alanjjohnstone
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This website is devoted to world socialism.
We have no interest in nation-states or in their rivalries and squabbles. We are not nationalists nor patriots. In both world wars, members of this organisation were required to either go on the run to avoid compulsory military conscription or they were sent to labour camps – Yes, Britain had its form of gulags, too.
“Taiwan is a province of China…There is only one China…”
What surprised me is your support for nationalism. What does it matter to you if the ROC remains separate or if it becomes part of the PRC? Why are you so emotionally attached to the idea of unification? What concern is it of you if a region chooses self-determination?
“The nationality of the toilers is neither French nor English nor German; it is toil, free slavery, sale of the self. His government is neither French nor English nor German; it is Capital. His native air is neither French nor German nor English; it is the air of the factory. The land which belongs to him is neither French nor English nor German; it is a few feet under the ground.”- Karl Marx,
“The revolutionary proletariat will have neither to keep its ancient nationalities nor to constitute new ones, because by becoming free it will abolish classes: the world will be its fatherland.” – Paul Lafargue, Marx’s son-in-law
“The World is my country, all mankind are my brethren, and to do good is my religion.” – Thomas Paine
“Nature made us relatives by creating us from the same materials and for the same destiny.”- Seneca (4-65 A.D.)
‘…The poor have no country, in all lands, they suffer from the same evils, and they, therefore, realise that the barriers put up by the powers that be the more thoroughly to enslave the people must fall’ – International Working Men’s Association.
‘In a class society, “the nation” as a homogeneous socio-political entity does not exist. Rather, there exist within each nation, classes with antagonistic interests and “rights”’ – Rosa Luxemburg
‘Flags are bits of colored cloth that governments use first to shrink-wrap people’s brains and then as ceremonial shrouds to bury the dead.” Arundhati Roy
“I have no country to fight for; my country is the earth; and I am a citizen of the world.” – Eugene Debs
But to return to your own national chauvinist beliefs. You don’t mention that the indigenous inhabitants of Taiwan have been dispossessed and oppressed for hundreds of years.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taiwanese_indigenous_peoples
If any group has a claim to Taiwan it is those people, the original Taiwanese, ethnically very different from the Han.
These islanders have been subject to colonisation and invasion by the Dutch, the Mainland Han, the Japanese and then the Kuomintang army.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Han_Taiwanese
As world socialists, our interest extends to every industry and every country. What happens to the workers anywhere is the business of us here. We are not at all worried about the accusation that we are “poking our noses” into matters that do not concern us.
However, your position is very much different. You don’t take the side of your class but support particular governments.
70,000 or more people who took part in the march in Brussels
Greenpeace Belgium told The Brussels Times on Sunday that her government’s climate pledges so far “are not ambitious enough,” but that words are no longer enough. “It is one thing to talk about climate,” she said, “and another to take concrete action.”
“We demand ambitious, solidarity-based and coherent measures. We need a Belgian Green New Deal and we propose more than 100 concrete solutions to make it happen.”
Banners said things like “Destroy the System/Not the Planet”
No Polexit?
Poles demonstrated on Sunday in support of European Union membership after a court ruling that parts of EU law are incompatible with the constitution
is this your view also?
I think the real point is that many social revolutions have been relatively peaceful. The fall of the Shah in Iran and Marcos in the Philippines, for instance, and in most cases, they were spontaneous acts of the masses and not instigated by the political parties and in this sense, they were leader free although they were quickly co-opted and the people power usurped. The Arab Spring is another example of when having disposed of dictators, people were misled into supporting other despots.
And yes this can be seen as counter-revolutionary. I happen to view October 1917 as a counter-revolution against the February revolution and the creation of the soviets which once in power, the Bolsheviks proceeded to dismantle.
You are correct about the manner Yeltsin resorted to tanks shelling the Russian Parliament and we can add how in Romania the dictator Ceausescu tried to use his special police to stop his removal but if we look at Eastern Europe as a whole, the fall of the Soviet satellite states was accomplished without bloodshed, compared with previous attempts in East Germany, Hungary and Czechoslovakia. .
