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Walter Lippmann and the Mugabe dictatorship
By Bob Gould
Now and then Marxmail seems to take off into the loopy
stratosphere. I don't know what I've ever done to Walter
Lippmann except take the mickey out of him a while back
for
his frenetic posting and his general semi-Stalinist support
for whatever unpleasant regime it's necessary for the Cubans
and Venezuelan governments to have dealings with for their own
survival.
That's entirely reasonable for beleaguered socialists in those
countries, but extremely unpleasant coming from Lippmann, a self-appointed
commentator living in the dominant imperialist country.
I have a feeling that his unprovoked outburst against me may
be a kind of pre-emptive strike against anyone who he
suspects may disagree with his support for the reactionary,
anti-socialist dictatorship in Zimbabwe.
As a matter of fact, I have been trying to get around to writing
something on that question, but Mike Karadjis and Norm Dixon have
been doing pretty well. I might just say about Zimbabwe that
there's almost no
one on the left in Australia who supports the Zimbabwe
dictatorship. The only exception is the very small Communist
Party (formerly the SPA).
Historically, the reason for that in Australia is that the
left here has had strong connections for 30 years or so with
the struggles for liberation in southern Africa, and several
activists, such as Sekai Holland from Zimbabwe, spent their
exile years in Australia, and many leftists know those people.
Sekai Holland, when she was in Australia was the subject of a
brutal attack by the local fascists, as was at roughly the
same time a bookshop that I ran. When Australians on the left
see Sekai Holland carried out of hospital seriously injured
by a beating from Mugabe's thugs, the revulsion against the
reactionary regime is close to universal on the left.
Sekai Holland is in her sixties, with 40 years of left
political activity behind her. The reactionary geopolitical
nonsense, with Stalinist overtones, pedaled by Lippmann and
others cuts no ice on the Australian left. This view is
shared by both factions of the DSP, Labor leftists, Greens,
the ISO, Socialist Alternative, etc.
As a matter of fact, Ed Lewis put the ISO statement up on
Ozleft and I wasn't even aware of it until it appeared. For
us, putting up things like that on Ozleft for information
purposes is entirely routine and Ed was quite right to
do so. One of the reasons that Ozleft gets a reasonable
number of hits is its serious information function. What's the
beef? The document was in the public domain anyway.
The really eccentric thing about all this is that there's
little disagreement between anyone on the left in Australia
on the assorted questions of national liberation struggles
that don't fit the mindset of Lippmann and Bustello.
Almost anyone on the left in Australia broadly agrees
with summary of issues in dispute made by Norm Dixon on Marxmail. On
another matter to do with Zimbabwe, I find Louis
Proyect's dragging in of “Zinovievism” into the Zimbabwe
issue forced and artificial. I have my own critique
of
Zinovievism, which is directed at resurrecting a more open
Leninism in debate among the whole of the far left, but to throw that
into the pot, and then to throw the pot at the Zimbabwe ISO seems, to
me, rather unpleasant.
I've met some people from the Zimbabwe ISO, and as
revolutionary socialist groups go they seem to be among the
least Zinovievist. They've stood up to Callinicos and their
international centre on tactics in their own country and in
opposition to the expulsion of the US ISO from the IST. Some
Zinovievists!
They clearly have a certain implantation in the student
movement and the embryonic labour movement, and although they
are largely Shona they've stood up vigorously for the other
large ethnic group, the Matabeles, who were the first major
victims of Mugabe's repression. They've also fought pretty
hard in defence of the
hundreds of thousands of urban squatters driven out of their
homes in Harare by Mugabe's thugs. Some global progressive,
that Mugabe!
With all the accumulated experience of ex-colonial regimes in
Africa, and some in Asia such as Myanmar, using Marxist
rhetoric to entrench brutal capitalist regimes, it's
anti-Marxist reactionary Stalinism to rush to the defence of
the anti-working-class Mugabe dictatorhip citing an
over-generalised anti-imperialism. I'll deal with the issues
raised about Australia by
Joaquin Bustello, in the framework of his published views, in
another post.
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