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by the International Minister, October 12, 2003 At first glance, this web page under recent construction is a reasonable, exciting and revolutionary web page. That is what makes it all the more crushing to our hopes that it contains the seeds of a genocidal line much in evidence in many small nations globally, especially in or near the ex-Soviet Union. The Armenian Revolutionary Federation's very name has us at MIM interested. At the top of the same web page is the name "Armenian Socialist Party." It's called a "consultative party" member of the "Socialist International" composed of reactionary social-democrats such as the "Democratic Socialists of America." (The "Social Democratic Party of Azerbaijan" has only observor status in that mish-mash.)(1) It goes to show what happens when Leninist internationalism is thought of as something that can be done without. The A.R.F. says, "It advocates individual freedom, national self-determination, independent statehood, social harmony, and economic well being to secure unobstructed, multifaceted, and sustainable development of both the individual Armenian and Armenian nation." It sounds reasonable. The A.R.F. continues: "Man's domination over man and exploitation of human labor has existed throughout history. "Capitalism, imperialism, totalitarianism, and colonialism are all different expressions of domination and exploitation and are manifested as militarism, racism, and oligarchy, as well as economic, ideological and cultural expansionism. The results are economic monopoly, disregard for national rights, neglect of human rights, ecological and environmental degradation, and political abuses often in the name of protecting human rights." MIM does not quite agree with that either, but we can say it's within a realm of reasonable opinion. Next, A.R.F. also says, "The Armenian Revolutionary Federation believes that the ideals of socialism are unattainable without democracy, and democracy is incomplete and lacking without socialism. "Democracy is anchored by respect for human and civil rights and freedoms. It provides legal protection to freedom of opinion, the existence of multiple political parties, and complete freedom of speech, conscience, press, creativity, and labor." All of that sounds designed for the Western bourgeois ear. In fact, MIM is quite sure that much of the purpose is to rally the West to a project of "Greater Armenia." The web page even says, "The A.R.F. rejects, however, all notions of national supremacy and chauvinistic manifestations as they impede the normal progress of human society." The problems start to arise when Armenia talks about recovering lands in Azerbaijan and Turkey. Those unfamiliar with the details might miss completely that words like "Artzakh, Javakhk and Nakhichevan" refer to territory currenty in Azerbaijan. Even worse, one might miss completely the following demographic gem referring to the Turks: "They altered the homogeneous national composition of the Armenian Highland." Those reading carefully will notice the following fantasy: "In 1918, the remnants of the Armenian nation stood fast against the invading Turkish armies, halted their progress, and gained independence."(2) The history in itself should have been a clue to the A.R.F. to disband and favor a Soviet solution as the best one for Armenian interests. Instead, they go back and rewrite everything decent since the Russian Revolution as having occurred without internationalism. Quite the contrary, when Armenia entered the Soviet Union it had been suffering from years of debilitating war. Nonetheless, it is fashion in the West and elsewhere to say only that Stalin brought brutal discipline to the national minorities of the Soviet Union as if they were in idyllic peace before Stalin. Liberal tolerance is not appropriate in a situation of continuous ethnic bloodletting: centralized repression is. Instead of acknowledging this, the A.R.F. attacks Stalin's communism, internationalism and "totalitarianism" while somewhat admitting that Armenia flourished under his rule. This brings us to the next point and why MIM is constantly talking about how Khruschev seized power, denounced Stalin and took the USSR backward. The Armenians would not be fighting a war with Azerbaijan since the 1990s and lusting for more territory had it not been for Khruschev who allowed the Russians to infect their communist movement with bourgeois ideology. When Russians started adopting a selfish and comfortable outlook especially after World War II and Khruschev did not crack down even in the party for that, it was inevitable that the small nations in the Soviet Union would suffer most. The blood of the war between Armenia and Azerbaijan and the subsequent economic blockade placed on Armenia by Turkey and Azerbaijan is on the hands of Khruschev and Brezhnev as well as all those who stood by and let Khruschev take his nonsensical "peaceful" road to capitalist restoration. It may have seemed peaceful to slide into capitalism, but the result was violence. All the strange and twisted ideas of small nations should be thought of largely as pain caused by larger nations and a failure to target the proper solutions to problems. For this reason, we must support the Russian Maoist Party and anyone in Russia who does fanatical and unflinching work against Russian great nation chauvinism. The greater the success of the Russian Maoist Party and that ideology, the more people from the Caucusus will be open to a Soviet solution. It will mean understanding great nation chauvinism inside-out, forward and backwards, the way Bobby Seale used to say Huey Newton knew Mao's writings. It will also mean understanding imperialist exploitation inside-out, forward and backwards. When the small nations see that Soviet movements have done a thorough job against exploitation and oppression they will consider the Soviet option as a way out of their predicaments. Before that, small nations will consider but often find