On 14 Aug 2020 at 7:51, Louis Proyect wrote:
>
> On 8/14/20 3:43 AM, Joseph Green wrote:
>
> He ranked Selassie alongside Cromwell or Robespierre, which for
> Trotsky -- who ignores certain things about these "dictators", such as
> Cromwell's butchering of the Irish people -- was very high praise.
> So what?
If the slaughter of the Irish people doesn't seem to you to be relevant, then
nothing I say can possibly make a difference. But for the record, it doesn't help
any progessive or revolutionary movement to simply say "rah, rah", and ignore the
problems. And it strikes me as an obscenity to look at the Ethiopian empire, which
was involved in repressing various subject nationalities, and dream of how
wonderful it would be if Selassie turned out to be like Cromwell, given that
Cromwell slaughtered an oppressed nationality. It's like wishing many happy
returns of the day at a funeral. And unfortunately there were indeed many returns
of the day this time, but not very happy ones, as the Empire ended up in a
decades-long war against Eritrea.
> Trotsky wrote an article titled "Learn to Think" that I reference in my
> CounterPunch article today about the U. of Utah fiasco. Joseph might
> find Trotsky's article useful.
Louis, you cite the article, "Learn to think", even though it has nothing to do with
the subject under discussion. That's pathetic. At most, citing this article is a
dog-whistle way to promote the slander that criticizing Trotsky's lavish praise of
Haile Selassie meant opposing support for the Ethiopian struggle against Italian
fascist invasion.
Of course in some other situations the Trotskyists say that they are capable of
supporting the fight of a country against imperialist attack without glorifying the
leadership. Indeed they suppose that they can provide "unconditional military
support" to regimes, without providing any "political support". With regard to the
Soviet Union, they put forward the Clemenceau Declaration. They were also able
to separate support for the Soviet Union against Hitlerite invasion from support for
the Stalinist leadership. And then they claim to find it incomprehensible that there
was a difference between solid support for Ethiopia against Italian fascist
aggression, and promoting his imperial majesty Haile Selassie, as a great
anti-imperialist hero and revolutionary, whose victory would strike a blow at
imperialism as a whole.
Now, it was essential to support Ethiopia, but it was not necessary to praise Haile
Selassie to the skies. In this case, Trotsky was at least on the right side of the
Italo-Ethiopian war. But his extravagant praise for Haile Selassie set a model that
has corrupted the Trotskyist movement ever since. It has been used to justify
support for Saddam Hussein or even the Taliban, where various Trotskyist groups
haven't been able to recognize when a war was reactionary on both sides.
Now, the prerequisite for useful thought is to study the issue under discussion.Yet
you apparently don't know anything about what happened in the Italo-Ethiopian
war, what were the problems that divided the people in the face of Italian fascist
invasion, who carried out the fighting in Ethiopia after Selassie fled, what
happened to them after the war, etc. You haven't devoted one second of thought
to whether Selassie's defeat of the reform movement harmed the anti-imperialist
struggle, and also helped pave the way for decades of warfare afterward. No, you
don't need this knowledge. Your attitude is "so what?" All you have to know is that
Trotsky is being criticized, and nothing else matters. And I observe the same thing
with the RCIT and various commentators on this list.
I stand for a diifferent attitude to socialist theory. If one is going to deal with the
issue of the anti-imperialist and socialist stand with regard to an African country,
one should know something about that country.Revolutionary theory must be
tested over and over again against experience. Trotsky replaced this with giving
hypothetical examples, one after another. One can never test one of his
hypothetical examples, because it is whatever Trotsky says it is; he can always
suppose any outcome he pleases. With regard to Ethiopia, one can test what
Trotsky said. But the Trotskyist movement won't do it, and closes its eyes to that
experience. It makes it into a hypothetical example. That's learning how not to
think.
African history matters!
The experience of the fight against Italian fascist invasion and occupation
matters!
What actually happened to the Amhara, Tigrayan, Oromo, Eritrean, and other
peoples in or around Ethiopia matters!
