Wikipedia

User:TJive/Ruy Lopez

< User:TJive

[A collection of external links pertaining to this case can be found at User:TJive/Ruy Lopez links]. --TJive 10:52, 14 February 2006 (UTC)

First encounter edit

My first involvement in Wikipedia where I was keenly conscious of Ruy Lopez happened in relation to the Wiki article on No Gun Ri, a South Korean village, an article which was created by Lopez. The village is only important as far as Lopez is concerned because of an incident during the early part of the Korean War where U.S. soldiers have been accused of a massacre, precipitated by an AP report in 1999. Since then released details and reports have highly qualified what specifically happened there so that it can not be neutrally identified as, "[a] massacre[ of] Korean civilians, mostly women and children," which was Lopez's assertion. Editors since his creation of the article attempted to insert references which disputed the characterization of the incident as it stood on the page; some of these were left alone, but when an anonymous editor, User:214.13.216.142, made significant edits to reflect this dispute, Ruy simply reverted him. When the anon made another edit, Ruy flagrantly admitted to using technical resources for the purposes of investigating the particular user, leaving this message in the edit summary: "rv, sorry Centcom - why not go and bomb Al-Jazeera again?"

He never discussed any of the changes, but I moved the content to a separate article, No Gun Ri incident, and made many additions, as well as removing the POV left on the page concerning the village itself. In response he began to chip away statements which did not suit him, as well as to move the article to "No Gun Ri massacre". While another user, User:Visviva, and I attempted to explain that this was not NPOV, he never discussed the matter and has simply continued to revert changes and move the article. Since then I have discovered similar POV insertions of his (and others') in articles which pertain to the article, including in U.S. 7th Cavalry Regiment and Pulitzer Prize for Investigative Reporting. I have reworded these insertions in an attempt to maintain NPOV but he has simply reverted them in a series of mass reverts he has engaged in pertaining to articles I have edited.

Sockpuppet accusation edit

The second instance I can recall of encountering Ruy was when he reported Trey Stone for a 3RR violation. There was some question as to whether it constituted an actual violation, as I pointed out. He then insinuated I was a sockpuppet of Trey Stone, an accusation he has repeated. This was also around the time where he attempted to insert POV language into Harry Wu, though I did not pay him much attention until after he had accused me of being a sockpuppet, which he also mentioned in an edit at that article around the same time as the Trey Stone 3RR report: "Is TJive a sock puppet? Hmm".

Espionage articles edit

As of this writing there is an ongoing dispute pertaining to a series of articles related to Soviet espionage within the U.S. Among these is Harry Magdoff, originally contested and rewritten by 172, who was brought to the article by Viajero, who in turn also had discussed it with Ruy Lopez. While the bulk of the proceedings at the talk page are not germane here, it is relevant to note that the majority of Lopez's comments are polemical attacks on involved users rather than factual objections; once the objections were refuted he simply picked up another line to attack. He also migrated to many other related articles where he has simply deleted factual details, sometimes large swaths of content, including in the following:

In some of these cases, notably that of White, other users have attempted to address specific problems they have with the article. User:Nobs01 politely extended an invitation to Lopez on his user page to do the same and he was starkly rebuffed. Nobs also attempted to admonish Lopez to state objections to the article and refrain from simply deleting content.

Mass reversions edit

Because of this behavior, I went around the various articles where he has summarily deleted content and reverted the changes. In response, he saw fit to look through my recent contributions and revert any recent edits I have made to articles regardless of their having no bearing on the dispute, with no explanation or talk whatsoever. I noticed this quickly because when I make substantial edits the articles go into my watchlist. Here are some examples from when he began to do this:

I edited "Democracy Now" because I was referred to a program of theirs in another forum. I edited "Helms-Burton Act" because I indirectly referenced to it in a prior edit to a U.S. history article (the last sentence of the changes). Dahal I contributed to because he is the leader of the Communist Party of Nepal (Maoist), which I have watched over for some time. Satellite state was an interest because of some edits I had done to a related term, puppet state. However, it became necessary to simply look at his own contribution list as he would revert over a dozen articles within the same timespan. Because of this I got caught up in changing some POV language he insisted on in two other articles, Lucheng and The Hunt for Red October.

Sockpuppet of Ruy Lopez edit

Perhaps noticing this, Ruy Lopez stopped reverting articles under his name. However, a user named Bee Hive appeared and contributed nothing but mass reversions and deletions of edits which I contributed, in the same vein as Lopez. Here are some examples of this:

Note that in the cases of the latter U.S. history article and of "Outposts of tyranny" in particular it comes within the context of a general consensus developed in the respective talk pages where "Bee Hive" had not contributed a single iota. Instead he simply saw fit to delete any contributions of my own while making no defense whatsoever for any single deletion, probably feeling it is best to simply provoke me into exhaustion rather than behave civilly and address substantive factual differences (as opposed to ideological ones).

Eventually he violated Wikipedia:Three-revert rule, and I reported him, explaining what was going on. Administrator then permanently blocked "Bee Hive, as a "sockpuppet created for the purpose of policy violation".

Ruy Lopez as a sockpuppet edit

Since then it has come to my attention that, in point of fact, Ruy Lopez was not initially a primary account. This section attempts to establish this fact incontrovertibly. I was pointed to a previous Rfc on User:Richardchilton, where at first glance it would appear that Richardchilton is a master account which created subsequent sockpuppets. It would be superfluous to recount much of the evidence put forward in support of this, but it is a contended fact admitted frankly by "Richardchilton" on his user page:

I see that Lancemurdoch and Hectorrodriguez, two of my usernames from this IP address range were found, from detective work to some extent, as well as someone looking at the admin page. I had another name from another IP for a long while, I see that has been discovered, although I no longer use that one. Durruti was found but I went out of my way to show how I could break the rules so I wanted that to be found. I've been editting a lot of pages thusfar, and while I've had some reverts for individual pages, no VV type detectives have popped up on my trail reverting all of my pages yet. We'll see how it goes.

