A regime beyond simple human decency
An announcement on the London LRC (Labour Representation Committee) e-list:
.
Dear Comrades,
Friday 25th June
The Korea Friendship Association is holding a picket to mark the 60th anniversary of the Korean War and the Month of Solidarity with the Korean people on Friday 25th June.
12 pm – 2.30 outside the South Korean embassy, 60 Buckingham Gate, London SW1E 6AJ
3.30 – 5.30 outside the US embassy in Grosvenor Square
…and a response:
Sent: Friday, June 11, 2010 9:43 PM
Subject: [londonlrc] Solidarity with Korea
.
In general people can make mistakes and be corrected by education. So I don’t approve of burning heretics at the stake.
But these people are so wrong that their presence in a long term front like the LRC without any serious challenge makes it unworkable. As a passive member of the LRC I’m pretty sure that comment from me would have little impact. I do not see tht there is anything to be gained from entering into debate with people who hold views so much at odds with the historical record that they can circulate this sort of shite.
Please delete me from your circulation list
Mikey said,
June 13, 2010 at 9:59 am
Good post!
Jenny said,
June 13, 2010 at 11:48 pm
wha? I am confused as to what you’re objecting too. Is the KFS directly supporting Kim Jong? What’s going on?
skidmarx said,
June 14, 2010 at 3:42 pm
Charlie is restating this blogs position as part of the Decent Left prepared to side with imperialist powers as it identifies the enemies of a common humanity with theirs.
John A said,
June 14, 2010 at 5:15 pm
Jim: you make it seem like it was an official LRC message, but that is far from the LRC’s position. Anyone can join the LRC mailing list and post to it, including those nutters who think that class war is about space aliens or that North Korea are a regime worth supporting. However, they normally get ignored, or as you have done, contested by those who can see straight. It’s the peril of a free discussion space that nuts have an equal say.
Tom said,
June 14, 2010 at 10:30 pm
“Is the KFS directly supporting Kim Jong?”
Yes, its a Juchist/Kim Worship front. It has nil to do with the Korean people or friendship of any kind.
Cugel the Clever said,
June 15, 2010 at 4:30 pm
‘Charlie is restating this blogs position as part of the Decent Left prepared to side with imperialist powers as it identifies the enemies of a common humanity with theirs.’
… so speaks the armchair gas chamber operator. But Isn’t he useful as a perfect example of the cesspool the far left has become? Murderous, hate-ftilled and utterly depraved. But don’t worry, he’s ‘anti-imperialist’. Human trash.
skidmarx said,
June 16, 2010 at 4:43 pm
Isn’t Cugel the not-so-Clever a perfect example of why making out everyone on the left to be Nazis doesn’t advance human thought one inch?
egg on your face said,
June 16, 2010 at 3:17 pm
Good to see AWL wankers dropping off the LRC list. Keep it up comrades!
Cugel the Clever said,
June 16, 2010 at 4:59 pm
Sorry to be ambiguous. Skidmarx is a perfect example of a *trend* on the far left, long recognized and as cancerous today as it has always been. I never mentioned Nazis, but if that cap fits these fucked up, murderous hypocrites then they can squeeze it on to their malformed heads.
How anyone, such as the cunt who just posted, can criticise the AWL over their stand on a hellhole like Kim’s shitty Communist kingdom is beyond me. But hey, that’s the sort of people Skidmarx represents: people who, simply put, would murder you, and your family, for strongly disagreeing with them, if they ever attained control. Like I said, human trash.
skidmarx said,
June 17, 2010 at 9:10 am
You mentioned armchair gas operation. Don’t pretend you’re not not just being abusive. You seem like the sort who would happily murder his political opponents to shut them up, if you do mind me saying so, sir.
egg on your face said,
June 17, 2010 at 9:45 am
“How anyone, such as the cunt who just posted, can criticise the AWL over their stand on a hellhole like Kim’s shitty Communist kingdom is beyond me”
I didn’t criticise the AWL’s stance on North Korea.
They are wankers for lots of reasons, that being rather low on the list even if it gets on in the first place.
