a marxist history of the world- counterfire

[butchersapron]

Awww it's lovely the way want to make a thread about Neils claim that ww2 was an "imperialist war", all about me :*, but is he right? Did some of the players, the various ruling classes, at least in part want to extend or defend their interests abroad?

You might want to explain how one of the war aims of the leading group of one the imperialist belligerents - an aim radicalised by its failure due to the actions of another of the imperialist belligerents - has no logical, empirical, economic or political relationship with imperialism. You will also want to show how it had no effect whatsoever on all the above as regards all the other imperialist belligerents. And i say want, because you will want to but you will be unable to. You'll be unable to even attempt it.

 

[elbows]

My harsh advice to fellow radical socialists is to treat this loosely connected little coterie of obsessive posters with considerable suspicion, and not to allow them to rubbish the socialist cause with the endless posturing of being genuine anti capitalist radicals that they have chosen to present for years on Urban and other Boards. Beware them all . They are not nowadays actually allies of the radical Left in my opinion..

I'll give you my take on it since I do not have a credible political past. Indeed when I first briefly set foot on u75, some years before I started posting often, I seem to recall taking the piss out of an upcoming marxist conference. This was for several reasons including ignorance, but also because of something your post has brought back to the front of my mind.

Fuck off with the radical credentials, the dogma, the easy posturing and the well-worn and grotesquely simplified positions that can be applied to situations as they emerge without the need to think afresh about the detail. I will take complex analysis over stuff that only offers 'the dummies guide to who the bad guys are' any day of the week.

Factionalism and ego are problems thats easy to spot on the left, but so are those who wish to avoid scrutiny of their ideas by resorting to accusations that the cause is being undermined. The 20th century demonstrated on multiple occasions the consequences of all of these problems, with adherence to dogma and utter disdain of scrutiny blighting much that otherwise had potential.

My version of your advice to everyone is to treat everything, including our own ideas and stances, with a sensible degree of suspicion. Resist the temptation to use your present worldview, analysis and cause to construct a new prison or a new religion. Embrace scrutiny, welcome challenges as an opportunity to learn. If you dont, then that does not bode well for what would be unleashed if those in your gang ever got some power.

 

[Random]

great stuff guys

 

[love detective]

My version of your advice to everyone is to treat everything, including our own ideas and stances, with a sensible degree of suspicion. Resist the temptation to use your present worldview, analysis and cause to construct a new prison or a new religion. Embrace scrutiny, welcome challenges as an opportunity to learn. If you dont, then that does not bode well for what would be unleashed if those in your gang ever got some power.

It is precisely the advantage of the new trend that we do not dogmatically anticipate the world, but only want to find the new world through criticism of the old one. But, if constructing the future and settling everything for all times are not our affair, it is all the more clear what we have to accomplish at present: I am referring to ruthless criticism of all that exists, ruthless both in the sense of not being afraid of the results it arrives at and in the sense of being just as little afraid of conflict with the powers that be.

 

[elbows]

Thanks for the quote, I found the letter it came from to be interesting. http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1843/letters/43_09.htm

 

[JimW]

Here is the truth, kneel down before it! This could be my new tag-line.

 

[TremulousTetra]

I am surprised what was first described as being an ostensibly marxist analysis has become an imperialist analysis

as you are stalking me on the issue over threads, no such thing has happened;

Some fun may be had with the latest installment of this series on counterfuck website.
Niel Faulkner has written an 'interesting' account of ww2 which was, apparently, an entirely imperialist conflict, which was marked by horrific massacres by the western powers and soviet union, while the Germans were simply attempting to regain a fair division of imperialist spoils. No holocaust, no death camps, no mass slaughter of Jews, slavs, gypsies, homosexuals etc. No mass terror of civilian populations ( except by the allies).
There is a comments box, can anyone get something past the clusterfuck moderators?

right from the very first post, of which I said;

I haven't read the article, and I'm sure your rendition of it is somewhat cartoonesque, but it sounds like a pretty reasonable analysis to me. Is there a better 1400 word analysis you have in mind?

PS I quite liked his stuff in the past on the fall of the Roman Empire. So, I may be biased.. lol

it was the "imperialist war" analysis, which I referred to.

and I still say, out of all the stuff that has been written about the second world war, the article is much nearer to the best stuff, than the worst stuff.

do you have a better 1500 word analysis of the Second World War?

 

[frogwoman]

I've got no time for the IWCAs politics but I really don't think that pointing out that the holocaust isn't mentioned in an article about the war is an example of "dodgy political obsessions". di you read the thread ayatollah?

 

[TremulousTetra]

Excellent review summary of the Adam Tooze book i mentioned earlier in the thread, from the trots at WSWS.

Hitler’s “intelligible response” to the contradictions of global capitalism





More at the link.

But is this book an analysis of the Second World War, or an analysis of Hitler's attempt to carve out an IMPERIAL hinterland? You do realise they are not the same thing?

