One of the funniest moments in the blogosphere so far this year has been a seemingly never ending thread at Troppo which segued into an endless Rafean inquisition, until diverted in its dying moments into a more sedate and learned disquisition on the finer points of Baroque opera by Rob and James Farrell. The thread inspired an intervention by cs I think must be close to the top of the pops this year for best comment, which in turn inspired a new blogosphere analytical concept – conspicuous indignation.
Yeah, conspicuous indignation has become a kind of right-wing performance art. Loved the flamboyant little gig your crowd played over the disco-anthem in the run-up to New Year! Gave me a good belly laugh every day. An empty-headed outrage that achieved the usual zilch and is now well forgotten of course, but that’s not the point. Posturing as ordinary, patriotic, virtuous, down-trodden victims of traitorous, biased, hectoring, arrogant, sanctimonious, tree-hugging, big word-using, chards-guzzling, latte-mainlining, inner-city liberal elites is the whole performance art of the thing.
As you say, the ABC is the RWDB’s most favoured source of getting all conspicuously indignant, although silly old Prof Bunners never runs short of fuel from the Fairfax press and Tim B will always be glad to have Margo to stoke his virtuous fire. Your lot have been fulminating over the ABC since the dawn of time, or however long it has been since Howard was first elected. But it gets nowhere of course, for that would close the theatre, and then you’d have to find something else to act powerless over and get all furious about being betrayed by. One of the tricks is to get indignant over a cause you can never win. Meanwhile, back in the shadows, your government moves to further concentrate the already concentrated ownership of commercial media, but no-one is allowed to worry about that in the new PC.
Perhaps Nowra’s onto something. If you ever get sick of uselessly complaining about the ABC and academics and journos that don’t toe your line, maybe the right could have a full-scale indignant re-run of the cold war now that its long over – a sort of post-modern McCarthyism. Can you imagine anything more pointless? Perfect! Might even further boost sales for the Che t-shirt, coffee mug, poster production line. That should keep the corporations happy while also safely maintaining the flow of fuel. Way to fulminate! Must be off – the chards will be cold by now.
Ah, the best of the blogosphere.
But, what, I hear you ask was all this about? And when do we get to find out what the poll is? Read over the fold, dear comrades.
It was all started by Andrew Norton who posted a criticism of the practice of wearing Che T-Shirts, remarking:
it is really quite disturbing that people don’t feel uncomfortable using the images and icons of a movement responsible for mass murder, oppression, and impoverishment.
The obvious comeback, which cs among others didn’t miss, is that the commodification of Guevara’s image was, well, capitalism at work.
Now Rafe Champion is a nice bloke, who writes me long emails I don’t always find time to respond to, and kindly sends me papers he thinks would be of interest to me in the mail, but he’s also someone with a bit of a habit of constructing a straw-collective called THE LEFT.
And Rafe has duly returned to the Che lists at Catallaxy, with an assist from the redoubtable C.L. who accuses me of “denialism”.
This relates to the post below, on the tendency for elements of the left to elevate murderous thugs to the level of cult heroes, or at least to make apologies for them, or to blame other people one way or another. In the case Che Guevara this has been hugely aided and abetted by western film-makers.
I dare say there’s also a market for capitalist film-makers in Che films, or they wouldn’t get made.
But remembering that the fallacy of composition is apparently absent from Popperian logic, I did think it was worth confirming my hypothesis that THE LEFT don’t actually idealise Senor Guevara, with the obvious exception of Green Left Weekly types, who after all are in the youth ideas market, and have to make 4th International Trostskyism somehow kewl.
So, dear fellow card-carrying members of the Vast Left Wing Conspiracy, what is your considered opinion on Che?
NB: As an aside, I think that all this goes to prove what is already at evidence in three recent redrag domain threads, that lefty blog types are the stylish geek hotness (particularly when it comes to footwear – well at least in the case of Lefty Kim and Lefty Kate). Che’s kinda sexy, and so is THE LEFT. That’s where the parallels end, and that doesn’t require all of us to “accept historical responsibility” for his crimes.
Nice hat. Bad politics.
Actually, unlike CS I never felt that cold war has ended, it’s just morphed into yet another sales channel (Islamo Mart) so that the capitalist military industrial complex can earn billions oppressing nice bearded hat wearing individuals who then turn into murderous bastards.
So you see it’s all America’s fault that Che exists and is so popular. I also note the similar rampant popularity of OBL sold on t-shirts and posters in the Islamic world, gotta love that market terrorism.
Good one, Phil – bloody hilarious satire!
ROTFLMAO
MarkL
Canberra
Thank you, being fair and balanced is the new PC.
Unforgivably violent socialist, now glamourised to an extreme that I’m sure would have pissed him off something shocking.
Never been that interested in Che, and I think the Cuban Revolution was badly deformed by its absorption into the Soviet Bloc. But the t-shirts and films are kewl!
Fidel was right to send him packing, the Venezuelan middle class tosser that he was. Endangered the revolution. And now sells Coca-Cola, I believe.
Of course the left idolised Guevara. The image of the sombre, thoughful political bandit whose charisma and leadership were of course devastating (lonely moodiness notwithstanding) was the dominant motif of the adolescent left in the seventies. (Think Leonard Cohen’s ‘The Partisan’ – more Algerian than Bolivian.)
All the lefty boys wanted to be Che, and all the lefty girls wanted to sleep with him.
It was of course pure self-induced fantasy, like our infantile infatuation with Mao.
Speak for yourself, Rob, I’d never heard of him when I was in kindergarten and the early years of primary school in the 70s.
Ditto, though I’m 5 years Kim’s senior.
I don’t think I ever heard of Che til I saw the trot posters at Uni in the late 80s!
Mark, that’s because the commodification of totalitarian icons was a 90s phenomenon.
