[Sunday 11 November]The Unpatriotic History of the Second World War

[Jean-Luc]

You seem to have retreated from your earlier extraordinary complacent claim that if only the British Ruling Class had cut a deal with Nazi Germany in circa 1940, after the fall of France, the German Ruling class would have taken its winnings (after next conquering Russia presumeably ?) , got rid of the Nazis, spared the surviving Jews, and set up the EU a few years earlier !

It was only (likes yours) an idle speculation anyway put forward to offer a different possible outcome to your nightmare scenario. I have to admit, though, that your scenario proved accurate for the people of eastern Europe: they were incorporated into what you call a "Totalitarian Industrial Slave State" that dominated a large part of the Eurasian landmass for the following 45 years. I doubt if a Nazi Europe would have lasted that long as a "Totalitarian Industrial Slave State" as that would have been economically impossible. But we're back to idle speculation again.

In any event, the Second World War was an imperialist war whose outcome was going to be a re-division of the world amongst the imperialist powers, the specific carve-up depending on the outcome. We're just speculating about what the carve-up might have been had the Axis powers won. This didn't happen and the world was re-divided in the way it was, with the big gainers being Imperialist America and Imperialist Russia, with British and French imperialisms being relegated to the second division.

 

[Captain Hurrah]

I understand everything there is to know about the nightmare of the Cultural bloody Revolution you toy stalinist tit, Hurrah. Why don't you give us all a sick laugh with some sort of sad apologia for it ? Next up an appreciation of the greatly misunderstood achievements of Kim Il Sung and Pol Pot ?

I am not a Stalinist. I see you've stopped using CAPITAL letters, though, which I guess is an improvement. Or perhaps you gained a little self-awareness. The only toy Stalinist on these boards is DotCommunist.

I don't see how the Cultural Revolution has similarities with what you've been talking about above. If you insist on being a pompous twat with an air of authority on threads then you should at least try to know a little about what you're talking about. I know your position seems largely to be what you learned by rote in an irrelevant Trotskyist sect when I was watching some posho with his hand up a puppet on the telly, but it also seems, like some western interpretations, to be informed by the Chinese Communist Party's attempt post-Mao to dominate how the CR and the collective era is remembered and its meaning - that is, 'ten years of chaos,' a decade of unbroken and constant bloodshed somehow orchestrated by one man, some kind of evil genius. It suited Deng, it suits you I suppose. Part of this is the encouragement in the publication of misery memoirs or 'scar literature' as a genre based on themes of terror and madness and the like.

You don't even seem to realise that the more bloody or 'chaotic' part of the CR with mass participation was only a small period within that decade, was but one aspect, and after three years with some cities resembling through street battles a break down into 'civil war,' the CPC had to bring in other state actors in order to put a brake on what had been unleashed from below. That is, frustrated millions with access to meaningful political participation for the first time. And we're going to have to delve into these contesting constituencies who grasped out for it, and how they experienced it. Within that, there is much to disappoint those quaint hardcore Maoists who still hold up the GPCR (they'd prefer that) as the furthest advance to communism yet seen, and ignorant muppets like yourself.

One very important and central aspect is the all too familiar cult of personality exported by the international Communist movement, but beneath the surface you'd need to examine how Mao's texts (he was a better writer than Stalin, and I bet you've read neither) and symbolism were used by the above to suit various agendas, interests, were subverted and manipulated. Brainwashing into living a fantasy didn't happen, rather people in oppressive and authoritarian societies like Maoist China resist their oppression and exploitation by using whatever is closest to hand, even that which is used by the powers that be to justify their dominance, including the official image of the Great Helmsman.

And what about DPRK and DK? Want to go down that road? And then get in a huff and call me a Stalinist?

 

[ayatollah]

Slippery , slippery, but ultimately completely analysis-free stuff , Hurrah - In the worthless bullshit above you've taken no actual "position" on the class nature of Mao and his regime , or on the real class purposes and impacts of the process called "the Cultural Revolution". There is nothing meaningful that can actually be deduced from your pompous verbiage. I repeat yet again. You are simply a slippery, dishonest, neo stalinist apologist, hiding behind a disconnected series of excuses and straw men arguments. Pathetic, and contemptable.

