[DEBATE] : Re: James ' tijo firo' Petras

[peter waterman]

Well, Andrej, I am writing this from Moscow, and I can truly, deeply,
understand the sentiments of Petras (previously known as James, possibly
even Jim).

After the fall from a state of grace of (depending on preference) Lenin,
Stalin, Walter Ulbricht, Pol Pot, Tito, Mao, Kim il Sung (and son), Robert
Mugabe, Daniel Ortega and [fill this space at will], I can understand that
Petras still wants to worship an icon. It seems to me possible, pending
counter-evidence, that Marulanda did not repeat the sentiments of Karl
Marx (who denied he was a Marxist), and who's favourite dictum was
'criticise everything' (which, in so far as Marx was also a thing, has to
mean, 'Criticise Me!).

I once wrote a piece on individual internationalists entitled 'Saints,
Sinners or Companyer at s'. The last word signifies a comrade, male or
female. I suggested here that we surpass the language of manichean binary
opposition (virtue and vice) in discussing and relating to
internationalists. And...umm...everything else actually. I suggested we
consider them as comrades, and therefore subject to critique as well as
sickening sycophantic(?) praise.

However, someone has to play this Stalinist role. And I think we should be
really happy that it is Petras. Someone without a kalashnikov, a gulag,
electric torturing equipment, or even the capacity to fire someone from
their job or exile them to Sibera.

I do, however, note that in his celebration of this Spotless Revolutionary
Saint, he does not tell us too much about his internationalism...

Best,

PeterW





-- 
Peter Waterman
Jacob vd Doesstr 28
2518xn The Hague
Netherlands
Tel: +31 (0)70 3631539
Mob: +31 (0)60 1753 1257
Emb: p.waterman at inter.nl.net
Emb: pwaterman at gmail.com


Petras is getting crazier with every new article, so it seems....
He is on his way of becoming a tiro fijo of the sclero-paleo-left.....

a.



