Apologies accepted, clarification rejected for lack of clarity (Part 1)

["Nestor Gorojovsky" <nestorgoro@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Sorry, people, this will have to be long.

Alternative has said his last word (a decission I will respect and
cling to myself, lest this exchange turns out to become as
intoxicating, stupid, senseless, useless and asphyxiating a debate as
those that are still held at the halls of some "leftish" University
Faculties in Buenos Aires). Thus this is also my last word.

I accept his apologies not without some admiration for the slyness of
his answer, where an attempt to indirectly label me and my group as
"semifascists" became a simple matter of "objective" facts [Lukacs
had some things to say on this kind of appeal of "facts"...] Of
course, this did not take me unawares, since I know the manners and
ways deployed by the ordinary anti-Peronist leftist against the
Izquierda Nacional from my earliest ramblings in Argentinean
politics.

Will write down my comments to Alternative's comments between square
brackets [ ], so the whole thread can be followed and this posting
acts as a precis of our differences. In this way, I believe, we shall
safely keep the lid tightly closed and no stench will disrupt the
clear atmosphere of this list.

But, as a general introduction to my reply, allow me to post words by
a popular Latin American leader, words which stress the difference
between Alternative's view and mine. During a mass gathering in the
central and main square of the country's capital, this leader stated:

"[This mass of people gathered here today...]
¿Acaso se trata de fanáticos, personas ignorantes e incultas,
carentes de conocimientos históricos y políticos? A esta enorme masa
se le podría preguntar si hay entre ellos uno solo que no sepa leer y
escribir, o un analfabeto funcional con menos de sexto grado"
[Are these perhaps fanatics, ignorant people without culture, people
who lack historic and political knowledge? This enormous mass could
be made the question whether there is, among them, a single one who
cannot read and write, or a functional analphabete who has not
finished sixth grade]

Fidel, 2002? Peron, 1952?

My reply begins only now.

************************************************************
Apology and Clarification for Nestor

    To: <marxism@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
    Subject: Apology and Clarification for Nestor
    From: "Alternative" <alternative@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
    Date: Wed, 1 May 2002 17:55:09 -0700
    Importance: Normal
    In-Reply-To: <200205012324.TAA23724@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
    Reply-To: marxism@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
    Sender: owner-marxism@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

Nestor Gorojovsky :

I can assure you that was not my intention to enter in a flame war
with you.  I have no personal or political interest on such an
endeavor.

This response to you will be the last you'll ever receive from me on
these matters and I wrote it as to clarify that was neither my intent
nor the result of my postings to slander you or your organization.  I
apologize in advance if couple of comments I made in passing about
your organization hurt your feelings:

I wrote:

>"As for the Argentinean "National Left" would be interesting for you
to note that it exploded (was already very small) when its founder,
>Abelardo Ramos, reached the logical conclusion of his politics and
>uncritically supported Menem."

Nestor answered:

"Immediately upon his apostasy, which only a few could see in those
days, there was a split in the FIP, which slowly led to the formation
of what was known, at first, as the "Corriente Nacional" of the FIP,
and eventually to the foundation of the "Partido de la Izquierda
Nacional" in 1983."

Conclusion:

Your organization exploded.  The founder capitulated completely to
the bourgeoisie.  You obviously agree with me on this, spinning
notwithstanding.  Where is the slander?

[The slander lied in that you did not express the whole truth. "Dirán
que mientes dos veces / si dices la otra mitad" is a good piece of
verse by Antonio Machado that I have always kept highly among my
personal political rules. From your description, the important thing
was not the _explosion_, which I have never minimized or denied (and
which in fact shows that we were deeply ingrained in Argentinean
politics, because it shows that the greatest defeat of the national
movement -the 1976 coup- did not spare us), but the attempt to blame
for Ramos's apostasy the whole and complex array of groups that came
out from that explosion, which was generated, precisely, by that
apostasy. In Argentinean Spanish there is a verb, dear Alternative, a
verb that we in the national camp know far too well, which is the
verb "ningunear", which means approximately to "turn someone into
nobody". Consciously or unconsciously, carried on by your distaste
for any attempt to establish a national policy in Argentina from the
point of view of the working class, you simply tried to profit from
the scant knowledge that exists on the Argentinean left in the United
States and tried to "ningunear" the only living fraction of the
Izquierda Nacional,  which is the Spilimbergo group. Thus, "slander"
is a very mild word for what amounts to an attempt to effect a
political "disappearance". Let us lay this thing here, I accept your
apologies but nevertheless show to the general public this very old
and distasteful trick of the mainstream Leftists in Argentina when
confronted with a representative of the national movement.

Moreover, in the final days of his carreer, Ramos had very few
Izquierda Nacional militants around him, and at the same time we in
the Partido de la Izquierda Nacional began an (alas very slow)
interesting movement that is placing us in the centre of the vast
universe of former "Izquierda Nacional" members (BTW: many of them,
victims of the particular methods of the Ramos fraction, who, in the
same way that Alternative did, suggested that the Spilimbergo -
Corriente Nacional fraction did not exist, have expressed their joy
at discovering that there remained a hard core of socialists within
the national camp)].