There are plenty of misguided people, particularly comfortable armchair "Marxists" (like Hurrah) safely distant from the horrors of the realities of Stalinism, ready to argue that Stalin was a great socialist leader, or , as a softer form of apologia, "not nearly as bad as western propaganda claims", and that the Great Famines caused by Collectivisation were also just Western propaganda, as with the deaths in the Great Purges. There are also still plenty of people also ready to maintain that Mao was also a great Socialist revolutionery, and that the "Cultural Revolution " was a genuine revolutionery socialist process.. The Trotskyist theory of "Permament Revolution" in action ! In fact all of these mass murderous events were driven solely by the particular tactical needs of these two state capitalist class dictators seeking to further entrench (and in Mao's case recover lost personal power in the Communist bureaucracy after the disaster of "The Great Leap Forward") their personal and collective bureaucratic class power on their societies, nothing more.

The Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, commonly known as the Cultural Revolution lasted from 1966 to 1969 in its main phase, but is often argued to have actually continued in various forms until 1976.

The death toll, never mind those whose lives were simply ruined or disrupted, in the chaotic "Cultural Revolution", is an issue of huge debate. Maoist apologists put it at about 5 people and a dog – crushed by accident at a mass rally in 1968 possibly ! Other analysts however are a bit more believable--- even if the totals are highly controversial.:

In Mao's Last Revolution (2006), Roderick MacFarquhar and Michael Schoenhals assert that in rural China alone some 36 million people were persecuted, of whom between 750,000 and 1.5 million were killed, with roughly the same number permanently injured. In Mao: The Unknown Story, Jung Chang and Jon Halliday claim that as many as 3 million people died in the violence of the Cultural Revolution. Sociologist Daniel Chirot claims that around 100 million people suffered and at least one million people, and perhaps as many as 20 million, died in the Cultural Revolution.

Those, like Hurrah, who try to bury these ghastly human costs in a welter of pseudo academic double talk and obstruse debate about multi layer complex processes, etc, simply piss on the graves of the millions of dead, and soil the cause of Revolutionery Socialism, by their failure to take a firm stand against the aberrant counter revolutionery political/class system known as "Stalinism", which is the gravedigger of working class revolutionery self emancipation, not a varient of "Socialism" or "genuine "Communism".

 

[Random]

So far I've found out that Ayatollah doesn't like Capt hurrah and that he's exposed Mao as a Stalinist. I await further revelations

 

[Captain Hurrah]

Slippery , slippery, but ultimately completely analysis-free stuff , Hurrah - In the worthless bullshit above you've taken no actual "position" on the class nature of Mao and his regime , or on the real class purposes and impacts of the process called "the Cultural Revolution". There is nothing meaningful that can actually be deduced from your pompous verbiage. I repeat yet again. You are simply a slippery, dishonest, neo stalinist apologist, hiding behind a disconnected series of excuses and straw men arguments. Pathetic, and contemptable.

There are plenty of misguided people, particularly comfortable armchair "Marxists" (like Hurrah) safely distant from the horrors of the realities of Stalinism, ready to argue that Stalin was a great socialist leader, or , as a softer form of apologia, "not nearly as bad as western propaganda claims", and that the Great Famines caused by Collectivisation were also just Western propaganda, as with the deaths in the Great Purges. There are also still plenty of people also ready to maintain that Mao was also a great Socialist revolutionery, and that the "Cultural Revolution " was a genuine revolutionery socialist process.. The Trotskyist theory of "Permament Revolution" in action ! In fact all of these mass murderous events were driven solely by the particular tactical needs of these two state capitalist class dictators seeking to further entrench (and in Mao's case recover lost personal power in the Communist bureaucracy after the disaster of "The Great Leap Forward") their personal and collective bureaucratic class power on their societies, nothing more.

The Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, commonly known as the Cultural Revolution lasted from 1966 to 1969 in its main phase, but is often argued to have actually continued in various forms until 1976.

