[PEN-L:9530] RE: Pol Pot and Shades of Summers

["Craven, Jim" <jcraven@xxxxxxxxx>]

-----Original Message-----
From: Macdonald Stainsby [mailto:mstainsby@xxxxxxxxxxx]
Sent: Thursday, July 22, 1999 2:08 AM
To: marxism@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: Re: Pol Pot and Shades of Summers





> > From: Craven, Jim
> > Yes, some of the propaganda about the "Killing Fields" is exactly
> > that--propaganda. Yes Pol Pot was a serious revolutionary deeply
>committed
> > throughout his life to the liberation of Khampuchea. Yes, "revolutionary
> > excesses" were committed prompted partly by machinations from the
>outside
> > and deep-seated contradictions inside. Yes, neither sins or
>accomplishments
> > can be laid at the feet of any one person no matter how influencial. But
>we
> > should also call a spade a spade: real crimes were indeed committed and
>some
> > real innocents needlessly suffered and were killed.
>
>It's worth noting that these crimes were exposed by genuine
>revolutionaries, and that Pol Pot allied to imperialism to oppose them.
>
>'Yes Pol Pot was a serious revolutionary deeply committed throughout his
>life to the liberation of Khampuchea.' is a simply grotesque statement,
>exhibiting the willful blindness that kept Stalinism dominant in the
>workers' movement for so long in so many states outside the Soviet Union.
>This blindness played into the hands of reaction far worse than the
>occasional Stalinophobic excesses of Trotskyism.  There are good reasons
>why imperialism was able to steal the mantle of democracy, and the
>inability of so many Marxists to recognise what is unacceptable, and to
>reject the indefensible, was one of them.

One day I get the premature feeling that "finger pointing" is coming to an
end so we can start to build in unity  Then, out of nowhere, Trotskyism vs.
Stalinism actually enters into a debate on the historical experience of Pol
Pot! On this point, I think we can all safely assume that Jim isn't planning

a revival of Pol Potism, but is pointing out that even this gotesque picture

should not be allowed to be painted by reactionary press script. Pol Pot DID

overthrow a regime that was a comprador of the US, and indeed does anyone
believe that all of the starvation totals had nothing to do with the
American blockade? Is it really all that more "honest" to say "I'm a red,
but I'm an anti-Pol Pot type, so it doesn't concern me to look deep into the

history of it..."
>
>Alan Bradley
>alanb@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
>
Macdonald


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Let me try again to explain my position and try to be clearer than I have
been.

I have a friend named Pocho (I hope he is still alive). I knew him in 1974
and was involved in hiding him and others in Canada from the RCMP and from
DINA agents who had been allowed into Canada by RCMP to conduct special
surveillance, harassment, intimidation against Chilean dissidents and former
prisoners of the Pinochet regime. Pocho had been an engineering student in
Santiago and on the day of the overthrow of the Allende regime, Pocho was an
engineering student with liberal leanings but not active. In a firefight at
a copper mine outside Santiago, he picked up a gun to defend himself. He was
captured and the DINA thought he was an activist. As part of his
interrogation, they brought his wife in (she ran a cultural centre in
Santiago) and ten scum gang raped her in front of him and then decapitated
her with piano wire before his eyes. He was put in a camp and not killed
because they thought he was a MIR leader--he wasn't at the time. They cut
off two of his fingers during one interrogation and only a physician in the
camp who sewed up his stumps with horsehair saved him from bleeding to
death. He got TB and a Swiss representative of the Red Cross finally got him
out and to Canada where he suffered even more repression and harassment.

Now Pocho had a lot of rage and for good reason. Yet he kept it together and
became a dedicated MIRista. I'm sure if he were back in Chile his treatment
of former DINA would not be too gentle if that ever came to pass.

In all revolutions, people who have been subject to some of the worst
horrors imaginable turn their rage to representatives of the old order and
often against innocents they wrongly believe to be representatives of the
old order. Mob rule and mob psychology often takes place. Frustration from
delay and setback in constructing a new order takes place. Old family feuds
are settled under the banners of politics, ferreting out
counterrevolutionaries etc takes place. And the imperialists do consciously
promote dissention, divide-and-rule, justified paranoia, economic/political
destabilization, famines, ethnic rivalries etc specifically in order to
destabilize, destroy and in order to engineer the kinds of conditions in
which anarchy and repression will invariably take place in order to engineer
and manufacture the "evidence" that any new socialist system must be/will be
anti-demoncratic and repressive and "inefficient" and unable to produce the
necessities of life for the broad masses. That is what social systems
engineering is all about--to push the hot buttons and levers of power to
destabilize, control, manipulate, shape and destroy incipient socialism and
construct a "new order" that is an appendage to the global needs and
imperatives of imperialism.

Those who have suffered and have witnessed unimaginable horrors do not take
kindly to those who wish to have parlor debates about the merits of
capitalism versus socialism. They do not take kindly to fellow citizens
collaborating with foreign powers intent on strangling the socialist baby in
the crib. They do not take kindly to self-appointed "dissidents" whose only
credibility seems to be with foreign press and politicians intent on the
destruction of socialism and the new society. They do not take kindly to
those who feel they are privileged and high intellectuals too good to do
manual labor. They do not take kindly to criminals who prefer to do crime
instead of necessary labor. They do not take kindly to speculators and
profiteers who profit from misery and famine. They do not take kindly to
journalists intent on using people and misery as "props" for their slanted
and deliberately contrived propaganda aimed against the new society.

So from all of this you get mistakes, crimes, excesses and even sometimes
those who sould be killed are not while others who are innocents are further
victimized this time in the name of liberation and revolution. all of this
cannot be laid at the feet of any one personage. This only repeats the bogus
star system and omipotent/omniscient individual theory common among the
bourgeois "social scientists." It is anti-historical and it is
simple-minded.

None of this is to "excuse" but to explain. If Pocho had gone off and had
assassinated not only his former DINA torturers but all their families and
relatives as well--innocent or not--I would lay the blame for the deaths of
the innocents on US Imperialism, The Pinochet Regime, DINA and the torturers
for having produced the level of rage that produced the deaths of innocents.


Pol Pot didn't just become a revolutionary in 1968. He spent many years
underground, hunted and on many death lists. The same applies to Kim Il
Sung, Ho chi Minh, Fidel Castro, Mao Zedong and yes even Stalin and many
others often villified and given sole blame for all sorts of actual or
imagined crimes and statistics. They were shaped by their times experiences,
traumas and imperatives of survival. They were shaped by desperate measures
necessary for survival in the context of continual imperialist encirclement,
military attacks, social systems engineering and in the context of internal
forces being used as instruments and proxies for the overthrow of the
revolution.

For all of these reasons and others, I, especially from the confort of my
office and a life that has not handed me hardships that are anything close
to that suffered by the forementioned and others, am unwilling to lay the
sins or accomplishments of a whole era or a whole revolution at the feet of
any one person. It's just too easy, simple-minded and too easy to be used by
nefarious forces for nefarious purposes.

For those who see this as an apology for crimes or want to call me a
"Stalinist" or whatever and you really know nothing about me, fuck you;
you--and I--are nothing in the scheme of things.

Jim Craven