Losurdo, Chomsky, Brar: Highly Recommended Books & Documents

PATRICE GREANVILLE

TGP's Book & Docs Recommendations
Bulletin #1a:
Stalin and Hitler: Twin Brothers or Mortal Enemies?
Domenico Losurdo

Recommended and annotated by Patrice Greanville

In this bulletin's premier edition (divided in 3 sections), we bring to your attention the work of three thinkers who need little introduction: Harpal Brar, Domenico Losurdo, and Noam Chomsky. Despite their inevitable differences in focus and nuance, all three are eloquent critics of US imperialism. Please note that our highlighting of their work does not signify an uncritical approval of all their positions. This is particularly so in the case of Chomsky, whose hard-to-classify, often esoteric, anarchist tendencies and derogatory pronouncements against revolutionary leaders like Lenin, Castro, etc., render him for all intents and purposes an anti-communist. I think this makes sense since Chomsky, like Chris Hedges and other political actors of the same ilk, is essentially a left-liberal.

Losurdo

Losurdo fights deliberate political "confusionism" ushered (dishonestly) by Marxist Revisionism

Those aware of the huge damage done to the cause of true socialism by the longstanding, unchallenged theft of the "left" political label by liberals (an especially acute problem in the Anglo world), owe an immense debt to serious leftists like Losurdo who sought to expose the fraudulence and impact of revisionism, one of the fountainheads of this manufactured mess. Indeed, abetted confusion by the ruling orders has reached ridiculous levels in the US, given its mostly politically illiterate population. After all, this is a nation in which political paranoia on the right justifies idiocies like calling solid globalist imperialists like the Clintons, Barack Obama and even Joe Biden, "communists".  And not even millionaire clans or bankers are above suspicion. Many right-wingers still seriously believe that the Bolshevik revolution was financed by Western capitalists. The legend that WOKE identity politics—itself a cynical hoax of indecent proportions whereby anything that rocks established mores is described as "progressive" or "left"—has only exacerbated the confusion and further outraged the conservative masses. Obviously, if the masses cannot even identify their class enemy they are unlikely to remove it. A reliable political roadmap is urgently needed, but first, the real left must eliminate the pretenders, in this case chiefly the US Democrat party and the British Labour party, frequently inseparable twins in crime. That is a tall order. It will likely require a mini-class struggle of its own, and the ideal vehicle to wage it, a time-tested Leninist party is nowhere to be found. That's why thinkers like Losurdo, who have paid attention to these essential matters, deserve close attention.

The equation of fascism with communism has become popular in the West. The problem is that it is a complete fraud.

Domenico Losurdo (14 November 1941 – 28 June 2018) was a [highly original] Italian historian, essayist, Marxist philosopher, and communist politician. He devoted substantial critical attention to historical revisionism and the controversy surrounding the misleading interpretations of prominent bourgeois historians and social scientists such as Hannah Arendt, François Furet, Karl Popper, and Ernst Nolte—all at one point or another connected with the CIA cultural war against the Soviet Union. In particular, Losurdo criticized a reactionary tendency among contemporary revisionist historians such as Nolte (who traced the impetus behind the Holocaust to the excesses of the Russian Revolution!) and Furet (who linked the Stalinist purges to a "disease" originating from the French Revolution). According to Losurdo, the intention of these revisionists was to eradicate the revolutionary tradition as their true motivations have little to do with the search for a greater understanding of the past but rather it lies in both the climate and ideological needs of the political classes and is most evident in the work of the English-speaking imperial revivalists, such as Niall Ferguson and Paul Johnson. ... Diego Pautasso wrote that after the dissolution of the Soviet Union, Losurdo "devoted himself to four areas of research: 1) critique of liberalism and the fight against the belief that liberals they were at the forefront of democratic struggles; 2) balance of socialist experiences (USSR, China); 3) criticism of colonialism, imperialism and 'the various forms of subjugation of peoples to Washington and its allies'; 4) the critique of the contemporary left, in particular of 'Western Marxism', which would have 'neglected the great problems of its time', abandoned the 'class struggle and the struggle against imperialism' and embraced 'the narratives of globalization.'"

In Stalin: History and Critique of A Black Legend (2008), Losurdo stimulated a debate about Joseph Stalin, about whom he claimed is built a kind of black legend intended to discredit the whole of communism. Losurdo clearly saw that the nonstop demonisation of Stalin was simply the utterly cynical propaganda part of the West's multidirectional war on the Soviet Union, a war that the collective West had been waging on the Bolsheviks from the moment the revolution came to power in 1917. Indeed, by the time the West began to concentrate its gigantic machinery of malicious mass communications on Stalin, after its intel mavens had concluded it was far easier to demonise a leader, one person, than an entire system, it had already tried just about every form of imaginable hostility on Moscow without achieving its aim (the toppling of communism), except causing a great deal of suffering on the Russian people. Revolutionary Russia had been starved, sanctioned, invaded by 17 armies, thrown into a ferocious civil war, sabotaged, diplomatically isolated as if she were a new plague (the US refused formal recognition until 1933), and denied medical assistance. By 1941, via Hitler, the West would try its most formidable kinetic dagger at the still-enfeebled Soviet Union, a multinational fascist thrust that would cost the Soviets a quasi-destroyed infrastructure, thousands of towns and production facilities erased from the map, widespread starvation, and 27 million dead plus tens of millions of sick and wounded—a level of penury unimaginable in the West, especially the US. But, at the end of the day, we know how that turned out, don't we? It was the Red Army that planted its flag on the German Reichstag on 2 May 1945, two days after Hitler's suicide. And let's say it clearly and irrefutably: it was the Red Army that broke the back of the Nazi military machine. The West again had underestimated the Russians, communism and Stalin.  Too bad they haven't learned the lesson yet.

Stalin and Hitler: Twin Brothers or Mortal Enemies?
Domenico Losurdo

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