Wez’s point is I believe (and he can correct me if I am wrong) that a dictatorship depends upon the passive acquiescence of the majority and when that is withdrawn, the legitimacy of the government disappears and a regime can fall. And the more involved and participate in the social unrest, the less violence occurs.
You may not accept it but in 1989 the situation existed where a substantial part of the Chinese army and a number of prominent CCP politicians plus elements within the media were perceived as being disaffected and they had the popular support of the local people. That was the trigger for such a brutal crackdown. Fear.
The Hong Kong pro-democracy protests did not spread to the mainland and could be isolated because as you say, Xi Jinping, holds the support of most of the Chinese people because of the economic prosperity that has arisen over recent years. A full belly is rarely the cause of rebellion. If in the future economic conditions change for the detriment, he will lose that sympathy.
An interesting article on the drug trade and the Taliban
During the insurgency years, the Taliban profited from the trade by taxing traffickers, a practice applied on a wide variety of industries in the areas under their control. Research by David Mansfield, an expert on the Afghan drug trade, suggests the group made $20 million in 2020, a small fraction compared to other sources of revenue from tax collection. Publicly, it has always denied links to the drug trade. But the Taliban also implemented the only largely successful ban on opium production, between 2000-2001, before the U.S. invasion. Successive governments have failed to do the same.
MS, I have studied the assassination of JFK extensively and it is very easy to take a few supposed discrepancies and produce a conspiracy and ignore all the other relevant data that contradicts the basis of that conspiracy.
The Nazis “did it” school of thought have never actually explained why a construction battalion is said to have carried out the massacre and not the Einsatzgruppen units, dedicated to such a duty.
What is Furr’s purpose? I don’t believe it is mercenary for the sales of books. It is ideological. He was a member of an M-L sect.
As YMS suggested, Furr inadvertently promotes the anti-Bolshevik case. If the 5-Year-Plans were such a success, why are saboteurs in high positions required to explain when they failed to achieve their targets?
What TS forgets is that most of the mainstream media accepted the Party-line that the Moscow trials were fair and that the confessions were extracted without torture. He can disregard the testimony of countless gulag inmates who said differently. He forgot that when the Katyn forest massacre was revealed most governments for political reasons accepted the Soviet version of it. Stalin at the time was still “Uncle Joe”. Furr in the historical context is no heretical historian but a purveyor of previous conventional analysis that has now been discarded and rejected.
I have not read his work on the Great Famine (I haven’t studied the topic, at all), but perhaps that is better researched and have some credibility.
The badges were found not on the corpses but in the bulk layer with rubbish (household items etc.) above the corpses. The archival research showed that at least one of the policemen was detained in Volodymyr Volynski for weeks in 1939. This means that his badge (and probably that of the other policeman, about whom less is known) was taken from him then, and when the Germans overtook the prison they eventually disposed of the useless inmates’ belongings (still kept in the prison) in the burial area
Let a real historian go into detail with the explanation of the supposed anomaly with the badges
“…Russian historian Aleksandr Guryanov has solved the “riddle” in his thorough study Ubity v Kalinine, zakhoroneny v Mednom, 2019, vol. 1, pp. 79-81 (the references are omitted, see the original text):
The camp fate of one of them – Ludwik Małowiejski – could be traced back using archival documents of the NKVD from the moment of his capture, which made it possible to explain the discovery made in 2011 during the exhumation of mass graves of 1940-1941 by Polish and Ukrainian archaeologists on the territory of the former prison in Volodymyr-Volynskyi, Volyn region of Ukraine. During the excavations in the bulk “rubbish” layer (containing various damaged household items) above the grave pit with human remains (most likely people shot by the Nazis), a police registration plate number 1099/II belonging to Ludwik Małowiejski from Lodz was found. A year earlier, Ukrainian archeologists had also found a service registration plate with number 1441/II belonging to another prisoner of the Ostashkovsky camp, the Łódź policeman Józef Kuligowski (the Roman numeral II in both service plates means the prewar Łódź district of the State Police). After the report of these findings, Russian publications appeared, where the discovery of police registration plates during the excavations of mass graves in Volodymyr-Volynskyi was considered as evidence that Józef Kuligowski and Ludwik Małowiejski were buried there, and therefore they were shot in 1941. This statement was interpreted as one of the facts proving that there were no “shot Poles” in Mednoye at all (without any justification for the acceptability) of such an extensive extrapolation. The fact that official police signs during the exhumations in Vladimir-Volynsky were found not among human remains, but in the bulk layer above the graves, was ignored in these publications.
