I do not know if the Occupy Wall Street movement is properly called a leftist movement. But, I do know that looking around the Internet that a lot of self described leftists support it. However, what I find interesting is that unlike left wing movements in the US during the 1930s and 1960s there does not appear to be any worship of foreign dictators like Joseph Stalin, Mao Zedong, Ho Chi Minh, or Fidel Castro among the current activists. This is a huge change and a very positive one from the early leftist movements. I hope the lack of support for tyranny by the Occupation movement continues.
I think in the 1930s no one in the west was fully aware of what Stalin was doing, were they? As for the 1960s, Ho Chi Minh must have seemed like a patriot defending his country from an imperialist aggressor. The guys nowadays like that Zizek fellow are just post-modernist game players trying to prove how clever they are, regardless of how offensive to humanity their writings are.
ReplyDeleteSome people had a good idea in the West of what Stalin was about. There were letters from Russian-Germans and Mennonites sent to relatives in the US and Canada about the Holodomor and deportation of the Kulaks. A number of these letters were even printed in US newspapers in the Midwest. Letters from special settlers in the Urals made it to western Canada and other places. So there was a pretty good idea of what was going on if you cared to look.
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