Re: AUT: Re: passe-montagne (1/2)

[Ilan Shalif <gshalif@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi comrades.
Like the article itself, so my runt is not news. However, as
it
made me remember old bad smells I feel the urge to comment.

Antagonism wrote:

> BEHIND THE BALACLAVAS OF
> SOUTH-EAST MEXICO
>
> "Because those who are too quick to admire and who are
> suddenly convinced are rarely the salt of the earth"
> - B. Traven, In The Freest State In The World, 1919,
> Insomniac Edition, Paris 1995.

Citation are aplenty, and cheep. I can also find one about
people who are so pessimistic they dare not dream... and are
going after those who do.

> It would seem not! With a smile slung over their shoulder,
> people today again go off "to do revolutionary Chiapas" in
> convoys organised by fellow travellers of the Zapatistas.
> On a well-signed route, people have to agree to see only
> what they have to see and to believe in the leader's
> words.

Demagogues have the well versed tactic of "transforming" the
other side position to make it easier to attack.

No sane leftist of any kind think that Chiapas is in the
middle or even prelude to the revolution which will bring
about "any kind of class less society".

They use of "fellow travelers" label of the despised
"Leninists" is another trick.

I only met 3000 of sympathizers of EZLN and only two amongst
the 100 or so mexicans were from Chiapas.

NO ONE OF THEM claimed that what is going on is "the
revolution". Only dogmatic people who do not hold in high
esteem the mass struggles against aspect of the system -
which are not of industrial workers, can so state their
mind.

Only those who are not so much interested in non
authoritarian ways of struggle (or just less than those of
the past) can ridicule the Chiapas struggle and its
significant.


> The groups of revolutionary tourists, seduced by the
> exoticism of the unique Indian culture 1,

Going to Chiapas is mainly in the mood of Spain 1936. Far
from luxurious treatment. With less than 100% personal
security.

> are incapable of giving out any information or direct
account
> of what is happening in the Mexican countryside:

It is more probable the result of reluctance to provide
ammunition to an opponent.

S/he who want to obtain the facts can find it in
libraries...

> The groups of revolutionary tourists, seduced by the
> exoticism of the unique Indian culture 1, are incapable of

> giving out any information or direct account of what is
> happening in the Mexican countryside:

The one who cares, can find aplenty facts about male
dominance in the villages. No one with a bit of reality
touch can expect a patriarchal religious people to change
over night, just because they fighting for their indigenous
rights.

The community ownership of land is well known in many parts
of the world. In palestain of the 19th century it was the
norm.

Even today, in Israel, part of the remnant are brought to
curt and economic magazines.

> They are also incapable of expressing the slightest
> critical
> element which could enable us to deepen our knowledge of
> the avant-garde organisation running the armed struggle.

Tell me who your friends are...

May be there was not effortless available information three
years ago. However, to brings an out dated text like this in
a au-top-sy list?

>  How come they can throw themselves naively in support of
> a movement which is a vehicle for the values of ethnic
> identity and patriotism, which are nowadays at the heart
> of the most
> barbaric tendencies in the world?

In the name of the advanced industrial proletariat, the old
leftists supported the "state feudalism" of soviet Russia...

Are people who are fighting against the oppression and
forced proletarization of indigenous people so insignificant
for the "purists"? People of the same mind are against the
support to the palestinian indigenous people who are
struggling against Zionist settler colonialism.

Are they need punishment because they are still with mode of
thinking suitable to their level of development?

> It's in this way that, in the name of tactical support,
> people consider as acceptable for others what is
> unacceptable for
> themselves!

Old bread is a luxurious for a starving person. Being
satiated or with the hunger of diet dose not prevent one
from acknowledge this fact. According to the same logic,
people should not have joined the resistance to the Nazi
occupation.

> 2.
>
> The totalitarian character of Mayan and Incan societies no
> longer needs to be demonstrated. Despite that, the myth of
> an idyllic Indian community has a long life. This myth is
> partly nourished by the idea that people hold about
> community. As
> if the community form of pre-capitalist societies somehow
> prevented a very structured hierarchy, centralised power
> and barbaric forms of work exploitation.

People who dream about the post capitalist community based
order, can have a glimpse of some non capitalist, communal
way of organization.

The settler colonialism in Palestain/Israel created a very
developed commune movement. In spite of the chauvinistic
ideology and being colonialist tools, it fascinated
libertarian socialists all over the world.

The dream of post capitalist class less society need more
than economic analyzes as raw material...

> To speak of "local traditions of democratic
> decision-making" and to present the rules which governed
> them as forms of primitive democracy is to keep silent
> about the authority of
> the elders and chiefs which depended on a central
> theocracy to enforce orders and to defend their
> interests....

