[lbo-talk] Re: Worker's Paradise (was: Gulag query)

David Mandl dmandl at panix.com
Fri Apr 11 10:41:25 PDT 2003


I'm not sure I follow you, Curtiss. I was replying to the claim that "the crushing of the Hungarian uprising and the invasion of Afghanistan were both supported by the bulk of the Soviet population." By that logic, popular support in the U.S. for an invasion of Iraq makes that defensible (and I don't think it is, just for the record). Whether you have unanimity in a dictatorship through intimidation or in a "democracy" through more subtle means (corporate-controlled media, advertising, etc.), "popular opinion" has to be taken with a big grain of salt. And even if the Soviet population was really, truly in favor of the '56 and '68 invasions, surely that didn't make it right to send the tanks in?

--Dave.


>From: "H. Curtiss Leung" <hncl at panix.com>
>
>Would you say the same thing about Nicholas Daniloff, the US News/World Report
>correspondent accused of being a US spy? "Make no mistake--there is a consent
>of the governed here."
>
>Curtiss
>
>> Holy cow...an actual Soviet apologist/revisionist.
>>
>> The bulk of the American population supports the invasion of Iraq--I
>> guess that's OK, then. And I didn't realize that it's OK to put
>> people with non-mainstream views (even less representative than
>> Chomsky's!) in mental hospitals. It's like an old cartoon in the
>> situationist zine "Spectacular Times": Some stuffy old British
>> banker-type in a suit sniffs, "I don't know what these protestors are
>> grumbling about--I've lived in this country for 63 years, and I have
> > never ONCE been beaten up by the police."

-- Dave Mandl dmandl at panix.com davem at wfmu.org http://www.wfmu.org/~davem



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