A pure Stalinist line. Literally.
--- James Heartfield <Heartfield at blueyonder.co.uk> wrote:
> Yoshie wrote, elegantly as ever:
>
> "In any case, the principle of democracy is that the
> Russian government's
> legitimacy derives from the Russian people, not from
> leftists in the West"
>
> Yes (and the same is true of Iran, too).
>
> And also
>
> "What if the Russians prefer a less authoritarian
> state with a slower
> growth rate and lesser industrial base to a more
> authoritarian state
> with a faster growth rate and larger industrial base
> like China's?
> Maybe the Russians are not so enamoured with fast
> growth of industry
> under an authoritarian state -- they have been there
> before, under the
> USSR."
>
> I would be a bit reluctant to make the correlation
> quite so tight between
> industrial growth and authoritarianism - though
> certainly it is true that
> societies that squeezed personal consumption to
> facilitate a higher rate of
> investment often had to resort to authoritarian
> measures.
>
> A low level of technology also tends to put limits
> on consumption, creating
> conditions that favour authoritarianism. So if China
> was your example, you
> would concede I think that Mao's regime was more
> repressive than the current
> one, I guess? (And fans of the Dalai Lama never
> really understood what a
> vicious system of social control the sedentary lives
> of the Bhuddist monks
> imposed on their people.)
>
> Not wishing to understate its downsides, the
> post-war growth of west
> European societies corresponded with a
> liberalisation of those societies
> (with regard to divorce, abortion, censorship, gay
> rights), whereas the
> return of economic recessions in the seventies and
> eighties corresponded
> with a growing authoritarianism (on all the same
> issues), which seems to
> have relaxed again in the more bouyant (well,
> bouyant here in the UK, I
> forget that the US is in the throes of immiseration)
> nineties and noughties.
>
>
>
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