But it is good to see these wankers pulling away from the LRC irrespective of that. They are doing us a favour by disappearing up their own shitters.
Keep it up comrades!
skidmarx said,
June 17, 2010 at 4:45 pm
Does this correctly describe you: “Cugel though he fancies himself an aesthete and a superior being to those around him, in his actions he is a liar, a cheat, an inveterate thief, a guiltless coward, a charlatan, selfish, greedy, vicious, and so on”? Or would “Michael Ezra” be a shorter version (or someone stupid enough to swallow Mr.Ezra’s crap wholesale). I know a lot of people on this blog share a lot of political agreement with the Shallow Place, but mostly they aren’t quite as crass as you.
skidmarx said,
June 17, 2010 at 4:47 pm
Sorry, missing html markers. Should be:
Does this correctly describe you: “Cugel though he fancies himself an aesthete and a superior being to those around him, in his actions he is a liar, a cheat, an inveterate thief, a guiltless coward, a charlatan, selfish, greedy, vicious, and so on”? Or would “Michael Ezra” be a shorter version (or someone stupid enough to swallow Mr.Ezra’s crap wholesale). I know a lot of people on this blog share a lot of political agreement with the Shallow Place, but mostly they aren’t quite as crass as you.
Mikey said,
June 17, 2010 at 5:33 pm
skidmarx,
Why don’t you just go to North Korea and stay there. One thing’s for certain, if you do, you will no longer be free to write your rubbish on blogs. Having said that, you might enjoy praising the peerless leader of the working class and denouncing Imperialist pig-dogs.
charliethechulo said,
June 17, 2010 at 5:56 pm
Just for the record, the message to the LRC in the main posting (above) did *not* come from an AWL member.
sackcloth and ashes said,
June 17, 2010 at 9:38 pm
Pardon me for being a boring historian, but didn’t the Korean War actually start when the North invaded the South?
(This might confuse skidmark – as Tony Cliff offered no guidance on this question).
skidmarx said,
June 18, 2010 at 11:59 am
On the first point , maybe, though the two hadn’t been historically separate, and when the Americans got the chance the pushed right through the North and were threatening to head into China (according to Jon Snow).
On the second, wrong again.
Mikey said,
June 17, 2010 at 10:35 pm
Oh yes, the Skidmarx that cited Tony Cliff to argue that “the number of people executed by the Cheka in the first year of its existence was less than two dozen.”
Idiot.
skidmarx said,
June 18, 2010 at 12:02 pm
Mikey, congratulations on being able to correctly spell my screenname. I see that Michael Ezra (is that you as well) put up some alternate figures, but didn’t show that they were superior.
Mikey said,
June 18, 2010 at 12:18 pm
Skidmarx, below I copy in full the response to your claim about the Cheka’s murders.
Any decent book on the Red Terror will show you that the claim that the Cheka killed less than two dozen people in the first year of its existence is ridiculous. You have either not read anything decent, in which case you are basically clueless as to what happened in Russia in the 1917-1918 period, or, you have done, in which case you would know that Cliff has used discredited data and you are being dishonest. Which one is it?
skidmarx said,
June 18, 2010 at 4:35 pm
I presume “decent” here means “believing the same things you do”.
Mikey said,
June 18, 2010 at 4:46 pm
No “decent” means something that might be recommended by a good university for students to read on a subject. I cannot imagine Tony Cliff making the cut of those that should be read on the Red Terror. Leggett, who sackcloth and ashes mentions, is another story. His book is superb. Melgounov is also recognised as a world leader in this area and his archive, available at LSE Library is regularly sourced by those interested in this subject.
You, however, have just read Tony Cliff, someone with zero credibility on the subject. Try reading something by Melgounov.
skidmarx said,
June 18, 2010 at 6:13 pm
And “zero credibility” presumably means “someone you don’t agree with”.
sackcloth and ashes said,
June 18, 2010 at 1:52 pm
I also referred skidmark to Leggett’s book below:
The Cheka: Lenin's Political Police
Leggett gives the figure of 1/4m at least executed by the Cheka during the civil war. These figures have not been refuted.