Meanwhile, according to documentary data of the UPV, Ludwik Małowiejski was indeed in Volodymyr-Volynskyi, but not in 1941, but in 1939. In the NKVD files of prisoners of war of 1939-1941, stored in the RGVA, his archival record card, filled in Shepetovka on February 7, 1940, which contains records of his capture on September 19, 1939 in Volodymyr-Volynskyi and his arrival on October 14, 1939 in Shepetovka reception center of the NKVD for prisoners of war……Information about his capture in September 1939 in Volodymyr-Volynskyi and his transfer from there to the NKVD Shepetovka reception center for prisoners of war is recorded in the NKVD archive documents for some other prisoners of the Ostashkov camp. It should be noted that in the course of archaeological excavations of mass graves near the former prison in Volodymyr-Volynskyi, other Polish police registration plates were found, in particular, with numbers 639/XII (Pomeranian region), 1154/III and 2202/III (both in Kielce region), but the names of their owners have not been established (it is possible that these policemen were captured in Volodymyr-Volynskyi and then got into the Ostashkov camp). Ludwik Małowiejski’s record card shows that after his captivity he was kept in custody in Volodymyr-Volynskyi for at least three weeks. We can assume that in prison his service badge was taken away from him and then not returned when he was sent from Volodymyr-Volynskyi to Shepetovka, and the badge remained in prison, and after the Germans occupied the prison it was thrown away by them together with other unnecessary items (damaged kitchenware) and got into a bulk layer on top of the mass grave of the shot. Since Ludwik Małowiejski was captured wounded in September 1939, after his arrival at the NKVD Shepetovka reception centre he was placed in a hospital in Shepetovka, where he was kept until he was sent to the Ostashkov camp. Documentary data on the date and place of the capture of Józef Kuligowski, as well as on where he was held as a prisoner of war until his arrival at the Ostashkov camp, are not available in the researched archive documents, but we can assume that he, like many other Polish soldiers and police, in September 1939, was captured in Volodymyr-Volynskyi and his police registration plate probably ended up in the bulk layer above the mass grave in Volodymyr-Volynskyi in the same way as the sign of Ludwik Małowiejski. It is very likely that Józef Kuligowski, like Ludwik Małowiejski, was transferred from Volodymyr-Volynskyi to the NKVD Shepetovka reception center, but did not go to the hospital, and was sent with one of the two groups that arrived in the Ostashkov camp in November 1939…”
And because many of the executions takes place in nearby camps and not literally on the site of Katyn forest where the corpses were dumped is a distraction. It is a not so clever dodge used by the Holocaust Deniers…”of course many Jews died in the camps but it was from disease, not the gas chamber, and the bodies had to be incinerated for health reasons”
And before you accuse me of accusing you of being a holocaust denier, I am saying you use the similar logic as them.
And once more you cite Furr that the NKVD did not execute children so easy to check with Google
Dubno: All the prisoners in Dubno’s three-story prison, including women and children, were executed.
Ivano-Frankivsk: Over 500 Polish prisoners (including 150 women with dozens of children) were shot by the NKVD and buried in several mass graves at Dem’ianiv Laz.But alas that is a wiki entry and will not satisfy you that kids were murdered by the NKVD.
TS writes,” Those victims could not have been killed by the Soviets. It was impossible.”
