Attack on Maoists in Harpers May 2005

[ToniSweep]

It's not online yet but I would encourage people to read the May 2005 issue of Harpers. It has a horrible attack on the Nepali Maoists, claiming among other things that they intend to invade the U.S.

People should email or write the editors.

I emailed a short letter and put a much longer response on my blog.

www.sweepofhistory.blogspot.com

[redstar2000GUEST]

I've read this article...and I believe the remark about "invading the U.S." was either a joke or just hyperbole.

On the other hand, it is harshly critical of the Maoists in Nepal. At one point, the author says that "Maoists torture 60% of the soldiers they capture" while the royal army "tortures 80%".

Both numbers are purely imaginary, of course.

Much more serious politically is the claim that the Nepalese Maoists have resorted to conscription of young peasants in the areas that they control...something that the author claims Mao was totally opposed to.

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It's a coincidence, I suppose, that ToniSweep brought up the current issue of Harper's Magazine because I was going to recommend it myself for an entirely different reason: there are two excellent articles in it on Christian fascism and "how it works".

That's stuff we "need to know".



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[ToniSweep]

I'll definitely second that people should pick up the magazine for the articles under the banner "The Christian Right's Attack on America." That's what caught my attention in the first place.

However, I wouldn't write off this point about the "Maoist invasion" as hyperbole. Whether the US actually invades with its own forces the US has no intention of letting the Maoists win in Nepal. And part of that is beginning to create justifications for intervention in one form or another (or should I say heightened intervention since there seems to be US advisors there already). How this all plays out remains to be seen.

As for the author, I'm gonna go out on a limb here and say she has no love for Mao. I don't think she's trying to defend Mao's On Guerrilla Warfare here. My take on the thing is that she's trying to portray it as these Maoists aren't living up to Mao and that they're just carrying out mindless terror, devoid of a conscious ideological base.

[redstar2000GUEST]

I read your lengthy reply at your blog...and I think it's excellent.

I've been a reader of Harper's Magazine for at least 15 years...and, in general, I highly recommend it. It frequently features incisive criticisms of today's capitalist reality...such as the pieces on Christian fascism.

And yet...it is petty-bourgeois -- there's just no getting around that.

Harper's once published a critical letter that said something along the lines of: "The problem with your foreign correspondents is that they cannot adjust to places which not only do not provide good room service but are entirely unfamiliar with the concept."

I think the article on Nepal fits that description...the author does not and probably cannot really grasp what motivates peasant rebellions in the "third world". She can spell words like slavery and serfdom and caste and even use them in sentences...but they are just abstractions to her -- drawings or faded photographs in a very old book.

She probably thinks that she "means well"...but she just doesn't "get it".



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[ToniSweep]

Yeah, Harpers is what it is. It's done some excellent pieces over the years and some not so good pieces over the years.

I think direct experience and reporting from the scene are important but it's not the end all be all and it needs to be put in context. I think part of how people like Griswold get these articles into "left" publications is by being on the scene; the table of contents refers to this as a "Letter from Nepal."

For one, I things there's a BIG difference between talking to a couple of Maoists for a few hours vs. really being among the Maoists for weeks which is what Li Onesto did. Strangely, the cover of Harpers refers to the Nepal article as "Among the Maoists in Nepal" which is not at all what the article is.

I don't entirely know Griswold's story but I was looking at some of her past pieces. They've been about the Taliban, a growing Islamic counter-revolution in Bangladesh, and she did a book review of some book or report detailing the three armed "Marxist" groups in Columbia. It seems kinda like that's her "beat," covering the armed groups opposing the U.S. in one form or another. Along with that she seems to have as a base assumption that America does good in the world and so kinda ipso facto these groups are bad without making any type of distinctions between them, just that they "oppose" the U.S.

I didn't comment on it in my blog but this thing of U.S. Ambassador James Moriarty saying that "It's not Islamic fundamentalism, obviously, but it is a very fervent brand of Maoism..." is pretty outrageous too. I mean he's basically saying 'yeah, we can't get away with calling this thing Islamic fundamentalism but it's pretty similar it a lot of ways.'

For someone "knowledgable" enough to be able to write an article for Harpers, at the very least she should challenge this.

She doesn't have to like the Maoists, that's not a problem. What is a problem is that she takes every anti-Maoist thing people say to her as Gospel and questions everything the Maoists say.

I mean even by petty-bourgeois standards a journalist should question what an ambassador is telling her.

[repeater]

I noticed in the article it referenced some "humanitarian organization" on the statistics for torture. It automatically struck me as something you could not quantify on that level. I was very curious if anyone had ever heard of the organization. I forgot the name, but if you have the article you could find it.

I think these NGO's are playing a really awful role in the world, especially in relation to U.S. imperialism, and they should be exposed for it.

[ToniSweep]

I believe this is a link to the organization:

www.cvict.org.np/news2004/nov02004.htm

Not that I don't have criticisms of their reports--I very much do--but even one of their own reports only charges that the Maoists are responsible for something like 29% of the tortured victims. Hardly the one-up-manship that the guy from that organization claims.