However, a glance through the contribution pages of the major contributors in question reveals a different linear chronological succession in the positively identified users than that implicitly proposed in the Rfc:

  • Lancemurdoch -- Initial contribution: 01:43, December 14, 2003 Final: 06:05, January 16, 2004
  • HectorRodriguez -- Initial contribution: 12:02, February 8, 2004 Final: 03:42, February 20, 2004
  • Richardchilton -- Initial contribution: 13:48, February 20, 2004 Final: 21:12, April 7, 2004
  • Durruti -- Initial contribution: 20:31, March 3, 2004 Final: 20:48, March 3, 2004

For reference, Ruy Lopez is still a contemporary editor whose contributions began on http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:Contributions&target=Ruy_Lopez&offset=20041022004748&limit=500 04:41, March 27, 2004,] which was not even two weeks after "Richardchilton" admitted to using sockpuppets, and shortly before Richarchilton's contributions ended.

On the Wikipedia:Requests for comment/Richardchilton, there is a reference to an IRC log posted by User:Tim Starling, where a user self-identified as "Chill" (IP address 67.31.41.177 gives his bleak, inflammatory view of Wikipedia and its owners. He references to edits by User:Ed Poor on Sun Myung Moon which occurred in December of 2003, provoked by edits from User:67.170.216.109, whose contribution list reveals edits starting on 18:11, December 14, 2003, the same day that Lancemurdoch began editing. Based on this evidence, it is elementary to establish that the anonymous comments in chat were those of the user known by the above listed accounts.

The pertinent comment in the chat log for the present purpose is this one:

<Chill> I think part of my strategy needs to be to build up a "normal" user

This chat occurred on March 3, 2004, the only day on which "Durruti" contributed. Emphasizing the point, Ruy Lopez's contributions began on March 24.

Thus far I have not found any suspicious accounts which would suggest a trail prior to Lancemurdoch. His user page, with the initial message, betrays a sense of novel self-introduction:

Hello I'm Lance Murdoch. I plan to contribute pages regarding political economy (nowadays split into two subjects: political science and economics), as well as on other topics like chess. [Emphasis mine]

Ruy Lopez, of course, is the name for a popular set of opening moves in chess. He used to have a pic representing this fact on his user page. This, however, is not the only connection between Ruy Lopez and the Lancemurdoch accounts.

Ruy Lopez has on numerous occasions advertised to other leftist Wikipedians "alternative" ideological-based "encyclopedias" in an attempt to recruit their services in those locations. As follows are recent examples:

He had a similar reference to these sites on his user page until such time as he began to seriously engage in edit wars with myself (and after Adam Carr made reference to a possible ArmCom case against him in my talk), when he subsequently deleted it all.

Among the sites mentioned (as per Ruy Lopez's description) are:

  • Infoshop's OpenWiki - a general wiki with an anarchist bent (and run in an authoritarian fashion)
  • Anarchopedia - a general wiki with an anarchist bent (and run in an anarchic fashion)
  • Red Wiki - a general wiki with a somewhat socialist and Marxist bent
  • dKosopedia - a "left/progressive/liberal/Democratic" wiki
  • Demopedia - the "liberal/progressive" Democratic Underground's wiki
  • Sourcewatch - a good progressive wiki with a focus on think tanks, lobbyists, public relations firms and so forth

He has even contributed to Wikipedia articles pertaining to these sites, starting Anarchopedia and dKosopedia. I have found on most of these sites a user named "Lance Murdoch". Here are some of these relevant user pages:

On the dKosopedia page, Lance Murdoch says, "Hello. I am an admin at Disinfopedia and Anarchopedia and a user at InfoshopOpenWiki and Demopedia." I was able to find an administrar at Disinfopedia by the name of Venceremos which is also the name of another suspected sockpuppet of Lancemurdoch here on Wikipedia (as per the bottom of the Rfc page). His contribution page lists edits from March 11 and 12 of 2004, when Lancemurdoch was struggling to maintain a normal user. On the following three user pages:

He posted the following link: http://www.geocities.com/progressivepix/wikiwatch

It gives stern criticisms of Wikipedia. I archived the text at User:TJive/Wikipediawatch. Here are some relevant quotes for the purposes here [note that quotes from the GeoCities site are with one asterik, subsequent comments with two, and so forth]:

