"....We are concerned by some of the discourse that has emerged from progressive circles with regards to the ongoing crisis in Syria. In particular, we are embarrassed by the ways in which some individuals known for their work on Palestine have failed to account for some crucial context in their analysis of Syria."
Read full piece here:
A new footnote to the current climate of antisemitism on the middle class left.
Classic Jew-hating motifs in the World Socialist Web Site article on Shimon Peres.
Full article here:
http://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2016/10/01/obit-o01 (dot) html
....the rapacious, land-grabbing, militaristic state....
....the carving out....
....most rapacious actions....
....arch-schemer and back-stabber ....
....poisoned by assassins working for the state of Israel.
....a dispossessor, a pariah....
___
Readings on this anti-worker pseudo-left group:
http://www.themilitant.com/2012/7629/762958.html
http://www.themilitant.com/2013/7708/770854.html
http://www.themilitant.com/2016/8010/801053.html
Stalinists whitewashed Nazis’
massacre of Jews at Babi Yar
(feature article)
BY JOHN STUDER
Sept. 28 and 29 mark the 73rd anniversary of the cold-blooded murder over two days in 1941 of more than 33,000 Jews at Babi Yar (Granny’s Ravine) on the outskirts of Kiev, Ukraine, by Nazi occupying troops and some collaborating Ukrainian police units. Over the next few years another 70,000 to 80,000 were killed and dumped in the ravine. Most were Jews, along with Romas, pro-Soviet partisans and anyone else who resisted or the Nazis thought should die.
Babi Yar was the most infamous Nazi massacre of Jews in Ukraine. In 1933, the Jewish population numbered more than 1.5 million. Most of those who survived, fled the country. Today there are around 67,000 there.
Two days before the killing started, German forces organized to put up some 2,000 posters in Russian, Ukrainian and German ordering all Jews in Kiev and the surrounding area to appear Monday morning near the train station with all documents, money and valuables.
The Nazis spread a rumor that the Jews would be put on American boats and shipped to Palestine. Instead, they were stripped naked, pushed into the ravine in waves, and shot dead. The mass slaughter took two days.
After the defeat of the fascist forces by Soviet troops, officials — in both Moscow and Kiev —refused to erect any memorial to the Holocaust massacre.
Anti-Semitism was an ideological feature not only of Nazism, but of the privileged and reactionary government bureaucracy under Soviet Premier Joseph Stalin.
“The revolutionary wave revived the finest sentiments of human solidarity,” Russian revolutionary Leon Trotsky wrote in 1937 about the first years of the Russian Revolution. Referring to the counterrevolution led by Joseph Stalin that was consolidated in the late 1920s, Trotsky said that the “reaction has stirred up all that is low, dark and backward. … The bureaucracy does not even hesitate to resort to chauvinistic tendencies, above all to anti-Semitic ones.”
The Stalinist regime’s anti-Semitism became more strident in the post-war decades.Jewish intellectuals, artists and others were arrested and killed as part of an “anti-cosmopolitanism” campaign. Conspiracy theories were spun to target Jews, such as the “Doctors’ Plot” of 1952-53 in which Jewish doctors were accused of plotting to poison government officials.
Demands that a memorial recognizing the Jewish victims be built at the site of the Babi Yar massacre began in the 1940s. To head off continuing pressure for a memorial, Soviet authorities in 1957 ordered construction of a dam to fill in the ravine, and planned to cover it with a park and a sports stadium.
In October 1959 Viktor Nekrasov, a veteran of the Second World War and Stalin-Prize-winning author of the 1946 In the Trenches of Stalingrad, published a protest inLiteraturnaya Gazeta, the main literature magazine in the Soviet Union, and called for a monument to those killed.
But authorities drove forward with the project and began filling the ravine with waste. In March 1961, the dam collapsed and a wall of sludge and debris swept through workers’ neighborhoods. Officials said 150 were killed, but some reports say it could be several thousand.
Shortly after the disaster, Yevgeny Yevtushenko — a well-known poet, opponent of Stalinism and champion of the Cuban Revolution — visited the ravine and wrote “Babi Yar,” which began with the words “No monument stands over Babi Yar.” He gave public readings of the poem in Moscow and Kiev in August 1961. The poem was published the following month inLiteraturnaya Gazeta and reprinted all over the world. The day after it was published, the magazine’s editor was sacked by Soviet cultural officials.
