don't vote.

[1871]

The point is that it was exactly the same as Spain - re the Civil War. Lenin put the cheka system in place. This became the NKVD> They hunted down and executed the Ukranian anarchists and centralised power.

Yezhov switched sides;

He completed only his elementary education. From 1909 to 1915, he worked as a tailor's assistant and factory worker. From 1915 until 1917, Yezhov served in the Imperial Russian Army. He joined the Bolsheviks on May 5, 1917 in Vitebsk, seven months before the October Revolution. During the Russian Civil War, 1919–1921, he fought in the Red Army. After February 1922, he worked in the political system, mostly as a secretary of various regional committees of the Communist Party. In 1927, he was transferred to the Accounting and Distribution Department of the Communist Party where he worked as an instructor and acting head of the department. From 1929 to 1930, he was the Deputy People's Commissar for Agriculture. In November 1930, he was appointed to the Head of several departments of the Communist Party: department of special affairs, department of personnel and department of industry. In 1934, he was elected to the Central Committee of the Communist Party;[4] in the next year he became a secretary of the Central Committee. From February 1935 to March 1939, he was also the Chairman of the Central Commission for Party Control.

Yezhov was known as a devout Bolshevik and loyalist of Joseph Stalin, and in 1935 he wrote a paper on Stalinism in which he argued that since political unorthodoxy was impossible in a perfect Communist state (such as the USSR), any form of political opposition to Stalinist policies was actually evidence of conspiracy by "disloyal elements" to overthrow the Soviet state, thus requiring violence and state terrorism to "root out" these "enemies of the People"; this became in part the ideological basis of the purges

Under Yezhov, the Great Purge reached its height during 1937–1938, with 50-75% of the members of the Supreme Soviet and officers of the Soviet military being stripped of their positions and imprisoned, exiled to the Siberian gulags or executed, along with a greater number of ordinary Soviet citizens, accused (usually on flimsy or nonexistent evidence) of disloyalty or "wrecking" by local Chekist troikas in order to satisfy Stalin and Yezhov's arbitrary quotas for arrests and executions. Yezhov also conducted a thorough purge of the security organs, both NKVD and GRU, removing and executing many officials who had been appointed by his predecessors Yagoda and Menzhinsky, but even his own appointees as well. He admitted that innocents were being falsely accused, but dismissed their lives as unimportant so long as the purge was successful

[Asshole]

(01-03-2012 01:54 AM)Notorious1994 Wrote:  This argument is pointless based on the fact that nobody gives a fuck if you vote. Ever since the 1960 voter turnout has been at a median of 50%, meaning half the people don't vote anyways. Now what you guys are doing is targeting the smart, informed voters and trying to convince them to drop their vote. You leave the vote to the misinformed and uneducated.

Do you think ANYONE gives a shit if only 30% votes? 25%? They aren't going to shut down the government just because of low turnout. All you've done is hand over the control of who gets into power to the ignorant instead of the informed.

Again, people need to fuck off with this "hypocritical vote" or "reformism" philosophical bullshit. It's nice to sit around in a circle and jerk off about why we don't like either parties, but that doesn't get shit done

Draw the line between political philosophy and progressive action.

this is like otf claiming that atheists have no morality for not believing in god. voting accomplishes little, we act through community organization and labor solidarity.

[Notorious1994]

Why are you all confused?

Who said to stop at voting. Vote AND participate in movements, unions and community education.


SCENARIOS-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------

1. The informed populace does not vote because they feel their vote useless, so they direct effort elsewhere instead. The uninformed and uneducated gain full control of the vote and we get worse government. Government and corporations do not care, since the informed aren't voting anyways so they don't have to worry about getting their person elected again. Much easier for a corrupt government. The government doesn't give a fuck about the people, because the informed people aren't voting anyways

2. The informed and uninformed vote. The informed at least have say in the government. The government and Corporations are aware that the informed are monitoring the government and will watch what they do so that they don't lose large portions of the vote. Not ideal, but at least the government is kept in check to some degree, and must consider its steps so as not to step over the line and face backlash

3. The informed vote and try to educate the rest of the population. Voter turnout over 70%, government and those in power are very aware what they do is being monitored and mis-steps could lose them power. The government is afraid of the people, because the people are informed

#3 is the best scenario, #2 is what we have now, and you are advocating #1

[Asshole]

(01-03-2012 02:13 AM)1871 Wrote:  The point is that it was exactly the same as Spain - re the Civil War. Lenin put the cheka system in place. This became the NKVD> They hunted down and executed the Ukranian anarchists and centralised power.

i disagree and wikipedia is a lackluster source. if you want to attack lenin, do so in the in defense of lenin thread. let's keep this on track. now i'm not sure how this affects my original point. were the political parties not a tremendous platform for the bolsheviks?

