ucbesvax.turner@ucbcad.UUCP (05/29/83)
#N:ucbesvax:7500017:000:7458
ucbesvax!turner May 28 17:16:00 1983
Gary Cottrell, in pointing out an anarchist's position on the USSR
("There is no communism in Russia" by Emma Goldman), and Guy Harris,
in defense of my note on El Salvador, in saying that he doesn't
...think an anarchist is likely to care much for Marxism-Leninism
in any form....
are welcome breaths of fresh air over the USSR/US Communism/Capitalism
controversy. Guy's comment was especially welcome, coming in response
to yet another tiresome diatribe from zrm@mit-eddi. For those of you
unfamiliar with Ziggy's fire-breathing, spittle-spraying style:
But wait! Lets play by Micheal Turners rules: How about if we locked
him in a room with a Vietnamese refugee who has also given up on
reason and is just homicidal about Communist sympathizers? Now that
would come up with some meaningful conclusions. Or would it.
That's "Michael", if you please, and "Turner's", if you must know,
and it so happens that I roomed for a summer with a Vietnamese refugee.
He was Saigonese, and didn't seem at all aware of what I was talking
about when I asked him about large-scale peasant massacres by "our" side,
or carpet bombings of civilian populations. It seems that that the more
liberal papers in Saigon would try to report such things, and be censored.
The only clue to what was going on were black columns of ink where those
stories were laid out originally. In any case, he didn't offer to kill me.
Anyway, Guy is right on target when he says that I'm not likely to be
a Commie sympathizer, although I quite sympathize with people who turn
to the USSR for help in trying to achieve a genuine revolution. One of
the better examples of the COUNTER-revolutionary style of USSR foreign
policy was Republican Spain--a nation that Stalin preferred to see fall
into fascism than have a real revolution. Stalin wanted a stable,
capitalist trading partner for the USSR--and, not getting it, dropped
the whole subject of the Spanish revolution. (Koestler's "Darkness at
Noon" alludes to this process; Orwell's "Homage to Catalonia" is a detailed
and moving account of it.) To me, the tragic thing about U.S. intervention
is precisely that it pushes revolutionaries into a dependent position on
what I will freely admit is one of the world's great empires. To quote from
one of my letters to bukys@rochester:
As for the plausibility of Soviet world domination, just how
is this going to come about? With the help of the U.S.! I see that
our government has just put the finishing touches on the Cubanization
of Nicaragua (complete with a Bay of Pigs invasion). What might
have happened if the U.S. had not sheltered Somoza -- a butcher, plain
and simple -- or cut off aid (which, given our arming of Somoza's
National Guard and Somoza's single-handed rip-off of the national
treasury, really amounted to war reparations), or had not put the CIA
in charge of Guard's renewed offensive against Nicaragua?
To me, this is just handing Nicaragua to the Soviets. Of COURSE
the Marxist-Leninist elements have prevailed. The U.S. WANTS them to
prevail, so that the world will forget the murderous tyrants that it
had propped up there since the Thirties. With an oppressive Soviet-
satellite regime in place, it will be much easier to promote an
invasion as a "defense of liberty", where they were so silent before.
Unfortunately, the people of the Nicaragua are, in this case,
being asked to choose the lesser of two evils. From experience of
both, they are supporting the Sandinistas, albeitly grudgingly
in many cases. What does this tell you? When the Sandinistas took
over, they gave those of the National Guard who did not want to stay
-- i.e., those who quite rightly feared reprisals -- safe passage
out of the country. Today, they [Guardia] are back, being slaughtered
by the Nicaraguan army and citizen militias. Soon, they will be out
of the way of both the Soviets AND the U.S., to whom they were an
intolerable embarassment. The situation stabilizes. The U.S.'s
interests are served, as are the USSR's. And Nicaragua continues to
suffer, just under a different master.
If you doubt that the U.S. government is as cynical as this, all
I can say is that you have a lot of history to read yet. For my part,
I feel sympathy for people who want to be free. But I have trouble
justifying oppression as a "necessary stage" on the way; this is an
integral part of domestic policy in the USSR, but it also an integral
part of FOREIGN policy in the U.S., which is wealthy enough to tolerate
a certain level of dissent at home.
Since I wrote that, things have changed some. The U.S. seems to have
settled in for the long haul in Nicaragua. Also, since I was trying to
persuade Bukys (who has not since replied), I didn't trifle with such
wishy-washy wording as "under a different--albeit more benign--master",
although this seems to be the case.
Anyway, one thing should be clear from all this: I am NOT a "Communist
sympathizer". Stalin is right up there with Hitler, in my eyes.
In the case of El Salvador, Ziggy needs to do some reading of his own, if
he is so sure that a "Communist" take-over would be worse. He would
find that, if U.S.-backed government forces in El Salvador DID succeed
in crushing the guerilla movement there, that it wouldn't be all peaches
and cream. The last time that happened was in 1932. Shortly after the
rebels were disarmed, government troops went out into the countryside and
slaughtered over 30,000 peasants.
And today? Roberto D'Aubisson, chairman of the El Salvadoran constituent
assembly, has been heard to say that "it may take 300,000 deaths before
El Salvador is free from Communist aggression." He has also been heard
to say, to a German diplomatic contingent, that the Germans had the right
idea in killing all those Jews in the thirties and forties, since they
almost certainly saved the world from a Jewish Communist take-over.
And is this man a "duly elected" representative of the people?
Dr. Charles Clements, in his plea for medical funding for the guerilla
effort, had some things to say about the electoral process in El Salvador.
It's not simply that leftist (and even moderate) candidates are often
assassinated. Apparently, on election day, when the rest of the U.S.
press was crowing over the "wonderful" (actually, mandatory) turn-out at
the polls, they missed the real action: voters signed their ballots, as
required by law. Soldiers "protecting" the polls refused to allow the
signed stubs to be torn from the ballots before voting, since "mutilation
of ballots" was forbidden by law. "Mutilated" ballots were, presumably,
not counted. "Valid" ballots tended to have the "correct" vote on them--
since the same security forces that manned the polls that day are under-
stood to be well-represented within the ranks of the self-appointed
guardians of "freedom" that roam the streets at night, killing and
mutilating "Communists". And who is the government figure most strongly
linked with these death-squads? Roberto D'Aubisson, who received his
police training in the U.S.
Do I want a Marxist-Leninist victory in El Salvador? No. But that
doesn't mean that I have to sit still for a campaign of lies, distortions
and silence on what U.S. foreign policy really means.
Michael Turner
ucbvax!ucbesvax.turner