  • He goes on in this vein talking about his discussion about Ayn Rand with people "Many years ago, when I was an Undergraduate and a huge fan of Ayn Rand...". Jimbo makes his money on porn sites, which is what finances Wikipedia.
    • This theme is recurrent in many of Lopez's messages, such as the following:
      • User:Ruy Lopez The primary reason for this is embedded in the question, who runs Wikipedia? The answer is the millionaire Ayn Rand devotee Jimbo Wales, and to a lesser extent his various lieutenants.
      • "Re:The Ongoing Trolling" And why wouldn't it be so? Wales himself is a capitalist, and an American. What kind of encyclopedia would one expect to result from the structure put in place by an American millionaire after all the money he made on pornography and whatnot? Wales sometimes feels he has to position himself above the fray, but the history is clear. Meaning his actions, such as the attack on Secretlondon, not his noting how he was enthralled with Ayn Rand as a student and that sort of thing, although I'll consider those sorts of things as circumstantial evidence....So to those of you not coming to this list to kiss the ass of Ayn Rand reading porn magnate Jimbo Wales - check out the Khmer Rouge article as my personal example of how Wikipedia does not work for the history (or society) master category. And check out Demopedia, Dkosopedia and the other wiki's I mentioned so we can build a good, cooperative wiki for historical and political articles without having to deal with the RK's and Trey Stones. The RK's and Trey Stones can go to right-wing nut Fred Bauder's wikinfo.org. And if you like Wikipedia for it's articles in the master categories of science, mathematics and technology - well, I think Wikipedia is good in those areas as well. But for history/society it is a lost cause, and I suggest at least trying out these other places before you get frustrated and leave, as so many have done. These alternative wiki's are all growing, and in a few months they'll reach a level of critical mass. So check them out. [Archived at User:TJive/The Ongoing Trolling]
  • Wikipedia also has developers. Some people like Ed Poor say on their user page 'I haven't the slightest idea how I wound up getting sysop and developer rights, unless it's that I help out a lot and do what I'm told. Or maybe because I am "someone who is gifted at articulating and implementing WP's NPOV philosophy."' You can see his gift at work in the comments for changes on the Red Scare page - "Not all historians agree with this POV - just those who saw nothing wrong with communism - those murderous butchers who killed over 100 Million civilians". Ed Poor is a Moonie (since 1977). Welcome to Wikipedia.
    • Recall that "Chill" in the IRC logs disparagingly refers to Ed Poor as a Moonie.
    • On Lancemurdoch's user page: Let's look at Mr. Poor's change comments on the Red Scare page to see his implementation of WP's NPOV philosophy in action: Not all historians agree with this POV - just those who saw nothing wrong with communism - those murderous butchers who killed over 100 Million civilians. Perhaps Mr. Poor is someone who is gifted at articulating and implementing WP's NPOV philosophy. Or perhaps he knows how to, as he says, "do what I'm told" (actually, I have no doubt he excels at that). Or perhaps Wikipedia is owned and controlled by a wealthy capitalist, Jimbo, and he and his little cabal see Mr. Poor as their brethren and invited him into ranks.
  • Ever wonder what NPOV sources articles come from, say, History of Colombia? Well, where else would you learn about the history of Colombia than the US State Department? With the vast oil holdings of the American wealthy down there, not to mention the billions in military "aid" the US sends down to Colombia every year, you'll not find a more neutral source. And who better to explain the history of Colombia than the US state department?
    • Ruy's user page again: Contributions to articles like the History of Brazil from this group are modifications on an history summary which was originally written by the U.S. State Department, as all of the country history articles on Wikipedia are.
    • "Re:The Ongoing Trolling" As I said before: I think Wikipedia has a bright future in the science/mathematics master categories where everyone is cooperating (and isn't Wikipedia essentially a cooperative enterprise) and headed off the cliff long ago on the history and society master categories. In fact, most of the original articles for the history of countries was FUNDED BY THE US ARMY. Virtually all of those not from US government funding were written by the US State Department. Yes. Go back and look at the original articles for all "History of so-and-so-country".

An independent confirmation of whose website this is comes from Marxists.org: From New International, Vol.4 No.12, December 1938, pp.377-379. Transcribed by Lance Murdoch. Downloaded with thanks from http://www.geocities.com/progressivepix/footnote.html. [Emphases mine] [Archived at User:TJive/Max Shachtman]

The name "Progressive Pix" comes from the site mainly serving as a repository of links to stories and pictures of May Day and similar left-wing celebrations and protest, such as this one at "Indybay", posted by Lance Murdoch. Which means, Lance Murdoch created a website for GeoCities of which the basic arguments are repeated by Ruy Lopez.

That is not all. Since he finds an intrinsic bias in Wikipedia at the hands of the U.S. government, he wishes to counter it thusly:

Chameleon's page:

Despite Adam Carr's fantasies that I have pictures of Lenin and Stalin on my wall and in small communist sect/cult (he says he used to be a communist, so perhaps that's where he gets these ideas), I would say he is mistaken - I often feel I've been driven to edit war the Stalin and Khmer Rouge pages here by others, kind of like Robert Benchley's humorous story The Making of a Red, where a mild-mannered man is persecuted by reactionaries, causing him to drift further and further left. Despite that caveat, I thought it would be funny that since Wikipedia is based on US army and US State Department histories, to base say Red Wiki on translations of the Great Soviet Encyclopedia. Two problems come from this - one, the GSE is incredibly bombastic "The Vietnamese people fought, led by the shining example of the Great Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, leader of world socialists, created by the great Vladimir Ilich Lenin, who was inspired by the wise Karl Marx...". I think this can be dealt with though, there is a lot of good meat in the articles, this type of stuff just has to get filtered out. It's refreshing to read a history of Vietnam from the side of the Vietnamese people. The GSE's articles on topics like Vietnam and Cuba are much better than the ones Wikipedia used from the US Army and US State Department. The second problem with the GSE is the same problem with any international wiki - translation. It has to be translated into English. I have translated some articles, but my Russian is very bad, and there are often words I don't know. But this becomes a problem for any international effort. You need to have wikis in different languages, for the pages to be connected (like Wikipedia does it), and for there to be people who know multiple languages. Until I added it to English Wikipedia yesterday, only Italian Wikipedia had a Giuseppe Pinelli article. [(Bold) emphasis mine]

Lance Murdoch, at his "alternative Wikis", had the same idea!

Reinventing the wheel
Obviously, it would be better to jumpstart this site with works already in the public domain.
People have been bringing Wikipedia GFDL'd works here, which is fine. Wikipedia itself has pilfered from old public domain encyclopedias. I have brought articles from the Encyclopedia of Marxism, which is GFDL.
Anyhow, there is a Great Soviet Encyclopedia - first edition 1926, second edition 1949, third edition 1969-1978. Since the USSR only began copyrighting works in May 27, 1973, the first and second editions are, I believe, public domain, and the third edition might be. The questions are is the third edition copyright, and what are the copyrights of the English translated works?
Other problems are is the encyclopedia online, and is in English? Actually, it appears it is online, in Russian:
Encyclopedia 1
Encyclopedia 2
This might be a good source of material. [Archived at User:TJive/AltWiki]
      • [:Progressive users will have flourishing wikis dealing with the same topics. These wikis will probably not discuss quantum mechanics or fracal geometry - why reinvent the wheel, and I don't see a problem of cooperation on those topics at Wikipedia, although of course some scientific topics have controversy attached to them, like whether evolution happened or whether some deity in the clouds created everything, or whether the truth about global warming is being told by scientists or the oil companies.]