Skidmark doesn’t want to confront sources like this though. To paraphrase Dorothy Parker, you can lead an ideological whore to water, but you cannot make him think.
skidmarx said,
June 18, 2010 at 4:36 pm
You make a lot of assumptions about what I am prepared to confront or not. And many times you’re wrong as well as puerile.
Jim Denham said,
June 18, 2010 at 6:04 pm
sackcloth and ashes wrote: “Tony Cliff offered no guidance on this question”: (JD’s reply): well in a sense, he did…
Cliff and his followers were expelled from the British section of the Fourth International (by Gerry Healy) for refusing to take sides in the Korean war, and maintaining a “third camp” position.
The likes of John “G” and other student SWP’er apologists for murderous regimes and movements still have trouble explaining that away.
How times have changed!
Mikey said,
June 18, 2010 at 6:27 pm
skidmarx,
zero credibility is not necessarily someone who I do not agree with as there are plenty of people who I do agree with who do have credibility. The relevance of the matter is that you have sourced Tony Cliff to make a ludicrous statement that “the number of people executed by the Cheka in the first year of its existence was less than two dozen.”
This is a nonsense. You have been provided with a number of sources to tell you otherwise. I can add a further one. If you read Richard Pipes, in his book, The Russian Revolution (Vintage Books, 1990), you would also know that Cliff was talking rubbish. It is possible that you might try and tell me that Pipes is right-wing and hence you will attempt to dismiss this source. This will not work, because what are you going to do about P.G. Maximoff, someone who came from an anarchist background, whose source has also been cited.
Your source is worthless and the claim by your source is ridiculous. The fact that you have not admitted this says quite a bit about you.
skidmarx said,
June 20, 2010 at 2:12 pm
So anarchists are always reliable?
Having found Cliff to be the most impressive socialist I’ve ever met, and having found his books to be always well-researched, it will take an awful lot to convince me that he is in error. Especially after having seen how shoddy much anti-marxist “scholarship” is (Isaiah Berlin springs noticeably to mind) from when I studied the politics of the Soviet Union (and then the politics of the former Soviet Union) at university.
Mikey said,
June 20, 2010 at 7:03 pm
That just shows how stupid you are. Not only did Cliff make errors, he is also guilty of plagiarism.
Cliff’s book, Trotsky, 1923-27. Fighting the Rising Stalinist Bureaucracy. (Bookmarks, 1991) was also panned by Ian Thatcher in Soviet Studies, Vol. 44, No. 1 (1992), Cliff’s 1955 book, Stalinist Russia: A Marxist Analysis was panned by R.N. Carew Hunt in International Affairs, Vol. 31, No. 4 (Oct., 1955). John Keep reviewed Cliff’s trilogy of Lenin for The Slavonic and East European Review, Vol. 58, No. 1 (Jan., 1980). Keep states clearly that the trilogy is “outspokenly partisan” and that anyone who wanted a more balanced view should turn elsewhere.
I could go on, but quite frankly, I really cannot be bothered. Anybody who rates Cliff is deluded. Outside the UK SWP, I doubt any one else bothers with anything he wrote.
skidmarx said,
June 21, 2010 at 12:35 pm
I can’t see any reference to plagiarism in the first link, you need to put an html closing marker after it if there are any other links. I couldn’t find the Thatcher or Carew Hunt articles on the net, without you citing specific criticisms it’s hard to say anything (except that I have read Carew Hunt before and don’t recall being that impressed). As for Keep, I don’t see “outspokenly partisan” as a something I’d ever deny or a criticism that invalidates what he says.
Lars.T.Lih seemed to show a lot of sympathy for Cliff’s view on Lenin.
Mikey said,
June 21, 2010 at 1:08 pm
Yes, I apologise for the html error. Hopefully the following works.
That just shows how stupid you are. Not only did Cliff make errors, he is also guilty of plagiarism.
