Re: [A-List] James Petras on Beslan - fire away

[Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxx>]

Waistline2@xxxxxxx wrote:
> Comment
>
> The issue that is Beslan and the hostage taking of roughly 1400 . . . and the
> murder of 330 people . . . many of them children . . . is a question of
> political terrorism . . . which no thinking communist can support.
>
> This is the question avoided. The issue is not Putin  . . . or Yelsin but
> rather the attitude of communist workers towards the current wave of political
> terrorism.

The Palestinians use terror as well. We should not condemn the struggle
against Zionism because suicide bombers kill innocent civilians. What we
need to resolve is not whether terror is counter-productive, but whether
 the Chechen cause is just.

> Nevertheless . . . Beslan  . . . the hostage taking and murder of children is
> avoided by the "left ideological frontmen" of the imperial bourgeoisie and
> presented as a colonial question and anti-colonial actions and this is not the
> case.

But it is the case. The Czars colonized the Caucuses in exactly the same
manner as England colonized Ireland. In 1917, the Bolsheviks guaranteed
the right of self-determination. Within 6 years, a Thermidor in the
party and in society was returning the Soviet Union to many practices
that had been rejected by a revolutionary working class. That is why
Lenin wanted to remove Stalin. He saw him as a spokesman for these
backward pressures. That is why he referred to him in the following
terms: "a vulgar Great-Russian bully" who "violates ... the interests of
proletarian class solidarity".

This is not ancient history. Yeltsin and Putin were both trained as
Communists. Despite their conversion to market economics, they retained
the kind of Great Russian chauvinism that marked Soviet bureaucratic
socialism. This chauvinism took many different forms, some more virulent
than others. In the case of the Chechens, it was the most extreme. The
entire population was evicted from its homeland and sent to Siberia
during WWII because they were supposedly pro-Nazi. This was a typical
Stalin reaction to nationalist resistance. Instead of seeing it as based
on legitimate grievances, it was seen as a plot hatched by Hitler. Think
of it as the Mad Hatter logic of the Moscow Trials applied to an entire
nation.

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