Also at Red Wiki: Thanks. I wrote most of them for Infoshop's OpenWiki and Anarchopedia after I became disillusioned with Wikipedia. Both of those Wiki's are anarchist-focused, this wiki is probably a better place for many of these articles. Most of my articles are written by me. Many of them are translations from the Great Soviet Encyclopedia (with some changes, the GSE is apt for hyperbole, throwing clauses like "led by the example of the Great October Socialist Revolution") - an encyclopedia which is public domain's outside of the USSR, atleast up until the 3rd edition published before 1973. I don't like the trend of copying articles from Wikipedia into other Wiki's, but do it once-in-a-rare-while, when the author of the article is good and it hasn't been ruined too much by the Wikipedia peanut gallery. Anyhow, I'm still writing and translatin', right now I'm working on Committee for Non-Violent Action.

The most direct connection in this context with Secretlondon at Secretlondon's page: Regarding, US-centrism...are you aware that the foundation of all (of the dozens I've checked so far) the historical articles on Wikipedia are on histories written by the US Army? To counter this, I have been working on getting copyright-free translations of the Great Soviet Encyclopedia on the alternative wiki's. The GSE is online actually, but is in Russian.

Ruy Lopez reports, Lance Murdoch posts.

POV warring and more on sockpuppetry edit

Ruy Lopez seems to be most well known for his edit warring in the cases of topics related to Soviet and Cambodian history. As mentioned above, he often gets accused of sympathizing with the subjects, which he denies:

Despite Adam Carr's fantasies that I have pictures of Lenin and Stalin on my wall and in small communist sect/cult (he says he used to be a communist, so perhaps that's where he gets these ideas), I would say he is mistaken - I often feel I've been driven to edit war the Stalin and Khmer Rouge pages here by others, kind of like Robert Benchley's humorous story The Making of a Red, where a mild-mannered man is persecuted by reactionaries, causing him to drift further and further left.

He's not being forthright, however. Lance Murdoch notes at Red Wiki:

I feel these articles should be honest and factual. On the other hand, most articles on Socialism, Anarchism, Communism and what-not dwell entirely on negative aspects of Socialist history, so I tend not to do that. In this regard I'm a fan of the "sympathetic point of view". Wikipedia says it is "neutral" yet most of it's articles on socialism are screeds against it to one degree or another, I feel it's better to just be honest and tell people to read multiple sources to get a full picture and to decide for themselves. [Emphasis mine] [Archived at User:TJive/AltWiki]

Well what are the points of view he is sympathetic to? The answer is not easily found on Wikipedia, where Ruy Lopez is guarded. However, Lance Murdoch elsewhere lets his hair down and speaks his mind. Two key topics come to mind, as always: the Khmer Rouge and the Soviet Union. Lance Murdoch has written about the former in his "sympathetic" portrayal:

The Liberation of Phnom Penh
It was decided in 1974 that the CPNLAF would liberate Phnom Penh during the dry season of 1975. On April 17, 1975, the CPNLAF entered Phnom Penh.
The US aerial bombardment of Cambodia, along with the civil war had caused many peasants to flee the countryside and head for the cities. This led to a situation where crops were not being grown, while people in the city, including the massive influx of refugees had to be fed. Compounding this, international food aid was cut off as soon the CPNLAF entered Phnom Penh. Many Cambodians had not been eating sufficiently prior to liberation, and Phnom Penh only had several days of food store to feed people. There were also fears the US might begin bombing Phnom Penh. The Royal Government of National Union of Kampuchea began sending some peasants back to the country so as to grow food.
On April 30, 1975, Saigon was liberated by the Vietnamese. In the weeks that followed, Cambodian and Vietnamese troops were engaging in minor skirmishes due to border disputes, especially islands off the coast of Indochina.
On January 5, 1976 a new constitution was put in place and the Royal Government of National Union of Kampuchea became Democratic Kampuchea. On March 20, 1976, Democratic Kampuchea held national elections to the People's Representative Assembly. In April 1976 Sihanouk and his cabinet resigned and was replaced with a new cabinet, with Khieu Samphan as head of state.

Here he has written, unperturbed, a history of the Khmer Rouge which describes their takeover in Cambodia as a "liberation", describes the emptying of the cities (an ideological move which killed many Cambodians) as, "[t]he Royal Government of National Union of Kampuchea began sending some peasants back to the country so as to grow food," which he implies was necessary due to actions of the U.S. He then goes on to imply that the Khmer Rouge was elected in a coalition government after the capture of Phnom Penh.

The issue of names and coalitions was of course one of the most contested in Ruy Lopez's revert wars over Khmer Rouge and related articles. It has come up elsewhere with Lopez, such as changing references to the "Viet Cong" and "VC" to "National Liberation Front" and "NLF". Lance Murdoch admits all of these to be pet peeves of his:

I also try not to use bourgeois propaganda phrases. An example is "free market". What does that mean? Putting the word free aside, saying the US has a free market and, say, the USSR didn't is silly. Further putting aside corporate welfare and the like, the difference between the US and USSR economies were not the markets - a market for commodities, say a "super-market" which sold food, was not much difference in the US or the USSR. The main difference was over production and control over production of commodities. Not the market and exchange of them, which was more similar, not the consumption of commodities, which was similar. There are lots of other bourgeois propaganda phrases - middle class, Viet Cong, Shining Path, Khmer Rouge etc. I try avoiding all of these terms.

Here is a recent example of his removing "propaganda" phrases for the benefit of Wikipedia, at the article, March on Rome:

Widespread social discontent, aggravated by middle-class fear of a socialist revolution and by disappointment over Italy's meagre gains from the peace settlement after World War I

Changed to:

Widespread social discontent was aggravated by bourgeois fear of a socialist revolution following the biennio rosso. There was also disappointment over Italy's meagre gains from the peace settlement after World War I.

Biennio rosso is a recent addition of Lopez. "Sympathetic point of view" for him comes quite naturally:

The Biennio rosso (English: Two red years) were two years, 1919 and 1920, in which there was a massive struggle for political power by the workers of Italy. In Turin, workers councils were formed, and factories were taken over by their workers.

