[Marxism] James Daly

[Louis Proyect]

James Daly, a philosophy professor and long-time Marxmail subscriber, 
just unsubbed. I guess that he found me unbearably abusive. Too bad 
he didn't stick around. I was just getting warmed up.

I would have told him this at some point: Comrade Daly, you express 
distaste for Gowans's comment that "Trotskyites have always been 
useful to Washington and London: many are reliably against the same 
revolutions (though for different reasons),  and therefore serve the 
useful function of whittling away at left support."

But he couldn't make the connection between this kind of vile 
Stalinist calumny and the pro-Mugabe apologetics. Talk about 
cognitive dissonance. It is like not being able to make the 
connection between Trotsky's assassination in 1940 and the Moscow 
Trials that preceded it.

Gowans's writings on Zimbabwe, to get straight to the point, is 
*exactly* the methodology of the Stalintern except that it 
substitutes decrepit bourgeois nationalist regimes for the USSR. If 
Trotsky had to be silenced in order to "defend" the Soviet Union, 
then it is necessary today to scandalize people like Patrick Bond who 
has the temerity to point out that Emperor Mugabe is not wearing any 
clothes. Here's some tidbits from Gowans:

"Board member Reginald Matchaba Hove won the NED democracy award in 
2006. Described by its first director as doing overtly what the CIA 
used to do covertly, the NED – and by extension the NGOs it funds ­ 
are not politically neutral organizations... It doesn't take long to 
connect Hove to left scholar Patrick Bond (of Her Majesty's NGOs) and 
his Center for Civil Society. The Center is a program partner with 
the Southern Africa Trust, one of whose trustees is ZESN board member 
Reginald Matchaba Hove."

Get it, comrades? NED, CIA, Patrick Bond. Six degrees of separation. 
I wonder if there is any truth to the rumor that Patrick is digging a 
tunnel from Zambia into Zimbabwe in order to smuggle in guns from the CIA...