Gutter snipe all you want Geoffrey Robertson QC

Gutter snipe all you want Geoffrey Robertson QC but you are on our side now!!

Last night (20/10/2014) I saw this on the ABC Lateline program.

EMMA ALBERICI: You were against the 2003 Iraq invasion, but you support the fight against Islamic State. What’s the difference?

GEOFFREY ROBERTSON: Correct. Well, in a sense there’s a link because if we had obeyed the law, we wouldn’t have overthrown the Baathist regime in 2003 in Iraq, which – and underneath that stone, once it was rolled over, crept all these horrific fighting groups and the latest one of them being ISIS. So it may well be that ISIS wouldn’t be with us if we’d obeyed the law, and let’s face it, there were only four who didn’t. There was George Bush, who wanted to kill the man who had – he thought had threatened his father. There was Tony Blair, who went in because he thought the British could restrain the Americans. There was that Spanish President whose name I forget. He reminded me of Manuel in Fawlty Towers. I think he’s now been made a member of News Corp board. And there was Johnny Howard, who perhaps didn’t look at the law or had forgotten it or never studied it when he became a solicitor. But it was a bad mistake to go in to overthrow Saddam Hussein and we are now left with ISIS and we have to deal with it. We have an obligation to deal with it, I think, because it is committing genocide. It is certainly committing war crimes and crimes against humanity and that engages international attention. There was no crime against humanity or genocide being committed by Saddam. He committed genocide in 1988 against the Kurds, but the world turned a blind eye to that. And so we have a duty, I think, to go in. I don’t think air strikes is going to solve of the problem. The problems are extremely deep and will take a lot of solving and we have problems in our own backyard with returning members of ISIS in Britain. They’ve adopted a view, initially, that they should keep them out, but that means …

EMMA ALBERICI: That’s a view that’s shared here too …

GEOFFREY ROBERTSON: Yes, I know.

EMMA ALBERICI: … in our government.

GEOFFREY ROBERTSON: But you can’t make people stateless. The answer I think is that you have to bring them back, arrest them and put them on trial for war crimes and crimes against humanity. We can do that. There are those crimes under the Crimes Act. And I think that view is gathering force in Britain.

EMMA ALBERICI: So you think it’s wrong to deny them – to cancel their passports, deny them re-entry to Australia?

GEOFFREY ROBERTSON: Well perhaps cancel their passports if they’re going, but when they come back, I think the answer is not to refuse them and leave them stateless because that’s – what we should do is prosecute them, send them to prison for a long time, or perhaps – the view in Britain is the Channel program. We’re developing programs with psychologists and imams and possibly returned jihadis to discourage young people from joining. And it may be that instead of getting a 25-year sentence for being an accomplice to war crimes in Syria, you will get a reduction if you’re prepared to help discourage other people from taking this primrose path. But it’s a problem that both countries are facing. I think the answer is to prosecute for the crimes that they’ve committed, for their accompliceship in these monstrous events and to punish them and hopefully the punishment will act as a deterrent itself.

EMMA ALBERICI: We have to leave it there. Many thanks for coming in, Geoffrey Robertson.

END
That dear reader is what the ABC puts to air and after all why not a great many people love him? All one has to do is listen to the disparaging personal attacks that pass unchallenged by the ABC reporters to realise how low it has sunk as a so-called independent news provider.

However, one can still say – thank you come in spinner as  another anti-war liberal has joined the ranks of the pro-war elements.  OMG we are currently so shamelessly broad in our ranks that we will even have this contemptible refugee from the old not in my name brigade. ROBERTSON may well rather be passing a sentence on the Spanish Prime Minister, George W Bush and Tony Blair as war criminals – but he will just have to content himself with a bit of gutter sniping instead! Little Johhny Howard indeed!

13 Responses to “Gutter snipe all you want Geoffrey Robertson QC”


  1. 1 patrickm

    I think that a comrade from Melbourne (Glen) is about to explain why he has come over the fence with Geoffrey. He was on Facebook yabbering about David Horowitz – of all people. So an invitation was extended by me for him to explain what he thought leftists ought to be doing now that we are well into the second decade post 9/11.