Very much a post-Gorbachev phenomenon. One of the many ironies of the “End of History” – as Fukuyama and indeed Kojeve predicted.
Ah, you children. You’ll never understand the left, because you didn’t live through the seventies as political radicals.
True, Kim. It’s also related to the speeding up of fashion cycles in the 90s – which is best captured by William Gibson, since we’re mentioning him tonight.
Some of us, Rob, spend our lives reading the 1970s on microfilm, and for some odd reason, despite out peers wearing Che t-shirts to their non-union work, still believe in socialism.
Who’d have thought that political ideals could exit without idols?
No, Rob, we were marching on assembly in militaristic style, listening to God Save the Queen over the tannoy every morning, and generally being Joh-era primary school kids!
Btw – I should mention that Mark has come over to my place to watch the cricket, and we’re well into the Merlot, so perhaps we’d better go and attend to the ostensible purpose of the visit and stop commenting before we stop making sense (80s Talking Heads reference!)…
You had to be there, liam. Nothing beats that.
Kim is stealing my point about Fukuyama and Kojeve – she’s been reading a chapter of my thesis! Aren’t we Saturday night funsters!
Missed the seventies by two months. Shit, I guess I can’t believe in social justice and redistribution now?
Bugger.
It’s a fair cop, Guv.
Ah, you children. You?Äôll never understand the left, because you didn?Äôt live through the seventies as political radicals.
Thanks for that,
Mr Hitchens, sir– I mean, Rob.Liam, I was probably predestined to be a Lefty – being born in 1968. The month of Tet.
A ’73 girl, me. Definitely a daughter of the summer of love and paisley and wide lapels and bellbottoms, before they got all retro.
Jeebus, I was born in ’59, I’m not the oldest here, am I?
Let me describe, if you will indulge me, the left in the seventies.
Basically, we thought we were on a roll. We’d already decided that the values of our parents and the post-WWII generation were shite. That was a given. We thought the floodgates of change had opened up, and we were riding the wave. We read Marx, we read Guevara, we read Mao. the more committed of us even read Kim Il Sung (not easy). We knew that Stalin was old hat, and had unfortunately fouled socialism’s nest, but we still had faith. We invested the faith in Cuba, Castro and most particularly Guevara, whom we adored. Most of all, though, we invested it in Mao’s China. This was the time of the Cultural Revolution, and we loved it. Everywhere you went, in Carlton in those heady days, you saw copies of ‘China Reconstructs’ (a glossy propaganda publication distributed by the East Wind Bookshop) prominently displayed, along with revolutionary posters on the walls. Determined peasants, earnest factory workers, oh yeah.
None of us, needless to say, had ever worked on either factory or farm, but we knew this was ‘the way’.
We knew it all. No one could tell us anything. Viet Cong atrocities? CIA propaganda. Millions of dead from the Great Leap Forward? CIA propaganda. Millions in Cambodia? CIA propaganda. The gulag? Well, probably, but remember the imperatives of revolutionary necessity and anyway – CIA propaganda.
What a bunch of dicks we were. And you guys still haven’t learned.
So Rob, given that I’ve never believed any of that shit and, by your own admission, you have…
Tell us why we shouldn’t hold you historically responsible for the crimes of THE LEFT?
Jeebus, I was born in ’59, I?Äôm not the oldest here, am I?
Maybe on this thread? Though Rob’s yet to fess up!
Brian, of course, who’s a most welcome commenter at LP, was 27 when I was born. So he was born in ’41. My good friend Michael, who’s also an estimable commenter here, was born in 55 (I think!). We’re absolutely a cross-generational welcoming blog at LP!
Rob, you have to make peace with your younger self, I think. My politics haven’t shifted much over the years, although those of a lot of my erstwhile comrades have. But there are glorious exceptions – as I discover when I go to student politics reunions (I can hear Liam scream from here!) – such as the 60th anniversary celebration of UQU rag Semper Floreat, which in itself was over a decade ago. Someone – one of our historical comrades, perhaps, needs to capture some oral history about left/student culture in the 70s.
Hobsbawm memorably said that our feeling for history is only really two or three generations in the past.
Personally, in the 70′s and 80′s I was a strong supporter on any anti communist initiative, and supporter of Ronnie Raygun and Maggie. So I wasn’t responsible either, but then I saw the error of my ways and defected to the Che loving capitalist faction of the Vast Left Wing Conspiracy. Why? Because we need some hugs to go with our wealth.
If only tim blair takes a leaf out of Margo K’s book, Liam, perhaps a people’s trial of Rob will take place online for his historical crimes.
I put my hand up to it (I said so on some other thread here). Not to the crimes themselves: but for the apologies, for the fawning excuses, the threadbare justifications. My generation of the left does bear a dreadful responsbility. Without us, it might not have been possible for the North Vietnamese to win, for Cambodia to have fallen to the Khmer Rouge, for Cuba to be enchained, Burma enslaved, and Tibet destroyed. That’s histrionic, of course. But the fact remains.
And to you guys, it’s all just a joke. All the millions and tens of millions.
Kim, that may not be as ironic as you think. If Paul Norton looks in on this thread, he might also know about this and be able to confirm this, but a friend of a good friend of mine, Dr Lee Bermingham, sat on People’s Revolutionary Tribunals at Griffith Uni in the 70s.
Lee of course – went from being a prominent CPA member to that other Leninist organisation, the AWU, before he was unfairly made a scapegoat by the Shepherdson Inquiry for historical crimes within the AWU.
I’m sure it’s difficult to imagine the atmosphere on campuses in the 70s, but I still think Rob could perhaps benefit from exorcising a few ghosts. That’s meant affectionately.
Yay, Phil! Spread the lefty love!
