File spoon-archives/marxism.archive/marxism_1994/marxism.Jul12-Aug17.94, message 296


Date: 8 Aug 1994 13:02:40 -0800
From: "Chris Connery" <chris_connery-AT-macmail.ucsc.edu>
Subject: vietnam


Hasn't that obscenity been laid to rest-- the one about the U.S. defeat in 
Vietnam being due to...........RESTRAINT?   Wes should check out James
William Gibson's _The Perfect War_, among other things.   
 I missed most of the Stalinism discussion, but I have a question---  
I remember reading a review of a book that came out in the mid 80s about the
Stalin period that claimed to have demonstrated pretty conclusively that the
deaths in the terror had more of a "local" character than a national one.  
That in many cases it was local officials taking matters into their own
hands, for varieties of motives.   Unlike Nazi Germany,  specific populations
were not targeted by the state for genocide.  The USSR was also not a racial
state.   Does anyone have a cite for this book?
 The Cultural Revolution in China, which I know more about than the Stalin
period, was  a case of the central government having far less control over
events than it claimed to have.  Violence was largely "local," with
localizable characteristics.   
One wouldn't expect that the connection between a government of a state and
the violence/terror in that state is of the same character in every state and
in every period.  

Chris



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