    It’s Rememberance day so here is one soldier that I would like everyone to remember.
    http://www.vanityfair.com/politics/features/2007/11/hitchens200711?printable=true&currentPage=all

    The war – now blessed by Geoffrey and our own resident anti- communist Steve is sure to be blessed by Glen as well…but here I am going on.. I’ll let him speak for himself. Actually after all these years I am truly keen to know what he thinks is going on with the world. He has been silent long enough!

  2. 2 Steve Owens

    Patrick may I just ask for a correction. You state that I am anti communist. This is just not true I am a supporter of the Russian and Chinese revolutions among others. I am anti, Im anti Socialism in one country.
    If you look at Soviet Union, Peoples Republic or Democratic Kampuchea what you have is a ruling group who decide to take a backward country and force it into modernity. High goals are set then are not met which is followed by a round of repression and then the cycle starts again leaving the population cheering for more because not cheering is a certain path to being exposed as a “kulak” or “rightist” or whatever.
    So there you are, Socialism in one country leads to a population that exists in fear alternating with wild forced enthusiasm (look at the pictures coming out of Nth Korea)
    I just dont think that fear and forced compliance is the road to Communism.
    So please by all means abuse me with the title of anti SIOC but not anti communist for like Orwell I dont want what happens/ed in the Soviet Union to be what peoples idea of socialism is.
    BTW well done Barry with his newish blog he has put up some interesting stuff as does Bill with his.

  3. 3 patrickm

    I think the one consistent point in your political views is your anti-communism and I’ve already explained why (in excessive detail) at this recent thread.

    What is interesting – to me – is not so much your slow evolution into a cruise missile enemy of fascism but what that general growth might imply about the western masses that lean towards pseudoleft thinking. The number of people in that category has fluctuated wildly over the last 4 decades or so but the basic trajectory is reflective of the collapse in the sects generally. The fact that capitalism is deeply mired in an intractable crisis that is now played out almost continuously as a government level financial crisis, indicates that the collapse of the sects is not related to the state of anything external to the sects themselves. The masses have and will continue to reject sect pseudoleftism as you have yourself, whatever state capitalism is in.

    The masses have always been ahead of pseudoleftists in the sects and young people who get sucked into them have to get themselves out before they can grow. That’s the well known churn as the naive gain experience.

    Indeed the masses are often ahead of genuine leftists, who are isolated and often lack a global vision and neglect to take class interests into proper consideration.

    The masses even when temporarily paralysed and directionless ‘on the fence’ in an understandable confusion as they continue to investigate are ahead of the certainty (and stupidity) of the sects deep in Neverland. That was the case for example when you all handed out ‘no blood for oil leaflets’ in 1991. Or earlier sympathised with the Argentinian Junta involved in naked aggression. It was the case when the masses in Portugal sought a bourgeois democratic revolution after many decades of intolerable fascist dictatorship so that they could live as any other western European people. Pseudoleftists sought the counter revolution of an east European police state tyranny, that was never going to be any sort of good idea! It was never going to fly.

    The Neverland response to fascist aggression (the spread of tyranny with the enslavement of a country and all the peoples’ of every class in that country as the actual object of a war) demonstrated a dead end and it was confirmed for all the sects when they repeated the exercise in 2003 with a policy designed to stop a COW being built that could and did launch a revolution that can and will destroy tyranny across the entire region.

    That goal as a strategic response to 9/11 I concede was harder to grasp given the track record of the forces involved. But honesty will work now; the liberation was real despite how backward the region is.

    The broad change in western progressive thinking lately towards a greater acceptance of war as the only response to fascism gives us a direction for 2015.

    We can ‘leap ahead’ to consider what is to be done about Boko Haram/Daesh/Al Qaeda/Baathist style Islamofascism or we can reflect on the more traditional fascism oozing out of Putin’s Russia, or we can comment on recent French developments. I will do so as a revolutionary democrat otherwise known as a communist. You can do so as an oponent of the communist revolutionaries that had come to power in their struggles in China and Russia. The revolutionary forces eventually lost power, after the leaders died, to forces that share your view on how bad those leaders were and struggle has unfolded further. I am satisfied that Mao had a better take on what Revisionism was all about, and that he had a far better grasp on what imperialism was all about as well, than any of the sects that you now shun.

