re: An outbreak of primitive Stalinism on the Marxism list

["Fred Feldman" <ffeldman@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

(Note that I now have a slightly changed email address:
ffeldman@xxxxxxxxxxx, instead of ffeldman@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx .  As of now, my
server will still recognize the old email address.  But those who mail to me
might want to make the adjustment just in case Verizon, which bought up Bell
Atlantic and will no doubt be swallowed up itself in the near future,
suddenly gets cranky about this.)

Actually, I didn't know there had been a NEW outbreak of primitive Stalinism
on the Marxism list, but I don't read every mailing all the way through.  (I
always read at least parts of Melvin's though, assuming he's the one who
broke out, and find them quite useful at times  Did he escape the grounds on
the Moscow Trials again?  Bad boy!)

One thing I always agreed on with Louis even before I became part of the
list was about the uselessness of endless and go-nowhere Stalin-Trotsky
debates.  I refuse to get excited about the remaining handful of people who
defend the Moscow trials, make jokes about ice-picks and so on.  The numbers
who do so with any sense of commitment at all are small and can only get
smaller.  I am not going to get into arguments over who didn't  meet who at
the nonexistent Hotel Bristol in Amsterdam or who didn't give what
instructions to Pyatakov when the latter didn't fly to the Oslo airport to
meet Trotsky.  There is literally nothing to debate anymore.  The facts have
been established.

This is a settled matter.  We won this one.  I prefer to debate those who
still disagree on matters on which they are more willing to accept the test
of reality. This is not 1937 when Trotsky, Sedov, Shachtman, Novack, and
others had to spend day after day pounding away at the trials.  Its a
settled issue, extremely well documented by thousands of people both better
and worse qualified than Bertram Wolfe. Nothing Bob Gould can say will
convince the stragglers, nothing he can say strengthens the verdict that the
human race, almost as a species, has reached on this matter.

Those of us who can securely chalk this battle up in our win column should
be eager to move on and determined to do so, as I am.
Fred Feldman


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