> ---------- Forwarded message ----------
> From: Patrick Bond <pbond at mail.ngo.za>
> To: debate: SA discussion list <debate at lists.kabissa.org>
> Date: Tue, 27 May 2008 05:46:26 +0200
> Subject: [DEBATE] : (Fwd) Petras on Marulanda
> Homage to Manuel Marulanda
>
>
> James Petras
>
>
> Pedro Antonio Marin, better know as Manuel Marulanda and 'Tiro Fijo (Sure
>  Shot)', was the leader of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of
> Colombia-Peoples
> Army (FARC-EP). He was without a doubt the greatest revolutionary peasant
> leader in the history of the Americas. Over a period of 60 years he
> organized peasant movements, rural communities and, when all legal
> democratic channels were effectively (and brutally) closed, he built the
> most powerful sustained guerrilla army and supporting underground
> militias in Latin America. The FARC at its peak between 1999-2005 numbered
> nearly 20,000 fighters, several hundred thousand peasant-activists,
> hundreds of village and urban militia units. Even today despite the
> regime's forced displacement of 3 million peasants resulting from scorched
> earth policies and scores of massacres, the FARC has between 10,000-15,000
> guerrillas in its numerous 'fronts distributed throughout the country.
>
> What make Marulanda's achievements so significant are his organizational
> abilities, strategic acuity and his intransigent and principled
> programmatic positions consisting of support of popular demands.
> Marulanda, more than any
> other guerrilla leader, had unmatched rapport with the rural poor, the
> landless, the subsistence cultivators and the rural refugees over three
> generations.
>
> Beginning in 1964 with two-dozen peasants fleeing villages devastated by
> a US directed military offensive Marulanda methodically built a
> revolutionary guerrilla army without either foreign financial or material
> contributions. Marulanda, more than any other guerrilla leader, was a
> great rural political teacher. Marulanda's superb organizing skills were
> honed on the basis of his intimate ties with peasants – he grew up in a
> poor peasant family, lived among them cultivating and organizing, and
> spoke their language addressing their most basic daily needs and future
> hopes. Conceptually and through daily trial and error, Marulanda worked
> out a series of strategic political –military operations based on his
> brilliant understanding of the geographic and human terrain. Between 1964
> to his recent death, Marulanda defeated or evaded at least seven major
> military offensives financed by over $7 billion dollars in US military
> aid, involving thousands of US 'Green Berets', Special Forces,
> mercenaries, over 250,000 Colombians Armed Forces and 35,000 member
> paramilitary death squads.
>
> Unlike Cuba or Nicarangua, Marulanda built an organized mass base and
> trained a largely rural leadership; he openly declared his socialist
> program and never received political or material support from so-called
> 'progressive
> capitalists'. Colombia's armed forces were a formidable, highly trained
> and disciplined repressive apparatus, bolstered by murderous death squads,
>  unlike Batista's and Somoza's corrupt and rapacious gangsters, who
> plundered and retreated under pressure. Marulanda, unlike many
> better-known 'poster-boy' guerrillas, was a virtual unknown among the
> elegant leftist editors in London, the nostalgic Parisian sixty-eighters
> and the New York Socialist scholars. Marulanda spent his time exclusively
> in 'Colombia profunda', the deep Colombia, preferring to converse and
> teach peasants and learn their grievances, rather than giving interviews
> to adventure-seeking Western journalists. Instead of writing grandiloquent
> 'manifestos' and
> striking photogenic poses, he preferred the steady, unromantic but
> eminently effective grass roots pedagogy of the disinherited. Marulanda
> traveled from virtually inaccessible valleys to mountain ranges, from
> jungles to plains, organizing, fighting
recruiting and training new
> leaders. He eschewed tripping off to 'World Forums' or following the route
> of international leftist tourists. He never visited a foreign capital and,
> it is said, never set foot in the nation's capital, Bogota. But he had a
> vast and profound knowledge of the demands of the Afro-Colombians of the
> Coast, the
> Indio-Colombians of the mountains and jungles, the land claims of millions
>  of displaced peasants, the names and addresses of abusive landlords who
> brutalized and raped peasants and their kin.
>
> Throughout the 1960's, 70's and 80's numerous guerrilla movements raised
> arms, fought with greater or lesser capacity and disappeared – killed,
> surrended (some even turned collaborator) or became immersed in electoral
>  wheeling and dealing. Few in number, they fought in the name of
> non-existent 'peoples armies'; most were intellectuals who were more
> familiar with European narratives than the micro-history and popular
> culture and legends of the people they tried to organize. They were
> isolated, encircled and obliterated, perhaps leaving a well-publicized
> legacy of exemplary sacrifice, but changing nothing on the ground.
>
> In contrast, Marulanda took the best punches thrown by the
> counter-insurgency Presidents in Bogota and Washington and returned them
> in spades. For every village that was razed, Marulanda recruited dozens of
>  angry and destitute peasant fighters and patiently trained them to be
> cadres and commanders. More than any guerrilla army, the FARC became an
> army of the whole people: one-third of the commanders were women, over
> seventy percent were peasants although intellectuals and professionals
> joined and were trained by movement-led cadres. Marulanda was revered for
> his singularly simple life style: he shared the drenching rain under
> plastic canopies. He was deeply respected by millions of peasants, but he
> never in any way cultivated a personality cult-figure: He was too
> irreverent and modest, preferring to delegate important tasks to a
> collective leadership, with a good deal of regional autonomy and tactical
> flexibility. He accepted a diversity of views on tactics, even when he
> profoundly disagreed. In the early 1980's, many cadre and leaders decided
> to try the electoral route, signed a 'peace agreement' with the Colombian
> President, formed an electoral
> party – the Patriotic Union – and successfully elected numerous mayors and
>  representatives. They even gained a substantial vote in Presidential
> elections. Marulanda did not publicly oppose the accord but he did not
> lay down his arms and 'go down from the mountains to the city'. Much
> better than the professionals and trade unionists who ran for office,
> Marulanda
> understood the profoundly authoritarian and brutal character of the
> oligarchy and its politicians. He clearly knew that Colombia's rulers
> would never accept any land reform just because a 'few illiterate peasants
