03-04-2020, 01:45 AM
(03-03-2020, 09:49 PM)pbrower2a Wrote: Mass suffering due to the failure of the economic order to meet basic needs such as housing, food, heat (or in hot climates, air conditioning) and medical care put a lie to the claim that a society is truly prosperous. Opulent splendor and unlimited indulgence by elites in the presence of overt suffering indicate the perversity of social priorities.
People who demonize Stalin or Mao for their ideology ignore what preceded them. Sure, those two were horrible -- but could they have ever arisen in societies not so severe in inequality to the extent that the poor lived in danger as a consequence of poverty? I've seen enough literature about Russia in the latter decades of the Romanov dynasty to recognize an extremely sick society. Maybe if people had not starved under the tsars or the warlords there would never have been a Stalin or Mao.
Mark Twain said of the Terror in the French Revolution that the real terror was the hunger, repression, and stunted lives of the common man during the Ancien Régime. Twain may not have been an accurate historian, but at least he understood that people who used the potential of democracy to bring back old privilege for the recently-ousted elites were many who felt the Terror. Those people did as much to debase democracy as did Maximilien Robespierre.
We have enough prosperity in America to not make human suffering a necessity to achieve some morally-deficient social order. We do not need a socialist revolution; we need a social market system that makes opportunity more a norm than a privilege. We have economic and bureaucratic elites who define morality solely as the reality that they get what they want -- and that such is conservatism. It is in fact anything but conservative in its consequences; if conservatism is to have any validity it must leave the common man with something worthy of preserving.
Happy nations do not fall for a Vladimir Lenin, an Adolf Hitler, or a Fidel Castro.
I respectfully asked not to politicize the material. Why bring a sanders rally to this thread?
do you have your own thoughts? respectfully. and please anyone address the actual question instead of holding a news conference for your candidate