TRENDS: Ideas in action; events as they reflect social tendencies
OAK, LISTON M.
TRENDS: Ideas in action; events as they reflect social tendencies By Liston M. Oak The Revolutionary Socialists and Greek Civil War STALINISM would be much leu of • menace if it did not »U under...
...Americans are exploited...
...Does it resemble in the slightest the outcome of the Spanish civil war...
...The original popular front character of the EAM-ELAS, and its "New Deal" program, simply concealed the Communist control of the organization, its complete subservience to Russian foreign policy...
...Every disciplined Communist owes primary loyalty to Russian totalitarian Communism and to Stalin...
...But it is unadulterated gibberish...
...there is anti-Semitism in the USA...
...The Greek Civil War • Dwight Macdonald, who is significant only because he is the most intelligent voice of the extreme left, and because he can dispense with the tiresome cliches, complains in his latest issue of Politics about the censorship in Greece during the civil war...
...Don't you know the facts of life...
...This is not loyalty to either the USA or to democracy...
...in Greece, the Communists dominated the EAM-ELAS before the civil war started, and no fascist powers supported the government And look at the results of the settlement between the government and the EAM...
...lit an article in The Militant of February *4, M. Morrison explains why the Trotsky ists supported the civil war launched by the EAM-ELAS In Greece...
...Complete unanimity can exist only in a totalitarian state and a totalitarian party...
...The EAM-ELAS position has been argued eloquently in Parliament...
...there are a large number of Communists who are officers in every branch of the armed services, as well as in every branch of the government...
...Isn't this the "lesser evil theory" which the Trot sky ists pretend to reject...
...Collected Work:) It is the logic of those who say, Look...
...And it has been proved that Russian imperialists are quite as ready to make deals with monarchists and reactionaries and crypto fascists as are British Tories...
...Communists can be "loyal" soldier* only so long as they believe thst in fighting for America they are fighting for Russia and the Comintern...
...Among those who aid the Stalinists in deception are their deadliest enemies—the Trotskyists...
...But Earl Browder stated in the Daily Worker of March 4: "The Army, after years of experience with . . . some 13,000 Communists in the armed forces, has not found the slightest evidence to justify any discrimination against Communists as a group, and has placed them in the same category as Republicans and Democrats...
...But if there arts** * conflict of interest*, or if the Kremlin again changee it* line...
...therefore, the Soviet Union is a higher democracy...
...Browder is quite right...
...But the main fault is not theirs, but the Communists in the EAM-ELAS, and in Moscow...
...But it was not like the Bolshevik revolution, for it was not a Socialist revolution...
...In all of Europe the Communists gained leadership of the forces of resistance, after Russia was invaded...
...This central and bask fact is entirely ignored by Morrison, and minimised by Macdonald...
...Does any Russian equivalent of Aneurin Bevin get up in the Supreme Soviet and damn Stalin's policy in Poland...
...But the Russian censorship is tight and efficient We do not know, perhaps will never know, what is happening in Central and Eastern Europe...
...Temporarily, "mutuality of interests," and the capitulation of Roosevelt to Stalin at Yalta and Teheran, enable the agents of Moscow to give st least lip service and verbal loyalty to American capitalist democracy—with mental reservations...
...Such historic parallelisms confuse, rather than illuminate...
...The leadership limited itself to the fight against reaction and British imperialism, and this is a necessary stage in the workers' revolution, "the defeat of which is a blow to the Greek workers and peasants," Morrison argues, adding that the Greek Trotsky ists supported the struggle while criticizing the EAM leadership, warning that they would compromise with the Bfitish imperialists, and urging a revolution for the establishment of a workers and peasants government...
...Macdonald, like all defenders of the faith in social revolution, makes much of the fact that EAM-ELAS was, during the period of Nazi-Fascist occupation, the center of popular democratic resistance...
...Again I say, on this • basis alone, British imperialism is a lesser evil...
...And the same to my comrades of the Socialist Call...
...The struggle for national liberation and for social change in Greece was entirely submerged in a conflict of Russian and British imperialism, with the latter on the'side of democracy and civilization—clearly a lesser evil than Nazi totalitarianism...
...Morrison never once mentions the fact that the EAM-ELAS was an instrument of Russian imperialism far more than the Papandeou-Damastrinos-Plastiras Government was a tool of British imperialism...
...Communist Officers in ffce Army • The .V...
...events as they reflect social tendencies By Liston M. Oak The Revolutionary Socialists and Greek Civil War STALINISM would be much leu of • menace if it did not »U under false rotors...
...American Negroes are discriminated against...
...The right to criticize is precious—the right to> oppose one'* own government when it seems in the wrong is a duty without which democracy cannot survive...
...Those who give Russia and Communism their allegiance can serve no other master...
...Bolshevik logic...
...What one might expect from an honest revolutionist is that he would compare Greece to the vast areas liberated by the Red Army...
