With the atrocious China-bashing going on in Australia at the moment, mirroring US policy, we decided to republish the concisely expressed views of an American living in China. The comments under the video indicate a general approval of his appraisal by people who are familiar with Chinese life. His main criticism of China is the media censorship, which commenters suggest has worsened along with US China-bashing.
It is very hard to cite a 'successful' Communist economy when every single one has been attacked militarily and undermined by US-NATO forces. Nonetheless some have survived. Most have not.
Yugoslavia was a communist country founded by communist partisans who resisted Nazi occupiers during the second world war. Yugoslavia prospered until after the Soviet bloc collapsed. As a result Yugoslavia was isolated and was pulled apart by subversion and military aggression by US-NATO.
The Democratic Peoples' Republic of Korea (DPRK - also known as 'North Korea') survived the most ferocious bombardment (per square kilometer) endured by any country in history during the 1950-1953 United States war against Korea. Given that this is even attested to by US Airforce General Curtis Le May, there can be no doubt that this was a genocidal war. In spite of that, the North Koreans and their Chinese allies were able to fight the United States and its allies to a stand-still.
In Greece during the Second World War the Greek Communist-led ELAS partisans administered most of the country that they had liberated from the Nazi occupiers and their collaborators. In spite of the war and conflict, these regions were very prosperous. Unfortunately because of the infamous 'percentages agreement' between Stalin and Churchill, in October 1944, the Greek ELAS partisans were tricked by the Greek Communist Party (KKE) into disarming, whilst former collaborators were rearmed by the British. As a consequence of this the liberated zones were conquered.
Most post-war countries could be described as socialist, or at least command economies, with all resources and services nationalised. Gradually they have been privatised, with disempowering effects using the excuse of economic liberalism. Syria is socialist and worked very well before being attacked by US-NATO. Cuba has a completely socialist economy and has faced total hostility and continous sanctions and propaganda from the United States, yet has managed to survive for 60 years, even when the oil subsidies from the soviet union were cut off it still managed to keep its economy going. They supplied doctors to work in lots of third world countries in Brazil, Venezuela, Africa. Every Cuban has free medical and hospital services.
Venezuela is yet another case where the capitalists simply won't permit any other form of economy.
Although we commemorate those who died on Remembrance Day 11 November, the courage and sacrifice of those who fought to prevent World War One from ever happening and who tried to remove from power the criminals who had caused that war, and others that followed, is never acknowledged.
On Remembrance Day, 11 November Australians and people from some of the countries of the previous Britsh Commonwealth of nations, commemorate the courage and terrible sacrifice of those who fought in the war of 1914-1918. In that war, 18 million died, including 60,000 Australians, Back then that war was referred to as the "War to End War".
Those who labeled the First World War the "war to end war"were clearly naive at best. Barely 20 years later 60 million more people were to die in yet another even more horrific world-wide conflagration. Many other wars occurred right up to Remembrance Day 2017 and are continuing.
The courage and sacrifice of those who fought to prevent World War One from ever happening and who tried to remove from power the criminals who had caused that war, and others that followed, is never acknowledged.
Where is the commmoration for those sailors of the German Navy who rebelled against the German government on 3 November after being ordered to sail on a last suicidal battle against the British Navy? (See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kiel_mutiny.) Where is the commemoration of all thoser German workers who rose up in many parts of Germany over the next few days, making it impossible for the war to continue? Where is the commemoration of Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebkencht who opposed the war at its outset? They were to lead the Spartakist uprising in Berlin from 1918 until when it was crushed by Freikorps mercenaries, many of whom were later to don the Nazi swastika. Where is the commemoration of their sacrifice?
Where is the commemoration of those French soldiers who were court-martialed and executed in 1917 for their mutiny against the war? Where is the commemoration of Australians and British who blocked their governments' plans to introduce conscription? Where is the commemoration of those German Communists who fought from 1919 until 1923 to wrest from power those who had led their country into war?
