Well, I _am_ a liberal. And so are most of you. And you should be proud of it. The Stalinists thought they were doing the work of of the revolution. It's convenient to redefined the stiff you don't like as "not real" [communism/liberalism]. I might do the same with Truman's loyalty oath program, which in fact violated every liberal principle. I prefer to say there is good liberalism/communism and bad, and you have to compare the good with the good and the bad with the bad. It's dishonest, a shell game, to define liberalism as not really committed to liberty but a tool of imperialism and so to ignore liberal principle and practice in support of liberty as irrelevant, while to define Communism as everything bright and beautiful and ignore the gulag and the cellars of the Lubyanka as "aberrations" or restorations of Czarism. (Lenin started shooting hostages and repressing the soviets decades before 1937.) My point is not that liberalism is better than communism, but that socialism requires and completes liberalism.
--- Shane Mage <shmage at pipeline.com> wrote:
> "andie" wrote:
> >
> >...My point is not invidious comparison, bad
> communsim
> >against good liberalism. It's just Mill's point:
> the
> >reference point for the dark days of 1947 in the US
> is
> >something like the dark days of the Stalin
> Purges...
>
> Like a true liberal, "andie" presents Stalin's
> pogrom against the
> bolsheviks as "bad communism"--instead of what it
> was, the definitive
> triumph of neo-Tsarist counterrevolution; and
> Truman's loyalty-security
> program as "bad liberalism"--instead of what it was,
> the beginning
> of domestic mobilization, in the name of liberalism,
> for all-out
> militarism in furtherance of the
> Wilsonian-Rooseveltian
> design of "democratic" US imperialist domination
> over the entire world.
>
> Shane Mage
>
> "One can never agree, in any kind of war, with
> events that take the
> lives of innocent civilians. Nobody could justify
> the attacks of the
> German Air Force on British cities during World War
> II, nor the
> thousands of bombers that systematically destroyed
> German cities in
> the decisive moments of the war, nor the two atomic
> bombs which the
> United States dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in
> an act of pure
> terrorism against old people, women and children."
> (Fidel Castro)
>
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>
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