They are not confined to relatively obscure topics, however. Some other significant contributions of his are left unmolested and egregious insertions can still be found in some articles. These are two noteworthy examples:

  • 1977 Soviet Constitution -- "Like democratic constitutions," changed to "A democratic constitution,"; "In line with the Marxist-Leninist ideology of the government, the Constitution also granted social and economic rights," appended with, "not provided by constiutions in capitalist bourgeois democracies." The next paragraph has "democratic" changed to "bourgeois" and the following phrase added to, "the Soviet Constitution placed limitations on political rights": "whereas in bourgeois democratic countries these limitations are usually left up to the federal legislative or judicial systems, or state constitutions and their corresponding executive, legislative and judicial systems."
  • Moscow State University -- A new paragraph is added: "After the Great October Socialist Revolution in 1917, the school opened up to allow the children of the proletariat and peasants, not just those of the more well-to-do petit bourgeois. In 1919, tuition fees were done away with, and a preparatory facility was created for children of the working class so that they would be able to pass the admission examinations."

The Richardchilton page recounts other instances of vandalism and disruptive, POV edits that would be redundant here.

So what does he think about the Soviet Union, after all? According to him he's just trying to compensate for the excesses of anti-communists. Yet that's not all there is to the story, as you can see in Lance Murdoch's various postings on other forums (Archived at User:TJive/Stalin:

In terms of accusations against the USSR or Stalin, the only there there I have ever seen is that a 1st Special Section of the Ministry of Internal Affairs (MVD) summary, dated December 11, 1953 documents 681,692 executions occurring in 1937-1938. Aside from this, I don't see much repression in the USSR.
This seems to be a list mostly of Trotskyists, so I doubt anyone would dispute the above any more than NBC News would, although I'd be interested in anyone disputing the accuracy of the report, or who would be sympathetic to the circumstances surrounding the Great Purge. Molotov in his old age said the Great Purge was necessary for the survival of the Soviet Union in the face of the coming Nazi invasion, and he was probably right.
In the end of course, Stalin's real crime was not 1937 and 1938 executions, but standing up to capitalism, fascism and imperialism.
On Fri, 28 Jan 2005 08:48:30 +0100, Einde O'Callaghan <einde@gmx.de> wrote: > What about the millions in the Gulag? The existence of the prison camps > isn't seriously disputed by anybody.
There are millions in prison in the US today, although people seem to enjoy writing more about Russian prisons from decades ago.
> > This seems to be a list mostly of Trotskyists, > > Since these so-called Trotskyists include the majority of teh delegates > ate the 1934 Party Congress, the so-called "Congress of the Victors" > (Stalinists all) and the majority of the Central Committee members > elected there it seems to me that this is a rather loose use of the term > "Trotskyist", to say the least.
  • This* seems to be a list mostly of Trotskyists. This mailing list.
> However, I'll say no more since the Stalin/Trotsky dispute is taboo on > this list - but if somebody posts nonsense such as this i can't leave it > unanswered. This will be my last word on this topic.
Well someone else was the original poster regarding gulags and Stalin and breaking this taboo I was unaware of, I am just answering it as well.
On Fri, 28 Jan 2005 19:13:42 +1100 (EST), Rohan Gaiswinkler <rohanger@yahoo.com.au> wrote: > To all on the list > It's probably a wasted effort trying to convince these completely > unreconstructed Stalinists of the error of their ways. Let them live in their > fairy-tale, Uncle-Stalin-was-like-Santa-Clause wonderland if they want to, I > say. They are destined to take their religious devotion to Stalin to the grave, > and we shall remain. > > Rohan G
Great, that means people can always go down to Pathfinder Books (during the 2 hours a week or so it's open, Tuesday 11AM-1PM or something) and buy The Death Agony of Capitalism and the Tasks of the Fourth International. National Review will have a steady stream of "ex"-Trot writers for time immemorial (my money on the next one is Snitch Hitchens). And perhaps after I die, some country somewhere (Ceylon?) will finally be taken over by a Trot government, God help them.

He is doing several things here:

  1. Admitting to being sympathetic to the Great Purge.
  2. Saying he does not believe the Soviet Union was repressive aside from this.
  3. In this context, badgers other users for failing to criticize anti-Stalinist information.
  4. Also disparaging "Trots" (Trotskyites) in the process.

In other words, as "Rohan Gaiswinkler" stated, he is an unreconstructed Stalinist.

Incidentally, that last post provides another direct connection to Ruy Lopez in language. Notice that Lance Murdoch refers to Christopher Hitchens as "Snitch Hitchens", an obscure epithet used by his far[, far] left detractors. Now notice the following two instances of Ruy Lopez doing the same:

And for the final nail in the coffin regarding these users all being equal, something which brings me back to my initial experience with Ruy Lopez:

http://mailman.lbo-talk.org/pipermail/lbo-talk/Week-of-Mon-20050328/006504.html [Archived at User:TJive/RuyWikipedia]

I have more peace of mind knowing after working days at an article, half-witted reactionaries will not descend on it and destroy it, questioning whether everyone who said Americans killed people at No Gun Ri, Korea was lying and so forth. On Wikipedia they may tear it apart, but on Red Wiki, I can work with others and collaborate.
Lance

See the history of No Gun Ri. Decide who is the reactionary, and who is complaining about him.

Intentions, flatly stated edit

Now, what of this? Are people allowed to have a Stalinist POV on Wikipedia? Well sure, I suppose, but what is this person's intent here? Let's allow his own words to explain:

One idea I have had for a bit was what would it be like to have a non-Wikipedia wiki where everything was different, from who owned the servers, to what the point of view policies would be, to what the structure of administration would be. I have discovered, via User:Fennec that there are other wikis out there that are more up my alley. Perhaps everything is not 100% the way I would want it on them, but they are definitely more on my wavelength than here.