    While the sects were calling hands off I was for French soldiers in Mali, and as I recall your silence on the topic marked you as a fellow traveller as you NOW are over the Bush-Clinton era NFZ war over Iraq. That air war was only launched after the fascists were thrown out of Kuwait by the large international force led by that life-long realist Bush Snr. You still – despite Libya – claim that an international united front effort to undo fascist aggression against the country of Kuwait with the clear purpose of enslaving to a fascist tyrant all the people of Kuwait was unsupportable. That position is plainly weird so I am not surprised that you have not delved deeply into this swamp draining warfare supported by revolutionary democrats.

    It makes no sense for you to oppose the Libyan tyrant regaining control of an insurgent part of his own country and that those people deserved international assistance to kill his troops rather than let them be re-enslaved to his tyranny but that the enslavement of the Kuwaiti people by a neighboring tyrant could be allowed to stand until some -wishfull- methods of sanctions forced him to undo the aggression without any fascist troops being killed (except those that even menaced the Kurds!

    Your position is now that the NFZ WAR and killing – the continuation of the Kuwait war – was supportable as a good effort by the Great Satan but that the Kuwait liberation war itself was not because it cost to many lives of Baathist soldiers who you complain were mostly poor conscripts! I think that revolutionary war can’t help but result in death to a great many fascist troops (however they come to be carrying their gun and involved in holding back human progress). Actually just think about what not killing them has demonstrated by compareing the German occupation with the Iraqi occupation! The fact that those Germans were killed in their millions in total war prevented any subsequent regroupment. Baathists troops that dicarded their heavy weapons and hid their infantry weapons simply regrouped when they could and went on with their ‘underground’ resistance work. Just like the Germans were they ARE very skilled soldiers.

    You support Australian and U.S. troops RETURNING to Iraq to fight alongside the armed forces of Iraq and their Kurdish allies in dealing with Baathists, Daesh, and in a very real sense be part of the extended war that has to be fought in Syria even if Australians are not yet committed by our open conservative leaders to that front. Good. The sects don’t. None of the usual suspect organizations have changed. They have just lost more members that have changed.

    Yesterday the U.S. administration announced 500 trainers were going (presumably to Jordan but could also be Turkey) to train Syrians! I am quite sure you support this as the best thing we have heard in 2015. It is real ‘boots on the ground’ escalation. We can expect these Syrian troops (given they will be protected by massive air cover to be specifically trained to move forward using that cover). I expect you to be as enthusiastic as this cruise missile Marxist is about such a great development. I expect that the U.S. planners are now able to get realistic about a war winning strategy that probably the next POTUS (Hillary?) will have to spend their first term supervising after the disgraceful Obama years. There are no reds to worry about at the moment just a general swamp draining bourgeois democratic revolution to think about even if we Marxists have been banging on about it.

    Africa requires much intervention and the hands off everything brigade are already understood to be isolated nutters. Consider the ‘eco-socialists’ response to the events in Paris. The masses took to the streets and the pseudo-left were exactly where you would expect them to be! Off to the side gesticulating and complaining – entirely missing the point that the masses want a strategic war on fascism. The masses could accept death to fascism to be their motto but as usual the sects and cults that people take to be the left can’t unite with the open right to defeat fascism.

    Neverland has lost even more to the wobbly fence and the fence has lost more to the pro-war left. You are now looking even further back to where you once wobbled up there on that fence. It is now a long way behind you. You can’t even think in the old way anymore.

    You know that the only strategy for this war is to drain the swamps. You know that Iraq body count goes ever on and you are now committed to the Iraqi war for liberation. You now say you support the forces being sent to drop bombs in Iraq! You also support them in Syria and you know that Syria deserves a Syrian body count! You are not backing down on your support for NATO intervention in Libya and there is a civil war there.

    In 2015 we can correctly raise the connection of the swamps. Neverland will also point to swamp issues like world wide economic distress via the massive growth of unemployment but we have useful things to say about that and you are lucky enough to be able to connect the dots that are still causing people to be dotty on this.

    Over in Ukraine the Putin aggression is adding to the economic rot and you ought to reflect on what you thought about that issue just a year ago!

    You are not yet up with the masses but with a couple more lifetimes you could catch up with the stragglers; nothing to do now but run to catch up.

    34 years back Arthur had this to say ‘But even more important, their whole approach to “correct line” politics seems alien.’ What an understatement! All these sorts that STILL have sects or cults or whatever are first rate nutters!
    ….
    PRIESTS AND HORSES

  4. 4 patrickm

    Have a read of this madness Steve.

