Democracy and socialism

Yoshie Furuhashi furuhashi.1 at osu.edu
Wed May 31 22:22:25 PDT 2000



>the only reason this debate started was because the Yoshie and
>Carrol Comedy Hour insisted that democracy was somehow "bad".

Who said any such thing? I for one wish America were democracy. Left up to ordinary Americans, there probably would be no U.S. imperialism of the kind we see now. The majority of ordinary Americans don't give a damn about foreigners one way or another; they don't care, for instance, if North Korea is a "classic Stalinist model," a "degenerate workers state," "state capitalism," or just traveling the capitalist road. They can't be bothered about China's entry into the WTO or PNTR or whatever. They don't care enough about Cuba, Iraq, etc. to put embargoes on them. And so on.

(In contrast, many LBO-talkers are unfortunately half-baked ideologues, often undemocratically tailing the imperial media, instead of following the masses; then again, opinions of LBO-talkers matter little, for they have _zero_ influence on American politics, especially on foreign policy, so actually there's no point in discussing them, except to kill time.)

Since America is no democracy, alas, we see all kinds of policies undertaken by the U.S. government that the American masses wouldn't care to initiate if left to their own devices. No amount of elections in America can change this reality. To make America democratic, we need actions other than electioneering.

Yoshie



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