Anyhow, me exploring these sites (especially one particular one) has taken time away from my campaign here. So now, the time I allot for Wiki activity is now half on other Wikis, on which I get along with the "power structure" better (the power structure being more rank and file, user supported etc.). I am still spending half of my time here however, it just irks me that people are going to go to Google and find a Wikipedia page with some total BS, and hear a claim that it is a supposedly neutral point of view article with "facts" on whatever. I have won some victories "in the open" (e.g. known user names), as I had too much consensus on my side about certain things, and I am happy about these, and am happy about my less well known edits as well.

So that is where I stand now. My time spent here has been halved, which shall be a relief to some. But I am not yet gone. There are certain articles where I am absolutely not going to let some of the BS said be stated as if it were a fact. I would prefer however to be part of a wiki that is (or is more) user-owned, user-run, user-controlled, and watch Wikipedia crumble under the weight of its own authoritarianism, centrality of control, lack of working processes and so forth. In other words, I would prefer, as these alternative wikis become more viable and more popular, to contribute positively to them, have all the sane people slowly leave here (unless things are radically remade), and I myself start abandoning the struggle here so that only the nutcases would take over. In fact, if a user-run alternative to Wikipedia grew to be equal to it, I think I would abandon Wikipedia completely, save for perhaps noting on some frustrated user's web page that there are alternative wikis out there that may be more to their liking. Richardchilton 02:57, 30 Mar 2004 (UTC)

I'm going to put my thoughts on Wikipedia here, as well as some other things. This account is going to be on a hiatus in terms of editting articles, although I may engage in meta-discussions.

Anyhow, when looking at the power distribution of Wikipedia, one may ask, what is the distribution of power? Obviously, the average user currently has a degree of power. Admins have even power. And who has the most power? The person who controls the means of production, Jimbo Wales. Lets start with the users.

If one looks at the demographics of the world, half of human beings in the world get by on less than $2 a day and are either chronically malnourished or have serious concerns over where their NEXT meal is coming from. On the other hand, if you look at Internet user demographics, the most average user would be a white, white collar American man. It can be seen a number of ways on Wikipedia which don't have to be gone into here. Anyhow, this makes for an America-centric, white collar worldview. It is quite obvious to me that this view is sometimes disconnected from reality. I sometimes think of Orwell's ministry of information, where the ally of one day turns into the enemy of the next, and the glowing portraits of them have to be replaced by propaganda caricatures. An example might be Saddam Hussein, whom the US armed, who at one point "gassed his own people"...and kept getting arms from the US! It's quite a wonder how the tragedy of this was not discovered in the US until a few years later. But this is the type of thing you find regularly on Wikipedia, anything friendly to the bourgeoisie is all goodness and light, anything not is a demon who the wildest accusation against deserves a prominent place on their page.

One thing I've noticed is that among the worst enemies of the US elite, even the right to name themselves has been stripped, and some pejorative or propaganda name is stuck on them. For example, the Communist Party of Kampuchea becomes the "Khmer Rouge". The Communist Party of Peru becomes the "Shining Path". Anyone in the popular front (National Liberation Front) fighting against the South Vietnamese government is called "Viet Cong", e.g. Vietnamese communist, whether they are communist or not. It seems to be the case where the most extreme propaganda smearing is going on that the US government and corporate media starts pegging these pejorative names on these groups, despite their protestation. I discussed this on Wikipedia talk:Naming conventions (common names), that it seemed logical to me to call a group what they call themselves (e.g. the Boy Scouts are called the Boy Scouts, The UK's Labor party is called the labor party and so forth). People came out of the woodwork to say this is not to be the case - the proper place for the name of a group is not from the group itself. The US corporate media, which is controlled by the wealthiest <2% of Americans (who are relatively wealthy themselves) is what is to determine the name of these things. They can get the name from the Pentagon psyops department or the State department or whatnot, disseminate it, and this is what we now must have as our authority of what to call something. Going back to 1984 again, this reminds me of the Newspeak dictionary, where words like freedom become thoughtcrime. Luckily we can still call french fries french fries for now, instead of being required to call them freedom fries (or eventually thoughtcrime fries). Such is Wikipedia.

One thing I've noticed is there seems to be a systematic persecution of left-wing users on Wikipedia. Users who do nothing but make POV right-wing rants like User:Ed Poor get made admin. The only admin who tries to help protect left wing users from persecution, User:172, is himself persecuted (Wikipedia:Conflicts_between_users/172, User_talk:172_sysop_status). Other users who might be called left wing like User:Wik are also persecuted (Wikipedia_talk:Requests_for_arbitration/Wik,Wikipedia:Conflicts_between_users/Wik).

An interesting thing is that the right-wing users are all ultimately and leveraging their ultimate power - that Wikipedia's servers are owned by "Jimbo" Wales, who controls everything, doled out adminships and so forth. I should note that Jimbo, who controls Wikipedia's capital of servers, is a fan of the far right Ayn Rand. The right-wingers base what they want to do on authority - the authority of adminships, where they can ban users and so forth and so on.

I do not include myself with 172 and Wik because I do not care about the rules of Wikipedia as much as they do. I do have some rules of thumb for doing things though, and one of them is when embarking on something new to always follow the rules in the beginning.

An interesting thing to consider about myself and the effect I will eventually have on Wikipedia, structure more than content, is that I am not a vandal in terms of trying to deny service to Wikipedia, or replace entries with "I RULE" and whatnot, I am just primarily unhappy with some of the propaganda I see passed off here as Encyclopedia fact.

Furthermore as far as "following the rules", currently whether I do this or not is more at my discretion than something that can be forced upon me. Another interesting thing is that admins are given a lot of power, and all I need is one admin to really have it out for me if I'm following the rules, to among other things silence me completely. But their control over me only exists as long as I follow the rules, and I've come to the point where I am less interested in allowing them that control over me. I wanted to see how far things could be pushed and frankly was a little surprised at how authoritarian these people trying to push a certain POV on Wikipedia are. Well, I guess that's how it always is.

