• 16 Posts
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Joined 5 years ago
Cake day: September 22nd, 2019
  • ComradeCorvOPMtoReddit Good Post Archive•"Yezhov's Opposition" an excerpt.
    2·
    5 years ago

    (3/3)

    It is not the purpose of this part of the essay to set forth either a detailed critique of Khrushchev or his policies (or those of Stalin, Gorbachev, et. al.). To return to the main subject: Yezhov was clearly more convinced about - and aggressive toward - this oppositionist underground than Stalin was. Stalin seems to have taken it - or parts of it - rather seriously, however, because, as several historians have pointed out, though he showed a great deal of skepticism about - and a need for close scrutiny of - Yezhov’s official actions, he approved of and took full responsibility for the Yezhovshchina. Stalin read through Yezhov’s manuscript on counter-revolution, making underlines and marks in the margins. Yet, as J. Arch Getty put it, not only with Yagoda, but even “in the cases of Piatakov and Bukharin, Ezhov [Yezhov] and others were ahead of Stalin in pushing for the need for severity” (op. cit., pp. 59 - 60). Why was this so?

    http://redcomrades.byethost5.com/redcomrades/index.html

  • ComradeCorvOPMtoReddit Good Post Archive•"Yezhov's Opposition" an excerpt.
    2·
    5 years ago

    (2/3)

    These were the people Yezhov’s “Iron Gauntlet” failed to reach. They became Khrushchev’s chief backers. The NKVD, which existed simultaneously with the CheKa in 1917, had consisted only of Bolsheviks. The CheKa and OGPU core referred to above had been multi-party, as were the sympathies of many of Khrushchev’s supporters in what had officially by then become a one party state. Khrushchev declared against a “Beria gang.” He showed marked prejudice toward any former Stalinist or old-style Marxist-Leninist, even if such stalwart Communists represented only technical programs or science affairs. He distrusted Trofim Lysenko for having been Stalin’s favorite agricultural expert. It was not Stalin, but rather the “liberalizing” anti-Stalinist Khrushchev (who hated to be contradicted) who determined all ousters, appointments, and liquidations based on the simple rule of whom he (and his patrons) could or could not work with - to once again use the phrase historian Tim Naftali incorrectly applied to Stalin’s modus operandi of governing. Anyone who had been loyal to Stalin had insurmountable hurdles to leap to gain Khrushchev’s confidence. This was so even if he had spent time in a forced labor camp under Stalin, such as Sergei P. Korolev, the “Russian von Braun,” known anonymously as the “Chief Designer” due to the secrecy surrounding his work, who engineered the Soviet Union’s huge N-1 rockets and all rockets used for launches that put the Soviet Union clearly ahead of the U.S. in the “space race” until the U.S. launched an aggressive, well-funded, successful effort to place a human on the moon. It was not Stalin and Yezhov who purged remaining Old Bolsheviks, but rather Khrushchev who, having both time on his side as well as the old “Yagoda gang” now holding together in the newly organized KGB, eventually ousted the very last of them, all great heroes of Bolshevism: Molotov, Malenkov, Kaganovich, General Zhukov, et. al. The latter group made a last unsuccessful effort to overthrow Khrushchev in 1957.

    Anyone who has seen the newsreel of Khrushchev personally congratulating the world’s first human in space, Yuri Gagarin, for successfully orbiting the Earth (April 12, l961), who has heard the simple, uncomprehending, awkward words that Khrushchev stumblingly delivered as he shook Gagarin’s hand, will not be convinced that Khrushchev had much intelligence. This was certainly not true of his backers, who made fools of almost every historian in the West. These were people who had Darwin’s theory of evolution taught to children at elementary school levels (instead of pap like “And God said, Let the earth bring forth the living creature after his kind… . And the evening and the morning were the sixth day”). They created institutes with formal courses of study for optimal chess play, schools which still have had no likeness in the world (except for a few academies in Japan where a more difficult and profound Chinese game called Wei-ch’i or “Go” is studied in an elaborate dan [competitive] system admired to this day by 8 to 10 million Japanese Go players). These were the people who really ran the government of the USSR, directing the lofting of the Earth’s first artificial satellite (Sputnik I), exhibiting to the world the first close-up photos of the moon’s surface (including its never before seen dark side) from a lunar probe (Luna Three in October, 1959), and then putting the first human in space. These three feats of engineering alone make the construction of the pyramids of Egypt seem rudimentary.

