No to Militarized Patriotism from Vimy Ridge

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Using our soldiers and veterans as political cannon fodder is very Americanesque.

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The militarization of Canadian culture reflects the spread of “deep integration” — the Bay Street initiative whose aim is to see Canada effectively assimilated into its behemoth neighbour. Harper and others on the right know that in order for Canada to adopt policies similar to those of the United States, we have to make the cultural changes that will provide the ideological base for those policies.

http://tinyurl.com/3acbgw

quote:Originally posted by N.Beltov:
Meh. The Marxist tradition that I'm familliar with has always preferred peaceful methods of change to violent ones. That's the high road and always will be. But neither method of change is absolutized. That would be dogmatic. Call me old school.

quote:Force is the midwife of every old society which is pregnant with a new one.

quote:On the other hand, the “Kautskyite” distortion of Marxism is far more subtle. “Theoretically”, it is not denied that the state is an organ of class rule, or that class antagonisms are irreconcilable. But what is overlooked or glossed over is this: if the state is the product of the irreconcilability of class antagonisms, if it is a power standing above society and “alienating itself more and more from it", it is clear that the liberation of the oppressed class is impossible not only without a violent revolution, but also without the destruction of the apparatus of state power which was created by the ruling class and which is the embodiment of this “alienation”. As we shall see later, Marx very explicitly drew this theoretically self-evident conclusion on the strength of a concrete historical analysis of the tasks of the revolution. And — as we shall show in detail further on — it is this conclusion which Kautsky has “forgotten” and distorted....

Fifthly, the same work of Engels', whose arguments about the withering away of the state everyone remembers, also contains an argument of the significance of violent revolution. Engels' historical analysis of its role becomes a veritable panegyric on violent revolution. This, “no one remembers". It is not done in modern socialist parties to talk or even think about the significance of this idea, and it plays no part whatever in their daily propaganda and agitation among the people. And yet it is inseparably bound up with the 'withering away" of the state into one harmonious whole.

[ 11 April 2007: Message edited by: M. Spector ]

I would be more sympathetic to the view that the only true way to be an environmentalist is to be anti-capitalist. But we're not arguing that here.

quote:Originally posted by unionist:

I'm told that there were even some people fighting against the Nazis and their allies who were not anti-capitalist.

I'm not sure that western leaders were all that enthusiastic about joing WWII. They certainly didn't jump into Spain's civil war in the name of freedom and democracy. Our feds in Ottawa had to have a parliamentary debate before entering WWII, and that was after London had been blitzed.

Nazi operation barbarossa was another spear-headed punch, this time into the heart of Russia and Ukraine. FDR and Churchill fully expected the Nazis to occupy the Kremlin in about six weeks time.

There is a study somewhere around that I want to read which hypothesizes that the purge actually saved the Red Army by creating ample room for the new breed of commanders like Konev, Rokossovsky, Chuikov, and Zhukove to asend quickly through the ranks, while the Brits were stuck with the generation steeped in WW1 ideas.

[ 11 April 2007: Message edited by: Cueball ]

quote:Originally posted by Webgear:

This is likely because the Russain military leadership were killed a few years early by Stalin.

What, no credit to Dzerzhinsky, Kaganovitch, Yagoda, Yezhov, or Beria?. Did Stalin and Hitler have no accomplices ?. It's true that 90 percent of the guards at Auschwitz were never tried for their crimes. Many slipped into Spain and Italy and declared sanctuary from communist oppression.

quote:There was no professional army in Russain when the Germans invaded.

Yes, the situation appeared hopeless. Stalin went home and contemplated a similar Tsarist fate. He expected the people's assassins to come for him as the Nazis laid siege to Russian cities.

At some point, armaments and munitions factories were ordered dismantled. Hundreds of thousands of men and women carried machinery, nuts and bolts on horseback and by hand, trudging over the frozen Urals where it was put reassembled and set in motion to feed the resistance. Stalin paid backdoor visits to FDR and Churchill over two years demanding a second front. Millions were slaughtered.

quote:Originally posted by Fidel:

Our feds in Ottawa had to have a parliamentary debate before entering WWII, and that was after London had been blitzed.

Wrong on all points.

The London blitz began September 7, 1940.

The vote in Parliament to join the war was September 9, 1939.

By the way, the vote was unanimous except for one. Only one MP was not enthusiastic about going to war against Hitler.

ETA: Would you have preferred they entered the war without a debate in Parliament - the way Canada did in 1914, as a lowly tail wagged by the British dog?

The Military Purge

I would say that this open many positions for new though on military tactics and advancement in the Russian Military.

If the British and French militaries had similar purges before the war, I have no doubts the outcome of WW2 would have been different.

There were professional armies before WW2, however not on a very large scale.

quote:Originally posted by Fidel:
Chamberlain and Deladier were the ultimate political concervatives and appeasers.

Chamberlain spoke of the coup plotters calling for help from the embassy as "anti-Nazis" and weren't to be trusted.

Perhaps. But on Sept. 1, 1939, Chamberlain condemned the Nazi invasion of Poland, passed a bill ordering the conscription of all men ages 18 to 41 into the armed forces, and went to war against Germany.

It took an invasion of the Soviet Union, 21 months later, by three million German soldiers, to get them to condemn Hitler and join the war.

So when you cast these stones:

quote:I'm not sure that western leaders were all that enthusiastic about joing WWII.

... make sure your walls aren't transparent.

[ 11 April 2007: Message edited by: unionist ]