 

[TremulousTetra]

I've got no time for the IWCAs politics but I really don't think that pointing out that the holocaust isn't mentioned in an article about the war is an example of "dodgy political obsessions". di you read the thread ayatollah?

that isn't what the original post did though is it?

the original post specifically made "fun" of the "imperialist war" and Germany seeking its own "Imperial" interests" in the NF article. No one I can remember, has argued why the imperialist analysis of the war isn't A reasonable analysis.

In fact, the link that butchers provides, agrees that Germany's aims were Imperial [though it 'fails' to mention the aims of the other players ].

in my opinion, butchers posting er’s “intelligible response” to the contradictions of global capitalism as an alternative analysis to NF is dishonest, because it is like comparing apples and oranges.

 

[frogwoman]

I wasn't talking to you mp3 sorry!

 

[Pickman's model]

But is this book an analysis of the Second World War, or an analysis of Hitler's attempt to carve out an IMPERIAL hinterland? You do realise they are not the same thing?

How come you insist (post 99) that the 1440 words challenge the dominant notions of the second world war, but now you're arguing for the "imperialist analysis" which is in.fact a commonplace argument about ww2 and has found expression in a number of recent texts on the subject?

 

[Lock&Light]

It's almost like he really doesn't know about 'Germany', the state that claimed didn't care about the holocaust, and it was simply 'lumbered' with it. No one could really think that though, could they?

It's a bit like a monkey on a typewriter. Eventually some sense will come out of it.

 

[Lock&Light]

.......Butchers , (and violent Panda, 39th Step, Love Detective, Joe Elliot , and a few others in their loose self-supporting claque)......

That made me chuckle.

 

[Favelado]

It's a bit like a monkey on a typewriter. Eventually some sense will come out of it.

"It was the best of times. It was the blurst of times? Bah. Stupid monkey!"

 

[ViolentPanda]

okay, totally unrelated to your previous point.

Panda. 1. IS IT your opinion Israel is of no purpose to the interests of American imperialism? 2. That the British establishments, particularly Churchill, main aim in the second world war was NOT to defend their interests/empire?

​

​

The main aim, as is very clear, was to defend the homeland. The fact that outposts of empire needed to be defended had roots in two main issues:

1) Those outposts were often where they were due to strategic considerations. If you held Singapore you could deny access to a very large area from there.

2) Access to resources and denying those resources to the enemy.

So, some nebulous mouth-farting about defending the empire and ruling class interests misses both of those points, and entirely misses the fact that without such strategic thinking, both the outposts and the centre of empire would have fallen, and tens of millions would have been trapped under rule that made British racism look like the paternalism of a smiling old man.
Do you know that some Burmese still use the savagery of the Japanese troops as a kind of morality tale to stop people getting above themselves - as an example that if you think too much of yourself, you invariably think less of others, and treat them accordingly, and that the Japanese were the apotheosis of such thinking?

 

[ViolentPanda]

I've pondered this issue too (with genuine growing sadness ) for some time MP3, especially as some of the people who post in the same general terms as Butchers are old ex-comrades with a very creditable political past. (Butchers probably does himself - but because of our assumed names apart from "Joe" I don't know who anyone really is).

Butchers , (and violent Panda, 39th Step, Love Detective, Joe Elliot , and a few others in their loose self-supporting claque) -, are in my opinion nothing more nowadays than disruptive "pseudo radical Trolls".. having some sort of general " anti capitalist" personal ideology/ies , and often a good grasp of marxist theory, but essentially really simply deriving great satisfaction from picking constant fault with other, particularly Radical Socialist, posters, bullying them if possible (as he has just done outrageously to you on this thread MP3 - you were far too patient, you should have told him to fuck off a long time ago), and always trying to prove that they alone have the "real insight" as to what is "going on" ,as opposed to to all us clumsy schmuks, with our outdated 19th century socialist ideology.

You sad doctrinaire wanker. You can't even spell schmuck properly, you gonif.

However I have noticed that Butchers and his ilk will NEVER go into any detail as to what his/their "immensely superior" global analysis and offered "political solution" actually is... NEVER. Because he/they simply haven't got a coherent one -- or not one which they are prepared to spell out on Urban anyway. .

Could that be because unlike you, some other posters are rational enough to know that a "one size fits all" solution won't work? No, there must be something sinister behind it, instead!

Despite Butchers outraged claiming of no connection with the IWCA there is a very nasty sub theme running through the periodic postings of this little , perhaps loosely connected, mutual support group when issues around "multiculturalism", Muslims and supposed " grooming" predilictions, and the impact of immigration on "indigenous job opportunities, the "unstoppable rise of the Far Right, the "uselessness of the Left"... surface....because here they all tail behind the Lumpen white working class support base of the Far Right, by making very slippery, unspelled out, concessions to these Lumpen obsessions and misrepresentations.

You've used my username and "credited" such thinking to me. Now prove it. If you can't (which you can't), then shut the fuck up with your conspiracy theories.

