Sinister Cultural Marxist
16th June 2011, 17:35
There seems to be a certain section of Maoists that could be called "Cult-Maoists" who need to find some way to rationalize a version of history where Mao, Stalin, and various Red Armies never did anything wrong and always helped to progress the Socialist effort. So when the Red Army was accused of rape, Red Cat and Red Sun went through all sorts of mental contortions to excuse the rapists or at least minimize their crimes.
There was a similar defense of groups like the Khmer Rouge and the Shining Path, which the forum maoists were shockingly uncritical of ... the shining path, of course, famously killed many peasants, and the forum Maoists basically excused the wanton slaughter of the actual workers by accusing their victims of being counter-revolutionaries. Of course, that's the inversion of the same kind of thinking that thuggish pro-American dictators used in Latin America to justify their slaughter of alleged Communists ... "Bah, they're just revolutionaries, we don't need to give them a trial or fair punishment, we can act as the police, jury, judge and executioner to such people." But that doesn't matter, because a party which they are loyal to insisted that the peasants were only killed for being counter-revolutionary. They don't even bother to consider the fact that these arbitrary killings might be a factor in the fact that more Peruvians are not sympathetic with the Shining Path today!
Of course, this line of thinking leads to a discourse of almost-religious absolutes. Their State enemies are not just capitalists but fascists, communist parties which disagree with them are "Social fascists" (that is what RedSun would say about the CWI), their members who die fighting for communism are Martyrs. And if outsiders are ever critical of their movement, it is only because bourgeois propaganda has corrupted them. Judgmental thinking is common with this mindset-just today, one got banned from this forum for calling South Asian workers "poisonous" for not joining a worker's party! It seems that one impact of that personality-cult creation is an unwillingness to confront reality or history in an theoretically consistent manner, but it has also created a cohesive, dogmatic worldview which seems hard for outsiders to engage rationally. What's the origin of this?
A caveat-Im not saying this about all Maoists, but a particular group of Maoists, including some recently banned from this forum.
There was a similar defense of groups like the Khmer Rouge and the Shining Path, which the forum maoists were shockingly uncritical of ... the shining path, of course, famously killed many peasants, and the forum Maoists basically excused the wanton slaughter of the actual workers by accusing their victims of being counter-revolutionaries. Of course, that's the inversion of the same kind of thinking that thuggish pro-American dictators used in Latin America to justify their slaughter of alleged Communists ... "Bah, they're just revolutionaries, we don't need to give them a trial or fair punishment, we can act as the police, jury, judge and executioner to such people." But that doesn't matter, because a party which they are loyal to insisted that the peasants were only killed for being counter-revolutionary. They don't even bother to consider the fact that these arbitrary killings might be a factor in the fact that more Peruvians are not sympathetic with the Shining Path today!
Of course, this line of thinking leads to a discourse of almost-religious absolutes. Their State enemies are not just capitalists but fascists, communist parties which disagree with them are "Social fascists" (that is what RedSun would say about the CWI), their members who die fighting for communism are Martyrs. And if outsiders are ever critical of their movement, it is only because bourgeois propaganda has corrupted them. Judgmental thinking is common with this mindset-just today, one got banned from this forum for calling South Asian workers "poisonous" for not joining a worker's party! It seems that one impact of that personality-cult creation is an unwillingness to confront reality or history in an theoretically consistent manner, but it has also created a cohesive, dogmatic worldview which seems hard for outsiders to engage rationally. What's the origin of this?
A caveat-Im not saying this about all Maoists, but a particular group of Maoists, including some recently banned from this forum.