On Sun, 25 Jan 1998, Adam Kessler wrote:
> Last month 45 Indian peasants were massacred in the Mexican state of Chiapas
> with the collusion of local PRI officials and the the state police. How do
> we know this? As a result of personal testimonials from survivors!
This argument rests on a false premise. I never denied that people
suffered in the gulags. Thus, your argument is irrelevant. People did die
in gulags, just as they die in prison systems all over the world. I admit
this. So now what do you do, Adam? How can your smear proceed without the
fact of "gulag denial"?
> So I know of of no general result of "social science" which says that
> personal testimonials automatically constitute propaganda and should be
> ignored.
There is nothing to prevent you from ignoring any propaganda technique. My
statement, I repeat again, was not about the reality of personal suffering
in the gulags. My arguments had to do with the relevance of personal
accounts to the question of the adequacy of the Soviet economic system
(gulags are irrelevant to this question) and with the function of the
testimonial in anti-communist propaganda. Neither of these statements
bears on the suffering of people in gulags.
> But if someone were to write that the survivors' personal testimonials
> remind him of the complaints of neo-nazis and racists, I would suspect
> that he thought the peasants deserved what they got. (Maybe they were
> bandits?)
Many of the people in the gulags were bandits. They were also rapists,
murders, traitors, Nazi, etc. Whether they got what they deserved is a
question that should be answered on a case by case basis. Only a small
fraction of the populations of the gulags were executed, and while I do
not favor capital punishment, most people would find no problem with doing
away with some of the criminals in the gulags. This is the hypocrisy of
anti-communism. This is why arguments using the gulags to bash the Soviet
project are so ridiculous. Even if we suspend their irrelevancy, they
falsely assume that everybody in the gulags were innocents. It is the same
with left idealists in the West thinking that everybody in the US
corrections system is a victim or that criminals are revolutionaries!
And such arguments, and this *is* relevant, naively assume that people
using the gulags to bash the Soviet Union have the people's best interests
at heart. Anti-communist generally don't have the people's best interests
at heart, which is why they are anti-communist! It seems that the
possibility that right wing ideologues might use the gulags to advance
their political goals of anti-communism escapes you, Adam. Can you imagine
where a Russian capitalist or landholder, or his cadres, dispossessed of
his property and the right to exploit land and people for his own personal
enrichment, might proclaim the terror of the Soviet state? Of course! Even
the most dim among us with three seconds of consideration can see this.
> Georgi Derlugian reports that his family was sent to the Gulag because of
> some political misdeed. What are we to do? How should we react? Catiously
> await further evidence?
No, we sympathize with Georgi Derlugian's suffering. But, if we grant
relevancy on this whole discussion, we also understand that many of the
people sent to the gulags for political reasons were sent there for
justifiable reasons given the exigencies of the context. While I stand
with Ignazio Silone in spirit when he tells the story of the little old
man being taken away in chains--I am sympathetic with the little old man's
unhappiness--I do not stand with Silone's paralytic anti-communism. Some
little old men might need to be taken away in chains. The picture is not
so simple. We cannot assume that everybody in the gulags did not deserve
to be there. And justice never comes without a price, Adam. Revolutions
are unpleasant. But that does not make them wrong. The slave master
suffers greatly when his slaves are taken from him and freed. But it is a
suffering that I am willing to inflict. Revolutions are not wrong because
people die or are imprisoned. Derlugian's personal tragedy takes place in
a web of interests and historical realities, interests and realities that
stand over and above any one man's family. One has to choose sides.
Morally, we cannot wash away our class responsibilities by refusing the
justify death in the pursuit of justice.
Andy