"
· The speech included details of a furious letter from Vladimir Lenin to Stalin in 1923 in which the former leader accused Stalin of insulting his wife
· Politburo archives show that Khrushchev concealed that he had requested permission to shoot or imprison about 70,000 people himself as a party boss in the late 1930s
April 15, 2009
Interview with Professor Grover Furr, author of "The Sixty-One Untruths of Nikita Khrushchev"
http://www.litrossia.ru/article.php?article=3003
Interview with Professor Grover Furr, author of "Anti-Stalinist Villainy".
One of the most unusual new non-fiction books to appear recently is the Russian translation of the book by historian Grover Furr, professor at Montclair State University, titled "Anti-Stalinist Villainy" (Antistalinskaia Podlost'), Moscow: Algoritm publishers, 2007), in which the famous report to the 20th Party Congress of the CPSU by Nikita Khrushchev is dissected in detail.
Thousands of readers have become acquainted with it in the short time since its publication. It has received both curses and praise in the reactions of its first reader-critics, and has succeded in becoming a bibliographical rarity even in our market-oriented time.
For this reason we believed it would be instructive to turn to Professor Furr himself, to get to know the author himself better and ask his opinions, as they say, at first hand.
Q- Professor, please tell us how and why you, a Princeton University Ph.D. whose doctoral dissertation was devoted to the French Middle Ages, became interested in Soviet history of the Stalin era?
A - My first field of specialization is medieval studies. I don’t have any formal certificate that would "qualify" me to do research on the history of the Soviet Union during Stalin’s time.
But as a medievalist I have been trained to do deeply historical research. For instance, to use primary sources in languages other than English. Never to rely on "received knowledge" or "received opinion." Not to trust the opinions of "recognized authorities." To check everything for myself.
As a graduate student from 1965-69 I opposed the US war in Vietnam. At one point somebody told me that the Vietnamese communists could not be the "good guys", because they were all "Stalinists", and "Stalin had killed millions of innocent people."
I remembered this remark. It was probably the reason that in the early 1970s I read the first edition of Robert Conquest’s book The Great Terror when it was published. I was shaken by what I read!
I should add that I could read the Russian language since I had already been studying Russian literature since High School. So I studied Conquest’s book very carefully. Apparently no one else had ever done this!
I discovered Conquest was dishonest in his use of sources. His footnotes did not support his anti-Stalin conclusions! Basically, he used any source that was hostile to Stalin, regardless of whether it was reliable or not.
Eventually I decided to write something about the so-called "Terror." It took a long time, but in 1988 I finally published "New Light On Old Stories About Marshal Tukhachevskii: Some Documents Reconsidered" ... During this time I studied the research being done by the new school of historians on the Soviet Union that included Arch Getty, Robert Thurston, Roberta Manning, Sheila Fitzpatrick, Jerry Hough, Lewis Siegelbaum, Lynne Viola, and others.
Q - These names will, I think, mean little to a Russian reader. It is hard to imagine that after Conquest representatives of any new Western "school" could contribute anything different to the conception of the history of the Soviet Union...
A - In fact it is just the contrary. The school of which I speak arose as the antithesis to Conquest and to the totalitarian conception of Sovietology of the Cold War period.
By carefully studying the evidence already available, and – most important – by trying hard to be objective – the researchers of this new school were already showing that all the Cold-War, Trotskyist, Khrushchevite, and later the Gorbachev-Eltsin "history" was fatally compromised by political bias. These had managed to so compromise their work by their political prejudices that their books should be viewed not as history but examples of propaganda.
In the world of scientific history the book The Origins of the Great Purges by J. Arch Getty, one of the founders of the new school, became a genuine sensation. In it Getty successfully disproved a large number of falsehoods that had been accepted as true. This included, among others, the notion that the repressions of the 1930s had been actions planned in advance by Stalin.
It was this scholar’s misfortune that his work was published in the USA during the years of "perestroika". During this time, under the false cover of "glasnost’" or "opennness", only the works of Getty’s opponents, the Cold Warriors, were published, and those in huge editions. How could Russian readers find out about Getty’s pioneering works if not a single one of his books on Russian history has as yet been published in Russia itself?
