Erik now posts a real quote from his discredited site. Yet the quote takes two pieces of an entire work, one from the very beginning of the work, and one from the very end, and puts them together as if they were one thought and not separated by 40 paragraphs!

Here is half of that quotation in context:

"The peoples who have been through the revolution know how dearly they have had to pay because in their simplicity at the time they believed the loud talk and bombastic assurances. Instead of safeguards for the revolution - everywhere reactionary Chambers which undermined the revolution; instead of fulfillment of the promises given at the barricades - counter-revolution in Naples, Paris, Vienna, Berlin, the fall of Milan, and the war against Hungary; instead of the fraternal union of peoples - renewal of the Holy Alliance on the broadest basis under the patronage of England and Russia. And the very same persons who in April and May responded jubilantly to the high-flown phrases of the epoch, now only blush with shame at the thought of how at that time they allowed themselves to be deceived by idiots and rogues.

"People have learned by bitter experience that the "European fraternal union of peoples" cannot be achieved by mere phrases and pious wishes, but only by profound revolutions and bloody struggles; they have learned that the question is not that of a fraternal union of all European peoples under a single republican flag, but of an alliance of the revolutionary peoples against the counter-revolutionary peoples, an alliance which comes into being not on paper, but only on the battlefield."

Here is the entire work:
Democratic Pan-Slavism
by Frederick Engels
February 1849
www.marxists.org/archive/m.../02/15.htm

The Engels critique of Pan-Slavism was made within the context of the revolutionary advances being made in Europe against feudalism at the time. This position may have been wrong then, and was certainly outdated as capitalist development advanced into the stage of imperialism.

Marx and Engels made changes to their positions on the national question later in their lives, but it was Lenin who put forward the correct position on the national question. Rather than writing my own piece on this, I'm going to cheat and let the following piece I just found discuss this issue in more detail:

"On the one hand, Engels backed the democratic tradition that supported liberation struggles against reaction. For instance, he backed the struggles of both the Irish and the Poles against the twin bastions of European reaction, Britain and Russia. On the other hand, as a strict centralist, he was committed to uniting all nations in a single centralised world economy. As such, he was reluctant to support any struggle conducted against the more advanced countries that did not accelerate the capitalist transformation of the world. This was because, at that time, only capitalism could develop the material basis for a world economy, even though it accomplished this in a barbaric. fashion. Because struggles for national liberation were then the exception rather than the rule, this contradiction necessarily remained unresolved. It was the product of the level of development of capitalism at that time.

"The best explanation Marx and Engels could offer was that, with the virtual absence of liberation movements, at least barbaric capitalism created the possibility of transforming society in a progressive direction, whilst pre-capitalist society meant barbarism without end. Nobody could produce any better answer than that, until there had been a further development of capitalist social relations. Given that the Austrian Slavs didn’t develop any national movements until some time after Engels was dead, it is perhaps understandable why he didn’t feel the need to repudiate his 1849 position.

"Nevertheless, there is much evidence to suggest that Marx and Engels began to change their position on the national question towards the end of the nineteenth century. Lenin, certainly, studied their Irish work closely in developing his own position. But in the end Lenin was able to solve the problem of the national question where his predecessors had necessarily failed because the development of imperialism itself had by his time provided the answer to the conundrum.

"Imperialism’s arrival on the world’s stage announced the fact that capitalism was historically bankrupt, and the economic (though not political) basis for a centrally planned world economy had been laid. At the same tithe, imperialism had carved up the whole world into oppressor and oppressed nations. As a result, from being an issue of merely episodic concern, the national question became the ‘burning question’ of the day for Socialist revolutionaries in the period around the First World War when Lenin developed his position.

“Lenin's position on the national question was that the imperialist epoch has made all nationalism reactionary, abstractly speaking, since only an internationally planned economy could bring progress. However, imperialism’s division of the world into oppressor and oppressed nations posed a political problem – the international division of the working class, the only force which could provide the basis for such a fully centralised world economy, The form this political problem took was the struggle between the Great Powers and the colonies over the democratic demand for the right of all nations to self-determination. The Balkans, for example, where many of the Austrian Slavs lived, became the focus of intense inter-imperialist rivalries which fuelled the nationalist aspirations that sparked off the First World War.

“Lenin argued that the international working class could never break politically from their own bourgeoisies, imperialist or otherwise, unless they championed the national question. Working class unity could therefore only be achieved internationally when, in the oppressor countries, the labour movement opposed Great Power nationalism and backed all anti-imperialist struggles unconditionally. It also required that, in a nation oppressed by imperialism, its labour movement should back the nationalist struggle insofar as it was directed against imperialism. This is because, in fighting Great Power oppression, small nation nationalism acquires a progressive content that it would not otherwise have in the imperialist epoch. In such conditions, it is by being the most consistent anti-imperialists that revolutionaries assert the separate interests of the working class, which are always independent of the more narrow concerns of the nationalists.

"Consequently, although revolutionaries do not aim to create myriads of small nations dotting the globe, if that is what is required to defeat imperialism and to secure a voluntary union of the international working class, then so be it. Such union would consolidate the single world economy, and so lay the basis for the mixing of national cultures, and therefore the eventual withering away of separate nations."

From:
www.marxists.org/history/e...dolsk.html

books.google.com/books

"Which is, of course, your choice. Now, that I've found the article quoted in that blog, in a book edited by his daughter, do you perhaps find it more so? It is merely information. Steven's supposedly authoritative site has been shown not to be truthful."

Look man, I questioned you for the source of something you posted. What other sources people use has no bearing on that request.



"Yes I did, and acknowledged that. I did so for those that might have missed it behind the camouflage of following posts. I have also posted several more as well. Perhaps you should go look at a few of them. And, by the way, if you actually read them, you will note that they contain link after link to other sources which, if you were really curious about the truth, rather than making character attacks, you might also examine. Some aren't even "random blogs." It is Steven that posted a single, biased, WRONG, source. I did find another Trotsky site, that mirrored it. I think they merely copied it verbatim, or perhaps it was the other way around. In any event, they are identical, both containing the error. "

Yes, I saw that you finally sourced the quote. But prior to that you just simply reposted the blog.

Also, asking you to source something isn't an attack on your character


"It most certainly is. I provided evidence, you dismissed it as incredible. I provided more evidence. It was ignored. Now, I have provided even more. Perhaps you believe it? Perhaps not. "

No, you provided a blog, and when questioned, reposted your blog

Sorry, i don't consider blogs to be credible sources

"Interesting, isn't it, that Erik starts quoting a mass murderer like Ronald Reagan who gave massive military aid to the following, murdering millions"

More unsupported reckless statements from an anti american commie leftie. Don't you have any daily workers to pass out today?