: : For my own part, of cvourse, I abhor the anti-communist philosophy that led to so much repression, tyranny and exploitation of man by man. : Truly Nikhil, I do not excuse the excesses of any large administrative system. This nation has its share of ills and woes as does any other. I've read perhaps hundred of Sam's posts. Never have I heard him mention what was right, good, and proper with America - only what is wrong.
SDF: If Stuart Gort has this impression, it's time to correct it. What's good about America is that it contains patriotic Americans who recognize that American foreign policy for the past sixty years has mostly been in the wrong, and who are working to change it.
: This attitude has a polarizing effect on debate. When Sam challenged my depth by asking me to offer any salient counterpoints to a Noam Chomsky essay on the subject of American persecution of communism, I did so. I wish I could find the post but its long gone on the C&A board. Nevertheless, Sam has completely mischaracterized my opinion on the issue.
SDF: This is really vague, and I beg to differ, but the point is moot since the posts have all been scrubbed.
: I never suggested that there is anything good about killing anyone.
SDF: This is where I beg to differ.
: If you are willing to accept his characterization of my opinions without question you lose any shred of repect I may have for you.
SDF: Go ahead, question everything.
: At question is the disruption of imperialism. We should start simply.
: Can communism as practiced by the Soviet Union, for instance, be considered evil? Do you dispute the body count of communsist governments. For the sake of this argument I will concede that pure marxism was not practiced in the USSR. My point to Sam was that the "Black Book of Communism" has claimed some 85 to 100 million murdered directly by their communist governments. Perhaps, because there is no perfection in this world, we can qualify degees of evil by tallying body counts.
SDF: Uh, nope. See Nikhil Jaikumar's post below. Also, I debunked this sort of thinking a long time ago. Its inherent presumption is that "communists" form one great homogeneous mass, that "they" killed so many millions and therefore "they" are all guilty, that we don't need to sort out who exactly killed whom. Again, I beg to differ.
: There isn't much argument being offered to dispute what is in the book. It was prepared by a group of well respected french researchers.
SDF: I'll get back to you on that one. I rather suspect that the capitalists (e.g. Nixon and Kissinger) were accomplices to many of the murders committed by the so-called "communists" (e.g. Pol Pot's takeover of Cambodia, greatly facilitated by N & K's illegal carpet-bombing).
: My main point of contention is that Chomsky's essays and Sam's posts both characterize the U.S. military as gleeful in its rush to kill communists.
SDF: Actually, I agree with Chomsky that the US has persecuted all sorts of people using "communism" as a blanket excuse for military aggression against everybody and every nation that tries or has ever tried to become industrialized without the help of US-based multinational corporations. Neither of us gives a damn whether any of these killers feels glee or sorrow or condescension or whatever. It isn't an issue of some mysterious something said to reside within our souls. It's an issue of whether there were better ways of resolving the conflicts of the Cold War than by a US foreign policy that killed lots of people (as it did) merely for the sake of making the world safe for corporate domination. I argued, and argue, that through such a foreign policy, the US thusly handed the rest of the "developing" world plenty of excuses for supporting (phony) "communism".
: Indeed, Sam alluded to this again in his recent offering by using the inflated rhetoric he did. My point is simple. Communist atrocities have occurred in far, far greater numbers than those American atrocities that occurred because of fringe elements of the anti-communist movement and faulty U.S. policy. I'll even say that it was morally correct position for the U.S. government to take in opposing the proliferation of communism by deadly force.
SDF: This I REALLY dispute. Let me suggest once again that Stuart Gort go to his local college library and search for a copy of William Corson's THE BETRAYAL or Lederer and Burdick's THE UGLY AMERICAN. America would have done FAR BETTER in Vietnam had it actually tried to help the Vietnamese (as SOME AMERICANS actually tried to do!) rather than predicating almost all its policies on this "deadly force against Communists" pretext.
: Please don't come back at me and offer every example of U.S. failed policy. I know what has surfaced with regards to most of these conflicts. Certain instances have all the looks of a U.S. witch hunt, complete with burnings.
SDF: You mean like the ones portrayed in Oliver Stone's PLATOON.
: My question to you Nikhil;
: Do you ever ascribe any degree of competence, altruism, or honor to those U.S. servicemen who are commissioned to stop the Hitlers and Stalins?
SDF: They follow orders -- any other qualities they may have serve as reasons for ascribing humanity to their bodies. Time to debate policy, rallying support for the troops is a sideshow.
: Do you allow that if the horrors of historical communist imperialism are true that there certainly would be people in positions within the U.S. intellegence agencies to know that atrocities were occurring in the mid 1960's?
SDF: As I said, "communism" was, and is, a blanket term for these people for anyone standing in the way of corporate domination. And why we should trust the CIA even now is beyond me.
: Do you allow that there is good reason to use deadly force to stop an idealism that intends world domination but leaves death, destruction, and oppression in its path?
SDF: There were even better reasons to teach the idealists that they were being co-opted by fascists like Stalin, Mao, Vo Nguyen Giap, etc. Too bad the people in charge were in the thrall of capitalist ideology and thus were not listening.
: Get all the books you can on McCarthyism, Nikhil. While the icons of
: this period of time are now popularly denigrated as being hyper-reactionaries, it is interesting to note that all the movie studios of that day were asking the government to monitor their businesses because of the fact that they had become a target of subversive communist activity. McCarthy was only a hyper-reactionary, anti-communist witch hunter if the "Black Book on Communism" isn't true or is true but McCarthy didn't know about the atrocities. On the other hand, McCarthy might have seemed subdued by comparison to what should have been the proper moral response to whatever the communist body count tallied in the late forties. Perhaps McCarthy knew more then than you think he did. Maybe not.
SDF: Like "communism" ever threatened the US! LOL!
: We need to ask ourselves what is right and true in this world, Nikhil. We cannot afford to pretend that men will not and have not practiced all manner evil in whatever system they live under. But I know men who live and will die by honor. They don't gleefully kill anything and I won't abide Sam or anyone else suggesting that this is what our military is about. That mocks those men in a way Sam will never understand and trivializes their duty.
(patriotic marching-band music playing in the background)
SDF: Stuart Gort here trivializes the foreign policy issues at hand for the sake of a support-the-troops sentimentalism that does nothing to help anyone evaluate US foreign policy fairly.
None.