Composer Dmitri Shostakovich worked with Yevtushenko to write “Babi Yar,” his 13th symphony, which included the poem as well as four other works against Stalinism and anti-Semitism by Yevtushenko. Soviet officials tried to sabotage the premiere. After two performances, the composer and poet were told the work would be banned unless they agreed to change some of the lines in two of the poems, “Babi Yar” and “Fears.”
For example, “I wish that men were possessed of the fear of condemning a man without proper trial” was replaced with “I see new fears arising, the fear of being insincere to the country.”
In 1966 Soviet author Anatoly Kuznetsov published a book entitled Babi Yar. Though heavily censored by Soviet authorities it described Kuznetsov’s visit to the site after the collapse of the dam: “I went there and looked in amazement at the lake of mud, swallowing the ashes, bones, stone debris gravestones.”
The book has a chapter detailing the slaughter at Babi Yar by Dina Pronichev, one of a handful of survivors.
In 1966, on the 25th anniversary of Babi Yar, thousands of people — from Kiev and throughout the Soviet Union — came to the ravine. A spontaneous rally took place that included three speakers, Pronichev, Nekrasov and Ivan Dzyuba, a Marxist who wrote Internationalism vs. Russification. Dzyuba’s book defended Soviet policy under the leadership of V. I. Lenin to back the fight to free Ukrainians and other oppressed people from centuries of oppression under the Russian empire and support their cultural development. But after Lenin’s death, Stalin revived Russian domination, including resettlement of ethnic Russians in Ukraine, known as Russification.
Dzyuba’s speech was clandestinely published as samizdat and circulated in the Soviet Union and abroad.
“Babi Yar is a tragedy of the whole of mankind, but it happened on Ukrainian soil,” Dzyuba said. “And therefore a Ukrainian must not forget it any more than a Jew.”
“But what is strange is that no battle has been waged against [anti-Semitism] during the postwar decades,” he said, “and what is even stranger, it has often been artificially nourished.”
“The Jews have a right to be Jews and the Ukrainians have a right to be Ukrainians in the full and profound, not only the formal, meaning of the word,” he said.
Under pressure, Stalinist officials eventually put up a monument to Babi Yar in 1976, but it contained no mention that any of those killed were Jews.
A monument to the Holocaust victims at Babi Yar was finally erected after the fall of the Soviet Union and the establishment of Ukraine as a sovereign nation in 1991, along with memorials to Jewish victims in World War II in cities across the country.
In November 2013 popular protest began in Ukraine that led to the overthrow of pro-Moscow President Viktor Yanukovych in February 2014. The government of Vladimir Putin in Russia sought to paint the protesters as rightists and anti-Semites.
Asked if there was anti-Semitism at the “Maidan” protests, one of a number of Jewish fighters leading self-defense units there told the Israeli news website Hadashot, “There was not even a hint of such attitudes.”
“There is little doubt that the spirit of freedom and unity is concentrated on Maidan in abundance,” he said.
http://www.themilitant.com/2014/7837/783750.html
SWP: What is ‘deplorable’ is capitalist crisis, not working class
BY MAGGIE TROWE
Half of Republican candidate Donald Trump’s supporters are a “basket of deplorables. … racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamophobic — you name it,” Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton said Sept. 9. “They are irredeemable, but thankfully they’re not America.”
Democratic Party leaders and liberal pundits defended Clinton, saying she was accurate — in fact, understated.
Considering Caucasian workers backward bigots is a widely held proposition among liberals and the left. They look at those who come to Trump rallies and see danger.
Trump — who also has no proposals to advance the interests of working people as they face “slow burn” depression conditions and worse to come — takes advantage of workers’ search for an alternative to capitalist politics-as-usual and the Clintons’ lack of credibility. But much of what he offers is rightist demagogy, aimed at dividing the working class.
He moved to capitalize on the angry reaction of many workers to Clinton’s contemptuous remark, declaring himself the representative of the “deplorables.”
“What is deplorable is what working people face in the U.S. and around the world,” Socialist Workers Party presidential candidate Alyson Kennedy, the only candidate representing the interests of the working class in the election, told the Militant Sept. 19. “When I campaign door to door with supporters, workers tell us about the reality they face — joblessness, low wages, speedup on the job and more dangerous conditions. They tell us of social problems like opiate and heroin addiction ravaging their communities.”
Kennedy said her experience — and that of hundreds of campaign supporters talking to workers about the SWP and its program on their doorsteps — shows opposition to racist attacks and a desire to build unity among workers of all nationalities against attacks by the bosses and the government.
