From: William M. Mandel (wmmmandel@earthlink.net)
Date: Tue Feb 13 2001 - 22:39:32 PST
Message-ID: <3A8A2823.6D6E5ADF@earthlink.net> Date: Tue, 13 Feb 2001 22:39:32 -0800 From: "William M. Mandel" <wmmmandel@earthlink.net> Subject: [Fwd: Climbers 2]
"William M. Mandel" wrote:
> I do take umbrage at the statement that "domestic revolutionary groups
> should have folded up if they had wanted to be honest about the
> possibilities of revolution in the West."
> Hindsight is no guide to how people thought and why they thought
> it, in an earlier time. When I was invited to re-join the Communist
> Party in 1956, after having been kicked out in a deep-underground
> secret trial at the bottom of MCarthyism three years earlier for
> having a mind of my own, I accepted, against my better judgment,
> because I loved the honesty,devotion, and courage of the people with
> whom I had spent thirty years in children's, youth, and the adult
> organization. I did make the condition that I would give it one year,
> to see if it would make the changes I thought essential to its being
> effectual. It didn't, and I left.
> My generation grew up in a time when there was the model of a
> country, the Soviet Union, that alone on earth had no unemployment
> during the world-wide Great Depression when many Americans were
> literally starving. It had no evictions when Americans were being
> thrown out into the street daily before your very eyes, and you
> wondered if you would be next. It was practicing affirmative action in
> education for women and ethnic minorities, as I saw it in my
> classmates in Moscow University in 1932, and in jobs, and in
> government appointments, and in the introduction of ballet, opera,
> symphony music, museums, and subsidized mass and cheap editions of the
> world's literary classics in dozens of languages, often of people who
> had been pre-literate before the Revolution, as well as the Russians
> themselves, three-quarters of whom didn't know Tolstoy because they
> hadn't been able to read and write. It was providing arms to the
> Spanish Republic when no other government on earth except Mexico would
> give any help whatever. It was calling for collective security to stop
> Hitler when the West was nudging him Eastward at Munich.
> So what was illogical about thinking that that was the way to go?
> If not for Roosevelt, who had brains enough to understand that serious
> concessions had to be made to the people if the anger described in
> Grapes of Wrath were not to overthrow the system, who knows what route
> this country would have taken?
> Of course I have left out the terror that began in the USSR in
> 1935, when there was no objective reason for it, and it was able to
> occur because (a) of the very discipline that had enabled its
> Communist Party to accomplish what I have listed above, (b) because
> the men who led the Soviet Union were, without exception, veterans of
> the three-year war of defense against the monstrous Intervention of
> 1918-20 by fourteen countries including the U.S., to destroy the new
> social experiment, and (c) because Hitler was frankly and openly
> offering to repeat that, and calling upon the West at least not to
> interfere, which is exactly the course it followed when he sent his
> Condor Legion and his navy to help Franco in Spain and shell its
> civilians (in those naive days that was regarded as a sin).
> Because, when I returned to the United States, I found our press
> lying every day about things I had witnessed with my own eyes before
> the terror, when I could talk to anybody and go everywhere, I didn't
> believe it was occurring. After all, the U.S. Ambassador, Joseph E.
> Davies, a corporation lawyer, had sat in the courtroom day after day
> during the trials of the oppositionist Communists and been convinced
> that they really were Nazi spies (see his book, Mission to Moscow). So
> I accepted the fact of the terror only when Khrushchev officially
> admitted it in 1956. And I went on believing in the desirability of
> Marxist socialism until 1991, when two years of sharply declining
> living standards in the formerly Communist-governed countries failed
> to bring about an about-face in their peoples' rejection of a return
> to it, and I had to re-think my convictions of a lifetime.
> If I didn't know you personally, and know you are a nice guy, I'd
> resort to sarcasm and write that we're not all as smart as you, Ken,
> or sharper words. But it does hurt to find you calling dishonest those
> who built the movement for unemployment insurance until even the A.F.
> of L. leadership, which had said: "American workers will never accept
> the dole," had to change its mind; those who were killed by the police
> in the San Francisco General Strike (specifically Communists); those
> who built a real movement against lynching, and won before the Supreme
> Court in the Scottsboro Case the right of African-Americans to sit on
> juries..
