#came across an appeal leaflet from the charity that supports it in the material I’m archiving

[sassmill]

Yeah I’m emailing the retirement home I died at in 1965 to see if they can show me any photos of what it looked like between 1961-1965, what of it?

[theculturedmarxist]

The same old stupid game

I’ve recently had the misfortune to come across a few articles, one by Inez Feltscher Stepman of The Federalist and David Satter, “senior fellow” at the so-called Hudson Institute. Naturally, as reactionary commentators for reactionary propaganda outlets, their tripe is full of lies, half-truths, and glaring omissions meant to serve their biases. It’s the normal bourgeois playbook for libeling Communism.

I’m not a tremendous fan of the Soviet Union, or the manner of “actually existing Socialism” that developed there, but I feel compelled to refute this nonsense not only because it’s dishonest, or that it’s a perversion of the actual history, but at least because the Soviet Union is the dead horse reactionaries love to beat when Socialism as a subject is discussed.

I came across Stepman’s tripe after seeing someone post the following cap from her twitter:

galaxymind.jpg

I try not to go by screen caps alone. A favorite of /pol/’s tactics is taking things out of context to craft their own narrative around events, which often have little or any basis in reality. Given the... content of this tweet, the meaning seems pretty obvious, but I try to err on the side of caution, so I ran her name through my sophisticated crime computer and was immediately directed to her posts at The Federalist. The results weren’t particularly impressive, but something did jump out to me: “The Biggest Legacy Of International Women’s Day Is Communism.”

I had a feeling it was going to be painful given the title, and I wasn’t wrong.

As a Communist, I have a soft spot for International Working Women’s day, as the event was originally known. Women have played a special role in the history of labor organization and revolutionary activity, and today Capitalism derives much of its profit from the relentless, merciless exploitation of the female gender in its various forms.

How progressive.

Even in the so-called First World, I’ve seen my female friends and co-workers mistreated and immiserated by the Capitalist system in ways unique to their kind. I celebrate IWWD because in its ideal form, it is an opportunity not only for women to build solidarity between one another (which is often sorely lacking) but for men to show their support, and build solidarity with the other gender (and vice versa on International Working Men’s Day). It’s an opportunity to remember the work of women past, the progress we’ve been able to achieve together, and lay the ground work for a better future for us all. The purpose of the day is to pay special attention to the circumstances of our working sisters, but at its heart it’s a day to reaffirm our dedication to the cause of true egalitarianism, and not the false mirage offered by bourgeois “feminists” that demand more female CEOs while ignoring the Mexican nannies they underpay to raise their children for them, or pushing expensive shirts for “charity,” assembled in stifling and dangerous sweat shops by the thousands of women they actually should be fighting for.

Naturally, Stepman starts off strong.

Leon Trotsky, of icepick fame, wrote afterwards: “We did not imagine that this ‘Women’s Day’ would inaugurate the revolution. Revolutionary actions were foreseen but without date. But in morning, despite the orders to the contrary, textile workers left their work in several factories and sent delegates to ask for support of the strike … which led to mass strike … all went out into the streets.”

What a splendid introduction. I wonder if she characterizes so “Abraham Lincoln, of getting-shot-in-the-back-of-the-head fame.” She links to a Fortune article, which in turn links to an apparently defunct World March for Women site. Usually, not linking directly to the source material (when possible) is a strong indicator of chicanery, to say the least. After a bit of searching, I was able to track it down to Trotsky’s History of the Russian Revolution, where the actual quote goes like so:

