Also, throughout the Cold War, and even since 1917, capitalist governments and their ideologues vociferously condemned the USSR as undemocratic. This was sheer hypocrisy. The capitalists hated the Soviet Union not for its lack of elected government or citizen rights, but for the fact that its factories and banks were not private property, and its economy closed to capitalist investment. It was not abetting the enemies of the Soviet Union, as the Stalinists claimed, to expose the police-state methods of the ruling apparatus. It was necessary, however, to accompany such exposure with a clear indication of the standpoint from which it was being made: that of those who wanted to redeem socialism rather than bury it. It was all too easy, however, to blur the distinction between anti-Stalinism and the disingenuous democratic bleating of the bourgeoisie and their petty bourgeois camp followers, or, what amounts to the same thing, to elevate political democracy to the status of the supreme value, transcending both class and the nature of the USSR's economic regime. Those who blurred the distinction usually wound up in the "democratic" imperialist camp, as the examples of George Orwell, Max Shachtman, Irving Kristol, Paul Berman and so many others clearly attest. All ancient history? Not entirely. We can see parallels among those--like Hitchens--who use legitimate abhorrence of Islamic fundamentalism as an excuse for backing the invasion of Iraq. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: <../attachments/20050524/b07556b6/attachment.htm>