It's an interesting thing. User:TimStarling for one realizes that currently whether or not I follow the rules are really just an option for me, so he's gone to work to make Wikipedia more authoritarian, more under tight control and so forth. It's interesting, how limited my functionality is within the system, and how eager some are to expand the authoritarian nature of the system. It took me about five minutes to figure out one way of getting around the rules (proxy servers). It seems quite a lot of time is being spent trying to figure out how to build a wall to prevent this from happening and keep people from breaking the rules. I consider this a victory - if hours of time by the enemy has to be spent to prevent me from doing something I did in five minutes, I consider that I have won. Being as that I've been on the Internet for 15 years so far, and still remember when domain names resolved to sri-nic.arpa, I can tell you that after the hours of effort that will be spent on this is eventually successful, I will simply spend another five minutes and use some other method to mask my IP. I've been reading about dialectic materialism and I see all of this as being natural, I have a demand (that entries stop being so biased), and the power structure is fighting against this.

One interesting note is I faced the same sort of thing myself once. I once had a web site where people could upload anything. People often uploaded warez for others to download. My problems with this in order of importance were: it filled up disk space, it used up bandwidth, and I would get legal letters. On the other hand, I had limited time to fight against it and didn't want to make things too difficult for my normal users. The end result was I tightened things up so that maybe people would go onto the next loose haven to trade warez. But on the other hand, if someone did it on a small scale and cleverly they could usually get away with it, and frankly, as long as it was on something of a small scale and not wrecking my whole operation, I didn't really care. That's how things operate - retail stores could be like Fort Knox to prevent theft, but instead they use a certain amount of security, and as long as things don't go past a certain level they're OK with it.

Personally, although I'm sure this galls some, I consider Wikipedia as much mine as anybody elses, including Jimbo's. I do not see the admins as people trying to maintain balance and NPOV, but rather as commissars making sure people stick to the party line, in this case, whatever is the crap that pours out of the corporate media on television is taken as truth. I consider it my duty to fight against this, using any tools I have in my arsenal, and I'm afraid with the limited amount of ways to do things within the rules, and the ease of working outside of the rules, I choose the latter.

VeryVerily's detective work and accusations are going to matter a lot less now, what are you going to do about someone changing his IP every few minutes? Frankly, I have been a lot less restrained in the past few days. Before I would qualify and modify things I thought were POV. Now I just delete them wholesale and - most of the time no one stops me. I felt the need to go by the NPOV before, but now I don't, and I am a lot more successful in modifying Wikipedia now.

The fact of the matter is, Wikipedia's rules system is biased and unfair, especially taking the human element of it into account. There is not much enforcement power for it though right now, so in many ways it is up to the user whether he wants to follow the rules or not. So I'm going to keep living outside of the rules for a little while and see what happens.

I see that Lancemurdoch and Hectorrodriguez, two of my usernames from this IP address range were found, from detective work to some extent, as well as someone looking at the admin page. I had another name from another IP for a long while, I see that has been discovered, although I no longer use that one. Durruti was found but I went out of my way to show how I could break the rules so I wanted that to be found. I've been editting a lot of pages thusfar, and while I've had some reverts for individual pages, no VV type detectives have popped up on my trail reverting all of my pages yet. We'll see how it goes.

<Chill> The finally indignity of POV is to not even let a group name itself. We should change the African-American entry to niggers since that name was commonly usage (by white Americans, the only group on the planet whose opinion matters) to refer to a certain group of people. The CPK called itself the CPK, Khmer Rouge is just what the American corporate press called the CPK (just like they called the NLF in Vietnam the Viet Cong, or

<Chill> Judeo-Christian values thing, like Adam being the one to have the power to name all the beasts of the air, fish of the sea and that sort of thing?

<TimStarling> hi Chill

<Chill> Hello

<TimStarling> did Adam really have the power to name everything?

<Chill> Genesis 2

<TimStarling> I wish I had the power to name everything, that would be handy

<Chill> 19 Now the LORD God had formed out of the ground all the beasts of the field and all the birds of the air. He brought them to the man to see what he would name them; and whatever the man called each living creature, that was its name. 20 So the man gave names to all the livestock, the birds of the air and all the beasts of the field.

<Chill> I'm sick of this common usage crap...I wonder what a good page to argue about this is

<TimStarling> well animals hardly have the power to name themselves

<TimStarling> it's not a very good analogy

<Chill> I've found that if you hang in long enough on an edit war, you usually win

<Chill> Attrition means victory on Wikipedia

*** Chill is samson@dialup-67.31.41.177.Dial1.NewYork1.Level3.net (abcde)

*** on channels: #p2p-hackers #wikipedia

*** on IRC via server irc.freenode.net (http://freenode.net/)

*** Chill has been 3 seconds idle

<TimStarling> yeah, there's a page about that somewhere, isn't there?

<Chill> I'm going to leave the Palestine pages alone, those edit wars scare even me

<TimStarling> suit yourself

<TimStarling> how long have you been at Wikipedia?

<Chill> Several months

<Chill> I consider VeryVerily my main enemy

<TimStarling> do you like the place?

<Chill> I just found out Jimbo made all his money on porno

<TimStarling> yeah but he does good deeds with it

<TimStarling> :)

<TimStarling> he's like Robin Hood

<Chill> At least VeryVerily is not an op

<TimStarling> except he robs from the perverts to give to the poor

<TimStarling> ;)

<Chill> I think part of my strategy needs to be to build up a "normal" user

<brion> what about the poor perverts?

<Chill> who will evenually get op

<TimStarling> that's clever

<Chill> Then I will be on an equal plane as RickK, Ed Poor, Jiang and Fred Bauder

<maximus_rex> doesn't building a "normal user", imply you are not acting normally now?

<Chill> Is Ed Poor acting normally now?

<Chill> and he's an admin

<Chill> I think I'm going to start an anti-Ed Poor campaign

<Chill> Like they did for 172

<Chill> Right now a capitalist, Jimbo, owns the means of production

<TimStarling> have you crossed swords with Ed Poor before?