Clearly the ruling elites and their newsmedia only want us to commemorate the sacrifice of those who were duped into fighting and dying to further the selfish interests of those elites who sent them to war.
The Russian revolution of 7 November 1917, one hundred years ago today, was a profound political upheaval which put in power political leaders resolved to remove poverty, exploitation, unemployment, economic chaos, and war from Russia and the rest of the world. The Russian revolution and sympathetic revolts in Germany in 1918 helped finally bring to an end the First World War, in which 18,000,000 died.
Had the revolution spread to Germany, Hitler's Nazi Party could not have seized power in 1933 and the Second World War, in which an estimated 60 million died, would have most likely been prevented.
Title previously was: How the Second World War almost didn't happen
The Russian revolution of 7 November 1917, one hundred years ago today, was a profound political upheaval which put in power political leaders resolved to remove poverty, exploitation, unemployment, economic chaos, and war from Russia and the rest of the world. The Russian revolution and sympathetic revolts in Germany in 1918 helped finally bring to an end the First World War, in which 18,000,000 died.
Had the revolution spread to Germany, Hitler's Nazi Party could not have seized power in 1933 and the Second World War, in which an estimated 60 million died, would have most likely been prevented.
In fact, the Russian Revolution almost did spread to Germany. In 1918, 1919, 1920 and 1923 there were political upheavals which could have led to the German Communist Party (KPD) becoming the governing party in Germany. [1]
In the political upheaval of 1923, the Reichswehr [2] invaded[3] the state of Saxony on 21 October to overthrow the elected government of Premier Erich Zeigner, a left Social Democrat and to disarm workers' defence militias that the KPD was helping to organise. All over Germany, trade union councils, consisting of Social Democrats, Communists and others, had called for nationwide general strikes in solidarity with the government of Saxony against this invasion. Many trade unionists had armed themselves in order to fight the Reichswehr, the police, and Nazi militias.[4]
A conference of various local worker organisations had been called by the Government of Saxony to be held in the city of Chemnitz on the very day the invasion began. At that conference, as the invasion was proceeding, Graupe, a Social Democrat Minister of the state of Saxony, threatened that all the Social Democrat delegates would walk out if a motion to call for a nationwide general strike to defend his government was put.
Then KPD leader Heinrich Brandler lost his nerve and did not put that motion. The Federal Germany Army invasion of Saxony proceeded and Premier Erich Zeigner was arrested and imprisoned and a right-wing Social Democrat was installed as premier.
In his previous visit to Moscow on 8 October 1923 Heinrich Brandler had appealed to the Communist Party politbureau to allow Leon Trotsky to come to Germany to give him guidance.
Leon Trotsky had led the Bolshevik insurrection of 7 November 1917, had founded the Red Army and led it in the Russian Civil War against the White Russians and foreign invaders, and was a fluent German speaker. Almost certainly his presence in Saxony on 21 October would have made the decisive difference. As Isaac Deutscer wrote in "The Prophet Unarmed - Trotsky: 1921-1929" (1959) the second volume in his three volume biography of Trotsky
:
[Trotsky] asked to be sent abroad "as a soldier of the revolution" to help the German Communists to prepare revolution. The idea had not come out of the blue. The leader of the German party, Heinrich Brandler, had just arrived in Moscow; and doubting his own and his comrades' capacity to lead an insurrection, had inquired in all earnestness from Trotsky and Zinoviev whether Trotsky could not come incongnito to Berlin or Saxony to take charge of revolutionary operations. The idea stired Trotsky; and the danger of the mission excited his courage. ... he asked for the assignment.
The triumvirs (Stalin, Zinoviev and Kamanev) could not let him go. ... If he went, succeeded, and returned in triumph, he would have dwarfed them as he acknowledged leader of both the Russian and German revolutions.
