--- Wojtek Sokolowski <sokol at jhu.edu> wrote:
<<Why should I believe in similar stories told by defectors from another "axis of evil" country?>>
Woj, you are right that people should be careful with these stories. On the Right, you have people wanting to exploit and sometimes exaggerate these stories. On the Left, you have certain people that want to treat such stories as just fabrications by the bourgeois press. At best, such people will say "there were some mistakes". Funny how the same people who will protest if an American worker gets a splinter will excuse or deny the devastation of the "Great Leap Forward". Or, parroting Mao, will persist in saying that the Cultural Revolution was 80 percent good, 20 percent bad. Fortunately those who speak like that are but an obnoxious minority.
-Thomas
<<We are at such a point in mankind's evolution where changed conditions invalidate all our policies that have been so successful even in the recent past, and that presumably have constituted the ideal response to a presumably unchanging and unchangeable human condition. No wonder we are stupefied and confused-but our mistake is the same which many cultures have made before us, namely to force a rigid model upon a fluid reality.
Erich Jantsch - "Design for Evolution: Self-Organization and Planning in the Life of Human Systems"
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