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1396 [lbo-talk] Heidegger, Arendt -- rank: 1000

Heidegger and Arendt in love No romance could be stranger than the clandestine affair between the Jewish anti-fascist Hannah Arendt and the Nazi philosopher Martin Heidegger - and yet it spanned more than forty years, from their first meeting as student and teacher in 1930s Germany, till Heidegger s death in 1976. As a teacher at Freiburg, when he first met the intense, 19 year old Heidegger was the superstar of the German University. His lectures were so demanding that his cult followers would ...

Document Size:	5488
Author:	heartfield at blueyonder.co.uk
Date:	Tue Feb 17 10:33:25 PST 2004

1397 [lbo-talk] The LBO resistance -- rank: 1000

Doug, (caricaturing Yoshie?): 'It's also about staking out your market niche - you can't be the baddest leftist on the block if you can't denounce all the others as stooges, dupes, and sellouts.' Well, possibly; that's a characterisation that resonates. But maybe you should take care that you do not sound a little shrill, yourself. (And, for sure, questioning the racial background of posting is a provocation too far.) But the rhetorical energy given over to denouncing the violence committed agai ...

Document Size:	6208
Author:	heartfield at blueyonder.co.uk
Date:	Mon Feb 16 15:16:16 PST 2004

1398 [lbo-talk] Iraqi resistance, Lysenko, Morganthau -- rank: 1000

Seth Ackerman wrote of the US: > But remember, originally they wanted to pastoralize Germany and impose a > punitive peace. They only reversed course under pressure from communism > and the left. A formulation which is open to misinterpretation. 'Communism and the left' continued to want to pastoralize Germany and impose a punitive peace long after Secretary of State Morganthau's plan was shelved in Washington. It wasn't because of the left's desire to re-build Germany that Washington f ...

Document Size:	8724
Author:	heartfield at blueyonder.co.uk
Date:	Sun Feb 15 13:20:57 PST 2004

1399 [lbo-talk] Iraqi resistance? -- rank: 1000

Quoth Doug: "Dunno about that - the capitalist hyena press, or at least the NYT branch of that beast, reports that the occupation forces have been fairly successful at arresting leaders of the resistance. And it's not likely that they could have captured Saddam himself without some help from the locals." Possibly, but many popular resistance movements were troubled by informers. The Provisional IRA always found it difficult to secure a majority of the catholic population, let alone any ...

Document Size:	7218
Author:	heartfield at blueyonder.co.uk
Date:	Sun Feb 15 11:15:21 PST 2004

1400 [lbo-talk] Back in the USSR -- rank: 1000

Chris Doss objects to being called an apologist of Stalin, but I am at a loss to understand where he differs in outlook from Stalin, or his heirs. So do tell, Chris, what exactly would have been your differences with Stalin, or Brezhnev, or are you, as charged, and unalloyed fan. Also, it seems to me, Chris is just confusing present-day attitudes to the Stalin, or Brezhnev eras, with the attitudes that people had at the time. In 1984 the sociological institute of the Soviet Academy of Sciences p ...

Document Size:	7166
Author:	heartfield at blueyonder.co.uk
Date:	Fri Feb 6 03:27:17 PST 2004

1401 [lbo-talk] Romanian health care -- rank: 1000

Joanna Bujes talks up Romania's public health care system. Hoping not to make conflict for the sake of it, I think this is missing the wood for the trees, concentrating on the detail at the expense of the whole picture. You know that public health in Nazi Germany was in some ways exemplary, too: Nazi doctors were the first to make the connection between smoking and cancer. Smoking was forbidden on trams and other public spaces in Germany in the 30s. German scientific papers that argued the assoc ...

Document Size:	7521
Author:	heartfield at blueyonder.co.uk
Date:	Thu Feb 5 17:29:13 PST 2004

1402 [lbo-talk] soviet workers - money, but no goods! -- rank: 1000

Chris Doss appears to be having his leg pulled, when he quotes: 'Yes, we had no possibility to buy many things but not because we were short of money - import was not developed and we were too closed country, you know.' But isn't that the point? Soviet output was so poor in quality that the domestic consumer goods sector could not meet ordinary people's basic needs. So Chris, you win, workers were rich under Brezhnev, it's just that they did not have anything to spend their money on!

Document Size:	5195
Author:	heartfield at blueyonder.co.uk
Date:	Thu Feb 5 10:21:21 PST 2004

1403 [lbo-talk] Overpaid soviet workers? -- rank: 1000

I see that Chris knows a lot of intellectuals who think that the working class were overpaid and lazy in the soviet era. I too have met middle class people who thought that workers were overpaid. I've also met people who are nostaglic for the 1940s and 1950s in Britain, and weave fairy stories to themselves about how we were all better off then. No doubt some people have ostalgia for the Stalin era, too. But a wiser person might have taken this with a pinch of salt.