So, driven by petty personal envy, Stalin, Kamanev and Zinoviev refused to let Trotsky go. Then, on 21 October 1923, as Heinrich Brandler had warned in Moscow on 8 October, the German revolution, without guidance from a leader of Trotsky's calibre, was defeated.
18 years later on 22 June 1941, the Soviet Union was invaded by the Nazi Germany made possible by the 1923 debacle and 25 million Soviet citizens were lose their lives defeating that invasion.
[1] See "The Lost Revolution - Germany 1918 to 1983" (1983) by Chris Harman
[2] The Federal German Army
[3] The Federal German Government had not been given permission by the elected government of Saxony to send its army into Saxony.
[4] op cit p288
There is a popular argument against communism that accuses Soviet communists of murdering more people than the Nazis. This argument refers to the deaths that resulted from Joseph Stalin's orders. However, the argument fails when you try to find out which communists performed or agreed to Stalin's murderous purges. Because nearly all of the founding communists assumed to have been complicit in these mass murders were themselves murdered by Stalin during the purges.
If the communists that led the communist revolution were mostly murdered by Stalin, how can communists be held responsible for Stalin's crimes? I don't believe that the people who helped Stalin murder the original members of the Bolshevik Party Central Committee can properly be described as communists. They were wiping out communists, under Stalin's orders. Stalin posed as a communist but was deadly to communism.[1]
Of the 21 members of the 1917 Bolshevik Party Central Committee, apart from Stalin himself and Trotsky, who was to be murdered in 1940 under Stalin's orders, only two others were still alive or not imprisoned by 1938. Those two were Alexandra Kollontai, who was serving as an ambassador to Sweden, at the time of the 'show-trials' of 1937. These show trials were to provide a legal justification for the murder of anyone whom Stalin considered to be a threat to his rule. Matvei Muranov, who had supported Stalin's usurpation of power in the 1920's, was the only -other survivor. Stalin's purges happened at every level of society and within the army.
If we look at this evidence, we find that the claim that communists, whether the 1917 Russian Bolshevik Party or their allies in Germany, killed more people than the Nazis that they fought against, is a baseless smear against the very people who might have prevented the slaughter of 70 million people between 1931 and 1945, had they lived.
Much of this has been forgotten due to the long-term corruption of the Trotskyist movement. People claiming to be Trotskyists have themselves become corrupted to the point where, ironically, many are now rioting in support of yet another attempted Maidan-style coup against President Donald Trump and in support of Hillary Clinton.
Not to be confused with Stalin's purges, were the executions carried out on the orders of those in command of the Red Army, during the 1917-1921 civil war, in which the Soviet Republic was fighting for its existence against the internal counter-revolutionaries, who were backed by about 13 foreign armies. Some historians opposed to the Russian Revolution use this to claim that Stalin's brutality was characteristic of communism from its inception, but this was civil war and the scale was not comparable to that of Stalin's purges.
[1] Historians who support the Russian Revolution tend to understand Stalin as having begun as a sincere communist but to have become corrupted by the privileges of power.
In 2016, much of the credit for the prevention of war can rightly be claimed by people labeled 'right-wing', 'far right' or 'extreme right'. Examples include Marine Le Pen of France, Nigel Farage of Britain and United States' President-elect Donald Trump.
Paradoxically, one hundred years ago, during the first inter-imperialist slaughter of 1914-1918, it was the Communist 'far left' that opposed war.
Whilst Australian histories tend to give credit to Australian soldiers led by General John Monash for defeating Germany on the Western Front in November 1918, the capitulation of Germany may, in fact, have been the result of the uprisings of 9 November 1918 in Germany led by the anti-war Spartakusbund of Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht. The Spartakusbund was later to become the Kommunistische Partei Deutschlands (KPD) or Communist Party of Germany.
The uprising was preceded on 3 November by a mutiny of German sailors, who refused to sail to fight a suicidal last battle against the British Royal Navy.
Sadly, the uprising in Berlin was crushed by right-wing Freikorps mercenaries and Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht were executed by them on 1 June 1919.
