Truth and Lies about Stalin

Interview of  professor of Medieval English literature at Montclair State University, Grover Furr, on the occasion of the 140th birth anniversary of Joseph Stalin

 Sixty-five years after his death, the name of Joseph Stalin remains at the epicenter of anti-communism. The bourgeois historiography, as well as bourgeois political forces, continue the vilification of Stalin, calling him a “dictator”, a “bloodthirsty tyrant” who supposedly “killed tens of millions of people”. According to your view, why anti-communists still focus their attacks on Stalin and what are the major sources of their claims?

G.FURR: Defenders of capitalism need to depict communism as something horrible! So, in addition to hiding the horrors of capitalism- imperialism, they require a “boogeyman” to focus on as the epitome of the “evil” of communism. Stalin was the leader of the USSR and the world communist movement during the period of its greatest triumphs, and therefore of its greatest threat to capitalism. So Stalin would be a natural target in any case. 

But there are at least two other factors. The first is Leon Trotsky, who lied about Stalin in virtually everything he wrote from 1928 until his murder in 1940. Trotsky’s post-1929 writings were the first major source of lies and slander against Stalin and the USSR. The second is Nikita Khrushchev. His “Secret Speech” of February 25, 1956 to the XX Party Congress was a devastating blow to the world communist movement. And it was an invaluable gift to the anticommunists of the world! 

After the XXII Party Congress in October, 1961, when Khrushchev and his people attacked Stalin even more viciously, with even more lies, Khrushchev and the CPSU sponsored hundreds of books and articles attacking and lying about Stalin. Khrushchev also sponsored hundreds of books and articles attacking and lying about Lavrentii Beria, whose murder Khrushchev organized on June 26, 1953. Beria is not as significant a figure in Soviet history as is Stalin. But Khrushchev and his men slandered Beria at least as viciously, if not more viciously, as they did Stalin. And those who had been closest to Stalin – Molotov, Malenkov, Kaganovich – supported Khrushchev in this unprincipled attack upon and murder of Beria.

What should we make of the yellow vest movement ?

We have seen the movement that grew up around the 17 November take off over the last few weeks, both in terms of media coverage and on the ground. At work and at home, on the streets and on public transport, the “yellow vest” movement is on everyone’s lips. The time has come to take stock of the situation.

What happened on 17 November (and the following days) ? 

It is clearly is a far-reaching movement, enjoying considerable media coverage from the outset unlike other social movements and making a show of its apolitical character has played in its favour. But the media have still tended to underplay the number of people involved, setting the figure at around 300,000 when even a quick estimate easily reveals that the true figure is considerably higher.
Unsurprisingly, most of the people involved come from the commuter belt of large towns and cities, rural areas, and small and medium sized towns because they are the ones with the furthest to travel to work.

BannedThought.net Banned in India!

 

Source: Bannedthought.net

At 7 minutes to midnight (New Delhi time) on November 11, 2018, the Indian government sent us at BannedThought.net an email informing us that in less than two days time it would hold a hearing in New Delhi to decide upon blocking public access by people in India to this website, or at least to the parts of it which contain materials from India and which express the views of large numbers of people in India which the government disapproves of. While we were invited to send a representative to argue our case at that hearing, this is not only impractical for time and financial reasons, it would also obviously be a total waste of time. (Or possibly even lead to our representative being arrested and imprisoned as has recently been happening even to people’s lawyers in India!) The committee meeting on Nov. 14 will almost certainly be a mere bureaucratic formality in any case. And there is nothing that we could say there that we don’t already say on our website—namely that we fervently support the right of free speech and the right to publish and distribute progressive or revolutionary materials not only in India, but everywhere in the world. This extremely basic democratic right is opposed by the current ruling class in India. So there is no point for us to say anything further at this meeting or elsewhere to this despicable anti-democratic ruling class bent on the suppression of all ideas that they disagree with.

The uprising of the Polytechnic School of Athens, Greece in 1973

Learnings for the revolutionary movement in our country

The uprising of the Polytechnic School of Athens in 1973 was the most important highlight in the class struggle after the revolutionary civil war that followed the Nazi occupation in our country. For this reason, the learnings of the uprising are crucial to the revolutionary movement and the communists in Greece. In order to understand these learnings, it is necessary to describe the situation before the uprising.

Greece. Two days of solidarity to the arrested militants and the revolutionary movement of India

On the occasion of the mass arrests of militants, activists and revolutionaries in India, a two-day program was organized, of informing the people about the popular and revolutionary movement in India, as well as denouncing these very arrests in that country.

On Friday the 5^th of October, a panel discussion took place at the books store of  “Outside of the walls” in Athens. There were many participants who were interested in finding out about the truth, in the revolutionary, workers' and popular movement, as well as in the democratic rights movement of India. The interest was apparent since all of the participants stayed until the end of the discussion but also because of the various contributions in the discussion and questions that followed. A contribution was also made by a representative of the Turkish magazine “Partizan”.

Antonio Gramsci: Unions and the dictatorship

The international class struggle has culminated in the victory of the workers and peasants of two international proletariats. In Russia and in Hungary the workers and peasants have established the proletarian dictatorship and in Russia as much as in Hungary the dictatorship had to sustain a bitter battle not only against the bourgeois class, but also against the unions: the conflict between the dictatorship and the unions was thus one of the causes of the fall of the Hungarian soviet, since the unions, though they never openly attempted to overthrow the dictatorship, operated always as “splitting” organisms of the revolution and incessantly planted discontent and cowardice amongst the workers and the red soldiers. Even a rapid examination, of the reasons and the conditions of this conflict cannot fail to be useful in the revolutionary education of the masses, the which, if they must be convinced that the union is perhaps the most important proletarian organism of the communist revolution, because on it must be founded the socialization of industry, because it must create the conditions in which private enterprise disappears and cannot be reborn, must also be convinced of the necessity of creating, before the revolution, the psychological and objective conditions under which will be impossible every conflict and every division of power between the various organisms in which the struggle of the proletarian class against capitalism is embodied.

What Makes an Urban Naxal?

Bernard D’Mello* writes about his former colleague, “urban Naxal” Gautam Navlakha.

 

The Bharatiya Janata Party-led government and the Hindutvavadi “nationalist” movement’s demonic drive for cultural orthodoxy seems to know no bounds. What is alarming is the former’s support for and complicity in the acts of the latter, as also the Indian state’s control of its “necessary” enemies through the use of state terror, with the category “urban Naxals” singled out in the latest of such drives (in June and August 2018) that otherwise routinely target Muslims, militant oppressed nationalities, and “Maoists.” In the government’s categorisation, the “urban Naxals,” at least so far, are lawyers, rights activists, poets, writers, journalists, and professors, deemed to be “active members” of the Communist Party of India (CPI) (Maoist).