Cliff’s book, Trotsky, 1923-27. Fighting the Rising Stalinist Bureaucracy. (Bookmarks, 1991) was also panned by Ian Thatcher in Soviet Studies, Vol. 44, No. 1 (1992), Cliff’s 1955 book, Stalinist Russia: A Marxist Analysis was panned by R.N. Carew Hunt in International Affairs, Vol. 31, No. 4 (Oct., 1955). John Keep reviewed Cliff’s trilogy of Lenin for The Slavonic and East European Review, Vol. 58, No. 1 (Jan., 1980). Keep states clearly that the trilogy is “outspokenly partisan” and that anyone who wanted a more balanced view should turn elsewhere.
I could go on, but quite frankly, I really cannot be bothered. Anybody who rates Cliff is deluded. Outside the UK SWP, I doubt any one else bothers with anything he wrote.
Mikey said,
June 21, 2010 at 1:29 pm
By the way, I have a copy of Thatcher’s article in Revolutionary Russia, June 1999) and he does demonstrably show the Cliff was guilty of plagiarism.
The fact that you cannot be bothered to go and read an article if it is not on the net, or possibly not been on the SWP Marxism for beginners reading list, says quite a bit about you.
I have a copy of Lars T. Lih’s article that you link to. In the full 45 pages, Lih mentions a number of authors who have written about Lenin, but funnily enough Cliff does not get a mention, not even in the footnotes. As I said in my previous comment to this section of the thread: “Outside the UK SWP, I doubt any one else bothers with anything [Cliff] wrote.”
skidmarx said,
June 18, 2010 at 6:29 pm
As Lenin said of the First World War, the first duty of socialists is to call for the defeat of their own imperialist masters. What seems to have changed is not the SWP, but those former socialists who think that Western imperialism and its Zionist watchdogs are preferable to…
Mikey said,
June 18, 2010 at 6:42 pm
The problem is that the SWP do not seem to first call for the defeat of their own imperialist masters. They first call for the elimination of the State of Israel. The SWP does not say to European colonial settlers in America that they must hand the country back to the native Indian population who they “stole” it from.
Moreover, where did Lenin say (or Tony Cliff for that matter!) that socialists should get in bed with radical Islamists who are homophobic, sexist and antisemitic? This is what the SWP did when they aligned with Muslim Association of Britain in the Stop the War Coalition.
It is noticeable that you did not finish off the sentence that you commenced as follows:
“What seems to have changed is not the SWP, but those former socialists who think that Western imperialism and its Zionist watchdogs are preferable to…”
Western Imperialist countries such as Britain and the USA are quite frankly preferable to North Korea! They are also preferable to radical Islamist countries such as Iran where homosexuals get executed for being homosexuals, women are forced to cover themselves in black and whose idea of democracy is to rule out any candidate from standing whom they do not like and then rig the votes if they feel that the wrong approved candidate has been elected.
skidmarx said,
June 20, 2010 at 2:15 pm
Frankly they probably are in many, many ways, but I don’t accept that the way to change them for the better is to support imperialist attacks upon them. And Israel is part of the Western imperialst system domination of the Middle East.
Mikey said,
June 20, 2010 at 6:23 pm
Western Imperialists do not dominate the Middle East! If they did, there would not be an Iran which has regular state sponsored demonstrations with a slogan “Death to America.” The Arab Middle East states are more dominated by the rulers of the Gulf States, with the exception of the Syria that tends to toe the Iranian line and Lebanon which is a total mess mainly as a result of Iranian and Syrian support given to Hezbollah.
Frankly, you have no clue about the Middle East.
skidmarx said,
June 21, 2010 at 12:43 pm
Ignoring the billions in US military aid to Egypt and Israel and others, the power of US (especially) oil companies, the invasion of Iraq by,uh, the US. If the Iranians are more powerful than the US, why is the former able to ram sanctions resolutions through the UN against the latter, and not vice versa?
Mikey said,
June 21, 2010 at 1:35 pm
skidmarx,
It is the Arab Middle East states that have the oil. I did not say that the the “Iranians are more powerful than the US”, you have a problem with reading comprehension. Go back and re-read what I wrote.
Regarding the United Nations and sanctions on Iran, may I remind you that the United Nations is not just comprised of Western imperialists. I can reverse your argument and say that if Israel is part of this Western imperialist system as you claim, then why is it that the United Nations has passed a number of resolutions against Israel? Logic is clearly not your strong point.
skidmarx said,
June 22, 2010 at 7:57 am
And the Emirates maintain their power with American help.