Alternative goes on:


[Uncritical support to Menem]
> was not the last and unpredictable
>turn of a senile leader, but the continuation of a  policy that
>included to have Juan Peron and Isabel Peron on the top > of their
>ticket in the 70s's Presidential elections.

Nestor replied:

"The Izquierda Nacional ticket _did_ of course carry the Perón-Perón
formula, but from a completely independent position."

Conclusion:

We agree that your party had, as I said "Juan Peron- Isabel Peron" on
the top of their ticket".  Spinning notwithstanding that voting for a
right wing presidential formula of the bourgeoisie with some kind of
"independent" position is laughable, what I said was accurate and you
confirmed it.  Where is the slander?

[Again, the slander does not lie in what is said, but (ah, these
delicious Argentinean ways of insult) in what is _implied_. From the
way you stated things, the Izquierda Nacional appeared as a gang of
semi-fascist opportunists. Same trick in action. Most interesting,
however, is what follows. When it comes to explaining what happened
in 1974 and why Perón came to power, Alternative copies the general
line and hooker of the rancid "left liberals" in Argentina, Alfonsín
the first among them, and this is not a matter of chance since his
political current has always given "hot red" expression not to the
working class but to the middle classes whose best expression was the
Radical Party of Alfonsín. Our friend says:]

I would like to add that the Peron-Peron formula came about after
Peron returned to the country, as part of a political agreement with
the bourgeoisie, forced the resignation of President Campora (elected
few months before) who represented the Peronist left

[Cámpora was not the leader of the Peronist left, whatever you name
"left" in Peronism. If Alternative had a single idea of what was the
history of Peronism he would have discovered that Cámpora had reached
Presidency in May 1973 because of an agreement with the _oligarchic
military_, who forced Perón out of the elections. In fact, the
bourgeois character of Perón's leadership expressed itself NOT in the
fact that he helped overthrow Cámpora in September 1973, but on the
contrary in the fact that he accepted that Cámpora be the candidate
of the national camp in March 1973. This was his way to agree with
the oligarchic bloc. But since Alternative cannot see a difference
between the Onganía-Lanusse dictatorship and the avowedly right-wing
and certainly murderous (but less murderous than its follow-up)
regime led by the sinister Lopez Rega, he believes, together with the
Montoneros, the conservative middle classes, and the whole host of
members of the anti-national camp, that Cámpora's government was to
the "left" of Perón. It was not. Thus Campora's replacement in
September 1973 was actually the restoration of the original Peronism
in power. If you read this restoration as a move to the right, then
you are saying a lot more about yourself than about Peronism.

Not only that. Cámpora himself had never imagined that history called
him to replace Perón. An odontologist in San Andrés de Giles, Cámpora
was always a faithful servant of His Master General Perón, one of the
symbols of the obsequent Peronist Party during the 40s, and 50s. As
the head of the Cámara de Diputados during the early 50s, this
ordinary man from a second rank little town in the Province of Buenos
Aires who never raised above that limited horizon was a master in
playing the Chamber's bell which did not allow the opposition to
speak.  More could be added to his C.V., but his attitude during the
September crisis was respectable. And he suffered death in exile due
to that. But not at all a "leftist".

What Alternative is defending, in fact, is not the "leftist"
Peronists but the Montoneros. The actual Peronist left, however, were
the working class, who did not want Cámpora in power, nor (much less
so) the Montoneros in power. They wanted Perón in power. Thus, the
September 1973 elections, far from being a turn to the right were a
turn to the _left_ in the Argentinean system of political
representation. Alternative stresses the ominous and sinister
characteristics of the López Rega reign that followed immediately
upon Perón's passing away, and this is all his comment on the class
meaning of the replacement of Cámpora by Perón in September:]

and imposed a right wing government that murdered journalists, trade
union activists and left militants, including hundreds of his own
left wing supporters in the Ezeiza massacre (upon Peron arrival to
the country, when over 1-Million people went to the Ezeiza airport to
receive him, his wife's main supporters, including Lopez Rega,
unleashed a massive terrorist attack against the crowds of
Montoneros, killing and lynching hundreds of them).

[Last things first, let us begin by Ezeiza:  yours faithfully the
underscored, dutifully disobeying the orders of his party -which had
expressly denounced the attempt to organize a reception for Perón in
Ezeiza, instead of doing so in the main arteries of downtown Buenos
Aires and thus preparing the terrain for the massacre-,  WAS PRESENT
IN EZEIZA on June 20th, and was happy to escape alive. Those
interested in understanding what happened there, from the point of
vie of the masses involved, should take a reading of Bernardo
Kordon's extraordinary short story "Ezeiza".

Since I WAS THERE, and what's more since I had arrived very early the
evening before,  I was sitting together with some friends and
comrades _exactly in the place where the whole thing began_, so that
I can give my personal account of what I SAW and SUFFERED.