unrealistic Soviet movements, especially in the midst of border wars. When Armenians denounce inter-marriage and speak for a mythical national purity, they are falling into racism, a belief in common ancestors and their importance. Whether they call themselves socialists and belong to the social-democratic international or not, the Armenian Socialist Party and others like it are doing the spade work for fascism. The peoples of the Caucusus region are in their vast majority exploited peoples. They are being held back economically by imperialism and their own failure to unite in Soviet socialism. Armenians would not be going down this road if Russians had not screwed up the USSR by allowing enemies like Khruschev and Brezhnev off the hook. People given real citizenship rights in a country as vast as the Soviet Union and going forward as fast as it did under Stalin do not hanker so strongly for wars against their neighbors who are also largely exploited peoples. The countless idiotic greater Russian nationalists say that their backward brethren of the smaller nations held them back and required too much subsidy economically. They are now the perfect fodder for Limonov's neo-Nazi ideas. What they do not understand is that small nations are going to be suspicious of the intentions of larger nations based on the reality of history. It is in fact harder for a small nation to contribute to socialism than a larger one and so they cannot be equated, especially if there is any question of uneven economic development involved or stagnation. If Khruschev and Brezhnev are allowing state-capitalism and nothing is done to shoot those involved in bribery the way Stalin did, we can only expect that small nations will take that ideology to its logical conclusion and hanker for free market capitalism. When the small nations all grab the same me-first bourgeois ideology self-destructive wars occur. Those wars impoverish Russia's most natural trading partners and only the most incompetent bourgeois in Russia could think that is a good thing for Russian self-interests. Now the A.R.F. has put together a plan and an umbrella of organizations to achieve a Greater Armenia on the basis of war, genocide and backward social customs prohibiting inter-marriage in a situation where Armenian culture is far from going extinct. In fairness, Armenia's larger neighbors are guilty of the exact same outlook applied in reverse--believing that Armenia is the source of problems and the object of struggle to go forward. Former Soviet peoples of Armenia and Azerbaijan now make plans to kill each other off, but much of the blame lies on those who destroyed the Soviet Union from within, principally Russians. However, we cannot even end the blame there with the Russians or seek to extend it to the Germans who did not quite take up the Soviet revolution in 1919 when they had the chance. No, the blame for this lies in the intellectuals who fail to point their peoples toward the proper enemy, toward the enemy they need to overcome to do the most to advance economically. That enemy is U.$. imperialism. The many nations struggling to advance target their neighbors as enemy and seek small pieces of territory while the imperialists rob even nations of vast size such as Brazil or the Congo blind. What progressive Armenian intellectuals should be asking is what good Artzakh is going to do if even a country as vast and populated as Egypt finds itself hemmed in by u.$. imperialism. If Armenia owned all of Turkey it would still have an exploited people set back by institutions backed by U.$. imperialism just as Turkey exists today. For that matter, the giant Russia has gone its own road, and as an imperialist, it still only has the economy of Belgium. Fights over land with exploited and oppressed neighbors are zero-sum games, while even making a slight dent in international exploitation can return a percent of well-being to a small nation every year. Although the largest sources of blame can land on Russians and u.$. imperialism, we cannot condone small nations engaging in wars that hurt the interests of the exploited. The Armenians were wrong to kick ethnic Turks/Azeris off their lands in Armenia and Nagorno-Karabakh as the Soviet Union fell apart. There should have been an anti-war movement both in Armenia and Baku. When Azerbaijan retaliated and created more millions of refugees, the Armenians in Azerbaijan suffered for a lack of credibility. Armenian intellectuals in Baku missed their chance to gain credibility by failing to form an anti-war movement to unite the exploited as the Soviet Union fell apart. The bourgeois nationalist Armenian line on Nagorno-Karabakh is also damaging to the interests of indigenous peoples. So stuck on this question are the Armenians that they still quote a statement from 1919: "In the forbidding rocks of Karabakh, for more that two thousand years, the Armenian people stood the pressure of nomadic tribes, preserving its culture, defending its national identity."(3) The struggle against imperialist exploitation requires unity of the oppressed and exploited. The Armenians and their neighbors should be trading and uniting against imperialism. Thanks to the lies of imperialist country social-democrats and their revisionist brethren denying the flow of surplus-value from places like the Caucusus to the united $tates, the Armenian and other suffering peoples are not being told how u.$. imperialism is ripping them off in detail. Far from being the case that Amerikkkan workers work so much harder than other workers in the world, the Amerikkkan enjoys a high living standard thanks to plunder of the rest of the world. The rest of the world can advance its material conditions and the basis of culture far beyond what possessing a favorite mountain mentioned in ancient history can do by overcoming imperialism. The unity created in multinational struggle against imperialism is also essential to the security of small nations like Armenia.
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