As for UN resolutions on Israel, the Americans never allow them to mean anything. Even with the resolution on the flotilla massacre which called for an impartial inquiry, the Americans are happy to let the Israelis pass off their own as such. My logic is fine thank-you Mikey.
Jim Denham said,
June 18, 2010 at 9:33 pm
skidmarx: ” What seems to have changed is not the SWP, but those former socialists who think that Western imperialism and its Zionist watchdogs are preferable to…”
Are you saying, Skidders, that the Cliff group was *not* neutral on the Korean war, and was *not* expelled from the FI as a result?
skidmarx said,
June 20, 2010 at 2:22 pm
Jimbo – Iwasn’t there at the time and haven’t researched the subject, but it seems that he did wish to put a different viewpoint from those who believed it supporting “workers states” come what may, which presumably did contribute to the parting of the ways with the FI. But that doesn’t preclude the belief that the main enemy is at home which seems perfectly compatible with the position cited in my reply @15 above (R.Tennant is Cliff), which is distinct from third campist neutrality.
Mikey said,
June 18, 2010 at 11:21 pm
Jim,
Part of the problem with many Trotskyists these days is that they do not know Trotskyist history.Cannon’s Open Letter in 1953 and the split between Cannon and Pablo is not something that would be known about by the vast majority of UK SWP members/supporters. For a bit of fun, at Marxism 2009, I got into a discussion with a SWP supporter and I started discussing the Russia under Stalin. I repeatedly, and on purpose, referred to Russia as “degenerated workers’ state” and the SWP supporter never even raised an eyebrow. Pathetic! This year, at Marxism 2010, I will try a different subject, I will mention Trotsky’s Transitional Program of the Third International to a random SWPer and see if that elicits a reaction. I don’t suspect it will. As Denver Walker put it: “Neither Washington nor Moscow, but somewhere over the rainbow.”
skidmarx said,
June 20, 2010 at 2:34 pm
Sometimes people complain that socialists are too obsessed with Russia, though you’re obviously not one of them.
Cugel the Clever said,
June 20, 2010 at 10:59 am
‘You mentioned armchair gas operation. Don’t pretend you’re not not just being abusive’
Not abusive at all, just noting with pinpoint accuracy that you are a cowardly, murderous little Jew hater. Now, off to Stormfront with you.
skidmarx said,
June 20, 2010 at 2:32 pm
I’m just noting that you can’t spell “pinheaded”, “inaccuracy”,”peace-loving”, or “above average height”.”Cowardly” is for others to judge, but I certainly don’t hate Jews . I’m not impressed with you insults as they are so far off the mark they don’t connect with reality. If you can’t put forward a coherent argument, perhaps you should find something a little more productive to do.
Jim Denham said,
June 20, 2010 at 2:45 pm
Skidmarx: you are correct that not taking sides in a dispute like the Korean war (or, more recently, the Falklands war) does not *necessarily* preclude use of the slogan “the main enemy is at home.” However, Cliff and the (British) Socialist Review Group and its international co-thinkers at the time were most certainly neutral and on record as stating their neutrality. They also called themselves “Third Campists” -the term first used (approvingly) btw by…Leon Trotsky.
See for instance, V Karalasinham’s article “The War In Korea” published in “The Origins of The International Socialists” (Pluto Press, 1971), which concludes as follows:
“If we are to support the decisions of the UN, then it is tanatamount to an abandonment of the position we have hithertoo taken on neutrality between the two power blocs – a position that distinguishes us from all other currents in the left movement. Our Third Force position – ‘Neither Western Capitalism nor Stalinist Totalitarianism’ – demands that we lend no support to either camp in Korea. Instead our solidarity is with the Koreans in their struggle against both was camps and for national independence and democratic socialism.”
The 1971 book notes that this article was previously published in ‘Socialist Review’ 1/2, January 1951.
skidmarx said,
June 21, 2010 at 12:55 pm
Should “was camps” read “war camps”?