The death toll, never mind those whose lives were simply ruined or disrupted, in the chaotic "Cultural Revolution", is an issue of huge debate. Maoist apologists put it at about 5 people and a dog – crushed by accident at a mass rally in 1968 possibly ! Other analysts however are a bit more believable--- even if the totals are highly controversial.:

In Mao's Last Revolution (2006), Roderick MacFarquhar and Michael Schoenhals assert that in rural China alone some 36 million people were persecuted, of whom between 750,000 and 1.5 million were killed, with roughly the same number permanently injured. In Mao: The Unknown Story, Jung Chang and Jon Halliday claim that as many as 3 million people died in the violence of the Cultural Revolution. Sociologist Daniel Chirot claims that around 100 million people suffered and at least one million people, and perhaps as many as 20 million, died in the Cultural Revolution.

Those, like Hurrah, who try to bury these ghastly human costs in a welter of pseudo academic double talk and obstruse debate about multi layer complex processes, etc, simply piss on the graves of the millions of dead, and soil the cause of Revolutionery Socialism, by their failure to take a firm stand against the aberrant counter revolutionery political/class system known as "Stalinism", which is the gravedigger of working class revolutionery self emancipation, not a varient of "Socialism" or "genuine "Communism".

Your source/s are Halliday and Chang! Not only that, but from Wikipedia! No wonder you're woefully ignorant. I've read the co-authored MacFarquhar and Schoenhals book. You haven't. And how can you tell me about the real class nature, purposes and 'process' of the CR, when you seem unaware of the varying social bases of Red Guard organisation and action, and their competing objectives vis-a-vis the CPC leadership?

And nowhere have I said that the CR was a 'genuine socialist revolutionary process.' I don't think of it in those terms, never have done, and I'm guessing when you say that, you're within the confines of your crude by the numbers Leninism. I'm saying that the flood of violence (not 'revolutionary activity' despite what the participants thought themselves) is rooted in earlier government class-based policies which affected millions, and that the violence, its direction etc, was more than just an evil scheme cooked up by a handful of people in 1966 Beijing or Shanghai, as you seem to think. As I said earlier, when the dam burst and the ensuing flood was seen as too threatening, the CPC had to bring in the PLA. Good to see that you grudgingly acknowledged that with your talk of a 'main phase.'

Surely, as a REVOLUTIONARY SOCIALIST at Visteon, you would be more inclined to jettison whatever purely moralistic condemnation you have adopted about Mao-era China, the failure to establish a socialist society during that time, or the man himself. For example, Mao was responsible for allowing mass death, but was never a mass 'murderer.' Responsibility can certainly be placed at someone's door even though they did not have death as their central or stated aim. But nevertheless, these people took decisions from a position of considerable authority, and did so on the basis of knowing that those decisions carried a risk of outcomes including death, and then did nothing or didn't intervene enough once those consequences had begun to show themselves.

Take the GLF. To understand it and its consequences, is it more fruitful to look at the conditions of the country at the time and its under-development, an inadequately resourced Leninist government with partially 'proven' Soviet models for remedying it along with the distinct voluntarism offered by Maoist thought, the position of China in the world re the major capitalist powers, and the Party's relationship with the peasantry going back many years? You know, instead of talking about a cartoon monster? Doesn't make the participants and what they created or allowed to happen any less awful and diminish their responsibility for it.

And next ... Defending Stalin and collectivisation in the USSR? Oh my. You're seriously going to have to back this up sunshine. In the very few instances where such a thing has been discussed here, or more accurately the industrialisation drive it depended upon, I've always been consistent in looking at it from the perspective of mainly non-working class resistance and self-organisation by those millions of migrating peasants who ended up being proletarianised by the changes brought about by the Soviet state. You know that shit called class struggle? But it was country bumpkins, so you can't stamp it with the word SOCIALISM.

So, yet again more bilge, and daft accusations. Come on AYATOLLAH. Let's talk about the Cultural Revolution, without the aid of Wikipedia.