THE  23rd  of  February  was  International  Woman’s  Day.  The  social-democratic circles had intended to mark this day in a general manner: by meetings, speeches, leaflets. It had not occurred to anyone that it might become the first day of the revolution. Not a single organisation called  for  strikes  on  that  day.  What  is  more,  even  a  Bolshevik organisation,  and  a  most  militant  one  –  the  Vyborg  borough committee,  all  workers  –  was  opposing  strikes.  The  temper  of  the masses,  according  to  Kayurov,  one  of  the  leaders  in  the  workers’ district, was very tense; any strike would threaten to turn into an open fight.  But  since  the  committee  thought  the  time  unripe  for  militant action – the party not strong enough and the workers having too few contacts with the soldiers – they decided not to call for strikes but to prepare for revolutionary action at some indefinite time in the future. Such was the course followed by the committee on the eve of the 23rd of February,  and  everyone  seemed  to  accept  it.  On  the  following morning, however, in spite of all directives, the women textile workers in several factories went on strike, and sent delegates to the metalworkers with an appeal for support. “With reluctance,” writes Kayurov, “the Bolsheviks agreed to this, and they were followed by the workers–Mensheviks and Social Revolutionaries. But once there is a mass strike,  one  must  call  everybody  into  the  streets  and  take the  lead.” Such was Kayurov’s decision, and the Vyborg committee had to agree to it. “The idea of going into the streets had long been ripening among the  workers;  only  at  that  moment  nobody  imagined  where  it  would lead.” Let us keep in mind this testimony of a participant, important for understanding the mechanics of the events.

Certainly lends a different perspective to the “quote,” I think, but we can’t show that the Bolsheviks weren’t power-mad, bloodthirsty tyrants now, can we? Of course, progressing through the article we find the same ridiculous libels that we usually find.

That revolution, which caused Russia to exit WWI and brought Vladimir Lenin to power, started the chain of events that eventually lead to the slaughter of as many as 100 million people under the banner of Communism.

To say that the revolution “caused Russia to exit WWI” is a half-truth at best. Russia was suffering severely from the deprivations caused by the titanic struggle with Germany, for which Russia was horribly unprepared. All the nonsense that reactionaries like this try to pin on the Soviets--not enough rifles or ammunition for their troops, mass human wave tactics, shooting ‘cowards’ retreating without orders, etc--was committed by Tsarist Russia. By the end of the war, due to incompetence among the aristocracy and general staff, unpreparedness either militarily or economically, intervention by the Tsar himself in military affairs on the Eastern Front, and the terrific conditions the Russian soldiers and peasantry were exposed to, Russia would see more than four-million of its people dead. Russia was incapable of continued involvement in the war. The Bolsheviks end up signing away a vast expanse of Russia to buy peace, which is exactly what the people wanted, and what the parliamentary government refused to give them.

The “100 Million Dead” is the usual smear, but I’ll return to that shortly.

Obviously, few people celebrating International Women’s Day in 2018 intend to glorify Communism’s dark history. But the day still retains the essence of its Marxist roots by encouraging women to think of themselves as a homogenous [sic] class with discrete common interests, in opposition to men’s.

Here the brainlet further exposes herself for the pseudo-intellectual that she is. There’s a lot to be said about Marxism and its history with “Feminism.” This sort of characterization reveals how little of either Stepman understands of either.

In Marxist terms, men and women don’t constitute separate classes within society. In short, one’s social class is determined by one’s relationship to the means of production, i.e., do you have to work for a living, or do you live from others working necessary resources to which you control by monopoly? There are numerous divisions possible based on how you want to slice it, but generally you can say that there are the bourgeois, those that own the things people need to live, and the proletariat, those that earn a wage working for the bourgeois. From the Marxist perspective, men and women inhabit the same class based on their material relations, but nowhere are their assumed to be “homogenous,” or that they have universal or even necessarily opposed interests. As workers, they have a united interest in overthrowing the capitalist system of bourgeois ownership that keeps them in bondage, but to treat people as a homogeneous mass with all the same needs and goals runs directly counter to the materialist analysis on which Marx bases his thought.

It’s well understood by the actual Left that until we’re all free, men and women, etc, then none of us are free, and even a cursory glance at the history of people’s revolutions reveals that without the united effort of women and men, they’ll both languish in bondage. One half of the proletariat trying to get a leg up on the other isn’t just nonsensical, it’s counter revolutionary, detrimental to the well being of both.

