Get your own Free Home PagePosted by Lidia from Poland (lemantad@polbox.com) on February 19, 1998 at 03:08:03:
Because of my Queens nostalgy I am holding now two reports written
by me in
1964. The first one, obligatory then in class 9-301 of JHS 189 Daniel
Carter
Beard, is entitled "The Common Market", the second one, optional, is
entitled
"The Era of Joseph Stalin". Both my reports have been highly appreciated
by our
teacher, Mr. Morton Shapiro ("Dear Lidia, This report is a teacher's
delight! It
is one of the best I have ever read!"; "Dear Lidia, An excellent report
in terms
of the amount of work that went into constructing it. [...] Proud to
have you as
my student."). I'm reading these reports and I'm reflecting upon our
way of
thinking in that time. To the report "The Common Market" I pasted in
among
others an article cut out of New York Times from February 25/64, "Monnet
Urges
Europe to Join U.S. in Atom Fleet" written by Arthur J. Olsen, and
I quoted the
following: "Jean Monnet said today that Europe could break the deadlock
in its
struggle toward unity if it joined with the United States in a multinational
atomic force. [...] Fritz Erler, leader of the Socialist group in Parliament,
said a united Europe remained a distant goal. "Nationalistic thinking
is again
beginning to flower and is endangering Atlantic solidarity," he declared."
As
concerns my report "The Era of Joseph Stalin" I must say that the main
item in
its bibliography was the book: Isaac Deutscher. "Stalin. A Political
Biography."
Vintage Books. A Division of Random House, New York, 1960 (still on
my shelf).
Therefore I am sure today that my report faithfully represents our
way of
thinking in that time because it does not include the following quotation
from
this book: "Stalin is nearing the completion of his tragic mission",
Trotsky
wrote in September 1937; "the more it seems to him that he needs nobody
any
longer, the nearer is the hour when he himself will be needed by nobody.
If the
bureaucracy succeeds in changing the forms of property and if a new
possessing
class crystallizes from its ranks, the latter will find new leaders
without a
revolutionary past and more educated ones. Stalin will hardly hear
a word of
thanks for the job he has accomplished. The open counter-revolution
will settle
accounts with him, very probably charging him with Trotskyism." A few
months
later Trotsky made a different forecast: "Stalin is preparing his "coronation"
on the ruins of the revolution and the corpses of revolutionaries.
Stalin's
Bonapartist coronation will coincide with his political death for the
labour
movement." (Ibidem, p.382). Old time - old way of thinking, new time
- new(?)
way of thinking.
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