The same situation holds in the case of most of the historians whose names I mentioned above. But fortunately there are also more encouraging examples. A few months ago a Ukrainian internet magazine published one of the excellent works by Professor Mark Tauger of the University of West Virginia. Tauger’s work utterly disproves the Nazi-inspired myth that the famine of 1932-3 was a "Holodomor", or "man-made famine" carried out by Soviet leaders.
Q - How and why did you become interested in Khrushchev’s Report to the 20th Party Congress?
A - The "closed" or, as it is called in the West, the "secret" report of Khrushchev’s is without exaggeration one of the most influential speeches of the 20th century. No matter how or by whom the report is evaluated, with "plus" or "minus" sign, it fundamentally changed the path of Soviet and Russian history. It’s significant that precisely this speech has become one of the pillars of the political conception of "anti-Stalinism", the foundational source for what can be called "the paradigm of the 20th Congress."
In short, no one interested in the history of the Soviet Union can ignore a document of such importance.
Q - But that is why this topic is a rather well-trodden path. How do you explain all the interest in your book "Anti-Stalinist Villainy" (in Russian: Antistalinskaia podlost’)?
A - It’s hard for me to say. Let the readers judge for themselves... I can only speak about what struck me as a researcher.
When I was forming a conception of this work my goal was modest. I wanted to place the "revelations" in the report alongside the historical sources that have been made public thanks to the declassification of some documents from the former Soviet archives. This kind of research could be done by a Russian historian or, for that matter, a Chinese historian, for during the past 10-15 years a large number of new sources have been made available to scholars that make possible an objective evaluation of one or another statement in Khrushchev’s speech.
And at this point a curious picture began to emerge. For as it turned out, out of all the "revelations" affirmed in the report that I could verify, not one of them turned out to be true. Not a single one!
A few of Khrushchev’s falsehoods were, of course, known earlier. For example, during the secret session itself a few of the delegates to the Congress evidently noted that some of Khrushchev’s "revelations", such as his absurd declaration that Stalin "planned military operations on a globe", were to say the least far from the truth. But that the entire speech was made up of "revelations" like this one – that was astonishing.
Q - Aren’t you exaggerating? It is very hard to believe that the speech consists of nothing but falsehoods. You must be simply defending Stalin, and so with that goal in mind you are denigrating Khrushchev and his epoch-making report.
A - I’m sorry to disappoint you, but I am not "defending" Stalin or anyone else. As a researcher and a scholar I deal with facts and evidence. If the object of my research had been a speech of Khrushchev’s on, let us say, space, maize, or the program of the CPSU, I’d have to study the sources related to these areas of concern. In fact, though, the topic of my research became that of the report that supposedly "uncovered" crimes of Stalin and Beria.
I isolated sixty-one "revelations" or accusatory assertions. I researched each one of them in light of the historical sources. The end result was that in Khrushchev’s "Secret Speech" not a single one of such "revelations" turned out to be true. There is no question here of "defending Stalin". The burden of proof always rests with the accuser’s side – Khrushchev’s, in this case. And not one of the "revelatory" assertions of the "Secret Speech" can withstand a confrontation with the evidence.
A word about the question of "belief." No serious researcher has the right to accept or reject any statement as true on the strength of his own convictions or preconceived ideas. Like it or not, in view of the historical evidence presented in "Anti-Stalinist Villainy" it is impossible to view the history of the Soviet Union in the funhouse mirror of the "Secret Speech" any longer.
Q - By the way, "Antistalinist Villainy" – that’s not a very appropriate title for a work of scientific research, is it?
A - The book was published with bibliographical and name indexes, footnotes, and documentary appendices – in a word, in full conformity with all the requirements of any solid academic edition. And, in fact, it was published in a larger edition. Can any author reasonably expect more?
Of course, when I was working on the manuscript I had a different working title. I also had an original chapter in which I organized the work in a narrative way to reflect the essential points of the work I had done. But for reasons of length, I assume, or for some other reasons it was not included in the final published volume.