My harsh advice to fellow radical socialists is to treat this loosely connected little coterie of obsessive posters with considerable suspicion, and not to allow them to rubbish the socialist cause with the endless posturing of being genuine anti capitalist radicals that they have chosen to present for years on Urban and other Boards. Beware them all . They are not nowadays actually allies of the radical Left in my opinion..

You're inflexible, dogmatic and indoctrinated. That makes your opinion somewhat tainted.

 

[elbows]

Barged into my house singing songs of freedom, but once they'd left I noticed they'd trodden dogma into my carpets and the chorus wasnt about freedom at all.

 

[butchersapron]

Next piece is up -
1941-1945: barbarism in a world gone mad

It laughs at rmp3:

The dual logic of Nazi racism and German imperialism led to large-scale genocide as huge swathes of Poland and Russia were overrun. The genocide intensified as the tide of war turned against the invaders. The Jews in particular became scapegoats for defeat and suffering.

The piece is even worse than the second one (the subject of this thread). It offers nothing as to why the list of atrocities it contains happened.

 

[Louis MacNeice]

My harsh advice to fellow radical socialists is to treat this loosely connected little coterie of obsessive posters with considerable suspicion, and not to allow them to rubbish the socialist cause with the endless posturing of being genuine anti capitalist radicals that they have chosen to present for years on Urban and other Boards. Beware them all . They are not nowadays actually allies of the radical Left in my opinion..

If you believe that the socialist cause - the emancipation of the working class by the working class - can be effectively rubbished by posts on a bulletin board, then you are wrong.

If not then what are you posting this 'harsh advice' for?

Louis MacNeice

 

[Pickman's model]

Next piece is up -
1941-1945: barbarism in a world gone mad

It laughs at rmp3:



The piece is even worse than the second one (the subject of this thread). It offers nothing as to why the list of atrocities it contains happened.

but... but... but it's challenging the dominant ideas about the second world war [/rmp3]

 

[TremulousTetra]

How come you insist (post 99) that the 1440 words challenge the dominant notions of the second world war, but now you're arguing for the "imperialist analysis" which is in.fact a commonplace argument about ww2 and has found expression in a number of recent texts on the subject?

I repeat for the hard of reading here

 

[TremulousTetra]

Next piece is up -
1941-1945: barbarism in a world gone mad

It laughs at rmp3:

"It laughs at rmp3:"
you truly are a delusional fuckwit.

The piece is even worse than the second one (the subject of this thread). It offers nothing as to why the list of atrocities it contains happened.

so, write a better one.

 

[TremulousTetra]

If you believe that the socialist cause - the emancipation of the working class by the working class - can be effectively rubbished by posts on a bulletin board, then you are wrong.

If not then what are you posting this 'harsh advice' for?

Louis MacNeice

Some fun may be had with the latest installment of this series on counterfuck website.
Niel Faulkner has written an 'interesting' account of ww2 which was, apparently, an entirely imperialist conflict, which was marked by horrific massacres by the western powers and soviet union, while the Germans were simply attempting to regain a fair division of imperialist spoils. No holocaust, no death camps, no mass slaughter of Jews, slavs, gypsies, homosexuals etc. No mass terror of civilian populations ( except by the allies).
There is a comments box, can anyone get something past the clusterfuck moderators?

 

[Spanky Longhorn]

Two quotes which have almost no relevance to each other you loon

 

[barney_pig]

there was nothing on the counterfire site which has any relation to the emancipation of the working class as the act of the working class.

 

[TremulousTetra]

The main aim, as is very clear, was to defend the homeland. The fact that outposts of empire needed to be defended had roots in two main issues:

1) Those outposts were often where they were due to strategic considerations. If you held Singapore you could deny access to a very large area from there.

2) Access to resources and denying those resources to the enemy.

So, some nebulous mouth-farting about defending the empire and ruling class interests misses both of those points, and entirely misses the fact that without such strategic thinking, both the outposts and the centre of empire would have fallen, and tens of millions would have been trapped under rule that made British racism look like the paternalism of a smiling old man.
Do you know that some Burmese still use the savagery of the Japanese troops as a kind of morality tale to stop people getting above themselves - as an example that if you think too much of yourself, you invariably think less of others, and treat them accordingly, and that the Japanese were the apotheosis of such thinking?

I think that is a perfectly reasonable analysis panda I've heard before. No doubt part of the analysis. However, I do think there are other factors playing in their, the ruling classes, decision-making process. In every war there is an element of 'the game'. " I haven't become the Kings first minister to preside over the destruction of British interests".. <Nemo comment.

by and large, I have no problems, I feel no need to "have some fun" with the idea that World War II was an imperialist war. of course, other people are free to do so.

 

[TremulousTetra]

Two quotes which have almost no relevance to each other you loon

what's the difference between posts on a bulletin board, and posts in a comments box?

 

[Louis MacNeice]

RMP3 could you explain what your post is meant to mean?

Cheers - Louis Macneice

 

[Louis MacNeice]

what's the difference between posts on a bulletin board, and posts in a comments box?

Did anybody claim that NF was rubbishing the socialist cause? I thought he was accused of doing some poor marxist history...which he did.

Louis MacNeice