Mysterious denunciation

Recent example of his delusions.
http://archives.econ.utah.edu/archives/marxism/2005w05/msg00178.htm
Re: [Marxism] Re: Sistani’s instructions
To: Activists and scholars in Marxist tradition
Subject: Re: [Marxism] Re: Sistani’s instructions
From: Louis Proyect
Date: Wed, 02 Feb 2005 17:42:21 -0500

Tom O’:
>Lou, I’m not sure whether you mean Sadr is a better alternative than
>Sistani. If so, you might be right, but we’d still be following the
>advocates of “faith, humility and the power of God” and it would still be a
>block (non)vote. Just a different block.

Looking at this dialectically, the *authority* wielded by Sadr is
anti-authoritarian. This reflects the class composition of his followers
who are remote from the Shi’a bazaar bourgeoisie. Don’t have the time to go
into this in any great depth, but it appears to me that the best hope for
the future of Iraq is an alliance between his army and the Sunni triangle
fighters–plus them getting a hold of the writings of Malcolm X and Che
Guevara.

—

http://www.marxmail.org

I already made the correction. I confused Bertram with Attila Hoare. For some reason, I get these characters confused with each other on a regular basis. I thought that Attila was married to his mother Branka Magas instead of his father, Quentin. If I had any kind of literary talent, I’d write a leftwing version of a Evelyn Waugh novel with characters based on them, Norman Geras, Christopher Hitchens, et al. Can’t you see them getting drunk on Brandy Alexanders with CIA agents and discussing the novels of George Orwell. Even the names sound like something out of a Waugh novel. Actually, considering how ludicrous they get at times, the association might be with P.G. Wodehouse.

But which one, the funny Amis, or the irritating one?

A revealing slip. Careful study of his writings by a skilled professional reveals that Comrade Proyect spends a lot of time thinking about marrying his own parents.

You mean that Attila is not married to his father? I will have to make another correction straightaway.

I have never heard of Louis Proyect before and have no idea who he is, although the vulgar personal abuse that he engages in speaks much about him, and about his evident lack of more intellectual arguments. But let’s have a look at his article. Proyect says of the people he is attacking: “What they also had in common was support for NATO’s war in the Balkans, which implied a much different [sic.] attitude toward imperialism than that found in classical Marxism.”

Classical Marxism ! Marx and Engels were champions of free-market capitalism and Western supremacy: they supported the US’s conquest of California from Mexico in the 1840s; supported Britain’s and France’s military intervention against Russia in the 1850s; and cheered the Ottoman military campaign against Serbia in the 1870s. Were they alive today, they would probably be cheering Bush’s campaign in Iraq as loudly as the staunchest neoconservatives. If anyone has departed from “classical Marxism”, it is those, such as Proyect and the current editors of NLR, who persist in seeing something “progressive” in the crumbling or defunct despotisms of Castro, Milosevic, Kim Jong-il and other neo-Stalinist dinosaurs.

Of course, Lenin and Trotsky were, unlike Marx and Engels, genuine opponents of Western imperialism. But then they were, unlike Proyect and the NLR people, also the opponents of non-Western imperialism (at least until they themselves took power). Trotsky spent the best part of 1912-13 publicising and condemning the crimes of what he called “Serb imperialism”. In January 1913, Trotsky wrote that “the Serbs in Old Serbia [i.e. Kosovo], in their national endeavour to correct data in the ethnographical statistics that are not quite favourable to them, are engaged quite simply in the systematic extermination of the Muslim population in the villages, towns and districts”. So, Proyect, now who is “demonising the Serbs” ?

Let’s leave aside the petty internecine squabbling for a minute.

Chris, I’m intrigued that you supported the venture in Kosovo, though I suppose it shouldn’t surprise me. Many left-wingers believed for a number of reasons that the intervention was, if not animated by a humanitarian impetus, at least likely to lead to an improved human rights situation for Kosovans.

Let’s say that it did in the long-term, even though the short-term consequences were disastrous, and the Serbs suffered terribly after the war ended.

Isn’t it obvious now, if it wasn’t then, that the war could have been averted if that had been the wish? Didn’t Lord Owen and even the monstrous Henry Kissinger concede that the war was Rambouillet text was likely to have been a deliberate provocation? And therefore the thousands who are said to have died in that war, the vast refugee flow, and the environmental destruction were surely possible to avoid?

I find it difficult to see how the war was defensible, even if one accepts for some curious reason that those who waged the war were engaged in a selfless effort on behalf of Kosovo.

I don’t want to get drawn into a retrospective on Kosovo here. But I would just like to respond to “Lenin” briefly. Leftist opponents of intervention tend to focus on the situation directly preceding the Kosovo intervention itself as if it were reasonable to consider that episode separately from the immediately earlier period in former Yugoslavia. My own view, now as then, was that, after Bosnia (and a fortiori after Srebrenica) , we knew how this was going to develop and the sooner Milosevic was stopped the better.

[My last word on this subject in this thread.]

“As far as Trotsky’s writings on the Serbs is concerned, he was dealing with a capitalist state. Milosevic ruled over collectivized property relations.”

That’s right, you fool. The former was responsible for reactionary atrocities. The latter, being progressive, committed historically necessary atrocities. Let’s just keep that straight.

Winston Smith: “The latter, being progressive, committed historically necessary atrocities. Let’s just keep that straight.”

What a relief it is that the USA and Great Britain do not act on the basis that the ends justifies the means.