And what does Grover Furr say”
“If the Soviets “did it”, I’d like to know. Frankly, I have my doubts. But it’s far from impossible, too. Maybe they did? Likewise, if the Germans “did it”, I’d also like to know. Maybe they did?” [my emphasis]
But since you have already indicated that you believe confessions
“…The head of the Board of the District NKVD in Kalinin, Major Dmitry Stepanovich Tokarev, recalled years later: “It was already on the first day. So we went. And then I saw all this horror. We came there. After a few minutes Blokhin [one of the NKVD officers who came from Moscow] put on his special clothing: a brown leather cap, a long leather brown apron, leather brown gloves with cuffs above the elbows. It made a huge impression on me – I saw the executioner! The charges were not read to the convicts. After being dragged to the cell, the victim was immediately killed by a shot in the back of the head…”
TS “Almost all the victims were killed using German ammunition.”
That is indeed irrefutable. The research on their markings indicated that they had been produced in the interwar period; at that time, the USSR had imported a lot of weapons and ammunition from Germany in the framework of military cooperation between both countries. Some of the murdered prisoners of war were additionally finished off with bayonets that were quadrangular, like the ones used by the Soviets, and not flat like a knife, used by German soldiers.
NKVD chief Vasily Blokhin had brought a briefcase full of his own Walther pistols, since he did not trust the reliability of the standard-issue Soviet TT-30 for the frequent, heavy use he intended. Another reason he used the Walther rather than his standard issue Tokarev was the blow back. The Walther’s lower recoil made it easier for him (as well as other executioners for the NKVD) to kill large numbers of people in one night. Walthers were readily available due to the cooperation between the Soviets and Nazi’s in which the Germans ended up giving a fair amount of arms to their Soviet Allies.http://libcom.org/blog/aukus-another-preparation-imperialist-war-04102021
The International Communist Tendency view.
Xi has declared “The historical task of the complete reunification of the motherland must be fulfilled, and will definitely be fulfilled”
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-china-58854081
He said he wanted to see peaceful unification occur under a “one country-two systems” policy, similar to that employed in Hong Kong.
With his suppression of dissent and repression of pro-democracy protesters in Hong Kong, Xi doesn’t exactly provide the Taiwanese with much confidence in any similar arrangement. Xi could have shot himself in the foot with his intransigence to political opposition in Hong Kong.
But mention has already been made on this thread of the extensive commercial links that exist between the two Chinas.
Taishang is the name of this.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TaishangJonathan Cook on the witch-hunt against David Miller
I’m sure that some fans would be attracted to the idea of threats of public beheading and whippings on the pitch for poor performance.
Al Jazeera reminds us of the bloody consequences of the Shining Path
Shining Path was responsible for killing at least 28,000 people, most of them from impoverished rural communities, between 1980 and 2000.
“That is the irony. This poverty is what led to Shining Path, but then they turned on the poor. It was the poor that they were killing,” Tacas said.
President Pedro Castillo appointed figures accused of being Shining Path sympathisers to the highest levels of his new left-wing government. The appointments prompted a backlash that Castillo was forced this week to change his cabinet just two months into his five-year term.
The sabre rattling between PRC and Taiwan continues
https://www.independent.co.uk/asia/east-asia/china-taiwan-world-war-biden-b1933106.html
Chinese state media has warned that the threat of war is “real” and that it “may be triggered at any time”
TS,i never accused you of being a white supremacist. I said you have a strange bed-fellow who is and who shares your pro-Stalinist admiration.
The overlap of opinion is very clear.
Both you and Kerry Bolton, the racist, have praised Stalin for his nationalist and patriotic policies towards Russia.
You may have differing reasons for your positions but the effect of them are the same – being apologetic to the rule of Stalin and white-washing the show trials.
Indeed, I never heard of Furr until you referred to him, some weeks ago now, and not days, and it was to recommend his research concerning Stalin and Stalin’s Russia.
I have gone beyond Trotsky and the show trials and argued that Furr is also been shown to be wrong about the Katyn Forest massacre. And your only response is that there is a conspiratorial cover-up of the complicity of the Germans in committing the crime. The opening of archives showing the culpability of the Soviets and Stalin are fake and therefore exonerates the NKVD.
So I accept your challenge on WW2. Offer your best evidence that the Katyn Massacre was committed by the Germans and not the USSR