The rest of her rubbish-bin of an article is just more smears and ignorance (to be charitable, rather than to assume she’s knowingly lying).

David Satter’s brain rot was ladled out during November of last year, the centennial of the Russian revolution, and he plays the same old tired tunes, inflating the supposed atrocities of “Communism.” That’s always the way, isn’t it? Anyone that dies in a “Communist” country is a victim of Communism, but the swollen mountain of stinking corpses that are still being piled up in the name of Capitalism, well, sorry! that just don’t count.

From the megamind himself:

Although the Bolsheviks called for the abolition of private property, their real goal was spiritual: to translate Marxist-Leninist ideology into reality. For the first time, a state was created that was based explicitly on atheism and claimed infallibility. This was totally incompatible with Western civilization, which presumes the existence of a higher power over and above society and the state. 

Another brainlet misrepresentation. Marxism is a materialist philosophy. It’s concerned with the objective and the real. There was nothing “spiritual” about the Bolshevik’s desire to abolish Tsarism, educate the peasants, feed them, house them, clothe them, and modernize the country. I fully doubt that Lenin et al made claims of “infallibility,” and as usual this dipshit completely ignores the reactionary, pro-Tsarist character of the Orthodox church and its role in supporting the aristocracy at the expense of the common people. To say that an “atheist state” is incompatible with Western civilization is utterly idiotic. What is he a “senior fellow” of, exactly? Poopy?

The Bolshevik coup had two consequences. In countries where communism came to hold sway, it hollowed out society’s moral core, degrading the individual and turning him into a cog in the machinery of the state. Communists committed murder on such a scale as to all but eliminate the value of life and to destroy the individual conscience in survivors. 

This is a bald faced lie. David Satter is either embarrassingly incompetent as a historian, or he’s an out-and-out liar. He blithely ignores that, previous to the Bolsheviks, the Tsar had no compunction about executing political dissidents, siccing his Cossacks on unarmed civilians, sending ordinary Russians to die by the thousands in wars his country could ill afford, much less equipped to fight, and a devoted proponent of autocracy.

There is no one or two ways about it: the Great War was a Capitalist war, fought for access to markets and resources. There was no noble aim, just destruction and mayhem to secure the fortunes of the wealthy. By the war’s end, Russia alone would lose more than four-million of its people. In total, nearly 25 million people would end up victims of a conflict that resulted ultimately only in ruin and misery for all involved. Pricks like Haig and Ludendorff would “lead” their armies from comfortable, opulent settings, ordering men to march into machine gun fire by the tens-and-hundreds-of-thousands. Even more would die in World War II, approximately 85 million people--110 million people in all, dead in ten years of warfare, and that isn’t even counting all the other conflicts and deaths resulting from the normal operation of Capitalism. Even if the “100 million killed by Communism” was true, it would be absolutely dwarfed by the casualties incurred by Capitalism.

But that’s a stupid game that I don’t like to play, reducing human deaths to some sort of barometer of “rightness.” It ignores the historical context of these events and smacks of bourgeois moralism masquerading as concern for humanity. More than that, it’s an insipid tu quoque parroted by idiots to convince other idiots.

But the Bolsheviks’ influence was not limited to these countries. In the West, communism inverted society’s understanding of the source of its values, creating political confusion that persists to this day.

I don’t know what this brainlet is trying to say by this. Communism is completely in line with Western values of fairness and democracy. The United States was one of the most militant countries in the world at the time, and for good reason. It was the Communists that won workers the 8-hour work day, sick leave, overtime pay, and so on and so on. The implication here is that this “political confusion” is the result of the plebeians standing up to their social betters. It’s clear that by David Satter’s idea of “Western Values,” he means social domination by an aristocracy of blood or wealth. Ah, yes, but it was the Bolsheviks and their mad desire for social equality that undermined human value.

He cherry picks some more quotes, plucking them from any explanatory context because they sound apparently vicious (violence is the prerogative of the wealthy, apparently). To be fair, I’m not entirely familiar with those sources. They very well could be as sinister as they sound, and if this piece wasn’t already stretching beyond the point of readability I’d investigate further, but for now that might have to wait for another day.