    How neoconservatives led US to war in Iraq

    Robin Yassin-Kassab
    December 11, 2014

    Meticulously researched and fluently written, [right] Muhammad Idrees Ahmad’s The Road to Iraq: The Making of a Neoconservative War is the comprehensive guide to the neoconservatives and their works.

    The book’s larger story is of the enormous influence wielded by unelected lobbyists and officials over the foreign policies of supposed democracies, their task facilitated by the privatisation and outsourcing of more and more governmental functions in the neoliberal era. (Similar questions are provoked by the state-controlled or corporate media in general, as it frames, highlights or ignores ­information.) [speaking of ignoring arguments and evidence]

    The more specific story is of how a small network of like-minded colleagues (Ahmad provides a list of 24 key figures), working against other unelected officials in the State Department, military and intelligence services, first conceived and then enabled America’s 2003 invasion and occupation of Iraq, a disaster that continues to overshadow regional and global relations today. [The liberation of Iraq is the disaster not the comparison of Syria!]

    The first crop of neoconservatives emerged from a Trotsky­ist-tinged 1930s New York Jewish intellectual scene; they and their descendants operated across the political-cultural spectrum, in media and academia, think tanks and pressure groups. Hovering first around the Democratic Party, then around the Republicans, they moved steadily rightwards, and sought to form a shadow defence establishment. During the Cold War they were fiercely ­anti-Soviet. Under George W Bush they shifted from the lobbies into office.

    The neoconservative worldview is characterised by militarism, unilateralism and a firm commitment to Zionism. Even the Israel-friendly British foreign secretary Jack Straw said of the neocon Irving Libby: “It’s a toss-up whether Libby is working for the Israelis or the Americans on any given day.” The neoconservatives aimed for an Israelisation of American policy, conflating Israeli and American enemies. [The outcome being to declare the ‘disputed territories’ to be the ‘occupied territories’ mind!]

    Of course this powerful influence wasn’t the only one. Ahmad recognises the military-industrial complex is always enthusiastic for war, and writes: “The neoconservatives succeeded because they operate within a political consensus that sees US global dominance as the desired end and military force as the necessary, if not preferred, means.” [Ho hum]

    Nevertheless, the fact that neoconservatives were placed well enough to exploit the terrorist attacks of September 11 was the crucial element in the decision to invade.

    The neoconservatives wanted (through “creative chaos”) to remake not only Iraq but also Iran, Syria, Lebanon and even such crucial American allies as Saudi Arabia. Yet their messianic vision didn’t dominate administration “realists” (Colin Powell and Richard Armitage were working on “smarter” sanctions to contain the Iraqi regime) until the “catalysing event” of 9/11.

    They immediately seized the opportunity to establish a link between Al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein, promoting claims made by Laurie Mylroie, who had also, improbably, held Iraq responsible for the 1995 Oklahoma bombing and the 1993 World Trade Center attack.

    Within the administration, Dick Cheney, a “robust nationalist”, championed neoconservative perspectives and propaganda. Supposed evidence of Iraq’s WMD programmes was entirely furnished by the neoconservatives and their allies.

    That unfounded allegations were presented as casus belli to the United Nations was not an “intelligence failure” but, Ahmad proves, the result of a successful process of suppressing, spinning or promoting information for the sake of invasion.

    Cheney was motivated not by neoconservative ideology but by a hard-nosed (and unrealistic) realism. For him, 9/11 was an opportunity to make an example of an easy target. But he was greatly influenced by the neoconservative Orientalist and popular historian Bernard Lewis, who held Arab rage against the West to be purely cultural, not political, and believed Arabs only understood the language of force. These assumptions played a part in “shock and awe” over Baghdad. [unrealistic realism is correct but 60 years of it is harder to see!]

    Iraq proved America’s weakness rather than its strength. The American public was briefly awed; the rest of the world was only shocked by American recklessness. More Iraqi post-war oil contracts were awarded to states which hadn’t intervened than to those which had, while insurgencies steadily bled American lives and morale, and the region plummeted to greater depths of polarisation and instability. [oh woe the instability caused by overthrowing fascists]

    Neoconservatives had hoped Saddam’s deposal would weaken the Iranian theocracy, but this was their most dramatic miscalculation. Strengthened by the removal of hostile regimes in Iraq and Afghanistan, Iran took advantage of the new order to embed itself in Iraqi politics. By the end of Bush’s presidency, the “realist” realisation that Arab democracies would produce economically nationalist and anti-Zionist governments was reasserted, and so therefore was the traditional dictator-friendly policy. [Now who support troops being sent to fight Daesh?]

