From: zeleny@husc10.harvard.edu (Mikhail Zeleny)
Newsgroups: rec.arts.books,talk.politics.soviet
Subject: Re: Robert Conquest's _The Great Terror_
Date: 27 Jan 93 20:04:35 GMT
Article-I.D.: husc3.1993Jan27.150439.19865
Organization: The Phallogocentric Cabal

In article <JMC.93Jan26205910@SAIL.Stanford.EDU> 
jmc@cs.Stanford.EDU writes:

>In article <1993Jan26.113447.19810@husc3.harvard.edu>
>zeleny@husc10.harvard.edu (Mikhail Zeleny) writes:

>>jmc@cs.Stanford.EDU writes:

>>>zeleny@husc10.harvard.edu (Mikhail Zeleny) writes:

JMC:
>>>>>There is a distinction to be made between the execution of someone
>>>>>believed and convicted, perhaps wrongly of a crime, and the killing
>>>>>of a 1 1/2 year old baby.  Every bit of restraint is valuable.
>>>>>
>>>>>Even if you believe the execution was motivated by malice and the
>>>>>person was innocent, the distinction is important.  The killing of the
>>>>>baby was a signal for a greatly increased level of killings of
>>>>>innocent people.

MZ:
>>>>I think you are missing something, Professor.  If the execution of
>>>>Parsons et al. is to be justified by the common belief of their guilt,
>>>>the same logic can be applied to justify the Nazi Judeocide, which
>>>>logically proceeded from the assumption that the Jews were an evil and
>>>>noxious race, congenitally and irremediably deadly to the Aryans.  Come
>>>>to think of it, the same could be said about the feelings a committed
>>>>bolshevik might have had for the members of the Romanov family.
>>>>
>>>>Should you like to appeal to the distinction of "due process", I entreat
>>>>you to consider the contemporary idea of "Revolutionary justice".  After
>>>>all, your argument turns on the participants' beliefs about their actions
>>>>being just, and not on any immanent aspect of the latter.

JMC:
>>>There were inhibitions among the Bolsheviks against killing children,
>>>and these inhibitions were overcome by arguments like those Zeleny
>>>mentions.  Overcoming them was an important step in extending the
>>>terror.

MZ:
>>I made no mention of any argument.  Consequently, you are failing to
>>address the real argument I used.  I repeat my questions: is it your
>>position that hypocritically following the motions of "due process"
>>makes the execution of Albert Parsons more *just* than the execution
>>of a Romanov child?  If so, what is your position on other egregious
>>phenomena of Western justice that were accomplished in equally full
>>compliance with due process, such as the Nuremberg Laws?  Should you
>>disapprove of the latter, what is your position on the doxastic and
>>epistemic warrant for judicial and political action, given by one of
>>their primary causes, the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, which were
>>sponsored by the selfsame Romanovs?  Finally, what is your position on
>>the like warrant given by the _raison d'Etat_?
>
>>In short, are you prepared to maintain that the sincerity of belief in
>>the justice of one's actions, somehow vindicates the unjust agent?  If
>>so, why do you choose to vindicate the bourgeois juror, but not the
>>proletarian revolutionary?

JMC:
>1. I regard every inhibition against arbitrary killing as valuable and
>breeching it harmful.  Therefore, I don't need to compare the conviction
>and execution of Albert Parsons with killing the Tsar's baby.  Wrongly
>convicting Parsons is not as bad as lynching him would have been.

As far as I can tell from reading Avrich and others, Parsons' conviction
and execution was justified *solely* by the charges that he and his
co-defendants publicly advocated the use of violence for political ends.
In particular, the prosecution had been unable to crack the defendants'
alibis, or to link them in *any* way to the Haymarket explosion.  On the
other hand, the contemporary justification for the extermination of the
Romanovs, was to deny the monarchist enemies of the revolutionary state
a "live banner" for their efforts.  As you should be able to see, both
events were similarly justified in the eyes of ardent defenders of the
order.  Thus in pronouncing one of them arbitrary, you are implicitly
appealing to the distinction between the merits of the killers' goals.
Naturally, each bourgeois reason can be, and has been, answered with a
proletarian one.

Note also that you are not in a position to say that the American
anarchist was culpable of something to cause his conviction and
execution, in a way that the Russian Crown Princess was not.  The
Haymarket conviction was for "murder in manner and form", and any of
Parsons' activities as a propagandist had as much relevance to it, as
the Princess' biting her nanny's tit had to her own, equally spurious,
and equally justified, conviction for counterrevolutionary activities.

JMC:
>2. I'm a bit puzzled about _The Protocols of the Elders of Zion_.  I
>thought the afore-mentioned Tsar recognized it as a forgery.  Parts
>of it were cribbed from a novel.

The source was not a novel, but an anti-Napoleonic political tract from
the 1860s.  Although the forgery was prepetrated by the agents of the
_okhranka_, the Tzar recognized the document as genuine.  This may have
had something to do with his "conscientious" objection to civil rights
for the Jews, or his oft-expressed detestation of "foreign Yids", or his
belief that "nine-tenths of the revolutionaries are Yids", or the covert
instigation and overt toleration of anti-Jewish pogroms, explained by
him as "justifiable punishment", by the Imperial Department of Police.

JMC:
>3. The unjust agent isn't vindicated by sincerity, but the magnitude
>of his crime would be aggravated by insincerity.

Is this some kind of intuitionistic argument, or are you denying that
vindication (as in "partial justification") is the logical opposite of
aggravation?

>--
>John McCarthy, Computer Science Department, Stanford, CA 94305
>*
>He who refuses to do arithmetic is doomed to talk nonsense.
>

cordially,
mikhail zeleny@husc.harvard.edu
"Le cul des femmes est monotone comme l'esprit des hommes."