I'm waiting to see his Fulan Gong wonderfulness holding hands with Pat Robertson on TV---a little prayer service for persecuted religious cultists.
Tom L.
Rob Schaap wrote:
> Hear, hear, Boddhi!
>
> >The legacy of the Red Mandarins seems
> >almost certainly to be the grinding into the dust of disrepute the
> >already-damaged reputation of socialism. Karl Marx deserves better. We
> >have nothing to lose but our chains.
>
> And so often it's the likes of us taking up those rusty old chains and
> giving 'em another turn, eh?
>
> Now, it may be that I read too much deLong or Sawicky, but it does seem to
> me that the problem with daft little cults in polities like China is that
> they suggest alternatives to a 'scientific' brand of governance that can,
> by its own self-validating logic, not be seen to tolerate any organised
> departure from the one true path but its own.
>
> My only little quibble is that we do have things to lose other than our
> chains - and we are losing 'em. Liberalism is in objective retreat, albeit
> in the wrong direction - an index to which is the concerted rhetorical
> campaign to associate same with its nemesis ('the free market') to the
> point of identity ... I hear, for instance, that Fukuyama is making as big
> a splash with his new paeon as he did with his first - and I heard one
> review which suggested another success was inevitable as his first book had
> been so perfectly vindicated by events! A lefty's fight today is most
> immediately a fight for a few vestiges of residual liberalism, I'm afraid.
>
> Yours menshevishly,
> Rob.