[fse-esf] Stalinist banner at the European Social Forum

[Jon Cloke]

Carla,

If you read what I wrote you’ll see I wasn’t making comparisons with nazi 
atrocities, save only to say that mass murder is mass murder. However, if 
you suggested (for instance) to a Tutsi of Rwanda who was there in 1993 that 
what happened in Rwanda wasn’t ‘as bad’ as what happened in 1939-45, I’m not 
sure they’d agree with you. By what standards would you then compare the two 
events?

I use no facts to denigrate humanist socialist ideas, so far as I understand 
them and what is meant by socialism, something I feel that is closest to 
representing what I believe myself to be. What makes me angry is the 
thoughtless attempt to simply re-present old left clichés, ways of 
organizing and above all power structures as if nothing had happened in the 
last 50-100 years to change the shape and processes of progressive politics. 
If you’re a Marxist, then can I quote Rosa Luxembourg to you: "The work Das 
Kapital of Marx, like all his ideology, is not gospel in which we are given 
Revealed Truth, set in stone and eternal, but an endless flow of suggestions 
to keep working on with intelligence, in order to continue researching and 
struggling for truth."

You talk about “the right wingers getting back to power in Poland” as if all 
right-wingers were endlessly and always the same and yet the answers are 
made complex by recent Polish history. Would there be the right-wing 
backlash that there now is if there hadn’t been a communist Poland? Would 
the Catholic Church have the iconic status it still does (in rural Poland 
anyway) if it hadn’t been a beacon of resistance to an awful so-called 
‘socialist’ regime? Would the legitimate resistance of Lech Walesa and 
Solidarity have been converted into a more socially progressive force if 
they hadn’t been fighting a military dictatorship dressed up as socialist?

As to the suggestion that Stalinism wouldn’t have been half as bad if there 
had not been Hitler, are you really suggesting that Hitler was responsible 
for the deliberate famines in the Ukraine in the 1920s and 1930s? That 
Hitler caused Stalin to undertake the purges? That Hitler caused the setting 
up of the Gulag system and the construction of the anti-Semitic ‘Jewish 
doctors’ plot’, long after his death, in 1951-53? I don’t think so.

While the old left, or right-left if you want, continue to stick to their 
outdated ways of thinking and their autocratic, fascistic practices, then as 
far as I’m concerned they’re just as much the enemy as Bush is. And as for 
fascism, let me quote you Ricardo Alarcon, Cuba’s vice-president and not 
normally someone that I’d have a lot of time for: “Antifascist is essential 
for democracy, peace and life. To fight to create new models, to forge 
alliances where possible or meanwhile promote points or moments of 
coincidence between the diverse forces that today, for the most varied 
motives, are out of step with the world as it is, should constitute the 
principal guide for revolutionaries.” (Counterpunch 
http://www.counterpunch.org/alarcon05082006.html)

And that means our own, internal fascism as well as the obvious external 
one.

Regards,

Jon