Com. Govindan Kutty Released on Bail!

Dear friends,

I was just informed today that People’s March editor P. Govindan Kutty has gotten bail. It is of course a conditional bail which included security of one lakh rupees and “2 personal bonds”. As many comrades may know, Com. Kutty had been jailed 2 months ago on fallacious charges due to his editing a legally registered magazine that is sympathetic to the Maoist movement in India. Com. Kutty had been beaten and mentally tortured during his detention which resulted in him engaging in a hunger strike until he was released. Furthermore, Com. Kutty has been suffering from numerous health-related issues. We welcome the news of his release. We now hope that the Indian government will release a number of other journalists and editors who have been sympathetic to people’s struggles in India and the region.

Lal Salaam,

Brownfist

Revolutionary Love

 

Stalin is faced with a decision in WWII to free his son, captured by the Nazis and sent to a concentration camp (where he would surely die) by releasing Nazi war commanders. Stalin choices not to free his son. Is this not profound love for the “people?” I should ask people look at Guevera’s quote about being moved by love, he not only loves but knows the duty that comes from such love. “You might have to cut the flowers, but you won’t stop the spring” is what he writes (maybe playing off a Neruda poem).

I think there are two distinctions that can be made here. There is the world of intimate love, love between people which have individual relations. There is love as a factor in politics. There are definite distinctions though, in that the first world of intimate personal relations is bound by shared identity and a certain recpriocal and mutual relation.

Politics is different, in the sense that there is not “intimate love” for anyone. You’re not making love to the Proletariat. Rather the Love that Guevera is speaking about is Duty as a political revolutionary to the masses of oppressed, and as his actual thought and work shows, that might even take the most violent means. He cuts the flowers, but there will still be spring.

Maybe just a thought, but what is taking priority for a Revolutionary. Here in a certain sense, love for the people is an ethos for self-sacrifice which is embodied in Stalin making the faithful decision not to save his son, an Abrahamic sacrafice, in favor of waging a ruthless war against Nazis.