The Walking Paradox

by Eduardo Galeano


Every day,
reading newspapers,
I attend a history class.
Newspapers teach me
by what they say
and by what they don’t say.

History is a walking paradox. Contradiction moves its legs. Perhaps for that reason its silences say more than its words and its words reveal the truth frequently through lying.

Soon a book of mine will be published, titled Espejos [Mirrors]. It’s just like a universal history — pardon my audacity. “I can resist everything except the temptation,” Oscar Wilde said, and I confess that I have succumbed to the temptation to recount some episodes of human adventure in the world, from the point of view of those who have not appeared in the picture.

In other words, it’s about little known facts.

Here I sum up some of them, just a few.

- - -

When they were expelled from Paradise, Adam and Eve moved to Africa, not to Paris.

Some time later, after their children had already embarked upon the ways of the world, writing was invented. In Iraq, not in Texas.

Algebra, too, was invented in Iraq. It was founded by Muhammad Al-Khwarizmi, one thousand two hundred years ago, and the words algorithm and guarismo [numeral] derive from his name.

Names usually do not correspond to what they name. In the British Museum, for example, the sculptures of the Parthenon are called “Elgin marbles,” but they are marbles of Phidias. Elgin was the name of the Englishman who sold them to the museum.

The three novelties that made the European Renaissance possible, the compass, gunpowder, and the printing press, had been invented by the Chinese, who also invented just about everything that Europe reinvented.

The Ancient Indians had known before everybody that the Earth was round and the Mayans had created the most exact calendar of all times.

- - -

In 1493, the Vatican gave America to Spain and granted Africa to Portugal, “so that barbarous nations be reduced to the Catholic faith.” At that time, America had fifteen times more inhabitants than Spain, and Black Africa one hundred times more than Portugal.

Just as the Pope had commanded, barbarous nations were reduced. Very much.

- - -

Water made Tenochtitlán, the center of the Aztec Empire. Hernán Cortés demolished the city, stone by stone, and with its rubble he filled the canals where two hundred thousand canoes sailed. This was the first water war in America. Now Tenochtitlán is called Mexico City. Where water once ran, now run cars.

- - -

The highest monument of Argentina has been erected in tribute to General Roca, who in the nineteenth century exterminated the Indians of Patagonia.

The longest avenue of Uruguay takes the name of General Rivera, who in the nineteenth century exterminated the last Charrúa Indians.

- - -

John Locke, the philosopher of freedom, was a shareholder of the Royal African Company, which bought and sold slaves.

When the eighteenth century was born, the first of the Bourbons, Felipe V, abdicated his throne signing a contract with his cousin, the King of France, that the French Guinea Company would sell Blacks in America. Each monarch took 25 percent of the profits.

Names of some slave ships: Voltaire, Rousseau, Jesus, Hope, Equality, Friendship.

Two of the Founding Fathers of the United States vanished in the fog of official history. Nobody remembers Robert Carter or Gouverneur Morris. Amnesia was the reward of their deeds. Carter was the only independence leader who emancipated his slaves. Morris, drafter of the Constitution, objected to the clause that established that a slave was equal to three fifths of a person. …………

Future of Socialism

by Randhir Singh

I have been asked to speak on ‘Future of Socialism’.  What I am going to say is based on my recently published book, Crisis of Socialism — Notes in Defence of a Commitment, which may be referred to for the detailed argument in support of the propositions I am going to advance with the help of passages culled from this book.  I am going to deal with the question in four separate but interrelated segments of my address.

During the heady, rebel days in the late sixties, students of Paris used to ask of everyone who would address them to first tell them: ‘where do you speak from?’  For every speaker, inescapably speaks from a particular philosophical-political standpoint and owes it to his audience to publicly state it.  It is only fair to acknowledge that I am going to speak from the standpoint of Marxism, rather Marxism as I understand it.  For I have no pretensions to scholarship in Marxism.  I picked up some on the way and have found it useful not only in my politics or profession as a teacher, but in living my life as well.  This last is not just a formal statement.  Knowing Marx does make a difference to what sense you make of life, how you understand, live and act in the world.  ‘Indeed, I must confess that Karl Marx made a man of me’, is how George Bernard Shaw once put it.  Marx, therefore, is important to me and, I believe, he is important to all of us, today more so than ever before, if for no other reason than this: the world we are living in is a capitalist world, more capitalist than ever before after the Soviet collapse, and Marx more than any other human being, then or now, devoted his life to explaining the reality of this world and his achievement here remains unrivalled.  In one sense, this is what I am going to speak about, for socialism, properly understood, is a historically necessary and possible negation of capitalism.