Rob, I’m a member of the Labor Party, I’ve never been any kind of leninist. Please forgive me for Kim Beazley, the Fergusons, Eddie Obeid and Bob Carr.
Rob, don’t take my levity personally. You weren’t responsible. Mark’s right – you need to put some ghosts to rest.
Remember one lesson – individuals make history, but not as they like. We can be haunted by the killing fields of Cambodia, or the Holocaust, but it’s the vigilance that we exercise in the present to prevent and pre-empt the first whiff of genocide that counts in saecula saeculorum.
Lefty love – boy, the world knows what that means, and it’s had a bellyful.
Always ready with an apt quote from Marx is our dear comrade Kimbo!
Yes, apt quotes from Marx always had a certain killing potential. God, you guys are just babies.
It’s pretty hilarious, Rob was one of those guys me and my Randist friends were blaming for everything. Talk about full circle.
Oh, Rob, then just love will do. Here’s some Dante for you:
Beautiful, Kim. Rob – you should listen to the lady Kimberella – she’s a wise woman. And a beautiful one.
I’ve been rereading Dante recently – as is appropriate for one who is midway through his life’s journey:
Yeah, Phil, I guess it’s pretty hilarious. I used to think Mao only killed 30 million Chinese. Now it seems he may have killed 70 million. Cracks me up.
Yes, apt quotes from Marx always had a certain killing potential. God, you guys are just babies.
Rob, avoid the temptation to speak down to your juniors. My intent was to say – you, and Marx, aren’t responsible for what Maoist sociopaths did in the 70s. Chill, friend. You need to forgive yourself. Be a good rightist now and pin the responsibility on those actually directly responsible.
As Leonard Cohen sings:
They weren’t sociopaths. They were good socialists. That’s why they did it. We applauded because we were good socialists too.
There were lots of socialists in the 70s, Rob, who didn’t support Maoism. Let go.
Anyway, Mark and I don’t seem to have achieved much of our Saturday night aim of watching the cricket. Though we do seem to have demolished a bottle of Merlot, and shared the computer chair equitably. I am just going to do my quick Kafka post, and then will reserve the right to drag Marky off to bed as my bonk buddy and share some lefty love the way it’s meant to be shared.
Let go? To live without memory is to be dead.
Just correcting Rex – El Che was Argentinian. Hence the nickname Che. Means ‘mate’ (more or less) in the wonderful, Italian influence Argentinian Spanish.
It’s how you relate to your memories, Rob. Yours seem to be about death and thus you’re effectively dead to your younger self. Be kinder to yourself, is what I’m saying. Anyway, my Kafka post is up, now to pursue projects of lefty2lefty love. Night all, and bless.
I was going to leave Liam to make the obligatory Popper reference – but Kimberella is threatening me with a very nasty jab with her evil prosthetic leg – which she claims has a name and will of its own, and will not condone blog commenting when other pleasures beckon. So I shall say Popper very quickly.
Speaking of murderous thugs, what’s the proper position on Richard the Lionheart (PC or mainstream opinion, it’s all the same to me).
Also – did Richard III kill the princes in the tower or was it a Tudor frame up by Shakespeare?
Ok, Rob, I’ve come back momentarily from post-c**tal goodness, despite the cold so far from the bed, to say, you need a hug, my friend. Here’s a virtual one. Ego te absolvo a peccatis tuis in nomine Patris et Filii et Spiritus Sancti. Amen.
You need a more Catholic view of memory, I think.
“I would have you keep in your heart these words that I say, and think of them at another time”.
So I go now to sleep. The lefty love is sweet goodness. As is this blog. Where else on an ostensibly political blog would you read what comes close to live b*nk blogging?
Night. Bless.
Christ, methinks someone has lost his sense of humour with his evangelical conversion to “The Way”. And the true path to a messianic political and cultural enlightenment also clearly comes with an attendant loss of irony.
It looks like I’m the oldest here (’56). Certainly I was around in the 1970s, and since then have derived a certain grim amusement from people like Rob, who switched, with barely a moment to catch their breath, from denouncing me as a bourgeois reformist running dog of capitalism to denouncing me as a bourgeois elitist fellow traveller of communism.
To be fair, they knew a bourgeois when they saw one, since they had typically attended GPS private schools, and could easily suss out an upwardly mobile state school kid like me.
Im 20 years younger John, and in defence of the much maligned Gen X – I suspect there’s less of the ‘long march’ to the Right phenomenon among us. But then, there were fewer of us to start with on the left. We didnt have popular culture on our side, I suppose, attracting the good-time, crowd-joiner blow throughs.
Obviously too, we didnt have the mud of history to work through. Few on the left by the late 80s were blinkered to Eastern bloc regimes (excepting perhaps a few 4th Internationale trots singing “gorby gorby gorby” for 10 minutes in 89-90 – and still defending Cuba I imagine)
Then again, maybe all this should be judged down the track.
…with barely a moment to catch their breath….
Hardly, John. It took me twenty years to work out that we were wrong about Vietnam, for example.
Damn, Kim, Mark, do you two have to bring all your lovin’ out into the wilds of a stoush on generationalism? Does your pillow talk involve deconstruction and speculation about the other’s mentalite? Get a room, kids.
Point taken, Liam, I’ve cleaned up Kim’s comment in the interests of preserving this blog’s family values reputation.
Merlot and commenting = dangerous, Liam!
Nonsense Kim! Pissed posting rulez. You were all lots of fun.
Though, as an occasional culprit myself, how about a weekend “Pissedpost” thread – for which next day apologies & recantations are implied, and therefore unnecessary.
Lefty, that could get ugly. Worth a try, though – what do we say, 4 drink minimum & no light beers (apart from “cleansing ale” thirst quenching later in the evening).