<Chill> I usually cross swords with VeryVerily

<Chill> Ed Poor just has a lot of trouble with NPOV

<TimStarling> he thinks he's a "maven of neutrality"

<Chill> Ed Poor is very high on Sun Myung Moon

<Chill> Maybe he's a Moonie and the Moonies make him edit on Wikipedia

<Chill> http://en.wikipedia.org/w/wiki.phtml?title=Sun_Myung_Moon&action=history

<brion> he is a moonie. don't know if they put him up to it though :)

<Chill> # (cur) (last) . . 15:46, 16 Dec 2003 . . Ed Poor (Moonies as smear word used by opponents)

<Chill> # (cur) (last) . . 15:43, 16 Dec 2003 . . Ed Poor (Two opposing views on "who" created the term "Moonies")

<Chill> I'll tell you the truth

<Chill> I could deal with NPOV if it was done

<Chill> MyRedDice is the only neutral admin I've seen thusfar

<Chill> everyone else is always on the side of the left-wing or right-wing person

<Chill> I've found guerilla tactics are much more effective than trying to be nice

  • <* Signoff: Chill (Read error: 104 (Connection reset by peer))

<TimStarling> well that was an interesting conversation

<maximus_rex> that was br00tus/Lancemurdoch

<TimStarling> really? How do you know that?

<TimStarling> and are either of those users banned?

<maximus_rex> same ISP and interests on the 'pedia

<maximus_rex> no, but br00tus comes on here and trolls about nazis and communists some times

<TimStarling> well, he's currently known as Richardchilton

<TimStarling> I looked him up in the server logs

It is too bad I don't have a colocated machine any more, or I would set up a wiki myself (or several). I am cognizant however that most these wikis have public domain or Creative Commons or GFDL licenses, and they even all use MediaWiki, so what I write for them I can put in Wikipedia if I want. I don't though - quick article like No Gun Ri or the aforementioned Giuseppe Pinelli I put in, but articles I spend days or weeks on I put on these other wikis. Some articles fit across wikis, so some articles I've written and posted on Demopedia, Dkosopedia, Red Wiki, Infoshop's OpenWiki and Anarchopedia. Some articles I post on just one wiki. So it depends. I often write articles on popular subjects, or groups with many current members, in an effort to get into Google and perhaps attract readers, or even editors. People don't want to contribute until there is a critical mass of people working on these encyclopedias, so I will be that person working to build up a critical mass of articles.
One thing I would ask - if say you look at the Tony Benn article which is about 10,000 words long, erase almost all of it and start pretty much from scratch and write a 50,000 word biography of him, with sources and that sort of thing - I'd ask that you post it to one of these alternative wikis. Maybe Dkosopedia, maybe Red Wiki, maybe Anarchopedia - whatever. I dislike the habit many of these wikis have of just copying Wikipedia articles. However, some of them are very good - User:172 completely rewrote the George F. Kennan days after he died, and it is a great article - and that sort of thing I would not mind in these other wikis. I would not want the Wikipedia article on Noam Chomsky though, which is complete garbage. A good biography article on Chomsky might mention Faurisson, but that shouldn't be half the article. This is all part of the "building towards critical mass" I'm talking about.
I am developing a portfolio of articles I have written on these alterna-wikis. Some of the articles have even been helped by others - with new information, spelling and punctuation changes and so forth. If a really good new wiki pops up of the type you're talking about, I can easily post all, or part, of my portfolio on the new wiki. One of the reasons I contribute to these alternative wikis is to try to get the ball rolling on them, building up a critical mass. Most of my creativeness goes to them, on Wikipedia I mostly slug it out over questions about Polish collaborators with the Nazis, Pershing II missiles being stationed in Europe, whether the Italian elections in 1948 were fair or not, and stuff like that. If these other wikis take off, I am out of here. One could almost say I am here to primarily recruit, and to hold the fort until these other wikis take off. In a few months I think they will get a bit better, and in a few years hopefully they'll be flourishing. Ruy Lopez 17:30, 11 July 2005 (UTC)

http://en.wikipedia.org/w/wiki.phtml?title=Wikipedia:Requests_for_adminship&diff=2976790&oldid=2976773

  • IRC chat sez: <ErnestMandel> Fennec, it's too bad you told me about these other cool wikis because you have derailed my guerilla campaign against Wikipedia
    • Erm. I don't quite know what to say. Enjoy yourself. - Fennec 03:02, 30 Mar 2004 (UTC)

A few things become clear when reading these comments (and undoubtedly many others can be found):

  • He has always considered the site a hopeless case which will probably eventually be run completely by "right-wingers" (if it is not already so, as you can see from his lashing out at administrators and those who have "control of the means of production"). The drafts of this complaint he has been circling even recently are simply polished versions of the Richardchilton rant from last year.
  • With respect to this perception, his edits here are a distraction from the work he considers valuable, done on the political/ideological-based sites.
  • He considers that his edits are for essentially political purposes, even warfare, that he is "hold[ing] the fort". He quotes Mao and Sun Yat-Sen to emphasize the point. Part of doing so is apparently to engage in mass reversions and IP hounding of users whose views he disdains.
  • In respect to leaving, he wishes to lure left-wing editors away from the project in order to build up political/ideological-based sites. "One could almost say I am here to primarily recruit...."
  • He plans to leave if he can accomplish this, as it is his only real goal in being here.

Summary edit

The single inescapable conclusion from all of this is that Ruy Lopez is merely a symptom of a larger problem: an old guard Stalinist who is attempting to either utilize the site to pursue his ideology or, if failing to do so, wreck it and lead ideological fellow-travellers to a separate project. He deserves to be banned, and his contributions thoroughly scrutinized.

[Last modified (other than minor format fixes) - Wednesday, July 27, 2005, 7:38:48 PM by me. --TJive 10:56, 14 February 2006 (UTC)]

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