Maoists or bourgeois liberals?

Back around the time of the Iranian Revolution--before the final results, when the place hadn't yet become an Islamic republic and it wasn't clear that it would--I was at a gathering space in the old student housing at the university here. These were old buildings put up as temporary housing at the end of World War Two, but they were still being used. Members of the Revolutionary Communist Youth Brigade (RCYB) threw the party. I had never been a member of their group and there were a number of people, including a few Iranian foreign students, who didn't share their views either.

One of the Iranians, a high school kid, said that he thought Iran needed a Stalin----someone to take control and rule with an iron fist. I was a little surprised.

What should have shocked me was the reaction of the RCYB members. They were appalled!

Stalin was a bad, bad man, they said. What about his crimes? How could you want anyone like him ruling over Iran or anywhere else?

Now, the RCYB was the youth group of the "Revolutionary Community Party", which was Maoist. It has no connection to the Communist Party, USA. They sided with Mao in the split with the Soviet Union after de-Stalinization. They considered Khrushchev a counter-revolutionary who turned the U.S.S.R. into a capitalist state. Officially, the group had some mild criticism of Stalin, but that was to make their praise for him seem more credible.

Could it be that, deep down, after they had a few drinks, that these revolutionaries were really just a bunch of bourgeois liberals?

Seems to be a common enough thing. When the US and NATO launched its bombing campaign against the Libyan people, local "anarchists" praised the imperialists for their humanitarianism.

We have local Libertarian Party members who love Israel and have no problem with the Israeli governments' confiscation of Palestinian land. After all their talk about individualism, they take for granted the collective guilt of all Palestinians and the collective virtue of all Jews.

And then we have the otherwise pro-gay liberals attacking Michele Bachmann's allegedly effeminate husband. I had read a gay magazine more than 20 years ago which attacked the Communist Party, USA, because, in the 1930s, the Daily Worker newspaper ran a cartoon which pointed out Ernst Röhm's homosexuality. In Marcus Bachmann's case, there's the possible hypocrisy since he's anti-gay, but that was obviously the case with Röhm, too, but there's also the hypocrisy of liberals attacking Bachmann for acting like a big sissy.

In the case of the RCYB, there was a Turkish couple in the group, Ismet and Turkan. They were more consistent in their views. Ismet acknowledged Stalin's crimes. He thought they were overstated, which is probably true, but he was fine with them in any case. He argued that Pol Pot prevented a famine by clearing out the cities. All this came out when a strangely non-judgmental university student questioned him during a political event.

"You don't think Stalin killed a lot of innocent people?" he asked politely.

Ismet replied that he did think Stalin killed innocent people, but that's unavoidable when your fighting counter-revolution.

Hard to imagine many people joining that revolution.

I ran into an old member of the RCYB a couple of years ago. She was quite a bit older but she was still an active member. She didn't seem to recognize me. She hadn't changed a bit. I bought a newspaper from her. And, strangely, the party leader, Bob Avakian, was still using the same slightly crazed official portrait.

According to Wikipedia, Avakian was asked in an interview if he thought there was a personality cult built up around him.

"I certainly hope so," he answered. "We’ve been working very hard to create one."

Wikipedia goes on to say that "Avakian contends that there are two mainstays of communist political work: the role of the party press and the 'Appreciation, Promotion and Popularization' of Bob Avakian".

I don't know. Maybe it's a good idea. Look at the Republicans dedicating themselves to the memory of Ronald Reagan. (They also swear their allegiance to Israel, a country which snubbed Reagan's funeral. Israel was one of the few countries to send an ambassador and not a head of state.) That's not hurting the Republicans any.