Eva Durant:
>So we in the west have rationality and order??? Ed, you must live
>on some higher plain than other mortals.
>I don't think ethnic origins have much to do with - well anything.
>In the USSR there was a lack of bourgois period emancipation
>to do more with historical events and geography than anything else.
>Truth and beuty are Europian? I'm not into all the
>pc rubbish but this is going a bit far...
I do seem to have rubbed you the wrong way with this. I didn't say we have
rationality and order. I said we see it. Perhaps I should have said we
look for it, and have been doing so ever since the Greeks. I'm well aware
that rationalists and order seekers can do absurdly disastrous things like
wipe out six million Jews or drop bombs on Hiroshima. If there is any
single thing that characterizes the western mind, I would suggest that it is
the dichotomy (or really vast gulf) between what it believes and what it does.
Perhaps you are right about the absence of a period of bourgeois
emancipation in Russia. However, there was a time between the military
consolidation of the revolution and the end of the New Economic Plan,
roughly 1920 to 1928 I believe, in which relative economic freedom
prevailed. Little by way of a bourgeoisie developed because there was
little to be developed. There was no strong bourgeois tradition reaching
back into pre-revolutionary history to build on.
>> There was a time of openness and experimenta
>tion in the arts before the
>> Revolution,
>
>actually, after the revolution, post 1917, until
>the eary 20s.
I believe it started well before that. But you are right. It continued for
a time after the revolution.
>> but it faded out rather quickly after that. Stalin, who was
>> more oriental than European in culture and personality, pulled Russia back
>> into its history of fearfulness and suspicion of the west (and the south and
>> the east, and just about everything else).
>
>What a load of xyz***!!! Those nasty orientals???!!! Blame them!
>If there wasn't a Stalin, there would have been somebody else.
>All the countries that fell into the pattern of underdeveloped,
>illiterate (powerless) working class not being able to take
>and share power, and an absence of
>viable capitalist class, developed a power vacuum that was duly
>filled by a totalitarian burocratic elite, not far removed
>from their inherited hierarchy.
>Similar powervacuum develops when a strong capitalist class
>weakens but manages to defeat the workers, this time
>the totalitarian regimes are fascist - a frightening probability
>still for the west.
I think you misunderstand me. I am not saying orientals are nasty. I was
referring to a particularly despotic form of rule in which one man holds
enormous power. I am not the first person to refer to Stalin as an oriental
despot. Had he been oriental, occidental or anything else, he was a very
sinister and manipulative man who ruled by fear. His power was absolute; he
had no intention of sharing it. He usurped and corrupted the Russian
revolution and turned it to his own purposes, economically ruining Russia in
the process. And underlying those purposes was an absolute certainty in his
own rectitude and absolute distrust of everyone else.
Eva, I suspect you are an idealist. You analyze things in terms of the
class struggle - greedy capitalists putting down powerless workers. I
admire idealists, but I do think they tend to float a bit free of reality.
I once worked with an important man who believed in only one thing: that
power corrupts - that those who attain or seize power, whether capitalists,
or workers, or peasants, will abuse it. I believe he was right. It is
probable that the very young Stalin, had he witnessed what the old Stalin
had done, would have been appalled, perhaps horrified. The young Pol Pot, a
student in Paris, probably wanted to create the perfect, harmonious society,
not the killing fields. Perhaps even the young Hitler had kind and gentle
thoughts, though probably not for the Jews. As for my friend, he had risen
through the labour movement, and quite often demonstrated what he preached.
Best regards,
Ed Weick
