Yeah, if Communism is so discredited, why does Hugo Chavez keep getting re-elected? And I’m of Anglo-Saxon descent, pretty sure my kin in the Age of Imperialism got the Marxists beat on sheer bloodiness. When did the Marxists wipe out an entire ethnicity?
What progressives in the USA don’t understand is the power of an ideology for which people will kill and die. Marxism has been that for millions for ninety years. Marxism was successful to the point that loons like Kim Il-Sung and Pol Pot pretended to be Communists–Marx certainly wasn’t in favor of absolute monarchy or forced agrarianism.
And calling the Khmer Rouge “pure” communism is really insulting. That’s worse than calling Jim Jones “pure” Christianity or calling Murray Rothbard a “pure” anarchist.
Because he’s rather authoritarian and successfully manipulates politics (a la Putin), he much like the demagogues of ancient Rome has control of the mob, and he’s not a full-on Commie.
No. Look at the Holodomor, Stalin’s purges, the Great Leap Forward, the Killing Fields, and the Cultural Revolution-can anything in American, or English history rival that?
When did Anglo-Saxons ever try to intentionally commit genocide (and no the Amerindians don’t count as most of the deaths were inadvertent deaths by disease and genocide was never a policy of the US government).
Which is why the whole Eastern Bloc collapsed in two years. One historian remarked that unlike the Nazi Third Reich which had enough ideologoues to fight onto the bitter end, the USSR and its satellites collapsed with very few people standing up for it.
They were the Communists most determined to abolishing all property-even more so than say the USSR which winked at some “black market” capitalism for example. And who knows-maybe Marx would have abandoned Communism completely had he seen its complete failure and its bloody disaster.
They called it extermination, the term genocide not having been invented yet, and it most certainly was policy. But I was thinking of the Tasmanians.
And again, while the Maoists supported Pol Pot, the Soviets and the Vietnamese were violently opposed to him. You insult a lot of decent Communists by tarring them with the brush of someone that Communist(!) Vietnam fought to depose. (Not to mention that the USA (!!) was allied to the Khmer-Rouge-in-exile in the 1980’s, even after relations with the USSR thawed. So maybe the Killing Fields were the failure of American conservatism, then!)
But since we’ve hijacked this well and good, yes, American progressives might consider the child soldiers and the brute terrorization of the populace and the forcible emptying of the cities and the killing people who wear glasses and the resetting the calendar to Year Zero and declaring their leader a god–you know, all the stuff completely contrary to Marx and to communism that the Khmer Rouge did. It would be a disaster, but it STILL would be better than joining hands, singing “Kum Ba Ya” and wishing for a pony!
“Better,” I say, in that actually accomplishing something is better than not accomplishing something. We must escape the American-Objectivist “ethic” that, “it doesn’t matter what happens, so long as it isn’t anybody’s fault.”
It does matter. It matters a lot.
Objectivists preach inaction (ironically enough) because to act in any way, even–no, especially–for the greater good, is supposedly evil. (Unless you’re sticking it to the arbitrarily despicable, like the Question would, and even then, you need that air of absolute selfish assholery to be taken seriously.)
McGovernites fear power because they actually believe in that Lord Acton bullhockey that power corrupts. The truth is that the evil seek power for their own selfish ends, and the good must seize power to counter that.
But do you really think it ever will be again? The Zapatista rebels in Mexico don’t even call themselves “Marxists” – they would have, if their rebellion had started 20 or even 10 years earlier. The name of Marx seems to have lost its power to conjure.
PRINCETON, NJ – Conservatives have maintained their leading position among U.S. ideological groups in the first half of 2010. Gallup finds 42% of Americans describing themselves as either very conservative or conservative. This is up slightly from the 40% seen for all of 2009 and contrasts with the 20% calling themselves liberal or very liberal.
As long as the United States remains a center right country there is no point in a third party to the left of the Democrats that competes with the Democrats. Progressives should form a movement to the left of the Democrats that supports the Democrats, while pulling it to the left.
During the 1930s the labor movement did this. During the 1960s the civil rights and anti war movements generated backlashes that benefited the Republicans.
The Wall Street protests may serve a function similar to that of the labor movement during the 1930s, but it is too early to tell.
Sounds fair, but of course, attempts to hold the line on abortion and gay marriage will be used by the overclass (great name for the 1%, so close to “evil overlords”) to demonstrate that progressive are indeed advancing that agenda. However, not introducing any initiatives ourselves to advance social agendas while working really, really hard on economic ones would definitely be a good idea.
I think election reform wrt money would be a great agenda, combined with a “revive the middle class economically” agenda. Let the conservative scumbags be against those things!
Well, that was exactly the idea behind the New Party, back in the 1990s, but it didn’t work out. They couldn’t get the SCOTUS to buy the theory that the constitutional rights of free expression and association include the right to run fusion candidates; and the party’s whole concept depended on the strategic effect of being able to give or withhold the NP’s nomination from Democrats.
Well, actually, the Voting Rights Act, a direct product of the Civil Rights movement, was a HUGE benefit to the Democrats, as you can see by the way the Republicans are working so vigorously to dismantle it.
When LBJ signed the Voting Rights Act, he famously remarked, “We [the Democrats] have just lost the South for a generation.” Wise and prophetic words. But guess what? That generation is now past.
Not a definition.
. . . Once again, Tom Tomorrow nails it!