Yes, probably right Tony … & could lead to all manner of mischief. For example, I might take myself on one evening as ‘Battler Populist’ and publicly destroy my fragile psyche online. What a magnificent and groundbreaking spectacle.
Actually, I was born in 1952. In the early 70s I was a draft resister and part of the Catholic Worker movement in Melbourne, where I fled to get away from the repressive atmosphere of early Joh Qld. As CWs we were all anarchists but somehow we seemed to be tolerated by the Maoists who dominated the Melbourne Left in those days. It was a bit of a culture shock to someone used to the Brisbane left, which was much more free-floating and really was much more like summer of love (whatever year that was it was definitely 60s). We always used to joke to oour Maoist comrades that we knew that it didn;t matter which side won, we’d be the first up against the wall when the revolution came. Melbourne was so sectarian. I remember going to a MayDay march in melbourne, I think it was ’73, and the organisers had their work cut out to keep the various factions apart – and there were so many, Maoists, MOscow line, assorted Trot denominations, Spartakists, not to mention keeping the Jewish Bundists away from the PLO. BUt I rememebr one demo that was orgnaised by the Young Christian Workers, in support of Catholic and Buddhist peace activists in South Vietnam who were being gaoled and tortured by the Saigon gov’t. It was outside the offices of PanAm in Collins St. Well, the plethora of marxist sectarians turned up as per usual but ended up getting into brawl over whose form of Marxism was the most pure. Naturally that;s what the coppers wanted and they took advantage to move in and make the usual arrests. We were quite applled by the whole shebang but still good Christian anarchist spirit of solidarity we went up to the wathchouse to see what needed to be done.
I came out in Melbourne and that was what pushed the Maoist boundaries to the limit. Fags and dykes were just a form of corrupt western capitalist decadence to them.
Anyway, I moved back to Brisvegas in ’74 ended up in what would become Telecom/Telstra where I got invovled in the union as a delegate, something very much in keeping with CW and anarchist principles. And by ther late 70s we had to deal with the newly burgeoning Trotskyist groups. JUst as earnest as the Maoists and with as litle sense of humour and no concept of people’s empowerment, pretty much like fundamentalists everywhere. Whenever we ahd mass meetings to determine industrial action, I used to really worry whethr the Trots would get up to speak in support, particualrly if the debate was quite contentioous. The Trots had a great knack of alienating the rank and file who would often vote on something by the stand of the Trots, if they supported it it would be voted down but if they opposed it then the memebrs would endorse it. THankfully a lot of the industrial action that was proosed was opposed by the Trots as it didn;t go far enough in their eyes – all they really wanted was to bring on the Revolution. When they spoke against it the memebrs became quite determinerd to support it. I note nowadays on campus there is a real boom in Christan fundamentalist groups while the Trots are merely a shadow of their former self.
I was born the year Elvis died, there must be someone younger.
This lefty’s view. I agree with Guy, Kim, Liam etc — never been into Che and find the GLW types with their shirts and posers very childish and usually incredibly shallow when it comes to politcs. I think Cuba is an interesting case but its a hideous dictatorship which doesn’t deserve its somewhat begign PR. I lived in Russia for two years and while I bought a few knick knacks which had cool retro goodness, never anything explicitly communist/leninist/stalinist. Deliberately, I have no desire to glamourise that regime. Wearing hammer and sickles I felt/fell very strongly was an insult to all those who suffered and died. If others wish to, thats their decision but me, I wouldnt feel comfortable.
Can I just say, I had no idea who Che was until after I left uni, and I hold no romantic attachment to communism whatsoever, especially after studying the history of China in high school. Just because my views are left-of-centre doesn’t mean I embrace the views of every other person who has also described themselves as left; in fact, this stupid dichotomy that keeps being raised drives me to tears. Can’t we hold complex political opinions without automatically being one or the other?
Also, I have soundly mocked those wearing Che t-shirts. And I will mock those who buy Mao propaganda material. Nasty stuff. Anyone who doesn’t recognise that Mao was a mass murderer — probably one of the worst the world has ever seen — needs to go back to school.
Rob, no offense mate, but are you bipolar? One minute you’re being all nice and friendly and having a genuine chat; the next you’re telling us what utter children we are and being a patronising old fart.
And, I was born in 78, so yeah, I’m still fairly youthful, but it doesn’t make me an idiot.
Probably bi-polar, yes. As for the babies remark, yes, that was bit uncalled for. I sometimes think blogging software should give us about two minutes after posting to edit or erase what we just posted. Even the live preview doesn’t quite tell you what your comment is really going to look like when it pops up on the actual thread.
Sorry I called you an old fart too… that was uncalled for…
Hang on, Kate – it might make you an idiot. Plug your name & birth date into this and let the stars decide! Apparently, I’m “You’re wise in many ways, but your instinct is legendary. It’s going to come in handy now, especially if you’re asked to manage a tough situation — and it would be surprising if you weren’t. Tap into your experience.”
Absolutely spot on!
Yippee – link thang worked. Thanks Mark – look out now for flood of stupid, unrelated links.
No problems, Kate. I’ve been called worse. Why, just the other day, someone called me a Marxist. Now that hurt. (Just joking…)
BY way of communist kitsch, I have an old Soviet peace badge a friend brought for me in perestroika MOscow in the late 80s. And I have a copy of Mao’s Litle Red Book which I found in a 2nd hand bookshop in Brisbane in the mid-90s. I regularly bring it along to relgion classes as one example of a sacred text.
As for Marx himself, I think he had quite a few good insights and there are a few Marxist philosophers, e.g. Ernst Bloch, who are a very good read. Ironically I think Marxism as a form of social analysis and critique is really suited to our globalising late-capitalist world. We might even be developing the conditions for a real communist revolution on a global scale. THat’s if the oil wars and climate change don’t get us first.