[Notorious1994]

[/quote]

this is like otf claiming that atheists have no morality for not believing in god. voting accomplishes little, we act through community organization and labor solidarity.
[/quote]

You will be able to fend off corporations like this, but will lose your control over the government. The government IS the people. If the people stop participating, you can say goodbye to telling the government where to spend your tax dollars

[1871]

hahaha WRONG

THE GOVERNMENT IS THE CORPORATES

[Asshole]

(01-03-2012 02:19 AM)Notorious1994 Wrote:  SCENARIOS-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------

1. The informed populace does not vote because they feel their vote useless, so they direct effort elsewhere instead. The uninformed and uneducated gain full control of the vote and we get worse government. Government and corporations do not care, since the informed aren't voting anyways so they don't have to worry about getting their person elected again. Much easier for a corrupt government. The government doesn't give a fuck about the people, because the informed people aren't voting anyways

2. The informed and uninformed vote. The informed at least have say in the government. The government and Corporations are aware that the informed are monitoring the government and will watch what they do so that they don't lose large portions of the vote. Not ideal, but at least the government is kept in check to some degree, and must consider its steps so as not to step over the line and face backlash

3. The informed vote and try to educate the rest of the population. Voter turnout over 70%, government and those in power are very aware what they do is being monitored and mis-steps could lose them power. The government is afraid of the people, because the people are informed

#3 is the best scenario, #2 is what we have now, and you are advocating #1

i am not advocating #1. i'm calling for the informed voter to stop voting for the worse of evil and discard a broken system. which is better then #3 because we aren't monitoring the destructive bourgeois, we are eliminating their power and restoring it back to the people.

[1871]

(01-03-2012 02:22 AM)Laz Wrote:  

(01-03-2012 02:13 AM)1871 Wrote:  The point is that it was exactly the same as Spain - re the Civil War. Lenin put the cheka system in place. This became the NKVD> They hunted down and executed the Ukranian anarchists and centralised power.

i disagree and wikipedia is a lackluster source. if you want to attack lenin, do so in the in defense of lenin thread. let's keep this on track. now i'm not sure how this affects my original point. were the political parties not a tremendous platform for the bolsheviks?

Not at all. There are so many books written about this. You quoted Lenin first and this is only tangetially related. Dont tell me that you are just referering to marxists.org or redant.com or whatever Vegans site is.

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Peoples-Tragedy-...roduct_top

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Cheka-Extraordin...712&sr=1-6

[Asshole]

(01-03-2012 02:23 AM)Notorious1994 Wrote:  You will be able to fend off corporations like this, but will lose your control over the government. The government IS the people. If the people stop participating, you can say goodbye to telling the government where to spend your tax dollars.

rofl. the u.s./uk/almost any other country (whether or not the likes of venezula and cuba is oppressive can be left to another thread) government is not the people. the people are the ones struggling to find a job or to pay their mortgage, the victims of the bosses. the people generate the economy and lack health care.

i suppose you are one of those fools who believe that we are a democratic nation.

---

(01-03-2012 02:31 AM)1871 Wrote:  Not at all. There are so many books written about this. You quoted Lenin first and this is only tangetially related. Dont tell me that you asre just referering to marxists.org or redant.com or whatever Vegans site is.

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Peoples-Tragedy-...roduct_top

vegan is a stalinist, i am a trotskyist. we are very opposed politically and i don't often cite his blog. (he's a good guy though.) you are going to debate that lenin's claim that there was political parties before the revolution and that they were a revolutionary platform? thats the only point that pertains to this thread.

also that book is complete bullshit capitalist propaganda that i'd love to debate on another thread. just not here. this is a huge point that should be addressed.