> It's precisely posts like yours that convince me I was right to
> spend all those years writing Saying No To Power, so the Seattle
> generation can learn something about how the American people learned
> to fight for its own interests in my lifetime.
>
> Bill Mandel
>
> Kenneth Ellis wrote:
>
>> Bill Mandel wrote a long time ago:
>>
>> > Not so simple, Ken. There was a point in the early '70s when the
>> staffs at all
>> > three then Pacifica stations, KPFA, WBAI, KPFK, were more Maoist
>> than anything
>> > else, due to their desperate desire to keep the '60s going. Had
>> things been
>> > fully democratic, the stations would have gone down the drain
>> along with
>> > everything else of a Maoist nature.
>>
>> Had Pacifica been fully democratic from the getgo, and had it been
>> taken over by the mainstream early on, would world (or American)
>> history have been much different, better, or worse? I doubt it.
>> Curious people would have found out what they wanted to know by
>> other means. But, this is not to belittle Pacifica's contribution to
>> free speech and thought. I am glad to have been able to play a small
>> role in the 80's and 90's, and I hope that those who are dedicating
>> so much energy and resources into restoring Pacifica will succeed.
>> Otherwise, I would be one of the many who have recently noticed us
>> with 'unsubscribe'.
>>
>> If KPFA fell into the hands of Maoists for awhile, Maoism obviously
>> wasn't strong, valid, or uniting enough to remain KPFA's guiding
>> ideology. Quick burnout, or an inability to become attractive to
>> enough people, is a problem for all ideologies that aim at radical
>> changes in government or property relations.
>>
>> The absurdity of some leftist ideology may know no beginning, and
>> may know no end. As soon as it became clear that Europe was not
>> going to revolt in sympathy with the Russian revolution of 1917,
>> domestic revolutionary groups should have folded up if they had
>> wanted to be honest about the possibilities of revolution in the
>> West. Enough people back then understood that the precondition for a
>> Marxist revolution included the overthrow of a bunch of monarchies
>> in Europe and Russia, but because some revolutionaries in
>> democracies back then were not honest, and because they could always
>> find a few gullibles to buy their damaged revolutionary goods,
>> 'revolution in democracies' became no more than what it could ever
>> have become - a mere business - hence the bureaucracy, censorship,
>> secrecy and sectarianism of modern revolutionary sects, dishonest
>> traits that are antithetical to democratic values, and which helped
>> to poison so many relations in the left. Unfortunately, few see a
>> way out of the mess.
>>
>> While failing to bring about 'revolution in democracies', many
>> radicals have nevertheless done important and impressive work on
>> social justice issues that will not soon be forgotten, driven in
>> many cases by the sense of fairness embodied in their socialist
>> ideologies. If they could only get over their foolish notions that
>> 'governments and private property need to be radically changed',
>> that new understanding would help their credibility and
>> effectiveness.
>>
>> > Fortunately, the then Pacifica Board had a better grasp of
>> reality.
>> > The difference from today is that it understood and upheld the
>> principles
>> > on which Pacifica was founded, which were for freedom of thought
>> > and not ideological. Today's Board wants the stations to be
>> megaphones
>> > for the Clinton-Gore Democratic Party.
>> > Bill Mandel
>> >
>> > Kenneth Ellis wrote:
>> >
>> > Evan asked:
>> >
>> >> I always wondered what makes a Mary Frances Berry or a Lynn
>> Chadwick -
>> >> how does someone with any roots in the community get to be like
>> that?
>> >
>> > Some people will do anything to get ahead. There may not be much
>> financial
>> > incentive to heeding the will of us little people, but fulfilling
>> the agenda
>> > of the politically powerful may be a different cup of tea.
>> >
>> >> This is the first time I have seen that transformation live and
>> first hand.
>> >> What can we do to detect these latent tendencies toward
>> syncophancy and
>> >> tyranny earlier and cast these people out before the metasticize?
>>
>> >
>> > Make our organizations truly democratic from the getgo instead of
>> bureaucratic
>> > like Pacifica. With Pacifica's structure, deterioration like this
>> was
>> > inevitable.
>>
>> Ken Ellis
>>
>> http://www.geocities.com/kenellis2020
>
> --
> ÐÏࡱá
-- ÐÏࡱá
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