The demonization of Stalin is about hiding his great contributions to revolutionary theory
Tag: Stalinism
Why Liberals Hate Leftists
Liberals hate leftists because there is a night-and-day difference between a capitalist, imperialist establishment and an ideology which wants to tear down that establishment and replace it with peace and socialism. There’s more of a difference between true leftists and establishment liberals than there is between the far right and establishment liberals.
Related:
Left Anticommunism: the unkindest cut
Editor’s Note: Part opportunism, part careerism, part willful denial (or ignorance) of true capitalist and imperial dynamics, and part attachment to the comforts of being within the respectable fold of “permissible” criticism, Left Anticommunism continues to take a huge toll on the American left. In this comprehensive and incisive essay, Michael Parenti explores the reasons why the Left anti-communist stance must be seen for what it is: a de facto collaboration with the forces defending the corporate status quo. [This selection is from Parenti’s book Blackshirts and Reds: Rational Fascism and the Overthrow of Communism (City Lights, 1997). It is reproduced here by courtesy of the author. ]— Patrice Greanville
Exaggerations against Stalin
So who is this responsible for this blatantly impossible assertion about Stalin? It was the son of a Trotskyist. Antonov-Ovseyenko was a Trotskyist who tried to use his military position to aid Trotsky take over the party in the USSR.
The bourgeois scholars in the West all clamored to support Anton Antonov-Ovseyenko’s book. The endorsements on his book jacket read like a who’s who of anti-Soviet propaganda. The book received an introduction and praise by Stephen F. Cohen, Princeton professor and darling of the social-democrats and revisionists for his sympathetic biography of N. Bukharin and political opposition to the Cold War. The other endorsers include democratic socialist Irving Howe, cold warrior and bourgeois scholar Robert Conquest, Robert G. Kaiser, Leonard Schapiro, Harrison Salisbury and of course the New Republic, which called it “the most important book to have come out of the Soviet experience since Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago.” From this we can see how much credibility the mainstream discussion of Stalin deserves–none.
Ms. Cat’s Chronicles 