---

shakur's preparing a bigasser post on my one bigass post and sean and raj usually stop posting after the third page of a political debate. i'm going to get my homework done and work out before school tomorrow, i'll check back before i go to bed.

[1871]

Quote:Lazarus

also that book is complete bullshit capitalist propaganda that i'd love to debate on another thread. just not here. this is a huge point that should be addressed.

Have you read the book? I have - and others related to that period of history. You are talking nonsense.

[Asshole]

[1871]

For fucks sake Lazarus - THE League of the Fifth International. Come on.

So they deliberately misinterpret by saying;

Quote:When Figes says that, “what began as a people’s revolution contained the seeds of its own degeneration into violence and dictatorship”, what he means is that it degenerated into violence and dictatorship because it was a people’s revolution. The people, you see, were barbaric.

No he doesnt attribute that to 'the people'. He attributes it to the political structure and methodology which was sunsequently played out. But it was there early on due to its centralised power structure and Lenin and Staklin & co's fondness of 'secret committee meetings. Once again - shown in ther review - theres the usual burying the head in the sand about the actual failed centralised power structure of the communist Soviet system as they
shift focus on to the imperialists - a complete red herring given that the Bolsheviks were by that time well on the way to securing power and further consolidated it through the use of the Cheka. Its that same approach to the use of power that eventually caught Trotsky. It wasnt just that the evil man named Stalin took over - her wasnt tjhe only one - the actual political structure of a centralised 'executive - put these people in power (Chekists who became NKVD)


quote;


Lev Chernyi (or Tchernyi), (18??-1921)
Russian anarchist, poet


Background:

During the Russian Revolution the Bolsheviks used the respite of the Brest Litovsk treaty with imperialism to solidify their power & attack their critics on the left.
On April 11, 1918, for example, 26 anarchist centres in Moscow were raided by the Cheka (secret police). A fierce battle raged on Malaia Dimitrovka Street with dozens killed on both sides & hundreds arrested.

A new wave of arrests swept the country in 1921 & thousands died or disappeared in the 'revolutionary tribunals' that year. 8,000 Kronstadters fled over the ice to Finland following the Kronstadt Revolt & 15,000 sailers were kicked out of the fleet.

The anarchists were scattered to the prison camps, where they died of illness, hard labor or Cheka (Bolshevik Secret Police) executioners (Lev Chernyi was shot by the Cheka on September 21, 1921). Those who evaded the net fled their homeland to a life of exile. Among them were Emma Goldman, & Alexander Berkman who wrote:


'Grey are the passing days. One by one the embers of hope have died out. Terror & despotism have crushed the life born on October. The slogans of the revolution are foresworn, its ideals stifled in the blood of the people. The breath of yesterday is dooming millions to death; the shadow of today hangs like a black pall over the country.

Dictatorship is trampling the masses underfoot. The revolution is dead; its spirit cries in the wilderness . . . I have decided to leave Russia.'

On September 29 the Cheka executed Fanya Baron, & nine other anarchist prisoners. Emma Goldman, a friend & fellow anarchist, was so outraged that friends had to dissuade her from chaining herself to a bench in the hall where the Third International was meeting to shout her protests to the delegates.



'It seems unbelievable that even today, after everything that has happened & is happening in Russia, there are people who still imagine that the difference between socialists & anarchists is only that of wanting revolution gradually or quickly.'

— Errico Malatesta, Umanita Nova, September 3, 1921



Biographical/historical note :


The anarchist poet Lev Chernyi suffered imprisonment under the Russian Czarist regime for his revolutionary activities. In 1907, he published a book entitled Associational Anarchism, in which he advocated the "free association of independent individuals." Paul Avrich, in his study, The Russian Anarchists, states that Chernyi was greatly influenced by
Max Stirner; although, other writers have minimized Chernyi's debt to Stirner.

On his return from Siberia in 1917 he enjoyed great popularity among Moscow workers as a lecturer. He was also Secretary of the Moscow Federation of Anarchist Groups, which was formed in March of 1917.