The publisher suggested a different title as well, as often happens. After all, it is up to the publisher to organize the editorial, artistic, and other forces in order to produce a work that will be successful in the marketplace.
Q - There’s still something that doesn’t add up here. On the one hand, as you have written, Khrushchev’s speech is a tissue of lies, while on the other hand not a single person in the leadership of the USSR ever pointed out the falsity of any of these revelations.
A - I’d go even farther and say that by their silence every single one of them showed complete solidarity with Khrushchev. And here we encounter one of the most intriguing questions.
Despite the widespread impression to the contrary, the main target of the "Secret Speech" was not Stalin himself but the political course, a certain direction of development, that was associated with his name. The Russian historian Yuri Zhukov has stated it clearly: Khrushchev’s goal was to put an end to the democratic reforms begun but far from completed during Stalin’s lifetime.
Today – and, it must be said, under the influence of Khrushchev’s Speech – "Stalin" and "democracy" are antipodal concepts in the minds of most people, conceptions that denote two incompatible extremes, phenomena that are polar opposites. But this view is in error. Stalin shared Lenin’s views on representative democracy and strove to root its principles in the building of the Soviet state.
It was Stalin himself who stood at the head of the fight for democratizing Soviet society, a struggle which was at the very heart of the political processes that took place in the USSR during the 1930s to 1950s. The essence of this program was as follows: the role of the Communist Party in the governing of the state would be reduced to normal limits, like those in other countries, and the political leadership of the state would be chosen not according to party lists but on the basis of democratic procedures.
Not only Khrushchev but, evidently, other Soviet leaders too disagreed with the course of such reforms. In any case Malenkov, Molotov and Kaganovich, the major political figures associated with Stalin, accepted, even if unwillingly, the secret subtext of the "Secret Speech" and assented to it. Khrushchev was able to come to power, deliver his potentially explosive "Secret Speech," and establish his own ideas only because he was able to win the Soviet Party elite to his side.
Let me take this opportunity to express my gratitude to Yuri Zhukov (Russia) and John Arch Getty (USA), two historians whose works inspired me in my own work on the "Secret Speech", who uncovered the fact, deeply hidden since Khrushchev’s time, of Stalin’s dedication to the principles of democracy.
Internet interview by S. Khartsizov
Interview with Professor Grover Furr, author of "Anti-Stalinist Villainy".
One of the most unusual new non-fiction books to appear recently is the Russian translation of the book by historian Grover Furr, professor at Montclair State University, titled "Anti-Stalinist Villainy" (Antistalinskaia Podlost'), Moscow: Algoritm publishers, 2007), in which the famous report to the 20th Party Congress of the CPSU by Nikita Khrushchev is dissected in detail.
Thousands of readers have become acquainted with it in the short time since its publication. It has received both curses and praise in the reactions of its first reader-critics, and has succeded in becoming a bibliographical rarity even in our market-oriented time.
For this reason we believed it would be instructive to turn to Professor Furr himself, to get to know the author himself better and ask his opinions, as they say, at first hand.
Q- Professor, please tell us how and why you, a Princeton University Ph.D. whose doctoral dissertation was devoted to the French Middle Ages, became interested in Soviet history of the Stalin era?
A - My first field of specialization is medieval studies. I don’t have any formal certificate that would "qualify" me to do research on the history of the Soviet Union during Stalin’s time.
But as a medievalist I have been trained to do deeply historical research. For instance, to use primary sources in languages other than English. Never to rely on "received knowledge" or "received opinion." Not to trust the opinions of "recognized authorities." To check everything for myself.
As a graduate student from 1965-69 I opposed the US war in Vietnam. At one point somebody told me that the Vietnamese communists could not be the "good guys", because they were all "Stalinists", and "Stalin had killed millions of innocent people."
I remembered this remark. It was probably the reason that in the early 1970s I read the first edition of Robert Conquest’s book The Great Terror when it was published. I was shaken by what I read!
I should add that I could read the Russian language since I had already been studying Russian literature since High School. So I studied Conquest’s book very carefully. Apparently no one else had ever done this!
