Re: Black haired young man still stubborn.

["Nestor Miguel Gorojovsky" <Gorojovsky@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

En relación a Re: Black haired young man still stubborn.,
el 7 Sep 00, a las 19:11, Andrej Grubacic dijo:

> My dear friend,
> please feel free to send our correspondence everywhere you like.

OK. Then, I am sending copies of this to both marxism and leninist
lists, even though you are an antimarxist and an antileninist!!!!

I will pour myself a little glass of tequila, put some salt in the
saddle between thumb and forefinger, lick it, drink to your health,
then sit down, and begin my answer. OK? Firstly you declare yourself
antiMarxist and many other things, on which I am absolutely not
allowed to comment, just to learn from your lived experience. Just
allow me to comment that the description of your formative readings
does not match with your definition of Tito as a dictator. But OK.
Again, you remind me of an anecdote in Argentina. One of the greatest
Argentinian writers of the 19th. Century, Lucio V. Mansilla, was
nephew to Rosas, a real dictator. One day, his father (hero of the
battles against the Anglo-French fleet in the late 40s) discovered
him reding Rousseau. They were rich people, and the old Mansilla was
a clever man. He took the book from the young boy's hands, threw it
outside the room, and told his son: "No nephew of Rosas reads the
_Social contract_ in Argentina", and he immediately sent the boy to a
long journey along Europe and the Middle East. Thanks to this
intelligent decission, Mansilla read many more things than Rousseau,
and we Argentinians obtained an excellent writer. Now, THAT is a
dictatorship. But let us go back to your letter, where you go on like
this:

> I don't
> understand your warning of " not making a terrible mistake"? What
> terrible mistake?  have already said that i have made my choice - I
> like to feel like Lucretius in all of this mess; I am not going to
> make a choice.

That is precisely the point. Lucretius hated all Gods, didn't he?
Thus, he chose reality and earthly things, not Heavens. You are
rejecting both, you are refusing to see, or unwilling to see, or unable to see 
if you
prefer, that there will come  a moment when your "neutrality" will become
partisanship. Then, you will make the decission I am thinking of. The moment is
approaching, want it or not, dear Andrej. The problem
lies in that while you are in your perfect right to state that "I do not
> believe and i do not participate in political process",

the political process does believe in you and will participate in
you. This is unescapable. As to the declaration of Marcos (see
below), either it implies that he is decided to wait for better
times, or that he is decided to bring his people to a tragedy. I vote
for the first, of course. And what's more, it is very meaningful that
Marcos and the zapatistas always stress the _Mexican_ character of
their struggle. This is political involvement at a maximum.

. As sup Marcos
> said, with  unmistakable anarchist connotation: "Elections are not the
> time of zapatistas". I do agree.

Then you go on, saying:

> because of my ... balanced anti governmental and anti imperialist
> stance, I think that I cannot make a mistake. No need to worry, my
> dear friend.

This is precisely why I am worrying. The balance will become
meaningful in political terms, whether you want it or not. When a new
confrontation comes (and elections will of necessity be a
confrontation between Yugo govm't and imperialism, though the latter
will operate via a local formation, as it always does) your
neutrality will not stand balanced at all. It will fall down to one
side. Please be careful to see which side it falls down to, because
they are not equivalent. Not at all.

Afterwards, you come to the core of the debate:

>
>  I do believe that ideology is almighty ( in this particular context)
> and I am putting my fellowman, very consciously, in the position of
> POLITICAL fools ( there is no elitism here) because they have
> been successfully manipulated. This same model
> of research of public opinion I am using to explain , mutatis
> mutandis, public opinion in US today and in Nazi Germany.

The problem with the model is as follows: one can be manipulated only
IF the manipulator has some material bargain for you, either in the
present or in a foreseeable future. Nazis offered the German people a
thousand years of German supremacy on the world, and a reconversion
of the economy that absorbed the huge mass of unemployed in a few
years. The American working classes, even though now under attack
from capital, are still largely privileged as compared with their
counterparts in the Third World. This is an objective fact on which
to build a mystification. Not such a fact in Yugoslavia. Thus,
workers in the central countries were not idiots, they were short
sighted. But in Yugoslavia? Why do they support a government that
ensures further sanctions, foreign intervention, and all that? If
under such conditions they are still manipulable, then they are
idiots. I do not believe that this is a sound sociological method.
People are not idiots. Individuals can be, but social classes are
not.

Well, the tequila is finished. And the important issues too. So that
I am sorry that I cannot move your eyes to a different point. I am
not trying to convince you. I am just offering friendly advice. I am
afraid, however, that you will not be able to discover the truth
until it is too late. In the end, this was the experience of my own
family too.

A hug, and take care of yourself,



Néstor Miguel Gorojovsky
gorojovsky@xxxxxxxxxxxx