Wednesday, February 24, 2010

I Support These Troops


Yeah, yeah, yeah. According to the current big- frog- in- a small- pond leftist tribalism common in the U.S.A. today, I should have nothing to do with these guys, since they are " Stalinists" and I'm a " Trotskyite".
Fuck that noise. These veterans actually fought fascism. They put their asses on the line to fight fascism. Literally. How many of us can make that claim?
George Orwell, who fought as a militiaman for the Marxist- Leninist party P.O.U.M., wrote in Homage To Catalonia ( his justly famous memoir of the Spanish Civil War), " The P.S.U.C. ( the Moscow approved Communist Party of Spain) militiamen I whom I knew in the line, the Communists from the International Brigade whom I met from time to time, never called me a Trotskyist or a traitor; they left that kind of thing to the journalists in the rear."
Please contribute to the Abraham Lincoln Brigade Archives and help these veterans continue the good fight.

2 comments:

00000 said...

I am most delighted at your use of the phrase "fuck that noise." +10 points. Also, I find your example from Orwell rather interesting - I haven't thought about the long-standing animosity in that light before.

comrade x said...

The repression of the spanish revolution wasn't due to some evil reaction of Stalin to non- Comitern socialist parties and anarchist movements. It was a cold- hearted calculation to make Great Britain and France allies of the U.S.S.R. against Germany. Stalin, rather naievely, thought the British and French would see his regime as not promoting revolution and enter into an alliance. As a bonus, the Spanish Republic would be beholden to the U.S.S.R. and provide a counter- point to the Italians in the Meditteranean. Of course the whole thing fell apart once the leaders of France and Britain balked at war with Germany in 1938 over Czechoslovakia- after that Stalin pretty much dumped the Spanish project.
Diplomacy- the shit piles up so fast you need wings to stay above it.