A number of times in subsequent years, the German Communists came close to success. The last occasion was in September 1923 when German Reichswehr troops invaded Saxony and Thuringia to crush the strong communist movements in those states and to overthrow the elected left Social Democrat governments.
Had the German Communists succeeded in 1923, Adolf Hitler would have become a small footnote in history and the subsequent war in which 60 million were to die would have been prevented.
 If Russia and the
United States led by President Roosevelt, had not cooperated, even the heroism and sacrifice of the Russian people may not have prevented a Nazi victory. |
The RT 1 news service funded by the Russian government is a beacon of truth in a world of deceit of the corporate mainstream newsmedia. Had RT been around earlier, it is much less likely that the fabricated pretexts for war against Yugoslavia, Iraq, and Afghanistan would have been accepted and those wars could have been prevented. Yet, for all its valuable contributions to truth and democracy, many of the journalists and reporters at RT still have considerable gaps in their understanding of the history of the 20th century and of the part played by the Soviet Union. (This article has been promoted from a comment here, owing to some important points it makes. It is not intended to detract from important commemorations in Russia of lives lost in the final battles in which Russia was victorious over Hitler and thus rid the world of WW2 Nazi threat.) British historian Richard Overy, when interviewed by Oksana Boyko on the Worlds Apart episode of 7 May put a somewhat flawed view about Nazism and Communism. Whilst she was able to challenge a number of Richard Overy's claims, she left others unchallenged. One was Overy's assertion that Josef Stalin was a brilliant and inspired leader who led and inspired the Soviet people to victory over Nazi Germany. |
Previously published (14/3/96) by the University of Chicago Chronicle.
As a child growing up in rural China, Dali Yang, Assistant Professor in Political Science, heard the stories of his parents and others about the horrors of the Great Leap Forward, a time of suffering for China that came soon after the Communist revolution in 1949.
"My parents were peasants who worked in the field. We grew wheat in the area where I lived, and they were part of a production team," said Yang, who was born in 1964, three years after the Great Leap Forward had ended. "They would often bring up the topic of the Great Leap famine and tell how bad things were during that time."
Yang's curiosity about the period led him to write the book Calamity and Reform in China: State, Rural Society and Institutional Change Since the Great Leap Famine, to be published this spring by Stanford University Press. The book, one of the first major works to analyze the period, relates how the Great Leap Forward and the subsequent famine still influence China today.
Unlike the later Cultural Revolution, which is well known in the West, the Great Leap Forward has been less of a focus for research by Western scholars -- yet, according to Yang, it was one of the most influential periods of Chinese history. It was the pivotal event that led China to adopt reforms in rural areas after Mao's death in 1976, resulting in the dismantlement of the people's communes that the Chinese government had fervently advocated during the Great Leap Forward.
Communist dream leads to mass death
The Great Leap Forward was begun in 1957 by Chairman Mao Zedong to bring the nation quickly into the forefront of economic development. Mao wanted China to become a leading industrial power, and to accomplish his goals he and his colleagues pushed for the construction of steel plants across the country.
The rural society was to keep pace with the dream by producing enough food to feed the country plus enough for export to help pay for industrialization. As a result of the Communist revolution, landowners had been stripped of their property, and by 1957 peasants already were forced to work in agricultural cooperatives.
These changes were intended to improve conditions for everyone by collectivizing agriculture and establishing communal eating facilities where peasants could eat all they wanted free of charge. This utopian dream turned into a nightmare as the central leadership grew increasingly out of touch with reality, Yang found through his study of government records and personal accounts.
At the beginning of the Great Leap Forward, Mao proclaimed that China would overtake Britain in production of steel and other products within 15 years. Other Chinese leaders, including Deng Xiaoping, supported Mao's enthusiasm, according to documents Yang studied in China.
A year later, Mao radically revised the timeline for catching up to Britain -- what was to be accomplished in 15 years now had to be done in just one more year, he said.
