Doug Henwood wrote:
>
>
> No doubt the Reagan buildup
> contributed to the end of the USSR, which was a bad thing on balance
> I think. But he & his admin never scared me as much as 43's gang,
> which sometimes looks like it will plunge us into some kind of
> catastrophe, maybe a generalization of the conditions of Israel & the
> Occupied Territories to much of the rest of the world.
>
There's a long mostly pointless debate (that nevertheless poses some of the crucial challenges of the historian) over whether this or that event (say Darwin's theory of natural selection to explain evolution) would have occurred had a given individual (e.g., in this case, Darwin) never been born. Or would Darwin have made his breakthrough had Adam Smith never written the Wealth of Nations? The questions can be answered in a negative way: Without certain historical conditions, Darwin or no Darwin there would have been no theory of natural selection. And Bush 2 or no Bush 2 there would be no Iraq war had Germany defeated Russia in WW2 or had the USSR survived and flourished or .... That's fairly definite. And _probably_ (?perhaps only possibly) had Bush not been nominated for the presidency we would not be facing the (potential) catastrophes his policies pose --NOW. And had Darwin not lived the theory of evolution would still have appeared, but with a less powerful send-off than the _Origin of Species_ and perhaps in sloppier form.
BUT given U.S. hegemony and the conditions of that hegemony and the general nature of the u.s. ruling class _something_ like (though not exactly the same) policy would have materialized. And it is a policy that very nearly guarantees growing contradictions among the world's capitalist classes, growing world disorder.
Are you really sure the U.S. political structure is (unlike the political structure of the Shah's Iran or of the Soviet Union immune to internal collapse under some external condtions? Give us a scenario for indeinitely continued U.S. stability, internally and externally.
Carrol
> Doug