I discovered Conquest was dishonest in his use of sources. His footnotes did not support his anti-Stalin conclusions! Basically, he used any source that was hostile to Stalin, regardless of whether it was reliable or not.
Eventually I decided to write something about the so-called "Terror." It took a long time, but in 1988 I finally published "New Light On Old Stories About Marshal Tukhachevskii: Some Documents Reconsidered" ... During this time I studied the research being done by the new school of historians on the Soviet Union that included Arch Getty, Robert Thurston, Roberta Manning, Sheila Fitzpatrick, Jerry Hough, Lewis Siegelbaum, Lynne Viola, and others.
Q - These names will, I think, mean little to a Russian reader. It is hard to imagine that after Conquest representatives of any new Western "school" could contribute anything different to the conception of the history of the Soviet Union...
A - In fact it is just the contrary. The school of which I speak arose as the antithesis to Conquest and to the totalitarian conception of Sovietology of the Cold War period.
By carefully studying the evidence already available, and – most important – by trying hard to be objective – the researchers of this new school were already showing that all the Cold-War, Trotskyist, Khrushchevite, and later the Gorbachev-Eltsin "history" was fatally compromised by political bias. These had managed to so compromise their work by their political prejudices that their books should be viewed not as history but examples of propaganda.
In the world of scientific history the book The Origins of the Great Purges by J. Arch Getty, one of the founders of the new school, became a genuine sensation. In it Getty successfully disproved a large number of falsehoods that had been accepted as true. This included, among others, the notion that the repressions of the 1930s had been actions planned in advance by Stalin.
It was this scholar’s misfortune that his work was published in the USA during the years of "perestroika". During this time, under the false cover of "glasnost’" or "opennness", only the works of Getty’s opponents, the Cold Warriors, were published, and those in huge editions. How could Russian readers find out about Getty’s pioneering works if not a single one of his books on Russian history has as yet been published in Russia itself?
The same situation holds in the case of most of the historians whose names I mentioned above. But fortunately there are also more encouraging examples. A few months ago a Ukrainian internet magazine published one of the excellent works by Professor Mark Tauger of the University of West Virginia. Tauger’s work utterly disproves the Nazi-inspired myth that the famine of 1932-3 was a "Holodomor", or "man-made famine" carried out by Soviet leaders.
Q - How and why did you become interested in Khrushchev’s Report to the 20th Party Congress?
A - The "closed" or, as it is called in the West, the "secret" report of Khrushchev’s is without exaggeration one of the most influential speeches of the 20th century. No matter how or by whom the report is evaluated, with "plus" or "minus" sign, it fundamentally changed the path of Soviet and Russian history. It’s significant that precisely this speech has become one of the pillars of the political conception of "anti-Stalinism", the foundational source for what can be called "the paradigm of the 20th Congress."
In short, no one interested in the history of the Soviet Union can ignore a document of such importance.
Q - But that is why this topic is a rather well-trodden path. How do you explain all the interest in your book "Anti-Stalinist Villainy" (in Russian: Antistalinskaia podlost’)?
A - It’s hard for me to say. Let the readers judge for themselves... I can only speak about what struck me as a researcher.
When I was forming a conception of this work my goal was modest. I wanted to place the "revelations" in the report alongside the historical sources that have been made public thanks to the declassification of some documents from the former Soviet archives. This kind of research could be done by a Russian historian or, for that matter, a Chinese historian, for during the past 10-15 years a large number of new sources have been made available to scholars that make possible an objective evaluation of one or another statement in Khrushchev’s speech.
And at this point a curious picture began to emerge. For as it turned out, out of all the "revelations" affirmed in the report that I could verify, not one of them turned out to be true. Not a single one!
A few of Khrushchev’s falsehoods were, of course, known earlier. For example, during the secret session itself a few of the delegates to the Congress evidently noted that some of Khrushchev’s "revelations", such as his absurd declaration that Stalin "planned military operations on a globe", were to say the least far from the truth. But that the entire speech was made up of "revelations" like this one – that was astonishing.
