--- Wojtek Sokolowski <sokol at jhu.edu> wrote: With that in mind, the "working poor draft" and other populist leftist dogmas, such as that the poor have no responsibility for their own actions, and that responsibility rests solely with the elites, or that the existing institutional order is nothing but a conspiracy of the elite, are examples of the regressive problemshift by regression to the founding "principles" or myths in this particular case.
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I hate to be Russocentric, as is my wont -- but I will. ;)
This is hardly a uniquely US left thing. It being the 100th anniversary of the 1905 October (old calendar) pogroms, some of the Russian newspapers/magazines are doing pieces on it, as well as reprinting extracts of articles written at the time. I assume TV is doing something similar -- I haven't checked.
It is ASTONISHING the extent to which the Russian liberal and social-democratic press at that time to avoid blaming the pogroms on the people actually doing the pogroms. It was always the fault of the "tsarist system," a "plot by the secret services," etc. etc., anybody but the actual pogromshchiki themselves. They just couldn't bring themselves ideologically to admit that it was the "oppressed workers and peasants" slaughtering people and burning down buildings on their own initiative. (Similarly, anti-Semitism in the USSR was blamed on "foreign agitators disseminating anti-Semitic and anti-Soviet materials among the working class".)
Nu, zayats, pogodi!
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