    Western historians - like Naftali - find Khrushchev’s ostensible statements and acts easy to understand. However, the real Stalin is a puzzle to them. They need to dumb him and his comrades down, as in Tsitriniak’s “portrait” of Yezhov given above. The dominant paradigm played a key role in this kind of anti-Soviet propaganda by doing what Western historians, steeped in the Great Chain of Being paradigm, have been very good at doing: cretinizing the representatives and beliefs of Stalinism. The most egregious recent example of this is an article by David Joravsky in The Russian Review (57, January 1998, p. 1 - 9) in which he sententiously counsels against Alexei Kojevnikov’s novel and high-brow interdisciplinary recommendation to apply chaos theory and Wittgenstein’s epistemology toward understanding Stalinist society - a structuralist approach. Joravsky states that Soviet ideology, in which Marxism is thought to have distinctive principles useful for all branches of knowledge, is “undeserving of philosophical dignity, since it was overwhelmingly inane [Joravsky’s emphasis]” and was simply a facet of “the pathological thought-control that was the most obvious [!] feature of Russian cultural history in the Stalin era” (p. 8). (Here paradigmatic features have become, in Joravsky’s mind, what is “obvious” about Stalinist society.) The reference to “pathological thought-control” is the contribution to “understanding” Soviet society that Joravsky fallaciously believes the totalitarian paradigm gives. He obviously thinks the paradigm yields more that is true than Kojevnikov’s suggestion ever could. (Joravsky’s scientific errors and pretensions with regard to Lysenko’s theories and ideas will be dealt with in Part II, showing the need for scientists to take the history of science away from historians until the latter can show they have done some real work in a physical science first.)

    A common core of sympathy united brash, notorious personalities like Khrushchev with the surreptitious, intelligent, patient conspirators who came to back him: they believed in Russia (they were nationalists), but not in Communism. Stalin had known them as a “Right Opposition.” They not only opposed and resisted agricultural collectivization, they favored a capitalist system of the type Lenin had provisionally instituted after the Civil War under the rubric of the NEP (National Economic Policy), which he regarded as a necessary but only temporary retreat from socialism. This opposition group, unreachable by Yezhov, linked together both the Trotskyites of the “left” and the Bukharinites of the “right.” They approved of one of Khrushchev’s most important steps in dismantling the Soviet system: the privatization of the machine-tractor stations that supplied farms with heavy machinery for planting, harvesting, and processing. They secretly applauded Khrushchev’s not-so-secret “secret speech” denouncing Stalin in 1956.

    The false impression given by utilizers of the dominant paradigm is that the rise and fall of Stalinism, ending with Khrushchev, was either some kind of natural historical decay process involving a flawed Marxist ideal, or that the Khrushchevites prevailed by dint of Khrushchev’s quaint peasant charm - missing in the intellectual Lenin and the “thuggish” Stalin - coupled with Khrushchev’s stolid Russian strength and undogmatic, “un-Marxian” flexibility. These personal qualities, the paradigmists assert, enabled him to do many things impossible for Lenin and Stalin who, it is implied, needed heavy-handed persuasion or outright force where the “liberal” Khrushchev did not. Khrushchev could make unguaranteeable - or even demagogic, they often concede - promises of stimulating the Soviet economy by infusing it with Western-style consumer goods. Lenin or Stalin could not or would not do this. When Khrushchev could not secure the vote of the Politburo against remaining Old Bolsheviks he could not work with any more, he did not appoint a “Yezhov” to liquidate them as Stalin supposedly did: he went to the Party Central Committee for a full vote and victory. These moderate and “legitimate” maneuvers - worthy of a “true parliamentarian” (by Western standards) - leave out of the picture, however, Khrushchev’s powerful but little known behind-the-scenes backers, such as Ignatiev, Ryumin, and many others even lesser known. These men had for decades looked upon the Old Bolsheviks much as Westerners do: as fanatical Marxist purists and idealists, like Yezhov and Dzerzhinsky and Molotov, as well as the multitude of unknowns who attempted to make Marx and Lenin’s “dictatorship of the proletariat” work, such early CheKa men and Stakhanovites whose names are lost to history. The formula “dictatorship of the proletariat” was learned by rote at an early age by Khrushchev and many of his age cohorts. It had no more real meaning for them than it does for Westerners, and seemed equally unworkable to them. This is one of the reasons many contemporary American, British, and French Marxist intellectuals were so enamored with Khrushchev: they did not think the “formula” could work - or be made to work - either. Khrushchev’s renowned expression of belief in “many roads to socialism” spoke to the Western Communist intellectuals’ agnosticism and to its psychic sister: eclecticism. At the same time, the Chinese Maoists denounced Khrushchev because they remained doctrinaire Stalinists and collectivists: they still believed in Marxism-Leninism. Marxist and non-Marxist Westerners regarded actions by Khrushchev that were traitorous in the eyes of Old Bolsheviks like Molotov and Kaganovich as being part of a salutary “thawing” of Communism’s “frozen rigor.” This had been the thinking of Yagoda’s group since the Civil War.

  • ComradeCorvOPMtoReddit Good Post Archive•China Megathread 2: Debunking Western Propaganda
    1·
    5 years ago

    3.) Corporations with no backbone/standing up for HK (Free Speech Arguments)

    This will be more of a logical breakdown of where this is stemming from, with a history lesson about China, with the hopes of those reading understanding why this hits a nerve with the Chinese people. I think this Rick Sanchez segment does an excellent job on how Western media constantly berates a country without any knowledge or appreciation for its culture and sovereignty.