 

[Jean-Luc]

This talk of China reminds me that China was the 5th member of the Gang of Five which set up the "United Nations" (successor to the League of Nations, also known as the League of Bandits). Its leader at the time was the warlord Chiang Kai Shek, hardly a democrat. Although on the winning side China didn't gain much from the war. Today of course it is different. Today Chinese imperialism has replaced Japanese as American imperialism's rival for control of the Eastern Pacific and its markets, trade routes, raw material sources and investment outlets and strategic points to protect these. Most observers are predicting a clash at some point. Certainly both sides are building up their military might in and around the area.

 

[dylanredefined]

I read it was one bloke who shot all those officers. over the space of a week. How he ever slept again...

Probably didn't live very long afterwards USSR tended to tidy up its awkward facts.
The Bengal famine was not caused by the British burning food stocks. Just by a poor harvest and a war
meaning there was a shortage of food and transport to get food to the starving.
Lots of stupidity and mistakes ,but, no obviously evil. Well Churchill was a cunt ,but,that is a given
isn't it.

 

[Jean-Luc]

The Bengal famine was not caused by the British burning food stocks. Just by a poor harvest and a war meaning there was a shortage of food and transport to get food to the starving.
Lots of stupidity and mistakes ,but, no obviously evil. Well Churchill was a cunt ,but,that is a given isn't it.

Some people in India take a rather different view:


http://www.samarthbharat.com/bengalholocaust.htm

 

[Random]

Probably didn't live very long afterwards USSR tended to tidy up its awkward facts.
The Bengal famine was not caused by the British burning food stocks. Just by a poor harvest and a war
meaning there was a shortage of food and transport to get food to the starving.
Lots of stupidity and mistakes ,but, no obviously evil. Well Churchill was a cunt ,but,that is a given
isn't it.

The Soviets and Chinese would say the same thing about their megadeath famines. "We never planned to kill all those peasants, it was a time of conflict"

 

[Captain Hurrah]

This talk of China reminds me that China was the 5th member of the Gang of Five which set up the "United Nations" (successor to the League of Nations, also known as the League of Bandits). Its leader at the time was the warlord Chiang Kai Shek, hardly a democrat.

Chiang Kai-Shek was involved with the old Comintern too. Following directives from Moscow to collaborate with the KMT would seriously fuck up the CPC.

 

[Random]

Chiang Kai-Shek was involved with the old Comintern too. Following directives from Moscow to collaborate with the KMT would seriously fuck up the CPC.

Did the KMT links with Comintern survive the sack of Shanghai in 1927? IIrc there was a left faction in the KMT, and it even held the official leadership for a while after, but Kai-Sheck managed to grab all the real military resources.

 

[Captain Hurrah]

Yep. But I'm not sure for how much longer, though. Of course the Comintern would, by its sixth congress in 1928, take an abrupt new direction and the start of the infamous ultra-sectarian Third Period, which had damaging consequences for the European labour movement, disastrously so in Germany.

You're on about the Northern Expedition, re the military resources? The Soviet Union gave the KMT aid in the fight against the warlords. The turning on the Communists happened part way through that military campaign.

The whole thing was a fuck up, though.

At the Comintern's fifth congress in 1924, a Bukharin and Stalin-pushed policy of collaboration with the 'national bourgeoisie' in the 'rural districts of the world' was approved. In 1925, the genius theoretician Stalin further advanced the thesis that the KMT (a rich merchant and big landlord vehicle) represented the 'revolutionary wing' of China's bourgeois nationalists.

It sent the CPC on a path of reactionary collaboration (acting in partnership with KMT landlords to put down the assertive peasant movement in 1926-27) and calamity in the form of a massacre of the CPC by 1927 (the KMT turned on them, launching armed attacks against the organised labour movement in the cities, nearly destroying the party apparatus, as well as non-Leninist organisation among China's small working class).

Then, it was off to the countryside.

 

[Random]

You're on about the Northern Expedition re the military resources? The Soviet Union gave the KMT aid in the fight against the warlords. The turning on the Communists happened part way through that military campaign.

Yes, and the official capital of KMT china was Wuhan, but Chaing ignored the party's constitution and set himself up as generalissimo in nanjing (iirc)

 

[Captain Hurrah]

That's right. Became the official capital until the Japanese arrived.