We might even be developing the conditions for a real communist revolution on a global scale.
You’re dreaming, Michael.
I have some Lenin badges that were given to me by a delegation of Soviet Yoof, somewhere. And a translation of Das Kapital printed in the USSR.
But I was an anarchist in my younger days, not a communist.
I’m less surprised by that than you might think EP
In what way exactly were you wrong about Vietnam, Rob? Wrong to oppose napalm and carpet bombing? Would the country really be a happier place now in 2005 if the US had escalated the war, stepped up the bombing, or maybe dropped an atom bomb on Hanoi?
As for Che, I liked Ariel Dorfman’s essay for Time Magazine back in 2000: http://www.time.com/time/time100/heroes/profile/guevara03.html
Possibly many anti-Vietnam War demonstrators were wrong in the same way that you are, James — using shallow slogans in place of thought, failing to understand the nature of war, careless of the consequences of one-sided emotive reactions.
In this way, their influence actually created a far greater evil than the bombing they opposed — communist regimes that slaughtered millions where the bombs had only killed thousands.
Perhaps each generation of naive lefties is doomed to repeat the same mistakes.
South Vietnam would certainly be a happier place now if the North Vietnamese had not conquered the place in 1976. For a start, it would still have most of the upwards of two million of their best and brightest, who instead of building South Vietnam into another South Korea, fled the horrors that followed the Communist victory and took their extraordinary talent and enterprise elsewhere, including here.
We were wrong to oppose the US involvement, wrong to support the completion of the Vietnamese ‘revolution’, wrong to support the Viet Cong, and wrong to facilitate the victory of the nightmarish Stalinist regime to the north by eroding the US’ will to fight on in defence of the South’s imperfect freedoms. No-one could claim the Ky/Thieu regime was perfect, but it was a lot better than what replaced it, largely thanks to us.
EP, it’s good to have that winking cat back. It just wasn’t the same in the dark days of no-gravatars.
What kind of anarchist were you? Gramsci and boring reading circles, glued hair, amphetamines and punk music, or Tom Paine and semiautomatic rifles?
I know which I think it was.
No-one could claim the Ky/Thieu regime was perfect
Indeed they couldn’t. Atrocious record on deprivation of civil liberties for political prisoners, appalling corruption, and no attempt to do anything towards economic development – content to distribute the rentier products of massive US aid to a small few.
The South Vietnamese regime was rotten to the core from the late 50s onwards, and as early as 1956, US policy makers recognised that free elections – as provided for by international agreements – would have resulted in a victory for Ho Chi Minh. So instead, right to the end of the South Vietnamese regime, plebiscites and elections were rigged to return results of over 95% and non-Communist opponents of the regime gaoled or shot.
From 1966 onwards, many of the military junta figures wanted to make peace with North Vietnam, but were prevented from doing so by their US masters.
Fortunately, many of the archives on both sides are now available and objective histories are being published which give lie to the emotional claims of partisans from the time – on either side.
EP, as is now usual in these discussions, seems to think that the death of thousands of innocents is as nothing when set against some sort of quasi-religious crusade against totalitarianism. It’s the EPs of the world who are cavalier about human life in the service of the gods that are their causes.
I’ll just draw attention to a comment from Michael which was held up in the moderation queue when I was out.
What are your views on the regime that took over in 1976, Mark?
To be honest, Rob, I don’t know enough to form a view. One of the historians of Vietnam whom I most respect, Gabriel Kolko (I did lots of Indian, Indonesian and Vietnamese history at Uni) has published a book on it which I believe indicates significant disillusionment. However, I haven’t had time to read it and don’t want to speak from ignorance.
Great comment by Michael. Interesting that his recollection of the dominance of Maoists in Melbourne in the 70s is the same as mine. They really were the dominant faction in the universities. I remember well their baneful, humourless aspect.
What kind of anarchist were you? Gramsci and boring reading circles, glued hair, amphetamines and punk music, or Tom Paine and semiautomatic rifles?
I was a psychedelic drug-fiend hippie anarchist who was really pissed off he missed the sixties, and was forced to use the eighties instead.
OK, Mark, but I’d argue that that is the critical point. Re-education camps, forced repatriation from the cities, systematic persecution of the ethnic Chinese, and the flight of as many as two million – not to mention a quarter century of poverty, misery and squalor. How many refugees fled before the Communist victory?
The previous government was no better and no worse than most south east Asian regimes of the time. Ho’s North, however, was already a Stalinist gulag. There were many accounts of how shocked the North’s soldiers were when they finally conquered the south, to find that far from the wretched and oppressed people that their masters had propagandised about, the people of the south were prosperous and happy, and hated them for the privilege of being ‘liberated’.
Also, isn’t it the case that the North committed, at the Paris peace talks, under whose terms the US withdrew, to not invading the South? Must have raised some hollow laughs in Saigon. All in all, a horrific betrayal of the South by the US. That was the ugly end of the real geo-political story, it seems to me.
In 1954, the North committed not to invade the South on the grounds that elections would be held in 1956 for the whole of Vietnam. In fact, “the North” didn’t invade the South at all. The so-called Viet Cong were largely Southern, and the Vietnamese Communist Party had great difficulty in restraining them throughout the 50s as they still wished to keep their part of the international agreement, and look for a negotiated peace, even if the US was quite happy to walk away from instruments of international law.
Most of the refugees, I think, were Catholics.
I think you’re whistling in the wind, Rob. You can’t paint the South pristine white no matter how many times you use the word Gulag.
The previous government was no better and no worse than most south east Asian regimes of the time. — Rob
I wouldn’t call that “painting the South pristine white”, Mark.
the people of the south were prosperous and happy
the people of the south were prosperous and happy
Compared to the people of the North, they probably were.