    Long story short, China has an embarrassing history so embarrassing they actually call it “the “Century of Humiliation” where intervention and imperialism by Western powers and Japan in China between 1839 and 1949 ran rampant in China and the government. Thanks to the Chinese Communist Party (CPC), not only was China finally unified under one government, but they were able to PROSPER with obscene amounts of wealth to the point where even the World Bank states that they lifted 800 million out of poverty in one generation, something that has NEVER been done in human history.

    What I’ve been hearing about this is that it is not about free speech.. This is more about this concept: “You cannot continue to profit from a country while blasting ignorant shit about it, from a place that has constantly exploited and harassed it for decades.

    4.) Back to HK protests

    I wrote on these protests at infinintum, so I am going to copy/past my two other megathreads here as sources for these protests:

    [The extradition bill cane about when a man from Hong Kong killed his pregnant girlfriend while in holiday in Taiwan. He fled back to Hong Kong. Taiwan asked for him to be extradited, but Hong Kong did not have an extradition treaty with Taiwan, so the administration in Hong Kong proposed a bill that would allow Taiwan, the PRC, and Macau to request extradition, which the judiciary in Hong Kong can then approve. There were 49 crimes that were to be included in the bill that would allow extradition requests. Some of these were financial crimes, and the Bourgeoisie in Hong Kong shit themselves because they are often in breach of PRC law, but protected by Hong Kong’s independence as a Special Administrative Region. This bill is completely reasonable, and any fears of the PRC taking over or of the extradition of ‘political’ criminals is unfounded. Right now I fear that the US is encouraging the organizers to keep protesting in order to provoke the administration in Hong Kong to crack down on them, so that they can blame China and keep up their propaganda narrative that ‘CHINA BAD!’]( https://www.reddit.com/r/communism101/comments/c1nxga/opinions_on_hong_kong_protests/ered9wl/)

    Now this is from an academic paper that lists out these atrocious laws while Hong Kong was under British Rule:

    • Laws were passed to ensure that no Chinese would live in the most desirable areas in Hong Kong, which the British wished to preserve as their exclusive enclaves.

    • In a land in which ninety-eight percent of the population was Chinese, English was the official language. The Chinese language was not permitted to be used in government offices. Laws regulating conduct were written exclusively in English, a language which the vast majority of the population could not understand.

    • The British unleashed a horrid opioid epidemic on the Chinese through Hong Kong. Here is a clip of Professor Michael Parenti stating “when the communist liberated Shanghai from the sponsored Kumintang reactionary government, in 1949, about 20% of the population of Shanghai, 1.2 million people, were drug addicts.”.

    • “The slave trade was merciful compared with the opium trade. We did not destroy the body of the Africans, for it was our immediate interest to keep them alive; we did not debase their natures, corrupt their minds, nor destroy their souls. But the opium sellers lays the body after he has corrupted, degraded and annihilated the moral being of unhappy sinners.”

    • The more fucked up part about this was that the Chinese government seized some of the opium and destroyed it. But after the opium wars, they were forced to compensate the very people that were poisoning their country ($6 million).

    • "The highest level British official in China in the late 1840s described Hong Kong as the “great receptacle of thieves and pirates protected by the technicalities of British law.”

    • “Hong Kong has been Chinese Territory since ancient times. This is a fact known to all, old and young in the world… British imperialism came to china by pirate ships, provoked the criminal “opium war”, massacred numerous Chinese people, and occupied the Chinese territory of Hong Kong… It is the British imperialist who have come from thousands of miles away to seize our land by force and kill our compatriots”

    • Sex slavery was a booming market, as girls were bought and sold by wealthy Chinese and British men. British rule legalized the sale of human beings and slavery, despite it being illegal in England.

    • Chinese residents were given curfews, and criminal punishments would range from legal physical beatings to bodily mutilation (compared to British rule breakers who would just pay a fine).

    This is only HALF of the paper that is well sourced with primary sources. You can find the paper here and here

    **But I will also like to highlight this HUGE database that has been recording everything that has been going on with the HK protests in the beginning here:**https://bitbucket.org/TheCrypticMan/hong-kong-protests/wiki/2019 attempted ‘Black Revolution’

    I still stand wholeheartedly with China here. It is absolutely unfair regarding the lack of understanding about China’s foundations; egregious racism, Sinophobia, and bigotry; and flat out lies people has been spreading about this nation that has gone through HELL to get where it is today. China is an economic miracle and has an enriching culture that everyone can learn from and implement. When I see that 1.4 billion has health insurance, housing, food, education, and clothes (even the poorest of the poor), while places of equal circumstances (like India) struggle to have anyone of these basic necessities, I know there is SO MUCH China can offer to the world.

    Additionally, if anyone is interested in doing projects or interviews regarding this, I’ll be more than happy to set up this and spread this information more. Just PM me.

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