I don't know Reed - only met him once - but I don't understand how he can be so insightful regarding IP - and yet so obtuse about a neocon candidate who has only IP to cover her viciousness.
—CGE
> On Aug 18, 2016, at 7:03 PM, Carrol Cox <cbcox at ilstu.edu> wrote:
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> From a recent article by Reed, published by Common Dreams:
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> " I assume readers get the allegorical point of that story. Just to drive it home, here’s another, more dramatic one that Harold Meyerson adduced last month in The American Prospect: in the early 1930s, as the National Socialists gained strength, Ernst Thällman, the Chairman of the German Communist Party held to the line that the Social Democrats were a greater threat to the working class and to the possibility of revolution than were the Nazis. The Communists’ conflict with the Social Democrats was both not without justification and mutual. Some Communists believed that the elements of the working class who were drawn to the Nazis, e.g., those in Ernst Röhm’s Brown Shirts, could be won from them. In 1931 some sought to collaborate with the Nazis to bring down the weak Social Democrat government. In expressing the conviction that the Social Democrats were the main danger in German politics, Thällman uttered the quip that has long outlived him as a cautionary device: “After Hitler, our turn.” His point was that a Nazi victory would expose them as fraudulent with no program for the working class. What Thällman didn’t count on was their success at criminalizing and liquidating all opposition. He died in a concentration camp."
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> This tired tale has been endlessly repeated by various political cowards calling themselves "leftists." It is simply despicable.
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> There is no doubt that Adolph Reed is both highly intelligent and well-intentioned -- which goes to demonstrate that there is no necessary or even probable connection between intelligence & intelligent arguments, and it also underlines the old saw re the pavement of the road to hell.
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> I have often argued in the past that "Fascism" was a special product of the inter-war period in southern and eastern Europe. The endlessly repeated squawks about the Fascist threat have the utter stupidity of the following bit of logic:
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> X is a mammal
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> Therefore X is a rabbit.
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> There are real threats to "bourgeois democracy" in the United States, but they don't come from either Trump or the likes of David Duke.
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> They come from the Clintons, the Obamas, and the fools who support them. The great achievement of the Obama Administration is to legitimize and raise to standard policy the wars initiated by the Bush Administration.
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> Clinton's Crime Bill was far more sinister than any of Trump's ravings.
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> Carrol
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