Dear Michael S,
No, not a problem...you haven't offended me in any way and there is no
need to apologise. In fact, I should be apologising to you for my
rudeness and crassness. I always welcome contributions such as yours as
I find them most welcome.
It is a long time since I read Lenin...:-). The centenery anniversary
of the Russian Revolution comes up in 2017. I wonder if (or am I being
unkind) it or will be celebrated. Will the present Russian leadership
support or fight against any organised celebrations. Will the Russian
people celebrate it... I see that there are still lots of
Marxist-Leninists around, with their dieletical and historical
materialism interpretations of philosophy, politics and history. Rich
ones too, I see, as one can now purchase the Collected Works of Vladimir
Ilych Lenin in 45 volumes for as much as £375. Originally, I bought my
collection from a communist book sale for around £1. I got lots of
cheap communist books, as Communism, Karl Marx and such like were
falling out of favour, in the late 1960's and 70s and people no longer
gave them pride of place in their home libraries.
When we moved home a couple of years ago, I had a clear out and threw
them or gave them away as they were cluttering up my library and I was
moving over to Kindle. I understand that Amazon does a free edition for
Kindle, but I never bothered to download it, as I discovered, only
after I had read the 40th Volume, that Stalin had his hacks doctor it to
more justify his style of leadership. (If Lenin said it, and Stalin
could quote from it, it must be true...sort of thing). It was a
difficult read too, it didn't translate from the Russian too well, the
langauge was dated, and one had to know quite a lot about Russian
culture, history and the class relationships between the various
factions and groupings which existed before, during and after the
revolution.
At one time I was a member of the British/Soviet Friendship Society and
went along to various soirees, where young Soviet journalists were
always trying to persaude me that the Russian Revolution was legal!!!
There is no doubt that the revolution brought about necessary and
tremendous change in Russia, and the influence of Marx's philosophy was
widely felt and influenced the revolution. There were two books which I
particularly liked by Lenin, one was "Left Wing Communism, An Infantile
Disorder" and the other was "The State And Revolution" which has some
real lessons for today.
I did like the socialist realism art in its early stages though, and I
enjoyed Russian literature from the classics of Tolstoy to Pushking and
the samisdat works of Bulgakov and Solzenetzin...well worth a read, in
my view. Gives a slightly different picture of reality.
From my own experience, most people who attend demonstrations know the
immediate issues, which is why most of them attend. They may not know
them in the depth to which we are discussing here, and most of them will
have contrary and diverse views about the solutions; but they do know
when women and children are being blown to bits, or their pensions are
being cut or taxes increased or wages are frozen, or necessary rights
are curtailed.
Change, you will find, happens all the time, with or without you or I's
contribution. Our world and universe are continuously changing and will
continue to do so, until we die or our minds become moribund, we just
tend not to notice it, or when we do, we tend to soon forget. History,
of course, is about remembering, but even then, history can be and is
very selective, the subject of fashion, culture and interpretation, as
much as what is written down. Even ancient artefacts are subject to the
interpretations of the vivid imaginations of the most learned
archeologists...:-). I have read more interpretations of the purposes
of Stonehenge than I have had porridge for breakfast...:-).
As Karl Marx once said, in relation to the Paris Commune of 1879.
"History often repeats itself, goes in circles, the first time it is a
drama, the second...a farce" C'est la vie...:-)
Now...where was I...Oh! Yes! the Labour opposition chancellor threw the
Little Red Book across the parliamentary table, because he was objecting
to the Conservative government allowing the Chinese to take over our
airport infrastructure and certain other industries. Just goes to show
where such a small and insignificant act of pique can take us... :-).
As if Labour wouldn't sell out to the Chinese...We need their
money...and we need their expertise...and we need their manufacturing
skills.
ATB
Dougie.
On 27/11/2015 01:47, Michael Shelton wrote:
Dear Sir,
I am truly sorry if I have offended you in any way.
I dearly appreciate your writing
And read the cryptome list almost every day.The quotes I use are ones that come to my
mind when I write.The one at the end was from Lenin.
The point I was making is this
that a lot of the struggle for
social change, reform happened already, we have issues today that relate back to those times,the 60s,without
Knowing any of that stuff there
Is a movement, a bunch of
Demonstrations in the present,
Many of the people involved
don't realise that there were
past events that mirror it today.
That is my whole point,once again I didn't mean to provoke
Or irritate you in any way.
Respectfully, and in that spirit
I remain,Iao
On 26 Nov 2015 3:28 pm, "doug" <douglasrankine2001@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Dear Michael,
The people...I am not a member of...unless you care to define
it...of course.
Can you explain...preferably in your own words, rather than
someone elses, what you mean by the quote below. I do apologise,
but really, I am much too stupid to understand it, and need
clarification. Please accept that I am a hard taskmaster, and
please make allowances for it...but...and I do hope that you won't
take offence when I ask you the following question... What do you
mean? In your own words...please? Please accept my apologies
for not understanding a point which you obviously have made which
is logical and coherent to you, but for me, it contains some
difficulty due to specificity...