In the spring of 1918, in reaction to the growing repression of all opposition and free expression, the anarchist groups within the Moscow Federation formed armed detachments, the Black Guards, and Lev Chernyi played an active part in these.

On the night of April 11, 1918 the Checka, the secret police, raided the building of the Moscow Federation, and the Black Guards offered armed resistance. About forty anarchists were killed or wounded and about five hundred were imprisoned.

In 1919 Chernyi joined a group called the Underground Anarchists, who published two numbers of a broadsheet which denounced the Communist dictatorship as the worst tyranny in human history. On September 25, 1919, a number of Left Social Revolutionaries and Underground Anarchists bombed the headquarters of the Moscow Committee of the Communist Party in protest at the growing repression. Twelve Communists were killed and forty-five others were wounded.

August, 1921, the Moscow Izvestia published an official report announcing that ten "anarchist bandits" had been shot without hearing or trial. Among the dead was Lev Chernyi [Paul Avrich indicates in two of his books on the Russian anarchists that Chernyi was executed in September, not August -- ed.]. Although he was not involved in the bombing of the Moscow Communist headquarters, he was, because of his association with the Underground Anarchists, a likely candidate for a frame-up. The Communists refused to turn over his body to his family for burial, and there were persistent rumors that he had in fact died of torture.

— Terry Phillips, originally printed in The Match! #79/Fall 1984) & was reprinted online at Prominent Anarchists & Left-Libertarians

See also the Wikipedia entry, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lev_Chernyi

http://recollectionbooks.com/bleed/Encyc...nyiLev.htm

QUOTE;


A short biography of the obscure figure of Ukrainian anarchist Sacha Piotr-real name Alexander Schapiro, active in the Ukraine, Russia, Belgium, France and Germany. He fought with the anarchists in Spain and was murdered by the Nazis in Auschwitz. Father of the gifted mathematican Alexander Grothendieck.

Alexander Schapiro was born into a Jewish family with a Hasidic background in Novozybkov in the Ukraine on October 11th 1889 or 6th August 1890. This is the date given by his son Alexander, but it is not clear whether this was by the Julian or Gregorian calendar! In addition the Red Cross report of 1957 on him give two different birth dates, one of 10/11/1889 and one of 11/10/1889! He should not be confused with the other more famous Alexander Schapiro, who also participated in the Russian anarchist movement and who also went to Spain during the Revolution and Civil War (the wikipedia aricle on Sascha, partly based on this entry, puts the words of the other Alexander Schapiro on the Constituent Assembly into the mouth of Sascha). This small town which was predominantly Jewish, was in a region that bordered with Bielorussia and Russia. From an early age he felt more sympathy for the peasants and the poor than for his middle class family.

In 1904 at the age of fourteen he joined an anarchist group and left his town. Sacha was passionately committed to anarchist politics throughout his life. Two years later he and the rest of the group were rounded up. All of the others were executed. Sacha Shapiro, only 16, was spared because of his youth, as had Nestor Makhno in a similar situation. However during three weeks he expected to be put in front of a firing squad at any minute. His sentence was commuted to life imprisonment. The Czarist regime incarcerated him in a dungeon in Moscow to die a slow death. This would certainly have happened were it not for the intervention on the part of an influential friend that resulted in his transfer to Yaroslav'l, where conditions were not as bad. Sasha remained there for 12 years. In 1909, in one of several attempts to escape, he was shot in the left arm, which was later amputated (he did not lose his arm in the Spanish Civil War as some accounts state). He unsuccessfully attempted suicide. The hardest year for him was in 1914, when he was placed in solitary confinement for a year.

In 1917 Sacha Schapiro was released and feted as a revolutionary hero. He was a friend of the anarchist Lev Chernyi, later murdered in a Cheka cellar, and of the fiery anarchist Maria Nikiforova, later shot by the Whites. He fought at the head of a heavily armed independent anarchist band in the Ukraine with links with the Makhnovists. A Sasha Shapiro is mentioned in a Cheka report as being a member of the Underground Anarchists which had organised a secret network in Moscow to carry out attacks on the Bolsheviks and who was sent by them to organise a similar network in Ufa in the Urals. This may be the same man as the subject of this biography.During these tempestuous years between 1917 and 1921 he had an equally tempestuous love life. His first wife was a Jewish woman called Rachil and he had a son with her called Dodek. He fled to Minsk in 1921, after the Bolsheviks began searching for him, where he met up with Alexander Berkman who supplied him with money (he met Berkman again later in Berlin in 1925). He was then aided by a Jewish woman called Lia across the Russian-Polish border. He left with false papers under the name of Alexander Tanarov (he was deported to Auschwitz under this name). Within the movement he also used the name Sergei.Between 1921 and 1924 Sacha lived in Paris, Belgium and Berlin.

