The Deal

Max Sawicky sawicky at epinet.org
Sat Jul 11 10:32:45 PDT 1998



> >Shouldn't the FDR administration be judged
> >by the times it was in? Isn't the historical
>
> Tired from a week of 9 to 5 and too lazy to put the following in my own
> words, here's some friendly reminders from Mr. Christopher Hitchens:
>
> "There was F.D.R. the good and F.D.R. the bad. . . .

The rest of the quote is all FDR the bad. My point is not to celebrate FDR the good, though a simple reminder as to that dimension is apparently required around here, but to note the nature of progress under social- democratic or liberal regimes.


> F.D.R. the bad was the man
> who betrayed the Spanish Republic, shut the doors of the United States to
> desperate refugees from Europe and campaigned ruthlessly to take over the
> British Empire as an American dominion. (You can read the
> evidence for this on almost every page of the three-volume
Churchill-Roosevelt Correspondence,

Hell, I saw it on public TV.

As for implicit lament over the British Empire's fire sale of assets to Pax Americana, as the saying goes, I can hear the smallest violin in the world.

The bottom line is that many of the comrades see no historical development over the past 100 years; just an unending sequence of atrocities against people and planet under capitalist rule. Small wonder that against this ahistorical panorama, revolution is understood as a moral choice, and lack of fealty to this choice as some combination of excusable ignorance, brainwashing, and immorality. Thus the more intelligent the partisan of non-revolution, the more evil must he be.

MBS



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