"Frequent changes in the timetable were symptomatic of the Great Leap, which, in retrospect, was fantasy incarnate. Even more exaggerated targets were subsequently presented, and then frequently revised upward, for steel, grain, cotton and other products. Any semblance of serious planning was abandoned," Yang said.
In pursuit of its goals, the government executed people who did not agree with the pace of radical change. The crackdown led to the deaths of 550,000 people by 1958.
The government also plunged the country into a deep debt by increasing spending on the development of heavy industry. Government spending on heavy industry grew in 1958 to represent 56 percent of state capital investment, an increase from 38 percent in 1956.
People were mobilized to accomplish the goals of industrialization. They built backyard furnaces for iron and steel and worked together on massive building projects, including one undertaken during the winter of 1957-58 in which more than 100 million peasants were mobilized to build large-scale water-conservation works.
Local leaders competed with one another to see who could create the most activity. In the rush to recruit labor, agricultural tasks were neglected, sometimes leaving the grain harvest to rot in the fields, Yang said. In the frenzy of competition, the leaders over-reported their harvests to their superiors in Beijing, and what was thought to be surplus grain was sold abroad.
Although in theory the country was awash in grain, in reality it was not. Rural communal mess halls were encouraged to supply food for free, but by the spring of 1959, the grain reserves were exhausted and the famine had begun.
No one is sure exactly how many people perished as a result of the spreading hunger. By comparing the number of deaths that could be expected under normal conditions with the number that occurred during the period of the Great Leap famine, scholars have estimated that somewhere between 16.5 million and 40 million people died before the experiment came to an end in 1961, making the Great Leap famine the largest in world history.
People abandoned their homes in search of food. Families suffered immensely, and reports of that suffering reached the members of the army, whose homes were primarily in rural areas. As soldiers received letters describing the suffering and the deaths, it became harder for leaders to maintain ideological discipline. Chaos developed in the countryside as rural militias became predatory, seizing grain, beating people and raping women. From famine to reform
During the struggle for survival, farmers in nearly one-third of the rural communities took matters into their own hands, abandoning the people's commune in favor of individual farming. Heavy central control was reduced, and the country's agricultural production improved.
Following Mao's death in 1976, central leaders disagreed over rural policies. Taking advantage of this policy paralysis, peasants and local cadres made alliances in those areas that had suffered severely from the Great Leap Famine and contracted land to the farm household. In just a few years' time, the people's communes were dismantled. Agricultural performance improved dramatically and gave momentum to the reforms under Deng.
The memory of the famine reinforced the important role peasants play in China's development, Yang said. That memory also has undermined the appeal of central planning in rural policy-making.
"Historical developments during more than four decades of Communist rule in China have again and again shown us how the unanticipated consequences of elite policies subverted their attempts at fundamental social engineering," Yang writes in Calamity and Reform in China. Institutional changes in China are the result of a contest between the elite and the masses, between the state and the society, he said.
"This study thus points to the crucial importance of guarding against those who claim to know some magic route to the radiant future, be they politicians like Mao or party intellectuals who supported Mao or the new technocrats who claim to have found a scientific way to make China rich and powerful and who happily clamor for more power for themselves."
The best way to prevent the country from following another movement like the Great Leap Forward is to create mechanisms that check those in power, Yang said.
"Had there been a free press and other institutions of oversight that are commonly found in open political systems, the Great Leap famine would certainly not have attained the magnitude it did," said Yang, who continues to follow events in China through visits there as he develops his academic career in the United States.
Yang became interested in the social sciences as a college student in Beijing, where he studied engineering. He received his B.S. in industrial engineering in 1983 from Beijing University of Science and Technology and developed an interest in English, which led him to receive his diploma for advanced studies in English in 1984 from Beijing Foreign Studies University.
He came to the United States to pursue graduate studies in political science in 1986 and received his Ph.D. from Princeton in 1993, the same year he joined the Chicago faculty.