Document Size:	5036
Author:	heartfield at blueyonder.co.uk
Date:	Thu Feb 5 07:45:59 PST 2004

1404 [lbo-talk] Stalin v Hitler? -- rank: 1000

Stalin's 'fight' against Hitler Opportunistically, the Stalinists favour a right-wing regime in Germany German communist Heinz Neumann warned Stalin about the threat posed by the 'Nationalists' i.e. the monarchist Nazi alliance, Stalin replied 'Don't you think Neumann, that if the Nationalists came to power in Germany, they would be so tied up with the West that we could build socialism peacefully.' Quoted in M Buber-Neumann Kriegs-schauplatze der Welt Revolution, p 317 When the SPD's Muller gov ...

Document Size:	7186
Author:	heartfield at blueyonder.co.uk
Date:	Thu Feb 5 07:37:32 PST 2004

1405 [lbo-talk] 'Stalin wasn't stallin'' -- rank: 1000

Chris Doss I realize that life in the USSR is supposed to have been like living in a horrible dungeon, but it just ain't so. As a matter of fact it was very carefree. The USSR was like one giant daycare center with tanks and ICBMs. Five million people died in the famine of 1932-4 caused by collectivisation of agriculture. Hundred of thousands of political prisoners were detained in barbaric conditions. Basic legal rights were suspended. Whole populations Ingush, Chechens and Cherkess were re ...

Document Size:	6562
Author:	heartfield at blueyonder.co.uk
Date:	Wed Feb 4 20:04:45 PST 2004

1406 [lbo-talk] Kornstadt -- rank: 1000

Lance on Trotsky "What a humanitarian. When was he warning against the dictatorial course Stalin had set upon, when he was lead the Red Army into Kronstadt? Was he maintaining his critique of Stalinism from the left when he was crushing Makhno and the Ukrainian workers movements resistance to Russian domination?" In both cases minorities took up arms against the Soviet state - it was entitled to defend itself, just as it was entitled to defend itself against the white armies.

Document Size:	5039
Author:	heartfield at blueyonder.co.uk
Date:	Tue Feb 3 12:01:56 PST 2004

1407 [lbo-talk] (no subject) -- rank: 1000

Chris Doss is right to say that he is not 'overwhelmingly knowledgeable' about Trotsky. But berating Trotsky for his dependence upon the 'inevitable' Chris seems to think that the course of the history of the USSR would not be all that different if somebody else had come into power apart from Stalin. But above all the USSR was created by the conscious intervention of men and women into the course of history. More than at any other moment, political choices mattered. Making light of them is indee ...

Document Size:	6198
Author:	heartfield at blueyonder.co.uk
Date:	Tue Feb 3 08:27:47 PST 2004

1408 [lbo-talk] "full of shit" -- rank: 1000

Doss...There are reasons for it -- mainly, Trotsky > was mostly full of shit. Hardly. He was one of the leaders of the revolution that changed the course of world history, *and* he had the foresight to warn against dictatorial course Stalin had set upon - maintaining a critique of Stalinism from the left throughout the rest of his life. You can talk about his weaknesses if you like, but there is a context, and it is one that secures his reputation in the history of the 20C.. If anything, his ...

Document Size:	5842
Author:	heartfield at blueyonder.co.uk
Date:	Tue Feb 3 03:38:46 PST 2004

1409 [lbo-talk] Hutton -- rank: 1000

The WEEK ending 1 February 2004 HUTTON ‘Recoiling from open conflict, the British prefer to see people brought to book, and imagine that officialdom can resolve all problems in an orderly way. The culmination of that fantasy is that the Ulster Judge Lord Hutton will become an instrument of fair play.’ ‘Hutton’s fantasy politics’ The WEEK, 24 August 2003 Illusions in Lord Hutton’s enquiry were widespread as it sat to consider the circumstances surrounding government scientist David Kelly’s suicid ...

Document Size:	10424
Author:	jim at heartfield.demon.co.uk
Date:	Sun Feb 1 10:05:12 PST 2004

1410 [lbo-talk] in the interests of internationalism -- rank: 1000

Das heutige Aufbegehren gegen "Imperialismus" und "Überakkumulation" impliziert nicht einmal im Ansatz revolutionäre Bestrebungen. Stattdessen werden diese radikalen Konzepte zum bloßen rhetorischen Ausdrucksmittel moralischen Abscheus gegenüber der Politik. Novo, November 2004 http://www.novo-magazin.de/73/novo7357.htm

Document Size:	5022
Author:	James Heartfield
Date:	Wed Dec 1 14:08:21 PST 2004