People living in non-communist countries are typically happier and more prosperous than those in non-communist countries. That’s why they had to build the Berlin Wall.
Right – the various “pacification” programs which dispossessed most people from their ancestral villages and incidentally created a lumpenproletariat in Saigon living off the scraps of corruption, American spending and prostitution would have put a big smile on Vietnamese faces as they reflected they had “imperfect freedoms”, to use Rob’s phrase!
Sheesh, EP, do you ever read any history?
I read a lot of history.
That’s how I know that non-communist countries almost always compare favourably with communist ones.
Nothing that you’ve said strikes me as much more than remotely germane, Mark. About 600,000 North Vietnamese fled to the south from the gulag-that-wasn’t after Ho took over in the North. Two million fled in the years after the Communists took over in the South. Between 500,000 and one million were incarcerated in re-education camps for years (even Pham Van Dong, PM in 1980, admitted to 200,000). It’s true that in the mid-80s the worst of the repressive policies were relaxed, with the closure of the killing camps to which southerners deemed to be poltically unacceptable had been migrated, and the beginning of the release of the hundreds of thousands of political prisoners.
Of course the South Vietnamese regime wasn’t ‘pristine white’, and I’m baffled by your rhetoric there, since I never tried to establish that it was. But, bad as it was, it was nowhere near as bad as the regime that replaced it. As was so typically the case, the casualties of right-wing regimes are counted in the hundreds and the thousands; those of the left, in the hundreds of thousands and the millions.
Oh, dear, Rob. Shouldn’t we be hoping for regimes that don’t cause casualties!
As was so typically the case, the casualties of right-wing regimes are counted in the hundreds and the thousands; those of the left, in the hundreds of thousands and the millions.
Your comment actually cries out for counting the deaths caused by Franco (certainly in the hundreds and thousands) and Suharto (probably over a million) but this just illustrates how bereft these “arguments” are.
I have no way of assessing your comments about the history of Vietnam post the mid 70s because I know nothing about it.
However, your statement about 600,000 refugees fleeing is wrong in one way, and misleading in another. These people didn’t leave immediately after Ho took over, but rather as part of the post 1954 settlement, and it was a negotiated resettlement for anyone who desired to leave the North rather than what you portray it as, or imply that it is. It was more like 800,000 people and almost all were Catholics, who mostly left as whole villages and parishes rather than as individuals. They then formed just about the only constituency that Ngo Diem Dinh could rely on.
LBJ called him the “Churchill of Asia” in 1960. Three years later, JFK condoned his assassination.
I’d take your word for what happened post 1975, but I’m reluctant to do so because the statements I am able to assess from extensive reading of history are wrong and/or misleadingly presented.
And you, and EP, have a tendency to make sweeping generalisations. You seem to feel that you need to support them, whereas EP just makes them. Unsupported generalisations are worthless.
I just don’t understand the mindset that compares regime x to regime y and claims it’s “better” on the grounds that it killed fewer of its own people.
I just don?Äôt understand the mindset that compares regime x to regime y and claims it?Äôs “better” on the grounds that it killed fewer of its own people.
I can’t think of a better or more absolute measure. And does the fact that the refugees were Catholics in some way make it less bad? 800,000 people – thanks for correcting my understatement, btw, is a huge number. They didn’t run the other way, did they? And my undrstanding of the exodus from the south after the conquest was principally from the ethnic Chinese community, and the educated middle class. Happy to be corrected if I’m wrong about that.
Jesus wept, Rob. The right wing regimes that kill hundreds of thousands of their own people certainly deserve condemnation as much as the left wing ones.
My point about the refugees (though really – that’s the wrong term) being Catholics is that they were the one social group in the North who were more favourable to the sort of regime (led by a Catholic family) in the South. The numbers are sufficient to indicate that others could have left if they wanted to.
I repeat again that the Americans believed in 1956 that Ho Chi Minh had majority support in the South and this is why they didn’t hold elections.
Ho could never have won independence from the French without popular support. He had about zero assistance from the Soviets. They’d have rathered he’d not succeeded, actually.
As to your last point, my understanding is that that’s correct, with the addition of a large number of Catholics.
They’re still digging up mass graves in Spain, by the way. But I suppose Franco was a good guy – he didn’t kill as many of his own people as you say Ho Chi Minh did. Hang on, he killed more of his own people than Saddam?
See how ridiculous your absolute measure is?
Surely, any regime that kills its own people warrants condemnation. End of story.
You’re interested what happened in the 50′s, before the communists took over. I’m interested in 70′s and 80′s after they they did. ‘I repeat again’ that up to two million people fled Vietnam after the communist victory, that thousands lost their lives in leaky boats along the way, and that, just to complete the circle, the Australian left denounced them as ‘fascists’ and Whitlam himself, I believe, as f***king Balts.
Yes, Whitlam and Hawke’s positions were appalling and Fraser deserves a pat on the back.
Um, Rob, Ho Chi Minh’s regime dates from 1945.
Have we now got a temporal criterion as well as an ideological one? Your argument becomes more and more obscure to me.
Anyway, what’s the point about the refugees meant to prove? I’m not trying to defend Communism in Vietnam. My apologies if you thought I was. I have no interest in so doing.
I think American policy was counterproductive in not recognising that many of those who originally supported Ho were far more nationalist than Communist. Roosevelt recognised this. Truman led the US down the path of supporting dodgy and unpopular client states. America made the same mistake with Castro.
Anyway, I’d be interested in how you defend your “absolute measure” in light of the Franco case.
Goodnight.
I’m dumb, I admit it: I just don’t know where you’re coming from with all this stuff about Spain. I thought we were talking about Vietnam. If you want to talk about Franco, why don’t we talk also about Hitler? Stalin? Mao? Pol Pot? Ne Win?