Although he does not see rapid democratization coming to China, he has noticed some indications of ways in which the system there is beginning to rein in the excess power of overzealous leaders. "To some extent the trend toward decentralization, market-based competition and legal rule has spread decision-making power throughout the system," he said.
The new leadership is, however, "tentative, reactive and at times schizophrenic," Yang said. "They are less driven by firm ideological convictions than by sheer desire to remain in power.
"The balance between the state and society thus appears precarious, but it is also less susceptible to elite manipulations and more likely to produce policies dealing with the concrete problems that crop up in a state that is undergoing rapid economic development and social change."
-- William Harms
In 2014, the internet has made it possible for journal corporate media to
be challenged
Leon Trotsky (1879-1940) led the Bolshevik insurrection of 1917 and subsequently became Supreme Commander of the Red Army. Joseph Stalin, who took power of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) in the late 1920's and ruthlessly suppressed his opponents, ordered Trotsky be killed by an assassin in 1940.
For all of Leon Trotsky's momentous accomplishments in his own life, much of his legacy has, largely for reasons over which he could have had no control following his murder in 1940, not assisted the advancement of humankind.
After 1939, Trotsky crudely transplanted Lenin's essentially correct analysis of the bloody inter-imperialist war, otherwise known as the First World War, to the Second World War. This analysis held that no capitalist nation fighting in the Second World War was any better than any other. Thus, Great Britain, the United States, Australia and New Zealand were no better than Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy and imperial Japan. Therefore, the duty of communists in these countries was to oppose their own government's war. (In Australia, this policy was carried out by the group known as the "Balmain Trotskyists" led by Nick Origlass (1908-1996) and Laurie Short (1915-2009))
However, Trotsky drew a distinction between, on the one hand, the "inter-imperialist war", between the fascist states and the western capitalist allies and, on the other hand, the war between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union. He still saw the latter as a post-capitalist "workers' state" in spite of Stalin's tyranny and, hence, humanity had a stake in supporting the Soviet Union.
So, whilst opposing U.S, participation in the war, Trotskyists, particularly in the U.S., supported the provision of aid by the U.S. government to the Soviet Union. A number of U.S. Trotskyists actually served as merchant seamen on the convoys which sailed through the perilous icy, U-boat-infested northern Atlantic waters to deliver cargo to the Soviet port of Murmansk.
Whether or not military action, by the U.S. Navy or Air Force, in defence of the convoys against or German U-boats or bombers would have constituted participation in the "inter-imperialist war", was not explained as far as I can recall.
In Trotsky's world view, the only political leaders likely to be of any enduring worth, were those who fully embraced his program for world socialist revolution. Those who were not were reactionary or, at best, vacillating "petty bourgeoisie". Thus, in the Trotskyist world view, there was no merit to be found in U.S. President Franklin Rooseveldt and, or if he had still been around, President John F. Kennedy (JFK), Bobby Kennedy and Martin Luther King.
This 'line' was effectively carried out in the 1960's by those who wore the label 'Trotskyist'. JFK and Bobby Kennedy were dismissed by the far-left as no better than other capitalist politicians. They chose not to dispute the fraudulent Warren Commission, which held that the solitary gunman, Lee Harvey Oswald, murdered JFK.
Jim Garrison's attempts to prosecute the murderers of JFK, as told in Oliver Stone's movie JFK (1991) would almost certainly have ended the bloody Vietnam War long before 1975 had he got assistance from just a few of the many thousands of activists participating in the protest movement. As an example, it would not have been far less likely that JFK's murderers would have then been able to murder Bobby Kennedy just as he was about to win the nomination for President of the United States at the Democratic Convention in 1968. The Vietnam War would have ended on the day of Bobby Kennedy's Presidential inauguration in January 1969, if not before.
Whatever may have been the motivations of the leaders of this protest movement, the practical outcome was the prolongation, and not the ending, of that war. The consequences for the people of Indo-China were far more tragic than they need have been.
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