Peter K.:
> I may be holding a gun to someone's head? I don't follow,
The State, imperialism, capitalism rest on power, that is, a gun held to someone's head, and sometimes discharged. As in Afghanistan, as around the corner. When one discusses matters of State, one is generally discussing who might be killed.
> but I
> do have one question: is capitalism an improvement on
> feudalism? I think it is even though there's been a huge cost.
I'd rather live with liberal capitalism, because that's what I'm used to and I know how to deal with it. But I don't know the universal answer, or even if there is one.
> Besides, now that their opium trade is back up and running,
> the Afgahns should be rolling in the doe again. My point to you
> and Yoshie is that the Bush and Clinton administrations
> were perfectly happy with the Taliban.
I'm of the opinion that a certain amount of imperialism often winds up benefiting, or shall we say appearing to benefit, many of the imperialized, especially in narrowly materialistic terms. But I still don't like it, because I don't want to do the necessary killing, torturing, terrorizing, enslaving, policing, spying, stealing, propagandizing, deceiving, and so forth. And if I'm not willing to do it, I'm certainly not going to send someone else out to do it for me. This reflects on Mr. Hitchens's unfortunate remarks about the American Indians, several million of whom seem to have been killed so that the wheel could be brought to North America -- at least, that's what he says. One would think the wheel, however important its propagation, could have been brought over and preserved and multiplied with less grief, but perhaps not. In any case, I recognize that all God's chillen now got wheels and vice versa, for better or worse.
Unlike Mr. Hitchens, who was mostly engaging in tweakery, I think, I would have tried to dissuade Mr. Dellinger from fasting with another argument. I would have said that we, too, are the victims of the grand crimes of the past, and that the way to deal with the residues of these crimes is not to mourn them or practice spiritual asceticism, but instead to keep up our strength so as to energetically break them down, scrape them up, and drop them into some bottomless pit of forgetfulness, while building a new society based not on feudal or capitalist relations but freedom, equality and peace -- that is, an anarchistic, communistic society. Columbus should not be arraigned, convicted, and excoriated; ideally his memory should be consigned to oblivion.
But if it _must_ be remembered, we're going to remember all of it, if I can help it.
-- Gordon