Re: Rev Int Movement (fwd)

      mine writes:

>>>communist parties have a legitimate right to exist even >>>though they
use violence. their violence is against capitalism, which is >>>okey for me.
i believe that there is a legitimate right to use violence >>>on the part of
the oppressed against the oppressers.

Ed Weick responds:

I would never question the right of communist parties to exist.  I would,
however, question that they have a legitimate right to use violence to
attain their ends.  Who, other than they themselves, would have given them
this right?  Once a group believes it has that right, it can rationalize any
action it feels is necessary.  The actions of the Communist Party of the
early Soviet Union against peasants and others it identified as obstacles to
its reforms caused tremendous dislocation and the deaths of millions, all in
the name of the ends being justified by the means.  Pol Pot, has I believe,
been mentioned on this list   again, millions died on the killing fields
because of the belief that a society had to be reorganized into something
more ideologically correct.

It is not, however, communism or any other specific ideology that is the
problem, it is ideology itself.  Any ideology, when carried to the level of
a true belief, becomes something that deprives other points of view of
legitimacy.  The insistence that things be seen in only one way, that only
one path is correct and all others are in error, has occurred many times in
history.  Early Christians were martyred for their beliefs in ancient Rome.
They in turn persecuted other faiths when they became the official church.
In medieval times, their brutality toward Jews and infidels knew almost no
bounds.  Following the Reformation, Christians brutalized Christians:
witness Calvin's Geneva.

In our secular age, this insistance that things can be viewed in only one
way, that all others are in error, has been moved, very largely, into the
political sphere.  I believe that what Gert Koler was saying in pointing out
that the differences between the extreme left and the extreme right are not
that great referred not so much to ideology but to behaviour.  The specific
characteristics of beliefs matter little when beliefs are extreme.  Anything
that is extreme is dangerous.  Hitler was responsible for the deaths of some
six million Jews and perhaps at least as many Slavs.  According to people I
talked with in Russia a few years ago, estimates of Stalin's toll range from
twenty to sixty million Soviet citizens.

But to justify extreme actions, scapegoats are needed.  Christians had Jews
and infidels, Catholics had Protestants and Protestants had Catholics.
Currently, communists and other true believers have capitalists.  This is
not to say that capitalists are innocent.  However, it is to say that one
has to be very careful about who one labels as a wrong doer, and about what
is being done wrong.  Being a Canadian, I am used to a good, if far from
perfect, system of laws enforced by strong courts.  If I am accusing someone
of something, or being accused myself, I prefer to rely on those laws and
those courts.  I don't want to have to take matters into my own hands.

However, I do recognize that much of the world does not operate the way
Canada does, that many people worldwide do not have rights under the law,
and even if they have them, they exist in name only, not in practice.  In
such cases, people may have to use violent means to protect or assert
themselves.  My one wish is that they do so in a pragmatic way, without
clothing what they are doing in some grand ideological mishmash.  I recently
posted something to this list on garrison towns in Jamaica.  People in these
towns have organized themselves into self-protective gangs, which, because
of their size and strength, can not be dismissed by the establishment.  In
the absence of strong laws and courts, and without an impartial police, this
is what people feel they have to do, and it does seem to work for them.  I
saw much the same thing in the slums of Sao Paulo a couple of years ago,
where laws are also weak, courts are so slow as to be non existent, and the
police is an army of the establishment.  My point is that the people who
have organized themselves have done so practically, not ideologically.  They
are not labeling or scapegoating anyone, but simply protecting what they see
as their rights and interests.

Hope this helps to explain my position.

Ed Weick