Re: Dialectical Emptyness

[Margaret Trawick <trawick@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Carroll wrote:

>(3) Does it come from sheer innocence (ignorance), or are you acting as
>a troll in equating anti-communism with mere  "banning"?

C'mon Carroll.  This is a needless slap.


>Anti-communism
>refers to more or less systematic ways of poisoning the wells of discourse
>by establishing the preconception that something is false or vicious simply
>because it is a communist who expresses it. And amongst left anti-
>communists (and, I'm sorry to say, in debatres among communists themselves)
>the most common such method of silencing communists (or rather plugging
>the ears of their readers/listeners) is to imply/argue/ hint that a
>communist's arguments need not be responded to because they are
>not real arguments, they are merely the mechanical and mindless
>expression of some supposed "orthodoxy" which the poor sap of
>a communist mindlessly parrots. Nevermind that wherever two marxists
>congregate they will soon produce three "orthodoxies."

And whose fault is this?  If some self-professed communists waste their time by
flaming each other on a public website, they just show themselves to be damn
fools.

The problem with freedom of speech is that we take it too lightly.  We *assume*
that the invisible audience out there is already against us.  So we blather on,
full of self-pity, about how no one takes us seriously.  And open-minded people
who wander into the audience, fully prepared to learn and pay attention, will
just wander off again when they see our self-absorbed strutting and preening,
our stupid little cock fights.

>Probably there is no more deeply held conviction amongst the majority
>of people in the United States (including many who either think of
>themselves or really are marxists) than that communists (or *other*
>communists) don't think, they merely parrot an orthodoxy. All U.S.
>intellectuals must parrot some version of this to establish their credentials
>as  independent thinkers and free spirits in contrast to that thundering
>herd out there of "orthodox marxists."

Thus "communists" and "other communists" are hanging themselves.  Who's the
troll here?

MT