No it is not. It is just call for the attention the LESS
authoritarian aspect of an interesting struggle for
indigenous rights. No one will claim that there exists a
classless post capitalist island any where - not even in
Mexico.

Any one who bother to read the EZLN texts about female
members can find description of the internal struggle for
women liberation in the Zapatista's region.

> The aim is to create "red bases": a network of
> organisations which are to cover all spheres of social
> life and, eventually, be able to control these poor areas.
> Tactics are borrowed
> from the leftist tendencies of the Chinese cultural
> revolution:

Red bases were a tactic of the communist party of China all
along the years. It was mainly started a self defence
against persecution. It started in the 20's and continued
till victory.

It is a wild logic to compare Chiapas  of the 90's to China
of the late 60's. Or, to compare a struggle for indigenous
people rights with any revolutionary fights of nations
against imperialism.

(By the way, The chinese communists did not use wooden
simulations of guns...)

> the direction of the political organisation was never to
> come out into the open, its decisions always being
> presented as the result of consultation with the masses,
> expressed in committees and in assemblies.

Can you imagine how "stupid" must be the Cheapens not to see
through the women liberation component of the EZLN what
their real aims are?

To all comrades who do not know patriarchal superstructure
first hand: The suppression of females is the foundation of
this mode of social order. To put forward the struggle for
women lib in the EZLN army and in society as a whole is a
strange expression of cover up.

> Today, it is not easy to establish a clear and straight
> line from the organisation developing during this
> 'implantation' period to the birth of the EZLN. But what's
> for sure is the existence of this link. After a lapse of
> time other Maoist groups arrived in
> Chiapas. Marcos himself would have been among one of the
> last "brigades".

Wonderful way of insinuation. I myself learnt Mao texts in
Chinese... and even was a kind of extreme leftist Zionist.

So, what if they were Maoists in the past?

We are not mind probers... not even the psychologists among
us...

We can only analyze texts and observe real behavior.

If political activists talk like internationalist social
libertarians, behave like it and seems to feel like it
too... who come we are invited to treat them as another
spacious.

If some one write in the same paragraph about the dogmatic,
vanguardist, sectarian and murderous Shining path and the
EZLN as affiliated in any way in one compartment of the
author head... it must be a very sick one.

>  Its Marxist-Leninist cadres have never criticised the
> exploitative content of the systems which collapsed.

I wonder what texts were available to the authors and the
one who brought this old text without bringing it
up-to-date. I wonder how strong one should be so s/he can
stretch Marxism-Leninism so it can include the "net-work of
struggles" which contradict the hierarchy of the
state-capitalism ideology.

> The EZLN is the first guerrilla movement of the
> post-communist period, a bureaucracy which has its
> democratic demagogy as unsold stock.

I wonder what content have the outdoors intend the word
bureaucracy to convey. In Alice in Wonderland it was said
that words convey just the meaning the speaker means them -
no publicly agreed one.

It seems that the author of the article put a lot of effort
to destroy the connection between the EZLN and the awaking
post-communist-period communist libertarian movement.

Spain, Madrid, summer 1997 which experienced the 3000
participants of the second encounter, had a "second
opinion".

> The voices of the rebels of Chiapas are reduced to just
> one voice, which speaks and writes in the name of all the
> others!

In addition to various names, and genders, Marcos had to be
with supra natural abilities to be in the same time in
different places. You see, it was not Ramona who came to
Mexico-city to have a kidney transplant. It was really
Marcos himself in disguise.

> Modernity is revealed to us in the form of a caricature of
> the past: we thought we'd got rid of Bolshevik
> avant-gardism only to find o urselves with the
> avant-gardism of Zorro.
> The EZLN is managerialism in a democratic balaclava.

Sorry comrades. I thought that together with Bolshevik
vanguardism and Trotskist apologetics for elitism, we will
be free from intellectually unhonest persons in the
international of anti capitalist libertarians.

The old tactics of Leninists is still with us. The authors
criticizing the Chiapas struggle and EZLN - who do not
pretend to be more than a mass struggle for indigenous
people rights, that they do only this.

It is the equivalent of banning any mass struggle which is
not a part of a general revolution. It just does not have
any thing common with communist libertarians class war.

Ilan Shalif

http://members.tripod.com/~alternativ_psy/anarchy.html
http://www.geocities.com/~drilanshalif/Anarchy.html
http://flag.blackened.net/ishalif/anarchy.html
Tel-Aviv 61132 ISRAEL (Occupied Palestain)

  You CAN teach old dog new tricks BUT it takes lots of
effort.





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