“The capitalist rulers are afraid of the working class. They portray the majority, workers who are Caucasian, as reactionary to divide and discourage us,” Kennedy said. “But it’s not working. The mass movement that overthrew Jim Crow segregation, as well as recent protests against police killings, inspired millions of workers of all races and strengthened the working class.
“If this wasn’t true, how could you explain the speed and breadth of Confederate flags being taken down at statehouses all across the South over the past year?” she said.
“We meet workers of all races and nationalities who are attracted to the SWP’s confidence that working people are capable of fighting for unity, organizing the unorganized, and opposing the bosses and their government’s wars,” Kennedy said. “By doing this we will become strong enough to displace the capitalist dictatorship and build a new society run by workers and farmers based on values of solidarity and dignity.”
In a Sept. 15 Financial Times article, Edward Luce interviews people in Hazleton, Pennsylvania, especially Caucasian workers who say they’re leaning toward voting for Trump. Hazleton was built by workers from all across Europe who emigrated for jobs and made a living mining anthracite coal and in other factory jobs that have since shut down. The town began to shrink.
But it began to grow again, as the Latino population, largely Dominican, grew from 4 percent in 2000 to nearly half today. In 2006 then Mayor Louis Barletta gained nationwide notoriety trying to demonize the newcomers.
Much has changed in 10 years. “A striking thing about Hazleton’s Trump supporters is their reluctance to copy their candidate’s derogatory language about Hispanics,” Luce writes.
“Every time I see a Dominican they greet me and they smile,” Karen Ezak, 73, who favors Trump, told Luce. “I have never had a problem with them. They’ve brought life back to the schools and churches.”
Members of the Socialist Workers Party knocked on doors in a working-class area in Hazleton Sept. 18.
“I’m a full-time office worker, but I need a second job,” Dottie Pisano, 52, told the socialists. “I don’t live a flashy life. But I can’t make it month to month with one job. And if you get sick, forget about it — you have to move in with your folks.” She doesn’t like Trump but leans toward him, saying, “I refuse to vote for that woman,” meaning Clinton.
Pisano’s neighbor Angela Carrasco, in her 20s, at home on parental leave caring for her month-old son Johnny, was born in the Dominican Republic but grew up in Hazleton. Like many in the town she works for the big Amazon distribution center.
“There was a lot of discrimination against Dominican immigrants in the past,” Carrasco said, “but it’s much less now.”
Writing off large numbers of workers who are Caucasian, the Clinton campaign is counting on votes from African-Americans and Latinos, as well as those of women. But leaders of Clinton’s campaign are worried about lack of enthusiasm among Blacks.
“The Clinton campaign has refocused its efforts to a big turnout push directed at black and young voters,” the New York Times reported Sept. 18. “Younger black voters, in particular have expressed misgivings about Mrs. Clinton because of some of the policies of her husband’s administration,” including the 1994 crime bill, which imposed tougher sentences for nonviolent drug offenders and Clinton’s moves to “end welfare as we know it,” which resulted in deeper poverty, insecurity and social crisis for millions of working-class women and children.
“I will consider it a personal insult — an insult to my legacy — if this community lets down its guard and fails to activate itself in this election,” President Barack Obama, revealing some panic and a meritocratic contempt for Black workers, told the Congressional Black Caucus Sept. 17.
http://themilitant.com/2016/8037/803705.html
Middle-class contempt for workers
fuels liberal panic over U.S. elections
(front page)
BY ARGIRIS MALAPANIS
U.S. president George Bush won another four years in the White House November 2 by a significant margin. He received 51 percent of the popular vote, compared to 48 percent for Democrat John Kerry. The result was even more stunning to liberals and middle-class radicals because the turnout was larger than in previous elections and closer to what Democrats and their hangers-on worked for and dreamed about. About 116 million people, or 58 percent of eligible voters, went to the polls—the largest percentage since 1968, according to the Associated Press—and Bush won 3.5 million more votes than Kerry....
Read in full here:
The Militant - November 23, 2004 -- Middle-class contempt for workers fuels liberal panic over U.S. elections
Workers who support Republican Donald Trump were dismissed last week as "coal people" by Wlliam Clinton and "a basket of deplorables" by HRC.
Now the Black electorate is being put on notice:
http://mobile.nytimes.com/2016/09/19/us/politics/obama-trump-clinton.html?referer=http://m.facebook.com/
Apprently there will be plenty of blame for U.S. workers of all races if Clinton is defeated.
This is striking confirmation of an assessment posted a mere 48 hours ago:
"The 2016 election is increasingly focused on the working class...."
Read the entire article here:
The Militant - Vol. 80/No. 36 - September 26, 2016 -- front page