...Actually there is no similarity: in one the democratic people of Spain were united against an outright fascist rebellion, in the other the democratic forces were divided, and the government was neither fascist nor a puppet regime for British imperialism, nor even monarchist, as Macdonald asserts...
...Bourgeois democracy is an evil which we want to replace with workers' democracy, but it is to be defended against Fascism," wrote Morrison...
...I deeply regret that Churchill is a Tory imperialist addicted to "the monarchical principle...
...But if in October 1917 the halfhearted intervention of British, French, and American imperialism had succeeded in upholding the Kerenski Government, aiding the Menshevik-Social Revolutionaryliberal forces against the Bolsheviks, there might have been democratic Socialism in Russia today, instead of a barbaric Communist totalitarianism which denies and destroys every value which makes life worth living...
...Ttmem and Herald Tribune both reported last week that the War Department had said that Communists hold no commissions in our Army...
...The essential nature of the Greek civil war was a struggle of the masses against all the reactionary capitalist forces represented by the monarchy and supported by British imperialism . . . analogous to the action of the Russian masses in February, 1917, when they overthrew the Tzar, and in September, 1917, when they fought against Kornilov...
...Of course there are Communist* holding commissions in the US Army...
...Revolutionary Marxists support struggles for national liberation except where they are submerged in an imperialist conflict Under the particular conditions of the Greek civil war, we could readily support those aspects of the EAM's struggle . . . but it would be wrong to consider the struggle of the EAM as primarily a struggle for national liberation," Morrison continued...
...Every- one of them damned the USA and Britain as "imperialist war-mongers" before Russia was invaded...
...Here is a fair summary of the argument: Trotskyiits supported the Loyalist Government in the Spanish civil war because it was a light for bourgeois democracy against Fascism...
...The EAM was "a combination of Stalinists, Social Democrats, and liberals . . . similar to the Spanish Fopular Front Government...
...I bewail the fact that he and Papandreou and PI astir as and General Scobie blundered, stupidly supported reactionary elements, failed to solve the problem without armed conflict, as they might have done...
...What logic is this...
...The main facts shout tht Greek civil war have come through the British censorship...
...Every word uttered by Stalin and his henchmen, every idea printed in Izvettia, Pravda, and War and the Working Clan, is echoed by the Daily Worker and by every last member of the Communist Political Association...
...But can he or anyone honestly say that atrocities committed by our troop* are as bad as those committed by the Nazis or Japanese...
...Every one of them has invariably defended every policy and act of Moscow, while attacking the policies and actions of Washington and London whenever it served Stalin's purpose for them to do so...
...Macdonald says there were atrocities on both sides...
...This prove* nothing at all regarding the Greek civil war...
...The chances of democratic progress in Greece are not great, but they have been enhanced by the defeat of the EAM-ELAS, which turned out to be just what I said it was last December when the civil war started, a camouflaged agency of the Kremlin...
...See Lenin...
...Come, come, Dwight, be honest...
...Nor was it predominantly a struggle for national liberation as is the-struggle in India, though ie hmA «an*w*ta nt ai]/*h a atriiarurl* fnr l?rjMw»#t Kaa Innff ---—it hsd aspects of such a struggle, for Greece has long been dominated by Britain...
...the popular support it bad at the beginning weakened greatly when this fact emerged, and when the Communists seized complete control...
...If iU real totalitarian Bator* were not concealed by tat clever camouflage of demagogic verbiage, it could not get mas* support...
...The idea that the EAM-ELAS was fighting for bourgeois or any other sort of democracy is quite fantastic: Russian imperialism means totalitarianism, while the victory of British imperialism in the conflict, on the side of Greek democracy (not monarchy), clearly means that eventually there will be free elections which never could have taken place if the Communists had won...
...And there is no value in the analogy with the fight in Russia against Tzarism or against Kornilov...
...Already the "tools" of Britain are rebelling against certain aspects of British policy just as their counterparts in Italy are likewise asserting themselves...
...To Macdonald, one person shot by the Athens police balances the thousands shot by the ELAS...
...There is not just 51 percent or 99 percent unanimity, but 100 percent...
...This is doubtlessly true of any war, civil or in international...
...Consider the dishonesty (perhaps unconscious) of Macdonald's argument that the Greek civil war is parallel to the Spanish civil war...
...It is complete eurrender of the right to think, or to act, independently of Stalin, tie) persoa loyal to the principles of liberalism, no one loyal to democracy, no individual who loves freedom, ever so abjectly surrendered his stind t* any party, any government, any country, any church, any individual...
...But he is lying when he says that they are loyal to the United States, to our Constitution, or to democracy...
...In the case of Spain, the Communists gained ascendancy only after a year of struggle against the fascist Franco aided by Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy...
...The Trotskyist argument continues: The EAM-ELAS was fighting for bourgeois democracy against the British imperialists and their Greek puppets—but they did not represent "that specific form of reaction which we designate as Fascism...
Vol. 28 • March 1945 • No. 10
