USA: More Repressive Than North Korea (was Re: RES: a trip to North Korea)

Doug Henwood dhenwood at panix.com
Tue Apr 25 13:07:44 PDT 2000


Wojtek Sokolowski wrote:


>This is a false comparison, Doug, and I am surprised that you fall for that
>crap. You need to compare apples to apples, that is, countries under
>similar conditions. So to compare NK or Cuba to the US - you would have to
>perform a mental experiment of imagining the US being under similar
>conditions to the two countries in question, i.e. the same level of foreign
>threat, foreign induced economic instablity etc. - and then try to imagine
>how much bourgeois freedom you would have in the US in such a situation.
>My educated guess based on the behavior of US sponsored "democracies" is
>that you would probably end up in a torture chamber, a concentration camp,
>or being thrown out of a military helicopter. So would not you rather be
>in a Cuban jail instead?

That's a pretty weird exercise. This thread seems to me about that ancient controversy, whether bourgeois democracy is a sham or not. For all its flaws, I'm on the non-sham side, and our resident Leninists seem to be on the sham side. Your counterfactuals are pure but empty mental exercises about which one could never say anything conclusive.

Doug



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