In other words, chum..what the fuck are you talking about...in
plain English please...
With kind regards
Dougie.
On 27/11/2015 01:08, Michael Shelton wrote:
Dear people,
'Those who can't remember the past are condemned to repeat it.
quote from Santayana
Many of those alive today
we're not here in the 1960s,or if
they were they were too young
to have been aware of social and political issues. The cauldron
of those times altered
the world we live in today,and there are many parallels to
today's situations. By not being
aware of the history of those
times, some of the same mistakes are still being made,some of the
same battles are still being fought in
the struggle to end war,only it
seems like the wars never end.
The powers that be have too
many puppet strings in the
willing hands of the military/
industrial complex.
To quote another revolutionist;
'What is to be done?'
Loving life! Iao
On 26 Nov 2015 14:40, "doug" <douglasrankine2001@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Dear Colleagues,
Oh! How I remember it well...Mao's Little Red Book. Published when the Peace in Vietnam movement was reaching its
height in the late 1960's early 1970s. Demonstration after
demonstration in London, outside the American Embassy,
causing mayhem, breaking windows, demonstrators threatening
to overwhelm US soldiers who were threatening to shoot
demonstrators invading their sacred ground. Police strategies
of containment fucked due to the massive size of the
demonstrations. Harold Wilson, Labour Prime Minister, good
old socialist intellectual, supplying secret logistic and
military support to the South Vietnam fascist government via
our cousins across the water, and with CND and the various
Peace in Vietnam movements involved in stopping it all. Women in Black, via American Mr. Spock of child behavioural
fame rather than Star Treck, rolling marbles and bools, under
the feet of Metropolitan Police Horses, causing them to fall
over and get seriously injured. I was there, so was me
missus. No Animal Rights movement then....:-).. All in the
name of killing Vietnamese women and children because they
were harbouring the Vietcong...(today's equivalent of Muslim
Terrorists except they didn't get messages from Allah, but
from Ho Chi Min). :-). Ignore a Vietnamese woman and child
at your peril, because they might be working in the rice
paddy but they were perfectly capable of machine gunning you
with a Kalashinikov as you passed by. Tunnels built under
US Bases harbouring whole communities of Vietnamese involved
in the war of attrition against the US. How does one bomb an
American air base to bits...the colllateral damage would be
far too much...Schools and hospitals used as cover for the
Vietcong, as the terrorists were called at the time...Nuffink
changes...
When, all of a sudden, along comes the Maoist faction
(remember, I was a good young communist at the time, knew my
factions, see good soldier shwieck)
see
url:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Good_Soldier_%C5%A0vejk ),
shouting slogans in complete unison, about the wonderful Red
Gaurds and quoting romantic stuff about flowers and such
like, from the "Little Red Book". Being a curious kind of
person, of course I was intrigued with this new political
phenomenon. As a hardened member of the demonstration
faculty of the amateur opposition, for which I received
enormous sums of Soviet gold...according to the Conservative
Party at the time, I was most interested. (Oh! How I dreamed
of how I would spend all that Soviet gold in the land of
rent-a-mob...never got a fucking penny....promises, promises,
promisses, typical political crap). They turned up at
demonstrations in London, about 600 of them on occasion, and,
how disciplined they were, with their Maoist caps and coolie
garb and holding up a copy of the little red book, shouting
the appropriate slogans). One cannot have a decent
demonstration without carefully thought out slogans.
Meanwhile, in China, the Red Gaurds were forcing the old
establisment of professors and academics out of their ivory
towers and on to the fields to mix with the peasants and
gather in the harvest,without the money. Communist equality
of opportunity knew no bounds in Mao's World, tanks on
Tianamen Square...forget it. Removing the academics had its
consequencies of course. Life became simple, peasant
oriented. The land and its explotation was all important,
none of this chemical Monsanto shit.
Campaigns such as,... Birds eat the wheat and other grains
sown... so a campaign was launched by the Communist Party, to
eradicate birds...all the peasants in the countryside went
about massacring the birds...It worked...for the first
year...but then came a plethora of insects...Shit!!! Now, the
insects gobbled up the harvest. Decentralisation was another
ploy. We must move the casting of iron and metal into the
countryside, so that the peasants...and the peasants were
very important under Mao.., after all, they put him into
power and, through the Long March, they destroyed Chian Ki
Shek as leader of the Chinese, and freed the peasants from
slavery and the control of the bourgeousis...and American
interference...no mean feat.
see url: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chiang_Kai-shek
By the way, the Long March was a great achievement, and
caused a lot of deaths and suffering, but took the Chinese
out of one form of slavery into another, and progress always
comes at a cost. Where would the Chinese be today if it
wasn't for Ma Tse Dung... A real pain in the US's butt. Nowadays, they have a middle class, which is greater than the
population of the United Kingdom.
see url:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_March
And, of course,due to the wonders of the internet...Mao's
Little Red Book can be accessed at url:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quotations_from_Chairman_Mao_Tse-tung
Enjoy...:-).
ATB
Dougie.