—

“It’s a hard choice, but I think, …it’s worth it.”

(Madeline Albright’s reply to a May 11, 1996 60 Minutes question about whether the death of 500,000 Iraqi children due to sanctions was “Worth It”)

—

George Orwell’s reputation as a left-wing icon took a body-blow from which it may never recover when it was revealed in 1996 that he had cooperated closely with IRD’s Cold Warriors, even offering his own black-list of eighty-six Communist “fellow-travelers.” As the Daily Telegraph noted, “To some, it was as if Winston Smith had willingly cooperated with the Thought Police in 1984.”

My own view, now as then, was that, after Bosnia (and a fortiori after Srebrenica) , we knew how this was going to develop and the sooner Milosevic was stopped the better.

I don’t think we ever know how things are going to develop.

Also, ‘stopping Milosevic’ could mean anything from dropping a nuclear bomb on Belgrade to restricting trade with Serbia.

This is exactly the same kind of agument as ‘we had to do something about Saddam’ in justifying Iraq invasion.

As if the only choice is to bomb and kill or do nothing. Incredible.

Proyect’s problem with Nazism isn’t that it carried out genocide and exterminated millions of people, but merely that it was a “servant of big business” and tried to destroy “collectivism”. Presumably, if Hitler had nationalised the means of production, Proyect would have had no problem with his politics.

Krupps did not own Auschwitz; the death camp was an example of the “collectively owned social property” that Proyect admires so much. And, by the way, Milosevic was a champion of free-market reform and privatisation; he part-privatised the Serbian telephone network to pay for his campaign against the Kosovo Albanians. And he supported the US against Iraq in 1991. Sorry to destroy the reputation of your socialist idol, Proyect…

Perhaps Proyect could stop beating about the bush and give a straight answer to a straight question: Why does he think genocide is acceptable, provided the perpetrators rule over “collectivised property relations”, like his hero Milosevic ?

Perhaps Proyect could stop beating about the bush and give a straight answer to a straight question: Why does he think genocide is acceptable, provided the perpetrators rule over “collectivised property relations”, like his hero Milosevic ?

Such are the depths to which the Proyects and the Hermans have sunk – to become the left-wing equivalent of Holocaust deniers. Instead of showing the least bit of solidarity to the suffering peoples of Bosnia and Kosovo, they prefer to give their solidarity to the fascists and the ethnic-cleansers. Because let’s face it – who cares about a couple of hundred thousand dead people when “collectivised property relations” are at stake ? Well, if socialism means supporting murderous dictators and whitewashing their genocidal activities, then socialism is a bankrupt, reactionary ideology that belongs in the dustbin of history.

“Showing the least bit of solidarity for the suffering people of Bosnia and Kosovo” is in my view something that could be far better served by offering them at the time an open arms policy of asylum than making them colonial pawns into greatpowers’ political scheming. I’ve read Trotsky’s writings on the 1912-1913 Balkan Wars also, and forgive me, but I don’t remember him advocating something like a jointly Austro_Hungarian/German humanitarian intervention for the sake of the ethnic Albanians.

I’m a member of Proyect’s Marxmail list and there we have already had more than just a go about Trotsky’s 1938 comment on an hypothetical war between England and the “semifascist” Brazilian dictator Vargas, something about which Trotsky said that Britain’s victory could only mean a change of dictators in Rio de Janeiro, but that a Brazilian victory would mean a development of the national and political counsciousness of the Brazilian people that would eventually sweep away Vargas’ dictatorship as well as give a mighty push to the English Left…Being Brazilian, I’m afraid – had I been around at the time- I wouldn’t as much as welcome Vargas’ downfall, if I were to withstand colonial tutelage on his stead.

Even in the historical short run, the fact that some millions of Irish had to seek refuge out of their homeland during the Great Famine (in what many people take as an ethnocide)didn’t kill Irish nationalism as a factor in British politics, did it? Trotsky, of course, denounced Serbian atrocities during the Balkan War, but he didn’t see Serbia, Bulgaria and Greece as imperialist powers, as I do not remember him upholding the return of Turkish rule to the Balkans…

Actually, if I’m not mistaken, Trotsky tended to partake of the view that the Macedonians were ethnic Bulgarians and tended to be more sympathetic to the Bulgarians than to the Serbians. But then, what’s the point? The point is that no “national question” can be solved from the outside , except when one thinks that colonial tutelage is some sort of a “solution” to it, as the sorry stuation in the twin Bosnian and Kosovo statelets under NATO protection seems to prove, IMHO.

It is interesting how Hoare needs to go back into the 19th century to dredge up examples of ostensibly humanitarian capitalist interventions. But we are in the age of imperialism, not the age of the ascendant bourgeoisie. This misuse of history can be also found in Christopher Hitchen’s Iraq war propaganda. It would turn people like Donald Rumsfeld and Madeline Albright into something like the Marquis de LaFayette. It only turns my stomach.

“But we are in the age of imperialism, not the age of the ascendant bourgeoisie.”

This is a distinction that is only believed in by Marxist-Leninists, whose ideology has been thoroughly discredited: the tyranny established by Lenin and Trotsky killed far, far, far more people than Rumsfeld or Albright.

“Actually, the Kosovars are just as brutal as the Israelis.”

How funny of Proyect to compare a colonised nation with a colonising nation. A more appropriate comparison would be between the Kosovars and the Palestinians, whose extremists regularly blow up bus loads of Israeli civilians, though I don’t believe this detracts from the Palestinian right to self-determination…