    Eleven years after the invasion, “realist” folly has compounded neoconservative madness. One common thread between the schools is an abiding refusal to deal with the people at the grassroots struggling to improve their situation. After the 1991 Gulf War, America permitted Saddam’s defeated military to use helicopter gunships to put down the intifada in the south – the mass graves of this period incubated the later sectarian breakdown. In 2003 the neoconservatives pinned their hopes on Ahmad Chalabi’s Iraqi National Congress, an exile organisation as irrelevant on the ground as the Syrian National Coalition is today (the SNC enjoys tepid and purely rhetorical American support; the grassroots Local Coordination Committees enjoy no recognition whatsoever). And now, rather than providing effective weaponry to the Free Syrian Army which has been fighting ISIS all year, America loses hearts and minds by bombing Syria’s grain silos and oil installations. [bombing grain silos not fascists mind]

    If the region is to ever recover, imperial democracies as well as Arab tyrannies require further democratisation and greater accountability. This is one unspoken lesson of Ahmad’s very useful account. [unspoken lesson]

    Robin Yassin-Kassab is the author of the novel The Road From Damascus.

    thereview@thenational.ae

    END

    That, Steve, is just one of the pseudoleft schools of thinking now desperately trying to ‘explain’ events and it’s as bonkers as it ever was. That was the mad world that you used to go marching in the streets with. Now we both support troops being sent to fight Daesh, or ‘rescue’ all manner of peoples’ and to protect the Kurds etc..

    At least Robin Yassin-Kassab has a narrative even if incoherent; I guess most people from the old anti-war crowd don’t even try to pull a big picture together. Give it a go. Try setting down a narrative for yourself Steve that ends with you and me supporting troops being deployed to Iraq – like we currently do – but make sure you are not ‘rescuing’ people because as you now know unless they are liberated we will have to send troops back every other swing of the pendulum and nothing will ever change.

    As far as I can make out the only narrative still standing includes points like… death to fascism… unite the many to defeat the few… all political power grows…put politics in command…strategically drain the swamps etc..

    So now that Putin has launched a war to carve up Ukraine as predicted, and Obama has been dragged into Syria and back into Iraq and all manner of people are stirring in France in direct response to Islamofascist murder just what kind of cruise missile warrior are you Steve?

  5. 5 Steve Owens

    Patrick in your post of Jan 20th you have a link Priests and horses which takes us to an article by Albert Langer where he makes the claim
    “If we take Lin Piao for example, there is no doubt that he did make contributions to the Chinese revolution before emerging as an outright fascist.”
    I am interested in the Lin Biao case and would welcome being told how this man is a fascist.
    Bill Brugger (leading expert in Chinese politics) once told me that he thought that the Chinese governments explanation of the Lin Biao affair was not credible.
    Given reports that the Chinese government destroyed evidence relating to the Lin Biao affair I find it hard for anyone to come to a definitive conclusion apart from some sort of blind faith.

  6. 6 Steve Owens
  7. 7 patrickm

    My point in directing your attention back to Arthur’s 35year old article Fascism and the Left was not to divert your attention from constructing a narrative of the world for 2015 but to assist you to do so.
    ‘’Demands that people pull themselves together, combat liberalism or what have you, will not solve the problem of lack of faith. This is an atheistic age and real communists are atheistic people. Our only God is the masses and the only basis for our faith is scientific analysis of reality.” You zeroing in on what was the truth of the Lin Piao incident does not expose anyone that I know as being a faith follower of Mao, and it just avoids that more urgent task, stated all those years ago as; “The situation we are in calls urgently for working out where we are and where we are going. Without that, calls to press on more resolutely and with greater vigour will only result in people getting more lost.”

    You are not in disagreement with the article so use it to help construct your narrative.

    The article was an open declaration of confusion as to the path forward while clearly rejecting paths proposed by others – paths that now are known by you to have been dead ends. Nothing that any western radical ‘Left’ group did was worth doing because not one group avoided the fate that befell the entire genre.

