l'Enfermé

Maoism after the early 70's lost any reason to exist in the West. The ones that remain tend to have weird views, Third-Worldism included.

Here's a post I made in the mod forum that I feel you'd like to see.

"In the 1976-1978 period, before Pol Pot and Co. were overthrown and the extent of what was going on was made clear, the argument a lot of leftists adopted was that conditions in Cambodia were rough because the US bombing campaign had affected things to the extent that the Khmer Rouge had to evacuate the cities, or that at least doing such a thing could be seen as a reasonable action under the circumstances.

The argument thus went that most people who were dying were put in such a situation because the country's agricultural economy was ruined by the bombs. Thus it was not really the fault of the Khmer Rouge, who were said to be doing their best out of the circumstances.

Of course after 1979 this argument basically became untenable. I've seen a few super-Maoists continue to assert it though, using... 1976-1978 sources."

I replied in the Pol Pot post dispute thing.

I have been interested in communism since 2001. I became one in 2006 and had a pro-Hoxha orientation from the outset, before that I was a liberal Democrat moving increasingly to the left.

Hello Comrade! I like your positions here, not so dogmatic. Greetings

I suppose you'd concur with Jon Halliday when he states in his book The Artful Albanian: The Memoirs of Enver Hoxha (pp. 6-7) that, "Hoxha is both unusually well read and intelligent, on one hand, and an out-and-out Stalinist, on the other. These two sides of his character coexist without any resolution or synthesis. For Hoxha, Stalin can do no wrong. The world is divided into black and white... On these issues, Hoxha is entirely predictable and often boring... The conflict between Hoxha's shrewd observation and his purblind Stalinism is one of the oddest aspects of the memoirs. In effect, when in trouble, he wheels out Marxism-Leninism and deploys it like magic, in an incantatory, ritualistic way. But it is a magic straitjacket."

Hoxha led the struggle for the country's independence from fascism and was basically the founder of the Communist Party of Albania. Bokassa overthrew his cousin in a military coup. I think Hoxha leading the country for 40 years has a bit sounder basis than Bokassa ruling for a few years.

Have you, per chance, actually read anything Hoxha wrote? He could be quite lucid. See for instance his reminiscences on the struggle against Soviet revisionism: http://enver-hoxha.net/content/conte...shchevites.htm

What is your proof that Hoxha was "insane"? Peter R. Prifti, James S. O'Donnell, Jon Halliday, and various others have noted that he was the most intellectual head of state in Eastern Europe. He had a fluent grasp of French and a working knowledge of various other languages, he spoke of Voltaire and many other figures in his works, he had an extensive library, he traveled across Albania frequently until old age, etc.

Treating him as akin to, say, Bokassa is a bit much.

FYI: Beards were banned for being associated with Muslim and Orthodox clergy, and because having a beard was a sign of being a "learned elder" type in Albania's tribal north. Hoxha himself donned a beard at one point during the national liberation war, just like at one point he also donned a moustache as part of assuming a false identity to hide from fascist authorities.

Bananas weren't banned, they were, in fact, sold.

Bananas are bourgeois as fuck.

But yes, I did have a pretty long-winded political change a little while back. I do independent organizing nowadays.