andie nachgeborenen wrote:
>
> I was thinking of Stalin and Mao, et al.
Oour triumphs are triumphs of collective struggles of people. Mao wouldn't have been much without the Chinese peasantry. And you should toss in the black community in the '50s & '60s, the students of the anti-war movement (who might have had somekthing to do with no nuclear weapons falling in North Vietnam or China). And while Stalin's preparing Russia for the German assault was of immense importance, and (after a preliminary funk) organizing that resistance, the Russian people (including those surrounded and doomed troops who slowed up the German advance in the summer of '41) had quite a bit to do with it.
> Of course, we should be talking, hmmm? It's not like our side didn't have its way -- with terrible obstacles of course, but you expected a rose garden? -- and screw up as or even more royally, leaving almost all of us as bereft of ideas and hope as they are. Of course we did have some accomplishments, like saving the world, granted with their help, and leaving large parts of it in some ways better places at a terrible cost. But there is some symmetry here.
We won't ever be in the White House rose garden. And as to the screw ups; I'm not even sure they should be called that, since in popular struggles the screw-ups are (I think) seldom if ever separable from the triumphs. There will always be a mixture real bastards thrown to the top in such struggles. (I believe that servant of the slave-drivers, Robett E. Lee, was a 'nicer' man than Sherman -- but I'll choose Sherman.)
We simply aren't going to go anyplace (and this was the case in the past as it will be in the future) except through struggle in the streets, the shops, the malls.
Carrol