> voted them out of office.' By 1987 over 5,000 members of the Patriotic
> Union had
> been slaughtered by the oligarchy's death squads, including three
> presidential candidates, a dozen elected congressmen and women and scores
> of mayors and city councilors. Those who survived fled to the jungles and
> rejoined the armed struggle or fled into exile.
>
> Marulanda was a master in evading many encirclement and annihilation
> campaigns, especially those designed by the best and the brightest from
> the US Fort Bragg Special Forces counter-insurgency center and the School
> of the Americas. By the end of the 1990's the FARC had extended its
> control to over half the country and was blocking highways and attacking
> military bases only 40 miles from the capital. Severely weakened, the then
> President Pastrana
> finally agreed to serious peace negotiations in which the FARC demanded a
> de-militarized zone and an agenda that included basic structural changes
> in the state, economy and society.
>
> Unlike the Central American guerrillas who traded arms for elected
> office, Marulanda insisted on land redistribution, dismantling of the
> death squads and dismissal of Colombian generals involved in massacres, a
> mixed economy largely based on public ownership of strategic economic
> sectors and large-scale funding for peasants to develop alternative crops
> to coca, prior to laying down arms.
>
> In Washington President Clinton was hysterical and at first opposed the
> peace negotiations – especially the reform agenda as well as the open
> public debates and forums widely attended by Colombian civil society and
> organized by the FARC in the de-militarized zone. Marulanda's embrace of
> democratic debate, demilitarization and structural changes puts the lie to
> the charge by Western and Latin American social democrats and center-left
> academics that he was a 'militarist'. Washington probed to see if they
> could repeat the Central American peace process – co-opt the FARC leaders
> with the promise of electoral office and privilege in exchange for selling
> out the peasants and poor Colombians. At the same time Clinton, with
> bi-partisan support, pushed through a massive $2 billion dollar
> appropriation bill to fund the biggest and bloodiest counter-insurgency
> program since the war in Indochina, dubbed 'Plan Colombia'. Abruptly
> ending the peace process, President Pastrana rushed troops into the
> demilitarized zone to capture the FARC secretariat, but Marulanda and his
> comrades were long gone.
>
> Between 2002 to the present the FARC alternated from offensive attacks
> and defensive retreats – mostly the latter since 2006. With an
> unprecedented degree of US financing and advanced technological support,
> the newly elected narco-partner and death squad organizer, President
> Alvaro Uribe took charge
> of a scorched earth policy to savage the Colombian countryside. Between
> his election in 2002 and re-election in 2006, over 15,000 peasants, trade
> unionists, human rights workers, journalists and other critics were
> murdered. Entire regions of the countryside were emptied – like the US
> Operation Phoenix in Viet Nam, farmland was poisoned by toxic herbicides.
>  Over 250,000 armed forces and their partners in the paramilitary death
> squads decimated vast stretches of the Colombian countryside where the
> FARC
> exercised hegemony. Scores of US-supplied helicopter gun-ships blasted the
>  jungles in vast search and destroy missions – (which had nothing to do
> with coca production or the shipment of cocaine to the United States). By
> destroying all popular opposition and organizations throughout the
> countryside and displacing millions Uribe was able to push the FARC back
> toward more defensible remote regions. Marulanda, as in the past, adopted
> a strategy of defensive tactical retreat, giving up territory in order to
> safeguard the guerrillas' capacity to fight another day.
>
> Unlike other guerrilla movements, the FARC did not receive any material
> support form the outside: Fidel Castro publicly repudiated armed struggle
> and looked to diplomatic and trade ties with center-left administrations
> and even better relations with the brutal Uribe. After 2001, the Bush
> White
> House labeled the FARC a 'terrorist organization' putting pressure on
> Ecuador and Venezuela to tighten cross-border movements of the FARC in
> search of supply chains. The 'center-left' in Colombia was totally divided
>  between those who gave 'critical support' to Uribe's total war against
> the FARC and those who ineffectively protested the repression.
>
>
> It is hard to imagine any guerrilla movement surviving under conditions
> of massive US financed counter-insurgency, quarter million US-armed
> soldiers, millions displaced from its mass base and a psychopathic
> President allied
> directly to a 35,000 member chain-saw death squads. However Marulanda,
> cool and determined, directed the tactical retreat; the idea of
> negotiating a capitulation never entered his mind nor that of the FARC
> secretariat.
>
> The FARC does not have contiguous frontiers with a supporting country
> like Vietnam had with China; nor the arms supply from a USSR, nor the
> international mass support of Western solidarity groups like the
> Sandinistas. We live in times where supporting peasant-led national
> liberation movements is not 'fashionable', where recognizing the genius of
>  peasant revolutionary leaders who build and sustain authentic mass
> peoples armies is taboo in the pretentious, loquacious and impotent World
> Social
> Formus – which 'world' routinely excludes peasant militants and for whom
> 'social' means the perpetual exchange of e-mails between foundations
> funded by NGO.
>
> It is in this hardly auspicious environment facing US and Colombian
> Presidents intent on pyrrhic victories, that we can appreciate the
> political genius and personal integrity of Latin America's greatest
> peasant revolutionary, Manuel Marulanda. His death will not generate
> posters or tee shirts for middle class college students, but he will live
> forever in the hearts and minds of millions of peasants in Colombia. He
> will be remembered forever as 'Tiro Fijo': the legend who was killed a
> dozen times and yet returned to the villages to share their simple lives.
> The only leader who
> was truly 'one of them', the one who confronted the Yankee military and
> mercenary machine for a half-century and was never captured or defeated.
>
> He defied them all - those in their mansions, presidential palaces,
> military bases, torture chambers, and bourgeois editorial offices: He died
>  at after 60 years of struggle of natural causes in the arms of his
> beloved peasant comrades.
>
> Tiro Fijo presente!
>
>
>
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Andrej Grubacic

http://www.zcommunications.org/zspace/andrejgrubacic
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