Very quickly, Rob, because I want to go to sleep.
You claim that right wing regimes are superior to left wing ones because of the “absolute measure” that they kill less of their own people.
Franco killed hundreds of thousands.
He was right wing.
Do you think that America’s support for his continuance in power after WWII (where he actively aided and abetted the Axis powers) was justified because he was a right wing bastion against communism? And if so, how do you justify the hundreds of thousands of Spanish dead. Or don’t you worry about it because you can think of a left wing regime that killed more of its own citizens?
Christ, I’m glad I was in primary school in the 70s, is all I can say, if these are the habits of thought you picked up then.
Now, goodnight.
This is ridiculous. I never claimed right wing regimes were ‘superior’. My point was that they killed far fewer of their own people than the left-wing regimes that supplanted them. Which is true.
I will look into your claims that Franco killed hundreds of thousands of Spaniards, and report back.
It certainly is ridiculous, Rob.
Since you accepted Mark’s characterisation of what you were implying with your claim (which seems to me also to follow from it – otherwise why bother making the comparison – it’s not intended to be a neutral observation) in this comment and then stated that the relative number of deaths was a “a better or more absolute measure” than anything else than you can think of.
A measure of what? Your comment also implies some qualitative comparison over and above the bare facts.
Do you or do you not think right wing regimes are superior to left wing regimes because they kill fewer people?
If not, then what is the point of the comparison? A neutral historical observation?
Anyway, perhaps you can ponder these matters in the next few weeks as you embark on a serious study of Spanish history. I have too much respect for you to think you’d just do a quick google. See you when you get back! Spanish history is really fascinating by the way!
However, Rob, I don’t recommend Hayek’s History of the Spanish Civil War.
Final repecharge, before sleeping:
He had about zero assistance from the Soviets. They?Äôd have rathered he?Äôd not succeeded, actually.
That’s nonsense, sorry. Ho Chi Minh (to give him his real name, Nguyen Ai Quoc) was a fully paid-up agent of the Cominterm. The state that he created in North Vietnam after 1954 was consciously based on the Soviet satellite models of Eastern Europe. In 1949-50 he had sought and gained agreement from Stalin for the deployment of huge amounts of Soviet aid to fight the French.
“Do you or do you not think right wing regimes are superior to left wing regimes because they kill fewer people?”
Delete ‘superior’ and substitute ‘materially less imperfect’ and take out ‘kill fewer people’ and substitute:
and I would say yes, Kim.
This is one of those comments I’m going to regret.
“Kim, that may not be as ironic as you think. If Paul Norton looks in on this thread, he might also know about this and be able to confirm this, but a friend of a good friend of mine, Dr Lee Bermingham, sat on People?Äôs Revolutionary Tribunals at Griffith Uni in the 70s.
“Lee of course – went from being a prominent CPA member to that other Leninist organisation, the AWU, before he was unfairly made a scapegoat by the Shepherdson Inquiry for historical crimes within the AWU.
“I?Äôm sure it?Äôs difficult to imagine the atmosphere on campuses in the 70s, but I still think Rob could perhaps benefit from exorcising a few ghosts. That?Äôs meant affectionately.”
I am originally a southern socialist, my association with Brisbane left politics only began in 1988, and my association with Griffith University only began in the summer of 1991-92. I can however verify that Lee Bermingham’s membership of the CPA dates from 1979. Prior to that he was a member of the Australian Defence Force, the Brisbane anarchists, and (I’m told) the International Socialists. He was also a leading figure in a quasi-trotskyist youth group at Griffith University immediately prior to joining the CPA. I’m reliably informed that this group had a very interesting recruitment method, but I don’t want Mark to be sued for libel so I can’t say what it was. However it was the sort of thing which one might not be surprised to see being engaged in by young people with an ideological disdain for “bourgeois legality”.
I’m told that Lee Bermingham’s on-campus involvement at Griffith continued until 1986, but he retained an active interest after that via the intermediary efforts of Warwick Powell, who was the brains of the AWU at Griffith in the early 1990s. Lee Bermingham was present, and an active participant, in the 1992 Annual General Meeting of the GU Labor Club which began with an attempt at mass expulsion of the Left on trumped up charges, and ended in an all-in fist fight and the deregistration of the Club. A good friend of mind who was giving birth on the day of the AGM was deeply pissed off when she learned that her parturitive condition had prevented her from being present to witness the spectacle.
The rapid rise of Lee Bermingham and his associates such as the Blackwood siblings, Guy Petterson, Lyn Finch, Kate McGuickan, etc., to leadership positions in the CPA is largely explicable in terms of the internal culture of the CPA in Queensland from the 1950s to the late 1980s. Basically it was run by a clique of veteran communists around the late Ted Bacon, and whilst these people were on the side of the Eurocommunist angels when the CPA split over Czechoslovakia in 1968-70, they were none too liberal in their running of the party’s Queensland State organisation, and were also hostile to new-fangled revisionist ideas and practices brought in by young recruits. As a result they managed to drive successive waves of younger recruits from the party over a 30 year period, until a stage was reached by the late 1970s when they were past the age when they could effectively run the party themselves, yet did not have a substantial younger cadre force to pass the baton to. Thus when Lee Bermingham’s talented young crew presented themselves in 1979-80, they were rapidly able to fill the vacuum of young leadership, only to scandalise the older comrades through their ultra-revisionist practices, and also to drive comrades who weren’t part of the old guard into an anti-Bermingham alliance with the Bacon group. My advice, from people I respect who were there at the time, is that the Bermingham group and the Bacon group were about equally illiberal in their conduct of the factional war, and that the Bermingham group had some success in attracting the support of some younger feminist and queer activists who had been alienated by the social and cultural conservatism of the old guard.