In Paris he was friendly with the novelist Scholem Asch and the painter and journalist Aron Brzezinski. The latter made a bronze bust of Sacha. He also frequented the Café Dome, the haunt of many artists. He had occasional contacts with Makhno and his circle in Paris.

He was very active in anarchist circles in Berlin in the 20s under the name of Sacha Piotr (or Sascha Pjotr). He befriended Durruti and Ascaso in Berlin in 1928. He also became friends with the Italian anarchist Francesco Ghezzi who had fled repression in Italy and attended the Berlin congress of the International Workers Association in 1921. Ghezzi died in a Soviet concentration camp in Siberia in 1942. In May 1924 Sacha was one of several anarchists including Sébastien Faure, Ugo Fedeli and Walecki (real name Isaak Gurfinkiel) who founded Œuvres Internationales Des Editions Anarchistes (International Works of Anarchist Editions) based in Paris and run by the anarchist Severin Ferandel.He contributed at least two articles to it. Sacha was linked to the libertarian writer Theodor Pievier who dedicated his novel Stienka Rasin (1927) to him.

It was through the anarchist movement that he met his wife, Hanka Grothendieck. She came from a middle class family in Hamburg, which had come from Holland in the previous century. She worked as a journalist for the progressive newspaper, Der Pranger, (The Pillory). She gravitated to the Berlin anarchist movement where she met Sacha. He had to earn a living by working as a street photographer. This had first been suggested to him by anarchists in Belgium as a way of making a living. They had a son together called Alexander in 1928. He went under the Dutch name of his mother because of the increasing anti-Semitism in Germany.

In 1933 the young Grothendieck was entrusted in the care of a middle class family sympathetic to progressive causes, the Heydorns, while his parents moved to France because of the menace of Nazism. Both Sacha and Hanka moved to Spain in 1936 with the coming of the Spanish revolution and fought with the anarchist movement. There under the name of Sacha Pietra he addressed an assembly of foreign anarchist militias where he said that he was not a militia man, had lived through the Russian Revolution and had seen what they had done to the anarchists there. (Supplement to CNT/FAI Information Bulletin Barcelona 19.6.37) With the defeat of the Spanish Republic both Sacha and Hanka crossed the border to France. From the age of 5 to 11, Alexander was raised in Berlin. The Heydorns finally notified his parents that it was too dangerous to keep him any more. In May 1939, just a few months before France entered the war, the Heydorns put Alexander on a train to Paris and his parents.. Sacha was imprisoned in the concentration camp at Vernet with the outbreak of war in 1939. Vernet had the worse conditions of all the camps set up by the French government to intern refugees and exiles. The anarchist May Picqueray describes in her autobiography visiting Vernet to support her friend the anarchist sculptor Fernando Gualdi. She saw Sacha there and was able to pass food to him. She took a photo of him behind the barbed wire which she later passed to his son in Paris after the war.

In 1940 Hanka and her son were interned in the Rieucros camp near Mende. Later they went into hiding in the Cevennes mountains in the south of France. Sacha was deported to Auschwitz in 1942, where he was murdered by the Nazis.

Hanka and Alexander survived the war and settled in Montpellier. She remained in the south of France while he went on to become famous at universities in Nancy, Strasbourg and Paris. She died in 1957 of pulmonary tuberculosis contracted in the concentration camp. She wrote a novel Eine Frau ( A Woman) which was never published, a thinly fictionalised account of the years in Berlin, in which Sacha has a principal role. Alexander, known as the “Einstein of mathematics“ threw up a brilliant career and now lives somewhere in the French Pyrenees in almost complete obscurity.

http://libcom.org/history/sacha-piotr-sa...91890-1942