What I saw was an attempt to "win the stage", organized _by the
Montoneros_ against the right wing gangs of Colonel Osinde, who had
been the official organizers of the reception. What I saw was that
both Montoneros and the right wing gangs cared nothing about the
million or so ordinary people who were sitting there on the grass,
among the trees in the little woods near the bridge where Perón was
expected to appear, along the freeway that led to the airport, people
like me who had been spending the whole night playing cards, sipping
mate or drinking wine, people unlike me, who had come with their
children to restore the thread of history and give their offspring
the sense of pride that their parents had given to them when they
took them to the mass gatherings of Peronism during the early 50s.
They cared nothing about us, and we could not care less about them,
we people who had nothing to do with the attempts by the elitist (the
"leftish" robe was, in part, a disguise) Montoneros and the overtly
fascist organizers, that is with both wings of the anti-socialist
Peronism. Both Montoneros and the gangs of Osinde were efficient in
keeping Perón far from the only true "left" that was spread on the
field, the mass of ordinary Argentineans who expected to meet their
leader again after 18 years of exile.

It should be made clear that those Montoneros that Alternative
considers the "left" of Peronism were never a "left" in the serious
sense of the word. They were precisely the kind of "Peronist left"
that the ordinary Argentinean "leftist" adored, a "left" which hated
the patriotic and nationalist legacy of Peronism, a "left" that
believed in the possibility to turn Peronism "socialist" from within
(and was thus, of course, doomed and an easy prey for political
debate: against them, you could always score a point by remembering
the Canton Massacre of 1927), a Left which, child of anti-Peronist
liberal democrats, requested from Peronism socialism, and turned
against Perón when he simply stated that Peronism was not socialist.

Such a piece of news. As a mass phenomenon, the Montoneros expressed
not the advanced layers of the working class (which, at most, gave
some support to a few of the Montoneros-sponsored but hardly
Montoneros-led formations of the Juventud Trabajadora Peronista,
Peronist Worker Youth) but the rage of the middle classes in their
younger layers at the consequences of the 1955 coup (in a sense, a
similar though much milder mood prevails
among the less popular Neighborhood Assemblies in Buenos Aires today:
some of them kept
carefully looking to the sidelines while the workers were deprived of
their salaries, but
entered in rage when they were deprived of their savings).

These newly spawned "Peronists" wanted Perón to be a socialist, an
old Creole
personification of Mao Tse Tung who would mildly allow them to _drive
Peronist masses
towards_ (stress points to the common point of agreement between
"ordinary" socialists
like Alternative and the Montoneros) socialism from the top levels of
the Peronist apparat.
They surrounded this ultimate bureaucrat (though on personal terms,
an excellent person)
Cámpora, whose greatest virtue was his doggish loyalty to Perón (that
is why Perón chose
him as the Presidential candidate for March 1973), and loved most of
his cabinet. They were
against the "bourgeois"  Minister of Economy, José Ber Gelbard, and
they delivered
inflammatory speeches to the top levels of the police, of the
military, and so on. It would be
most instructive to explain the political origins (and, worse yet,
the political evolution up to
this day) of those "leftists". But we don't have the time to do it
now. Suffice it to say that
the "Camporist" months, from the point of view of Perón AND of the
working class, was a
historic unjustice. After 18 years of resistence, struggle and death,
the same gang of petty
bourgeois leftists who had hailed the 1955 overthrow of the
antidemocratic Perón, hailed
now the replacement of Perón with Cámpora by way of their children,
who were against the
return of Perón to Presidency because they were "socialists" and "el
viejo" was senile...

In order to fight this ultraleftist, hardly socialist, certainly
provocative and petty
bourgeois, not Peronist at all, generation, Perón leant on the right
wing of his movement.
What's news in this. Nothing. Precisely because of its strong working
class composition,
Peronism had always had a very ominous and gigantic "right wing". We
in the Izquierda
Nacional did not support Peronism because of its "progressives" (if
you wanted to be truly
revolutionary and remain on the national camp, was and is our line,
you had to belong to the
Izquierda Nacional, not to Peronism)

I do not adhere to the "two demons" thesis so heavily quoted by the
rightist liberal
democrats in Argentina, but it should be stressed that, willingly or
unwillingly (not to speak
of obscure members of the Secret Services of the oligarchic regime
who had infiltrated
them from the very beginning, and at the topmost level) this "left"
became a central piece
in the provocation that led to the 1976 coup.]

[Well, this is too long already. Will go on tomorrow or Saturday
next. I insist: this will be my last word on this issue, since I am
quite busy elsewhere, in a political arena where I am, in
Alternative's mind, "non influential"]

Hugs to all,
Néstor Miguel Gorojovsky
gorojovsky@xxxxxxxxxxxx

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Compañeros del exercito de los Andes.

...La guerra se la tenemos de hacer del modo que podamos:
sino tenemos dinero, carne y un pedazo de tabaco no nos
tiene de faltar: cuando se acaben los vestuarios, nos
vestiremos con la bayetilla que nos trabajen nuestras mugeres,
y sino andaremos en pelota como nuestros paisanos los indios:
seamos libres, y lo demás no importa nada...

Jose de San Martín, 27 de julio de 1819.

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