{"id":19354,"date":"2010-09-02T23:46:06","date_gmt":"2010-09-02T13:46:06","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/slackbastard.anarchobase.com\/?p=19354"},"modified":"2010-09-03T14:58:39","modified_gmt":"2010-09-03T04:58:39","slug":"anarchist-notes-september-3-2010","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/slackbastard.anarchobase.com\/?p=19354","title":{"rendered":"anarchist notes (september 2, 2010)"},"content":{"rendered":"

minus one<\/strong><\/p>\n

AK Press has just published In the Crossfire: Adventures of a Vietnamese Revolutionary<\/a><\/em>, an English translation of Ngo Van\u2019s Au pays de la Cloche f\u00eal\u00e9e<\/em> (Paris: L\u2019Insomniaque, 2000) and of excerpts from Ngo Van\u2019s Au pays d\u2019H\u00e9lo\u00efse<\/em> (L\u2019Insomniaque, 2005). From the ‘Introduction’<\/a> by one of the translators (Ken Knabb):<\/p>\n

\u201cHistory is written by the victors.\u201d With the increasing spectacularization of modern society, this truism has become truer than ever. The most radical revolts are not only physically crushed, they are falsified, trivialized, and buried under a constant barrage of superficial and ephemeral bits of \u201cinformation,\u201d to the point that most people do not even know they happened.<\/p>\n

Ngo Van\u2019s In the Crossfire is among the most illuminating revelations of this repressed and hidden history, worthy of a place alongside such works as Voline\u2019s The Unknown Revolution<\/a><\/em> and Harold Isaacs\u2019s The Tragedy of the Chinese Revolution<\/a><\/em>. It is also a very moving human document: dramatic political events are interwoven with intimate personal concerns, just as they always are in reality. In this respect Van\u2019s book is perhaps more akin to Orwell\u2019s Homage to Catalonia<\/a><\/em> or Victor Serge\u2019s Memoirs of a Revolutionary<\/a><\/em>.<\/p>\n

The two-stage Vietnam war against French and then American occupation (1945-1975) is still fairly well known; but almost no one knows anything about the long and complex struggles that preceded it, including the fact that many of those struggles were inspired by an indigenous Trotskyist movement that was often more popular and more influential than the rival Stalinist movement under Ho Chi Minh. While Ho\u2019s Communist Party slavishly followed the constantly shifting policy lines ordered by his masters in the Kremlin (which often called for alliances with the native landowners and bourgeoisie in the name of \u201cnational unity,\u201d or at times even with the French colonial regime when France happened to be allied with Russia), the Vietnamese Trotskyists expressed more consistently radical perspectives. The situation was somewhat analogous to what was going on in Spain during the same period. In both cases a radical popular movement was fighting against foreign and reactionary forces while being stabbed in the back by the Stalinists. One significant difference was that in Spain the popular movement was predominantly anarchist, whereas anarchism was virtually unknown in Vietnam. Many Vietnamese rebels thus understandably saw the Trotskyist movement as the only alternative, the only movement fighting simultaneously against colonialism, capitalism and Stalinism…<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

[h\/t : Viola]<\/p>\n

She said the proposal was “akin to running Queensland as an anarchist collective”.<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n

zero<\/strong><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

one<\/strong><\/p>\n