Q - Aren’t you exaggerating? It is very hard to believe that the speech consists of nothing but falsehoods. You must be simply defending Stalin, and so with that goal in mind you are denigrating Khrushchev and his epoch-making report.
A - I’m sorry to disappoint you, but I am not "defending" Stalin or anyone else. As a researcher and a scholar I deal with facts and evidence. If the object of my research had been a speech of Khrushchev’s on, let us say, space, maize, or the program of the CPSU, I’d have to study the sources related to these areas of concern. In fact, though, the topic of my research became that of the report that supposedly "uncovered" crimes of Stalin and Beria.
I isolated sixty-one "revelations" or accusatory assertions. I researched each one of them in light of the historical sources. The end result was that in Khrushchev’s "Secret Speech" not a single one of such "revelations" turned out to be true. There is no question here of "defending Stalin". The burden of proof always rests with the accuser’s side – Khrushchev’s, in this case. And not one of the "revelatory" assertions of the "Secret Speech" can withstand a confrontation with the evidence.
A word about the question of "belief." No serious researcher has the right to accept or reject any statement as true on the strength of his own convictions or preconceived ideas. Like it or not, in view of the historical evidence presented in "Anti-Stalinist Villainy" it is impossible to view the history of the Soviet Union in the funhouse mirror of the "Secret Speech" any longer.
Q - By the way, "Antistalinist Villainy" – that’s not a very appropriate title for a work of scientific research, is it?
A - The book was published with bibliographical and name indexes, footnotes, and documentary appendices – in a word, in full conformity with all the requirements of any solid academic edition. And, in fact, it was published in a larger edition. Can any author reasonably expect more?
Of course, when I was working on the manuscript I had a different working title. I also had an original chapter in which I organized the work in a narrative way to reflect the essential points of the work I had done. But for reasons of length, I assume, or for some other reasons it was not included in the final published volume.
The publisher suggested a different title as well, as often happens. After all, it is up to the publisher to organize the editorial, artistic, and other forces in order to produce a work that will be successful in the marketplace.
Q - There’s still something that doesn’t add up here. On the one hand, as you have written, Khrushchev’s speech is a tissue of lies, while on the other hand not a single person in the leadership of the USSR ever pointed out the falsity of any of these revelations.
A - I’d go even farther and say that by their silence every single one of them showed complete solidarity with Khrushchev. And here we encounter one of the most intriguing questions.
Despite the widespread impression to the contrary, the main target of the "Secret Speech" was not Stalin himself but the political course, a certain direction of development, that was associated with his name. The Russian historian Yuri Zhukov has stated it clearly: Khrushchev’s goal was to put an end to the democratic reforms begun but far from completed during Stalin’s lifetime.
Today – and, it must be said, under the influence of Khrushchev’s Speech – "Stalin" and "democracy" are antipodal concepts in the minds of most people, conceptions that denote two incompatible extremes, phenomena that are polar opposites. But this view is in error. Stalin shared Lenin’s views on representative democracy and strove to root its principles in the building of the Soviet state.
It was Stalin himself who stood at the head of the fight for democratizing Soviet society, a struggle which was at the very heart of the political processes that took place in the USSR during the 1930s to 1950s. The essence of this program was as follows: the role of the Communist Party in the governing of the state would be reduced to normal limits, like those in other countries, and the political leadership of the state would be chosen not according to party lists but on the basis of democratic procedures.
Not only Khrushchev but, evidently, other Soviet leaders too disagreed with the course of such reforms. In any case Malenkov, Molotov and Kaganovich, the major political figures associated with Stalin, accepted, even if unwillingly, the secret subtext of the "Secret Speech" and assented to it. Khrushchev was able to come to power, deliver his potentially explosive "Secret Speech," and establish his own ideas only because he was able to win the Soviet Party elite to his side.
Let me take this opportunity to express my gratitude to Yuri Zhukov (Russia) and John Arch Getty (USA), two historians whose works inspired me in my own work on the "Secret Speech", who uncovered the fact, deeply hidden since Khrushchev’s time, of Stalin’s dedication to the principles of democracy.
Internet interview by S. Khartsizov
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