As I said above, Cliff and the Socialist Review Group were arguning against support for the North on an international scale, and so I would imagine that what they were saying to specifically UK audiences would have been more focused on opposing the UN forces, but I think there is still a noticeable difference between his politics and those of Third Campism, such as over the role of Communist Parties in the West, which Cliffites see as alternative social democratic parties while Third Campists see them more negatively as embyonic Stalinst bureucracies.
And I don’t see that this differs from what is said today, or how they are any more apologists for murderous regimes than they are fascistic anti-semites (which they are not).
Jim Denham said,
June 21, 2010 at 6:13 pm
Yes, skidders, it should have read “war” camps. But I think the nquote speaks for itself in terms of “our Third Force position”; your stuff about adiffering assessment of western Communist Parties is
a/ not entirely accurate
b/ beside the point…
Cliff and co most certainly *were* Third Campists, and that quote is proof.
Btw: today’s SWP is obviously *not* “fascistic” but it *is* politically anti-semitic, which does *not* mean hating individual Jews – any more than traditional Christian anti-semitism did. The Christians *loved* Jews, so long as they converted. Much of today’s “left” (eg the SWP) also loves Jews, so long as they renounce “zionism”.
skidmarx said,
June 22, 2010 at 11:49 am
What is “political anti-semitism”? Is it not just an invention designed to suggest a priori that those who oppose zionism are motivated by what your tourists from Harryplace would call Jew-hatred? You may try and suggest that there can be anti-semitism that isn´t directed at individual Jews, but a far more coherent explanation is that it is simply anti-Zionism originating in a dislike of the actions and nature of the Israeli state and its agents, and what you are doing is a transparent attempt to delegitimise such opposition by claiming it to be racist (while ignoring the racist nature of the Israeli state).
And Jimbo, on your first point, because the forerunners of the SWP reaqched similar conclusions about Korea to the Third Campists doesn´t make them identical. What seems to be core to the politics of the latter is to take an abstract view of liberty as a key to which regimes to most demonise, which from Shactmann to yourself seems to have led to seeing Western imperialism as a much lesser threat than the worst of the bureaucratic collectivists, a trap it´s good the SWP hasn´t fallen into.
Jim Denham said,
June 23, 2010 at 6:53 pm
Skidders: “political anti-semitism” is dual standards: eg denying the Jewish people nationhood and what virtually every other people are acknowledged to have a right to under bourgeois democracy: their own state and self-determination (ironically, by doing so, the political anti-semites also deny it to the Palestinian people). Historically, anti-semitism does *not* necessitate hatred of individual Jews – merely the suppression of their right to express themselves as Jews and the demand that they – in effect- deny their Jewishness. A sort of “anti-loyalty” test. The late Steve Cohen wrote tellingly about this:
http://you-dont-look-anti-semitic.blogspot.com/
The “anti-loyalty” test is what today’s “anti-Zionists” increasingly demand of Jews.
On Socialist Review/IS and Third Campism: when people *call themselves* “Third Campists”, publish articles like Karalasinham’s in their own official history, and use the slogan “Neither Washington nor Moscow but Internationalm Socialism” (itself borrowed from Shachtman) I honestly fail to understand how *anyone* can seriously dispute that they were, indeed, what they proclaimed themselves to have been at the time…Third Campists.
skidmarx said,
June 25, 2010 at 10:40 am
At one of the first philosophy classes I attended when I was 17, I learned that if false or contradictory premisses are placed into an argument, any conclusion can be logically drawn from them. What it appears to me you are doing with your first point is transposing an argument about why you think supporters of a one state solution are wrong to reject the existence of a separate Jewish state in Palestine into a rigged deck where the cards can only be dealt out according the way you´ve ordered the pack, with your pejorative value-laden classification of their views as”political anti-semitism.