    A proposition of theory as THEN being primary was put forward at that time and ‘that time’ never ended so a focus on theory continued for a few people who were up to the task ever since with individualist contributions to various political struggles as they emerged being our ‘practice’. It may have been a wrong way to formulate what the primary tasks were, but right or wrong some theory quite distinct from other radical leftists was developed and applied to the practice that we were all dumped with by the times. The track record is now our recorded history. Our whole approach to openly investigating the problems that unfolded stood in sharp contrast to other former party members and produced a vital rupture with all sects and cults.

    All these groups now play a counter-revolutionary role in the 21stC.

    The pseudoleft were those who kept their eyes shut as policies changed at the level of the ruling elites running the biggest of the industrial nations of the world, just as they were shut to what was really happening when Mao shook hands with Nixon or recognised Pinochet a decade earlier.

    ‘It is [and they all were] conservative, not revolutionary to promote “leadership”, “organisation”, “doing things”, “collective life” and so on without a clear perspective for liberating people from oppression.’ The sects are not now and never have been interested in liberating people unlike leftists like Chomsky who clearly lost their way with no new theory fit for the times.

    Now we see that ‘never ever’ unite with the imperialists style politics produced the wasted decades you spent in Neverland. Real liberation requires the united front approach.

    Here is the context;
    ‘Communism is not the only ideology opposed to liberalism. Fascism opposes liberalism too. It is one thing to want to widen and deepen and ultimately transcend democracy by going beyond such mere forms as majority voting. It is quite another thing to declare that one’s policies have proved their own correctness and deliberately exclude others from even a vote, let alone a real say, on the matter. Yet we have repeatedly experienced this kind of behaviour not just from enemies, but from comrades who probably really do want to be revolutionaries.

    The fact that people like Lin Piao or Ted Hill could turn out to be fascists and that we could go along with a load of shit for a long time ought to alert us to the dangers. When people on the left start acting like people on the extreme right they must be pulled up sharply and told “You’re Ill” before the disease becomes incurable and before it spreads.’

    The context is that the disease became incurable; their brains collapsed and they ALL now exist as zombies! Not one grouping has been able to reverse course.

    There are pseudoleftists who opposed NATO intervening in Libya and excuse Putin and Assad and did not see the Egyptian coup coming, but rather assisted it to power with various actions that they supported against the MB government and it is these people who focus on opposing the Turkish government and who excuse the ‘resistance’ in Iraq and focus on how bad the Kurdish leadership and the Shia leadership of Iraq is and so on. They are the people that you have left behind in Neverland.

    A major part of the narrative from that old article was that;

    ‘Western bourgeois democratic society is heading towards an acute crisis and upheaval as another Great Depression and a Third World War develop. The outcome can be Communist Revolution or some form of fascism or social-fascism. We could face a new ruling class more powerful than the present one. It largely depends on how clear the left is on what we are fighting for and what we are fighting against and how sharply we can draw the line against perpetuating the old system of exploitation in our own practice. If the left continues to whinge about capitalism, and even oppose it from a reactionary perspective then it cannot hope to inspire people to fight for something fundamentally different.

    Indeed, just as one would have to defend the national independence that Western and Third World countries have already achieved, from Soviet “socialist” imperialism, one would also have to defend the achievements already won by the bourgeois democratic revolution from attack by alleged “socialists” who want to go backwards to a more oppressive society.’

    This obviously protracted struggle of communist revolutionaries and other democratic people in whatever progressive form they favor requires IMV a focus on the three big issues that Neverland is mostly blind to in practice whatever the rhetoric that they variously employ, because ‘countries want independence, nations want liberation and the people want revolution’.

    These big issues are dramatically unfolding in the 21st C in places like Syria, Mali, Ukraine and so on around the world and current events in Greece also provide plenty of opportunity to unite further in the struggle against the anti-democratic enemies. The struggle for more political democracy including some more struggle directed at economic democracy is IMV the key to fighting the widespread oppression that stands in the way of much human progress that is blocked by the 1% backed up by the 20% that they seem able to always buy off. Widespread war and mass unemployment generated by the economic idiocy of capitalism still keeps my focus.

    What is your NEW narrative?

  8. 8 Steve Owens

    Look mate if you don’t have any evidence linking Lin Biao to fascism then say so. If you have some evidence tell me I want to know.

