THE FILIPINO PEASANT IMAGINATION VERSUS AMERICAN LEFTISM (tags)
The following remarks are intended to supplement the author's paper "Blueprint for a Bulosan Project" posted in the online journal OUR OWN VOICE. This essay critiques the position of "leftists" in the elite U.S. academies who claim a "manifest destiny" to civilize colonized subalterns and peasant radicals like the Filipino writer Carlos Bulosan who (they claim) have failed to take "America" out of a transnationalizing U.S. Studies. Are we seeing a replay of the "Thomasites" who produced generations of neocolonized "little brown brothers" now serving U.S. imperialist aggression in Iraq, Aghanistan, Palestine, Mexico, Colombia, Venezuela, and in the Philippines, its former direct colony? "By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat down, yea...."
The Makhno anarchists, Kronstadt and the position of the Russian peasants (tags)
In September of 1920, Ivanov V. (representative of the Southern Front Revolutionary Soviet) visited Makhno. He later wrote this description of Makhno’s camp: “The regime is brutal, the discipline is hard as steel, rebels are beaten on the face for any small breach, no elections to the general command staff, all commanders up to company commander are appointed by Makhno and the Anarchist Revolutionary War Council, Revolutionary Military Soviet (Revvoensovet) became an irreplaceable, uncontrollable and non-elected institution. Under the revolutionary military council there is a ‘special section’ that deals with disobediences secretly and without mercy.”