Thinking that the name Israel should be wiped off the map does entail the full Ahmedinijad rap. I generally think your basic argument is wrong, that a persecuted people does not necessarily an oppressed nation make, that the creation of Israel by means of the dispossession of the Palestinians has inevitably resulted in it being an outrider for imperialism makes it neither a safe home for Jews or of benefit to the wider world and that it is not anti-Zionist rejectionism that inhibits the search for Middle East peace but the double standard which regards the Israeli demand for security as more important than the Palestinian demand for justice; but it is far more difficult to conduct such a discussion in any meaningful way if an assumption is made of instutionalised racist assumptions by those arguing against your position. You could replace every usage of the term “political anti-semitism” with “rejectionist one state-solution supporting anti-Zionism”(or some shorter version) and the essence of your argument would not be diminished, and you wouldn´t be virtually guaranteeing that any subsequent discussion would be carried out at a childish level of abuse. Don´t get me wrong, I don´t have a principled objection to that: when the house trolls at Newman´s Place thought the best way to engage was to react to every comment with a gush of invective but often less than the bare bones of an argument, I was quite happy to respond in kind, throwing their insults back at them, and engaging in nit-picking point-scoring rather more successfully than they were capable of, and didn´t involve having to put one´s brain in too high a gear. But someone did remind me yesterday that bad discussion tends to drive out the good, and perhaps it doesn´t aid the future of socialism or humanity to keep things at a puerile level. One of the things I do like about this site is the political affiliation to considerable social liberalism, and oftentimes the liberal comments policy operated here is to my taste, but it does seem to me that many others on the Left might as well think that AWL stands for Arseholes, Wankers,LIars, maybe if you dropped the tone to a more reasonable one you´d be placed more into a category with the less hostile anarchists, more Nice than Nasty (and not even having to drop the disagreements with the rest of the Left, just being a little more rational about it). I don´t think the “political anti-semitism” stands up its own at all, for starters it´s a fairly shoddy shift from a simple accusation of anti-semitism made to make give respectabilty to an unjustified slur by complicating the language a little, I don´t think I´m particuarly convince that medieval anti-semitism wasn´t aimed at individual Jews (though their might be a case that they were individually and collectively targeted as a people-class because of the way they had been forced into money-lending, notably in Western Europe, and the preference of monarchs for a spot of persecution to paying their debts. I think the “loyalty test” is a figment of you imagination(perhaps of others), and a look at Steve Cohen´s site doesn´t convince me that anything other than an unproven assumption is being made.
On your last point let´s start by reviewing what the official SWP line is on theories of the class nature of Russia. The degenerated workers state hypothesis is thought be be faulty because it claims a step towards socialism where there is no workers control, and so results in an unjustifiable preference of state capitalist tyrannies over multi-national monopoly capitalism. The bureaucratic collectivists go the other way, considering Russia to have no dynamic by which the forces of production drive the relations between social class to breaking point where new, more egalitarian social forms might emerge, and so have a strong tendency towards preferring West to East. Finally Cliff´s theory of bureaucratic state capitalism comes in through the middle (with the same name as some other theories of Russia, but with a somewhat distinctive basis), identifying the dynamic of Russian accumulation as a capitalist one, and so on an international scale being equally hostile to both blocs at a time when they were of comparable strength
I´m not saying that you´ll necessarily agree with that, but that it is the way the Internaional Socialist tendency sees itself. When the debate over Korea was going on, Cliff had only recently made coherent his doubts about the way Trotsky´s perspective had panned out. So it wouldn´t be that surprising that there was an overlap between the way they were saying things and the way the Third Campists were, and if they were in agreement, good. There are those from the other tradition such as Hal Draper, who did I think oppose the Vietnam War and certainly wrote an excellent series of books on Karl Marx´s Theory of Revolution which is an excellent example of how to keep your methodology honest and scholarly when trying to show what Marxists actually say, who kept more of their anti-imperialist principles, but there would be any state caps who would find any difficulty reconciling what was said at the time that North Korea was the pawn of a Sino-Soviet bloc the rivalled the American one, and the situation today where it is a small isolated state threatened by the only superpower, which has broken many of the promises it made to get the North Koreans to abandon their nuclear programme, and whose imposing of regime change would be more about strengthening the hold of imperialism than benefiting the North Korean people. This doesn´t make johng or others “apologists for murderous regimes”, it makes them opponents of imperialism. And like with the other point, you could make you argument without descending to such unsubstantiated slurs.