The contours of the CPA’s national debates in the early 1980s meant that the Bermingham group formed an alliance with the Taft group in Victoria (the “Right” of the CPA), and the anti-Bermingham bloc found themselves in league with the Sydney and National leadership (the “Centre”). After eventually losing the factional struggle in the Queensland party organisation, the Bermingham group joined the Taft group in resigning en masse from the CPA in April 1984, and entering the ALP.
The Taft group reconstituted themselves as a sub-faction of the Victorial ALP Left. However the Queensland ALP Left had been warned about the Berminghmam group by their contacts within the CPA, and refused to admit them. Their next port of call was the AWU faction, which welcomed them with open arms. It is said by some that Peter Beattie, in his then capacity as State Secretary, arranged to relax ALP rules in order to expedite the entry of a group of talented younger activists who had obviously managed to persuade people that their mass resignation was an “I chose freedom” defection, rather than a dummy spit after losing a power struggle.
On the state of Left politics in the 1970s and Rob’s experiences, I think it can be said that there was a Leninist and New Leftist hegemony within Australian radical left politics in that period (especially amongst younger people and on the campuses) in which basically reasonable stances on feminism, socialist democracy, queer liberation, indigenous rights, anti-nuclear politics, anti-war, etc., were often discursively articulated with romantic twaddle about the virtues of some “actually existing socialist” regimes in the Third World and violent self-defined “national liberation” movements, a lack of moral clarity (to put it no more strongly than that) about terrorism and political violence overseas, an obsessive hatred of Israel (as opposed to reasonable criticism of Israeli behaviour towards the Palestinians and support for self-determination for both peoples), ill-considered romantic stances on various other issues, and a lack of democratic civility, not only towards those considered “right wingers” but to alternative positions within the Left. Rob is not wrong to recognise that there was quite a lot of poo-ey bathwater in 70s rad-left politics, but his contributions suggest that he has thrown out the baby with it.
This is one of those comments I?Äôm going to regret.
Well, you should at any rate, Rob.
Hitler, who was of course a socialist anyway
If that represents your grasp of history, then it’s very hard to take any of your statements seriously in future. Or if it’s some sort of bizarre attempt to put an ideological spin on history, then ditto.
Rob wrote:
“You?Äôre interested what happened in the 50?Äôs, before the communists took over. I?Äôm interested in 70?Äôs and 80?Äôs after they they did. ‘I repeat again?Äô that up to two million people fled Vietnam after the communist victory, that thousands lost their lives in leaky boats along the way, and that, just to complete the circle, the Australian left denounced them as ‘fascists?Äô and Whitlam himself, I believe, as f***king Balts.”
I think we should also be interested in what happened in the 1960s and early 1970s when the US and Australia were attempting, through the use of massive military force, to prevent the communists taking over. Between 2 million and 3 million people (mainly Vietnamese) were killed, many more maimed or disabled by Agent Orange, and the ecosystems and agricultural systems of the country devastated by bombing and defoliation. Nothing the Vietnamese communists did, or were likely to have done, compares with the harm inflicted on the country by the war which resulted from the US and Australian governments’ actions in refusing to honour the provisions of the Geneva Accord for an election and reunification of the country in 1956, and in waging war to maintain the regime in the South (in our case, against the expert advice of our armed forces).
There is also the small matter of the overthrow of the neutral regime in Cambodia in 1970 and the subsequent bombing campaign which devastated the country and created the conditions in which the Khmer Rouge, who had previously been effectively contained, could take over the place with the consequences we all know about.
Don’t know where it puts me in the Chronological Stakes, but I was born in ’80.
And for the record re Che, the funny thing about the political spectrum at the moment is that because the Right has moved so far to the Right, with the hardliners in control, anything even centrist is now seen as the extreme Left. So a Labor Right guy like me, who is basically an economic centrist with slightly small-l liberal tendencies socially, is now, apparently, a screaming Trot, who ergo is in love with Che.
What’s really happenend is that the Right have traded common sense approaches in favour of hardline ideologues.
Spot on, Luke.
That?Äôs nonsense, sorry.
John Foster Dulles testifying to Congress in 1957:
Of course, Ho was a Communist. That doesn’t imply there was an “international communist conspiracy” or that the Soviet Party didn’t oppose his attempt to declare Vietnamese independence in 1945, and in fact acted diplomatically on several occasions (including during the lead up to the Geneva Accords) to try to block his aims. Same thing with Mao in the 20s and 30s.
Rob, if you have a serious interest in this, you should read some serious history. But hey, according to you, Hitler was a socialist, wasn’t he?
Also, note again this part of cs’ comment:
The RWDBs seem to be on strike today. Awfully collectivist of them.
Yeah, I was too smashed at the time, but the entire argument seemed rather poo-mongering to me. Are they prepared to take the rap for Hitler’s crimes on behalf of “THE RIGHT”? Its about as sane a link as much of the above is premised on.
Fascists!
Presumably that’s the reason for the maneouvre of claiming Hitler was a socialist. It just gets weirder in right wing po/mo land.
Yes, they’ve gotten cocky of late. Comes with having Murdoch ‘on message’ for Howard, Bush and Blair. Makes RWDBs think they can say any old rubbish and go front page with a hurrah.
Ill have to give them a good seeing to, once Ive finished polishing my clocks.
Perhaps they’ve all gone off to Iraq as volunteer fighters for freedom (and Shariah Law, but don’t mention that bit – it’s not in the neocon brochure)?
Yes, I havent quite figured out how they’re going to spin the Shi’a super-state of Iranaq as a foreign policy victory … but I certainly look forward to the attempt.
It’ll be interesting indeed to see how the Constitution is received, unless something changes drastically in the drafting stage.
The draft Bill of Rights is an interesting read. Thanks to EP for the link.