I just discovered that Radical Reviewer believes the western account of the 1932 Ukranian famine, and I could not be more disappointed.

  • volkvulture [none/use name]
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    4 years ago

    Arshinov is the one who can't help but overexaggerate the "importance" of Makhno & only writes glowingly

    all you have is Arshinov's idiotic hagiography of Makhno. Makhno and Arshinov both in reality were clowns. In no way is Arshinov's biased effusive Makhno fanfic infallible or completely credible

    This is how even-handed & unbiased Arshinov is in his recounting the history: "The Makhnovshchina is a colossal event in contemporary Russia. By the breadth and profundity of its ideas, it transcends all the spontaneous working class movements known to us"

    Give me a break lol

    https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EpGFFNaW8AAsRZ4?format=png&name=medium

    Arshinov's work is the original beatifying propaganda I am referring to lol. Others also reference it as such

    Arshinov can't even keep his own contradictions straight.

    At one point Arshinov says: "It must be noted that, like vast and spontaneous peasant insurrections which rise without any preparation, these organized guerrilla actions were always performed by the peasants themselves, with no help or direction from any political organization" and then no more than a paragraph later he says.... "The most important role in this effort at unification and in the general development of the revolutionary insurrection in the south of the Ukraine was played by the insurrectionary detachment guided by a peasant native to the region, Nestor Makhno"

    That's not just a hypocritical and confounded untruth, it's silly

    I will quote another primary source documentation of the period from the perspective of an anarchist again in Lucy Parsons: "The “anarchist” Mahkno is mentioned by Emma Goldman as a friend and sending food to Kropotkin. In a diary of Fedora-Gianko, the wife of Mahkno, are recorded facts and dates to show that these marauders were guilty of arson, train-wrecking, murder, robbery, all committed against the Soviet Government. By them workers were killed, villages destroyed, bridges blown up, wrecks caused by wild engines turned loose against approaching trains until Mahkno was driven from the country. This kind of work against the Soviet Government meets with the approval of Miss Goldman. Her heart was never with the Bolshevik revolution. Compelled to leave the United States, she came to Russia as there was no other place to which she could go. Friends have not cut her off; she has excommunicated herself. "

    • DivineChaos100 [none/use name]
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      4 years ago

      "What i use = actual primary infallible sources with very credible information

      What you use = Anticommunist slander"

      Lucy Parsons as primary source. Ok.

      • volkvulture [none/use name]
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        4 years ago

        In no way is Arshinov’s biased effusive Makhno fanfic infallible or completely credible

        Lucy Parsons lived during the time and visited Russia in this period. She published this scathing dismissal of Goldman in 1922 a year before Arshinov's book was published... making Parsons' writing even more of a primary source lmfao

        • DivineChaos100 [none/use name]
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          4 years ago

          Oh she visited Russia, that's fine, she was probably very well versed in life there then.

          "What i use = actual primary infallible sources with very credible information

          What you use = Anticommunist slander"

          • volkvulture [none/use name]
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            4 years ago

            yes, she was... at least far more than the elitist radlib Goldman was

            "It is to be regretted that Emma could not have visited Sparrow’s Hill, and seen there the thousands of children, boys and girls, robust and rugged, rosy-cheeked and beautiful in their remarkable collective exercise. Or have spent days at Pushkino, or some of the many hundreds of similar communities throughout Russia, where the summer homes of the bourgeoisie are turned into children’s colonies. At one of these homes I saw between forty and fifty of these little tots just after their bath, romping and frollicking, laughing and full of glee, a sight that would please the heart of almost any man or woman. Too bad that Miss Goldman could not have visited the Moscow River within the environs of the city, where on summer days anyone could see the naked boys and girls at play enjoying a plunge in the water. She should have met the children that Mary Heaton Vorse had temporarily adopted while here. Little Demitrus and his friends would have been other laughing children to her credit. It is a great loss to think that she did not visit Children’s Town. There the babes are learning, as they do in play, the advantage of association and solidarity. It is possible that Miss Goldman might have learnt, even from the little ones, that rules of order, discipline and self-government are the essentials of a socialised community. Miss Goldman would mention in the same breath men of such splendid character and attributes as Lunaraharsky and Gorky, comparing them with that crooked little politician, Judge Linsay, who conducted the juvenile Court in Denver, Colorado, and who only by the efforts of the officials of the Western Federation of Miners was prevented from sending little boys, who for delinquency were dealt with in his court, to work in the beet fields of Colorado, there to take the place of Russian emigrants who seasonally migrated from industrial centres for that work."

            sounds like Arshninov and Emma just have a touch of Russophobia lol, which isn't really all that surprising considering

            again, I notice you don't quote from any of these works, and still aren't bringing much to bear here other than personal sideways remarks & temperamental deflection

            • DivineChaos100 [none/use name]
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              4 years ago

              Emma Goldman the Russophobe russian.

              "What i use = actual primary infallible sources with very credible information

              What you use = Anticommunist slander"

              • volkvulture [none/use name]
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                4 years ago

                she was born in an Orthdox Jewish family in modern day Lithuania, but keep deflecting lmfao

                      • volkvulture [none/use name]
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                        4 years ago

                        she is listed as a Jewish-Lithuanian most places I read about her. She was taught within Prussian education system to hate Russia and admits in her anti-USSR screed that "My Russian at this time was halting"

                        and I was more speaking about the Ukrainian Arshinov's hint of Russophobia in his writings, recall that I said I detected a HINT. Also Emma Goldman similarly takes quite a dismissive attitude toward Bolsheviks despite her also admitting they fed orphaned children & did much in the way toward righting the wrongs of the Tsarist period.

                        Goldman literally admits to growing up hating Russia and Russian culture "Under the discipline of a Germanschool in Königsberg and the Prussian attitude toward everything Russian, I had grown up in the atmosphere of hatred to that country. I dreaded especially the terrible Nihilists who had killed Tsar Alexander II, so good and kind, as I had been taught. St. Petersburg was to me an evil thing"

                        Though she admits to growing spiritually in later years, and through all her talks & history as an activist appears to take stands for these nations from a Western vantage, Emma just can't seem to hide her elitism & underhanded dismissal of USSR & Russian attempts to socially & economically & politically address its own issues

                        "I began to suspect that the reason for much of the evil was also within Russia, not only outside of it.But then, I argued, police officials and detectives graft everywhere. That is the common disease ofthe breed. In Russia, where scarcity of food and three years of starvation must needs turn mostpeople into grafters, theft is inevitable."

                        "After showing us about, Zorin invited us to the Smolny dining room. The meal consisted of goodsoup, meat and potatoes, bread and tea--rather a good meal in starving Russia, I thought. "

                        I suspect she never really outgrew some of her kneejerk Russophobia from her childhood

                        what's important today is how these historiographies are used to demonize USSR/communism generally and Russia specifically.

                        Makhno is often lifted up by Ukrainian nationalist historians and his name invoked in their desperate attempts to demonize Soviet history.