I

No discussion of socialism today, least of all its future, can bypass what happened in the erstwhile Soviet Union.  What we have here, as I have argued at length in my book, is a failed revolutionary experiment: a grievously deformed socialism that was built and the final crisis and collapse of the sui generis class exploitative system it had ultimately degenerated into — all of which is fully amenable to a Marxist explanation in terms of its method of historical materialism and class analysis.  In other words, what failed in Soviet Union was not socialism but a system that came to be built in its name.  I have no time to discuss this subject here.  Immediately I would only like to emphasise the need for socialists to understand the why and how, and the implications, of what happened in the erstwhile Soviet Union.

It is indeed imperative for socialists who wish for a future beyond capitalism to understand what has happened, what was built and what has failed as socialism in the Soviet Union.  They must assess the costs and consequences of this failure, the collapse of what we have described as ‘actually existing socialism’, and some others as ‘authoritarian communism’ — though they must do so fully mindful of the costs and consequences of ‘actually existing capitalism’ or ‘authoritarian capitalism’ which has rushed in to pick up the pieces.  It was certainly mistaken to see the struggle for socialism in our times as a contest between ‘the socialist world’ and ‘the capitalist world’, as official Marxism in the post-1917 period made it out to be.  It was, as always, an international class struggle with several more or less important fronts.  The countries of ‘actually existing socialism’, while it lasted, were only one front of this struggle, and while they did condition or influence this struggle, positively as well as negatively, they did not determine or settle the question of its outcome.  Nor does the collapse of these countries now, or their return to the capitalist fold, in any way settle the question of the future of socialism — the struggle still goes on and will, so long as capitalism lasts.  Nevertheless, these countries constituted what was in many ways a most important front of the ongoing international class struggle and their collapse demands that socialists understand and come to terms with it.  If they no more need to carry the burden of a deformed and degenerated socialism or be answerable for its ugliness and cruelties, the burden of a genuine, Marxist explanation of its collapse has still to be carried by them so that our people know the truth and appropriate lessons are drawn for struggles of the future. . . .

PERSONALITY CULT: IS IT NECESSARY FOR REVOLUTION?

Ranganayakamma

While referring to the ‘cult of Mao’, Charles Bettelheim (197 observed that it harmed the ‘Revolutionary Line’ in China. He, however, made Lin Piao and Hua Kuo Feng responsible for the cult but did not find fault with Mao. When we asked him about Mao’s responsibility in this matter, Bettelheim wrote to us (on 6 April 1983) as follows: “I don’t think that Mao tried really to prevent the “Cult”. In my opinion, he considered it as a necessity, as a way of assuring the unity of the people in a situation where many disruptive forces were at work.”

This means, while persons like Lin Piao carried on Mao’s Cult for self-consolidation, Mao considered it a revolutionary necessity. This is the reason which every one who defends Cult would say. Mao also said the same thing in his interviews to Edgar Snow: that his cult was necessary. Did he give this reason alone? No. He also gave another reason: that people carried out Personality Cult on a large scale since they were culturally backward. Before we discuss whether this Personality Cult is necessary for revolution and whether people carried it out or revolutionaries resorted to it, it is necessary to know what sort of activities were undertaken for this Cult.

1. Whenever one talks or writes about Mao, ‘Four Greats’ must be added to Mao’s name. (1) Great Teacher. (2) Great Leader. (3) Great Supreme Commander. (4) Great Helmsmen. It was Mao himself who told Edgar Snow that these adjectives were used with reference to him. Mao was eligible to greater adjectives than these for his contribution to Chinese revolution. But, should people add all these adjectives to his name? Should they describe him in this manner? If they want to tell that ‘the Central Committee has passed a resolution’, they would not tell it so simply. What sort of Central Committee is it? It is under the auspices of the Party. What sort of Party is it? It is led by a great Chairman. What sort of Chairman is he? (1) Great Teacher. (2) Great Leader. (3) Great Supreme Commander. (4) Great Helmsmen. Hence, in order to tell that the Central Committee has passed a resolution, they would say, ‘The Central Committee of the Party –led by our Great Teacher, Great Leader, Great Supreme Commander and Great Helmsmen Chairman Mao – has passed a resolution.’ Whether they talk of the Party, the Central Committee or Leadership and whenever they mention Mao’s name, all these adjectives must be present one after the other like bogies of a train. After describing like this, if Mao’s name has to be mentioned again, the whole thing is repeated. We find hundreds and thousands of sentences in books and newspapers of China (also in our revolutionary papers). [What is the difference between these adjectives and descriptions like ‘Rajadhi Raja! (Oh, King of Kings’!), Raja Marthanda! (As brilliant as the Sun!) Do you say that all the attributes of the king are false and Mao’s are true? But, we don’t find all such true attributes in Mao’s Cult. Even if they are true, isn’t there any unnaturalness in the way in which they were expressed?] …………………….

