Superceding liberal democracy

Justin Schwartz jkschw at hotmail.com
Tue Mar 5 14:15:54 PST 2002



>CB: If you don't admit that the slave/jim crow system and genocide against
>the Indians of U.S. liberal democracy was worse than Stalinist Russia then
>you are a racist dog .

Charles has a point here, valid and important as far as it goes. Read Leon Litwack's Been In The Storm So Long, about the experience of the Jim Crow South, which was arguably in fact as bad as Stalinist Russia in terms of totalitarian microcontrol and sheer terror. "Scent of magnolia, sweatt and fresh, then the sudden smell of burning flesh. Maybe it was worse. High death toll too, if you count (and why not) the deaths in theconvict labor system, where no one who had a ten year sentence lived to get out. The toral death toall was lower even on the lower estimates of the Stalin terror--tens of thousands dead, thousands lynched in theSouth, versus hundreds of thousands murdered and millions imprisoned in under Stalin. The Indians were of course never within the sphere of lib dem, them were simply a conquered people.

But first, I don't defend US lib dem absolutrely, just relatively, and here the treatment of the minority population has been appalling, but that is treatment of the minority. In Stalinist Russia, everyone experience the terror of the night riders (aka GPU). Second, it has improved a lot in the US, although it is obviosuly not good. In the 1970s, my black DC girlfriend and I could not hold hands or kiss on the VA side of the line, it would have been worth physical harm. Today in VA, interracial marriages are not remarkable. Of course things got a lot better under Khrushchev, Brezhnev, and Gorby too in the USSR.

Second, the lib dem I advocate is a better version, nonracist, socialist, etc. You, Charles, advocate more less what the USSR had under Khrushchev. I advocatewhat the ACLU wants as far as lib dem (except that I disagree with them on campaign finance reform), what the NAACP wants for racial justice, and what Schweickart advocates for economics--needless to say, thsi is not what we have.


>You and Justin are slanderers and liars.

Oh, chill out Charles.

jks

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