<DIV>I will forward you a draft of the paper, I don't seem to have it on e-form at the office. The paper turns on a contrast between the Nuremberg Laws and the FSA, laws of similar immorality; while acknowledging that antebellum America was a very defective democracy, though fairly advanced for its time, I argue that we think that the Nazis judges should have felt no legal pressure to enforce the NL because they were enacted under a pure tyranny with no democratic legitimacy, but that we have to account for the fact, and it is a fact, that great antislavery judges like Joseph Story and Lemuel Shaw felt pressure based on (I think) the demands of democratic process to enforce laws they hated. </DIV> <DIV> </DIV> <DIV>The example is fraught, obviously, but I wanted a historical one; I might have made up one, but I wanted to cite actual cases. I think we can see there is a difference between Nazi Germany and antebellum America, despite the lack of universal suffrage and the existence of slavery, America was a sort of democracy and its laws, even its bad ones, received some democratic legitimacy insofar as it was one. Or anyway, it's not crazy to say that, the way it would be crazy to say that the Nazi laws had any legitimacy.</DIV> <DIV> </DIV> <DIV>I should emphasize I was talking about legal legitimacy -- part of the point is that the FSA were just as morally illegitimate as the NL, and it may well have been right to resist them on moral grounds the way the Underground Railroad did. But the question is whether and under what conditions morallyt illegitimate laws can be legally legitimate. My answer: insofar as they are enacted under more or less democratic conditions.</DIV> <DIV> </DIV> <DIV>Cuba, etc. I'll defend Cuba against US intervention, and I've said here repeatedly tahtw hile I make no apologies for Castro's dictatorship, I also am not sure that I see what alternative the Cubans have that would avoud turning their country into another Central American landfill like Nicaragau after the collapse of the revolution. But this just goes to Carrol's point that some dictatorships are better than others, not that Cuba isn't a dictatorship. It's not a model for us. Which isn't to say that it hasn't got positive and negative lessons, like every country.</DIV> <DIV> </DIV> <DIV>Sure, I know that Europen social democracy is built on a foundation of blood and robbery. But my point is that now it's rather nice, whatever its history, and one might support capitalism (if one did, which I don't) in its ESD form rather than its US/Brit form, and that would be much less objectionable. Despite the inroads on ESD in recent decades, and the anti-immigrant sentiment, etc., there is no question that if we had what they had in Holland, we'd think the revolution was over, and we'd won. And we'd be damn near right. A Swedish Communist once told me that Sweden was a harder place to be a Commie than the US -- whereas here the Commies are reviled, hated, and marginalized, there, the workers mostly don't see why they should bothered to go to the trouble of causing social upheavel when they have everything they could want. So the Commies are respected, get elected to parliament, and have no political prosects.</DIV> <DIV> </DIV> <DIV>Maybe you are partly right about the reasons for the fall of the USSR. Gorby, whatever his other limittaions, took the nuclear danger deadly seriously.</DIV> <DIV> </DIV> <DIV>jk<BR><BR><B><I>Charles Brown <cbrown@michiganlegal.org></I></B> wrote:</DIV> <BLOCKQUOTE class=replbq style="PADDING-LEFT: 5px; MARGIN-LEFT: 5px; BORDER-LEFT: #1010ff 2px solid">OK. But what is this about a theory that the Fugitive Slave law followed<BR>some ok procedure ?<BR><BR>Holland was the first capitalist country , and its current luxury of being<BR>democratically pure is bought in part with the blood of the primitive<BR>accumulation. There is some anti-immigrant sentiment there.<BR><BR>There has to be some place in American discourse where Cuba, Venezuela, Viet<BR>Nam are praised and held up as models to Americans. Wish it was more than a<BR>few small circles.<BR><BR>Castroism doesn't avow to negate fairness and due process. These have to be<BR>imbedded in the higher democracy of socialism, preserved and overcome. This<BR>is a goal, and like all of them, there is a struggle to attain this ideal in<BR>socialist countries. But the Cubans, Attorney Fidel, are aware of these<BR>issues of fairness and due process.<BR><BR>Yea, I was thinking the other day of a time we sat at a café in Ann Arbor<BR>discussing nuclear disarmament and danger. It is incredible to think that<BR>the cloud of the danger of nuclear war plays nothing like the role it did<BR>then. It is great that we have stepped back from the 11th hour. I often<BR>think that the fall of the SU was in part motivated by the need to step back<BR>from nuclear chicken. For some in the SU, their limited socialism in name<BR>was not worth preserving when balanced against the danger of nuclear<BR>exchange with the U.S. motivated by anti-CP, anti-Sovietism. "Why not drop<BR>the red flag from in front of the Bull ?", some may have thought.<BR><BR>CB<BR><BR>^^^^^<BR><BR><BR><BR>From: andie nachgeborenen <BR><BR>There is a widespread assumption that if one supports markets one supports<BR>capitalsim, and indeed, capitalism at it is in the US rather than as it is,<BR>say in The Netherlands or Denmark. Also an assumption, reflected here, that<BR>support of liberal proceduralism means that one is an apologists for<BR>American politics as it is. No matter how many times one rejects these<BR>claims, they come back in a tedious manner. <BR><BR>Charles, you have known me for 25 years (scary thought, isn't it?). You know<BR>that I do not support or defend American politics as it is. So why do drag<BR>this bugaboo up? Do you think I will find it hard to say that I want radical<BR>change? In my case, it is largely because we fall so short of the<BR>requirements of liberalism (a view that is considered right wing only in<BR>weird circles like this --most Americans think that liberals are communists)<BR>that I strive for such changes. So let's not have this from people who know<BR>better, OK? <BR>jks<BR><BR><BR>___________________________________<BR>http://mailman.lbo-talk.org/mailman/listinfo/lbo-talk<BR></BLOCKQUOTE><p> <hr size=1>Do you Yahoo!?<br> <a href="http://us.rd.yahoo.com/mail_us/taglines/10/*http://promotions.yahoo.com/new_mail/static/efficiency.html">New and Improved Yahoo! Mail</a> - Send 10MB messages!