  9. 9 Steve Owens

    “Nothing that any western radical ‘Left’ group did was worth doing because not one group avoided the fate that befell the entire genre.”
    Really? Havent you heard about Syriza where people just like me and maybe you are now the government. The people of Greece voted revolutionaries to power and it is because the political groups of the radical left did not just give up and retreat to theory but got their hands dirty did some work, did some organising. Syriza even has its own Maoist sub group.
    Dont worry I know all these people even the 1,000 or so Maoists are just psuedos going no where.

    http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2015-01-28/barricades-are-down-syriza-already-rolling-back-austerity-reforms

  10. 10 patrickm

    How foolish of me I forgot about Syriza that most successful of all the groups from the 1970s that avoided the fate that befell the entire genre.

    You are returning to your blank staring stupidity where soon you will pretend you can’t read. But don’t worry in Neverland they are reprinting economic books in Greek. Nobody has to learn to read them because they don’t make any sense anyway. You could order up a whole shelf full to replace your tattered collection of heavily thumbed ISO classics, like “how I came to love Lin Piao when I realised that he was accused of wanting to put a bullet in Mao’s head”

    How’s that narrative going?

  11. 11 Steve Owens

    You use the word accused in relation to Lin Biao
    Is Lin Biao only accused?
    The article you linked to by Albert says he is a fascist he doesn’t say anything about being accused.
    Have you read what Lin Biao was accused of? Here’s a General of the Red Army who plans to assassinate his closest political ally. He plans to bomb his train using planes, to blow up a bridge that the train will travel over. He plans to attack the train with a flame thrower and it all comes to nothing because Mao takes a different way home!
    It doesn’t make any sense. And then the Communist Party destroys the evidence.
    So what do we have that condemns Lin Biao. Laughable allegations and destruction of evidence by the accusing party.
    If you really need to believe this stuff I will leave you in peace but I have done my best to talk reason and point out obvious contradictions.
    I don’t claim to know what is right and wrong in relation to Lin Biao I think that there is too little hard evidence to form definitive conclusions.
    Lin Biao was accused of plotting a coup and so was Mao’s wife. I can’t understand how you can adamantly object to the guilt of the wife but have no problem with the guilt of Lin both cases seem to me to be absurd.

  12. 12 patrickm

    A brief glance at LIN’s work in the 50s and 60s is sufficient to tell me that his is not a political line that I want anything to do with and smells more like current day Nth Korea than the GPCR line that DID come out of MAO AND his international line that has turned up trumps again and again ever since; leaving us standing side by side with even Geoffrey and Tony Abbott.

    But whatever was going on when the Chinese defence minister got into a power struggle and ended up dead in a crashed airplane in Mongolia (and for Christ’s sake that ought to indicate something negative at first blush) you are not interested in what his political line was all about at all. EITHER WAY you think Mao and his ‘closest’ were deranged monsters that some hero putting a bullet in was a good idea missed.

    If you were interested in working out what the 2 line struggle was in this case, you would not be rambling along with your implication that we who have shown independence of thought all our lives are actually just faith based followers.

    Here I am in these threads exposing the clever people who ARE behaving like dolts, who are in our MSM like Chomsky, and Robertson and you want to divert your efforts away from constructing a viable narrative for 2015.

    Those of us who were capable of swimming against the tide of revisionism are nothing if not independent thinkers; you on the other hand are now swimming with the tide of Syriza and that is pretty funny. I guess the Obama tide has long ago ebbed, for most vote for the ALP ex ISO sorts and something new is required I suppose. Perhaps this Greek clown will produce change you can believe in – but certainly not economics I can believe in. As you know these issues are spelled out in the Unemployment thread.

    Just put down your current narrative – even as a tentative work in progress – and tell me how it is that we are standing together with Justice Robertson if you are not out of Neverland?

  13. 13 Steve Owens

    “But whatever was going on when the Chinese defence minister got into a power struggle and ended up dead in a crashed airplane in Mongolia (and for Christ’s sake that ought to indicate something negative at first blush)”
    I agree that something negative was up. The defense minister attempts to flee the country. Mao had clearly turned against him. I guess with the example of the previous Defense Minister and the previous President he had good reason to flee. I mean his predecessor was placed under house arrest and tortured. The President was placed under house arrest tortured and then died from lack of medical treatment.
    Yes I agree with you that something negative is indicated.
    But still you are making the claim that he was a Fascist you have yet to provide anything more than a glance at his earlier work and the fact that he died fleeing for his life.

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