If we add to this list the deaths caused by communist regimes that the Soviet Union created and supported—including those in Eastern Europe, China, Cuba, North Korea, Vietnam and Cambodia—the total number of victims is closer to 100 million. That makes communism the greatest catastrophe in human history.

This is a swell little piece of sleight-of-hand. The Bolsheviks now aren’t only responsible for every dead person in Russia, they now have to take responsibility for every dead person ever in every ostensibly Socialist country. Of course, this little weasel doesn’t provide any sources, no links or citations, but I’m sure we can just take him at his word.

You really think someone would do that? Just go on the internet and tell lies?

The effect of murder on this scale was to create a “new man” supposedly influenced by nothing but the good of the Soviet cause. The meaning of this was demonstrated during the battle of Stalingrad, when Red Army blocking units shot thousands of their fellow soldiers who tried to flee. Soviet forces also shot civilians who sought shelter on the German side, children who filled German water bottles in the Volga, and civilians forced at gunpoint to recover the bodies of German soldiers. Gen. Vasily Chuikov, the army commander in Stalingrad, justified these tactics in his memoirs by saying “a Soviet citizen cannot conceive of his life apart from his Soviet country.”

Every subsequent paragraph proves that David Sater is naught but a dishonest shill. Does he shed the same crocodile tears for all the innocent men, women, and children killed in Dresden? Tokyo? Nagasaki? No, I don’t expect so, not from this towering intellect working for the “Hudson Institute.” Just who was Hudson, anyway?

In 1961, Kahn, Max Singer and Oscar Ruebhausen founded the Hudson Institute.

Oh, well that doesn’t sound so ba

Unlike most strategists, he was entirely willing to posit the form a post-nuclear world might assume. Fallout, for example, would simply be another one of life's many unpleasantnesses and inconveniences, while the "much-ballyhooed" rise in birth defects would not doom mankind to extinction because a majority of survivors would remain unaffected by them. Contaminated food could be designated for consumption by the elderly, who would presumably die before the delayed onset of cancers caused by radioactivity.

Ah, well, so much for moral principles, I suppose. I’ve stopped being surprised by the complete hypocrisy of the reactionary right. They’ll twist and turn every event, word, and statistic, go to any lengths to secure the moral high ground, and with the blase recalcitrance of a sociopath. Many of the deaths to which Satter is attributing to “Communism” are the result of specific circumstance prevalent at the time. He tries to paint the famine in the Ukraine as entirely the fault of the “draconian grain requisition undertaken to finance Soviet industrialization.” Nevermind the intentional destruction of wheat stores on the part of the “kulaks,” or the fact that the country was still devastated by World War I and the subsequent Civil War. No, it’s stupid, brute, evil Communism to blame. Why? Because.

The famine in China, too, occurred in unique circumstances, after more-or-less a full century of internecine warfare, civil war, invasion and destruction at the hands of the Japanese (to say nothing the predations of the Europeans, such as Britain flooding the country with opium). Governmental incompetence and mismanagement factored significantly, but to pretend that it was the exclusive  result of some quality special to and inherent in Communism is nothing short of deceitful. These mitigating factors don’t absolve them of responsibility for what happened, but they certainly account for the severity of some of the aforementioned crises.

This is only a partial rebuttal to all the wrong in these tools’ empty-headed scribblings. All of this sort of bullshit is repeated tiresomely often by brainlets and the shills sent to influence them. I’m not certain if Inez and David are stupid, dishonest, or both. They’re certainly hack historians at the least. They ignore critical context, surreptitiously edit text to fit their narrative, and display nothing but the most stolid ignorance. It’s really no surprise considering the outlets of their “work,” but they’re still contributing to perpetuating the sort of stupid myths used exclusively to malign Communism.

Unfortunately, as the contradictions of Capitalism continue to compound, increasing the misery of the working class, I fear that this sort of inane garbage is only going to become more prevalent.