 

[Jean-Luc]

By coincidence today's Sunday Telegraph has an article on Stuart Laycock, author of All the Countries We've invaded. According to the book:

Out of 193 countries that are currently UN member states, we've invaded or had some control over or fought conflicts in the territory of something like 171. That's a massive, jaw-dropping 88 per cent!

 

[Random]

Laycock's definition of "invaded" seems to be so wide as to be almost useless. Looking at some of the countries on that list, like Romania: the only "invasion" must have either been SOE agents helping partisans, or have happened before the actual state of Romania existed.

 

[Jean-Luc]

I don't think much of the title either. "We" didn't invade all these countries. It was armed forces acting under the government responsible to the ruling capitalist class that did, not us ordinary people.

As to Rumania, I think you are forgetting that Rumania was on the Axis side in the Second World War and was bombed by the Allies including Britain. See:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bombing_of_Romania_in_World_War_II

 

[Random]

No, I'm not forgetting that at all. Didn't I just mention SOE agents? Bombing doesn't count as an invasion, that's a definition so loose as to be nonsense.

 

[Jean-Luc]

Bombing doesn't count as an invasion, that's a definition so loose as to be nonsense.

Oh yeah? So Britain didn't invade Libya last year and America didn't invade North Vietnam during the Vietnam War? Before you mention Syria, yes, Britain did send ground troops to invade it, Iraq and Iran during WW2.

 

[Random]

Oh yeah? So Britain didn't invade Libya last year and America didn't invade North Vietnam during the Vietnam War?

There's a word called "invasion", which means an incursion by forces; it's not the same as aerial bombing. To use one to mean the other is simply nonsense; Lazycock is doing so to hype his book. It's not a useful habit to fall into.

 

[Captain Hurrah]

Aye. The US didn't invade the DRV, just pounded the fuck out of it with planes.

 

[Lo Siento.]

Laycock's definition of "invaded" seems to be so wide as to be almost useless. Looking at some of the countries on that list, like Romania: the only "invasion" must have either been SOE agents helping partisans, or have happened before the actual state of Romania existed.

But "All the countries we've intervened militarily in" would be a shit title for a book

 

[dylanredefined]

I'm pretty sure the UK has dicked around with Guatemala when it wanted to take Belize.

 

[exiledinwales]

"Cultural Revolutions" aside for a moment. The main problem I see with ayatollah's perspective on WW2 is ultimately it seems to come down to practical support for a state and ruling class. How does your perspective relate to practice, would you have signed up with the British state? And how does it relate to the question of war today?

 

[Jean-Luc]

The main problem I see with ayatollah's perspective on WW2 is ultimately it seems to come down to practical support for a state and ruling class. How does your perspective relate to practice, would you have signed up with the British state?

I don't know about Ayatollah but this seems to be the SWP position. On Saturday at 6.30 Bookmarks in London are re-launching Donny Gluckstein's A People's History of the Second World War (the Armistice Day weekend seems to be good occasion to draw attention to books on this war).

According to the Abstract, Donny Gluckstein starts off from the same position as James Heartfield:

Governments on both sides of the Allied/Axis divide fought for world hegemony in a brutal fashion ranging from the Holocaust to the Hiroshima nuclear bomb. The war began as a fight between imperialist 'have nots' (Germany, Italy, Japan) against imperialist 'haves' (Britain, France, Russia). Thus it ended with the defeat of the former and a new carve-up of the world on Cold War lines. Stripped of anti-fascist rhetoric, the Allied governments fought to protect, extend, or create empires.

But ends up saying that it was "a war worth fighting":

The Second World War was different in essence from, for example, WWI or the Vietnam war. In its volatile combination of disparate elements it was unique, not only in the sheer scale of its wanton violence against civilians, but as a war worth fighting to end the scourge of fascism and Nazism.

 

[sunnysidedown]

So, has anyone actually read the book in the OP?
I'm just over half way through and have found it fascinating if a little dry.
Also it obviously wasn't proof read as there are a shit load of errors that shouldn't be in a book like this (I'm reading an ebook version I downloaded) I will however pick up the print version if there is a 2nd edition which addresses these and also tightens up some of the writing.