On Stalin

Some months before we posted an excellent article of Joseph Ball “Did Mao Really Kill Millions in the Great Leap Forward?” the article was very much appreciated by our readers. it countered the propaganda of western imperialists on the roll of Mao.we asked Mr Joseph if he had done similar work on Stalin.he replied us through mail as following.

Dear Parisar
I have researched the issue of Stalin. I’m not convinced by the so-called ‘archival’ evidence that Stalin had so many executed in the Purges. This evidence seems to have emerged during political campaigns by Khruschev, Gorbachov and Yeltsin against Stalin’s legacy (e.g. Khruschev circulated archival ‘evidence’ that Stalin had killed such large numbers when he was fighting his power struggle against those perceived to be more pro-Stalin). However, I am not in a position to come up with anything definitive about this, as I don’t speak Russian and can’t go through the archives. (One person who can-the academic Grover Furr has pointed out that some of the documents found in the Russian archives are falsified-though he has not tried to authenticate the documents I am mainly discussing.) What I am in the process of doing is addressing some questions to (the less right-wing) Russian archival researchers. I hope to publish an article about this next year.

Needless to say whatever the status of different documents in the archives this business of Stalin having murdered millions is rubbish and there was never any evidence for it. We are challenging the notion that he was responsible for hundreds of thousands of deaths as he prepared the country for a war against imperialism and Fascism that led to the deaths of tens of millions of Soviet citizens and would have led to the complete enslavement of the rest, not to speak of the destruction of world civilisation-but for the Soviet peoples victory against Germany.
Best Joseph.

Deaths In Other Nations Since WW II Due To Us Interventions

By James A. Lucas 24 April, 2007
Countercurrents.org

INTRODUCTION

After the catastrophic attacks of September 11 2001 monumental sorrow and a feeling of desperate and understandable anger began to permeate the American psyche. A few people at that time attempted to promote a balanced perspective by pointing out that the United States had also been responsible for causing those same feelings in people in other nations, but they produced hardly a ripple. Although Americans understand in the abstract the wisdom of people around the world empathizing with the suffering of one another, such a reminder of wrongs committed by our nation got little hearing and was soon overshadowed by an accelerated “war on terrorism.”

But we must continue our efforts to develop understanding and compassion in the world. Hopefully, this article will assist in doing that by addressing the question “How many September 11ths has the United States caused in other nations since WWII?” This theme is developed in this report which contains an estimated numbers of such deaths in 37 nations as well as brief explanations of why the U.S. is considered culpable.

The causes of wars are complex. In some instances nations other than the U.S. may have been responsible for more deaths, but if the involvement of our nation appeared to have been a necessary cause of a war or conflict it was considered responsible for the deaths in it. In other words they probably would not have taken place if the U.S. had not used the heavy hand of its power. The military and economic power of the United States was crucial.

This study reveals that U.S. military forces were directly responsible for about 10 to 15 million deaths during the Korean and Vietnam Wars and the two Iraq Wars. The Korean War also includes Chinese deaths while the Vietnam War also includes fatalities in Cambodia and Laos. ……………..

A People’s History Of The United States

(‘A People’s History Of The United States’ is a very popular book authored by Howard Zinn. it exposes the very myth of the world’s great and ‘oldest democracy’ as the ruling class of US describes it.recently this great book is scanned by History Is A Weapon.we are giving the first chapter of this must read book as it is not easily accessible in India.we will try to post more chapters in upcoming days — Editor)

Columbus, The Indians, and Human Progress

by Howard Zinn

Arawak men and women, naked, tawny, and full of wonder, emerged from their villages onto the island’s beaches and swam out to get a closer look at the strange big boat. When Columbus and his sailors came ashore, carrying swords, speaking oddly, the Arawaks ran to greet them, brought them food, water, gifts. He later wrote of this in his log:

They … brought us parrots and balls of cotton and spears and many other things, which they exchanged for the glass beads and hawks’ bells. They willingly traded everything they owned… . They were well-built, with good bodies and handsome features…. They do not bear arms, and do not know them, for I showed them a sword, they took it by the edge and cut themselves out of ignorance. They have no iron. Their spears are made of cane… . They would make fine servants…. With fifty men we could subjugate them all and make them do whatever we want.

These Arawaks of the Bahama Islands were much like Indians on the mainland, who were remarkable (European observers were to say again and again) for their hospitality, their belief in sharing. These traits did not stand out in the Europe of the Renaissance, dominated as it was by the religion of popes, the government of kings, the frenzy for money that marked Western civilization and its first messenger to the Americas, Christopher Columbus.
Columbus wrote: …………