[WS:] I can also cite a long list of good things brought by parliamentary institutions. However, the main difference between you and me is in cognitive framing of the world - in my framing most things can be good or bad or anything in between depending on particular circumstances; in your framing things are always bad or always good, pretty much regardless of the circumstances. You seem to have a fixed view of certain institutions as bad, and and you can't or won't entertain an idea that under a different set of conditions those institutions can be good. Likewise, you seem to have a fixed view of the masses, and you can't or won't entertain an idea that under a certain sets of conditions the masses may be way out in the left field, if not outright bad and reactionary.
I do not mean this to be a criticism of your POV - different people have different ways of thinking and that is what makes the world interesting. I am just pointing out that we may be looking at the same object and see two very different things. I can live with that just fine. Can you?
Wojtek
On Sat, Feb 5, 2011 at 10:49 AM, Carrol Cox <cbcox at ilstu.edu> wrote:
>
> WS] And for the record, based on my reading of history, I do believe that
> if
> any
> progress is to be made - it will be made through parliamentary
> institutions.
> . .
>
> But no Progress is going to be made. That is a 19th-c superstition. History
> is not and never has been linear.
>
> Revolution does not represent progress; it represents an attempt to gain
> some free space within which humans can, at least for the time being, take
> control of their history. No guarantees: that would presuppose a crystal
> ball, as does your faith in parliamentary institutions. Consider the
> terrible misery and death which France, England, and the U.S. have imposed
> on the world and often on their own populations over the last two
> centuries. Include in that record of horror (for example) the refusal of
> FDR
> & Churchill to order the bombing of the railroad lines leading to the death
> camps. Consider the famines imposed on India, Ireland, etc. by the
> Parliament of England. Consider the endless misery first England and then
> the U.S. imposed on the people of Latin America. Consider the ravaging of
> Africa by (mostly) England and France. Consider U.S. slavery and Jim Crow.
> Consider Hiroshima. Consider French rule in Algeria. Consider Apartheid.
> Consider the pacification of the Philippines in the first decade of the
> 20th-c under Roosevelt and Taft. Consider Wilson showing Birth of a Nation
> in the White House, not primarily as a great film but as a true reflection
> of a desirable historical event. Consider the horrors of WW1. (We will
> 'give' WW2 to non-parliamentary states, though there are complexities in
> the
> coming of that war.
>
> Endless horror and destruction. That is what your precious parliamentary
> regimes have imposed on the world. What makes you think they will suddenly
> blossom into the utopia of Progress.
>
> Carrol
>
>
>
>
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