> The point I was trying to make was that hoping, then or now, that the
> Federal Entity in Washington (FEW) can bring about social progress by
> dispatching its troops against some particularly abominable enemy is
> socialism of fools.
And the point your critics are trying to make is that the dispatch of Federal troops in the Civil War did bring about the end of slavery, which would seem to be a clear case of social progress (though not the establishment of Heaven on Earth, of course). This seems to me hard to deny.
> The point was to show that the US might be more vulnerable to
> internal challenges resulting from its fucked up social order. From
> that view point, any centrifugal tendencies challenging the FEW is a
> good thing and deserves progressive support.
*Any* tendencies? Even reactionary, racist, anti-Semitic, etc., ones?
Jon Johanning // jjohanning at igc.org __________________________________ A sympathetic Scot summed it all up very neatly in the remark, 'You should make a point of trying every experience once, excepting incest and folk-dancing.' -- Sir Arnold Bax