03-04-2020, 02:15 AM
(03-04-2020, 01:45 AM)TheNomad Wrote:(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
It is not my purpose in this post to pick one politician over another in the Democratic Party. I did not specifically mention any American other than Mark Twain.
Economic realities have political consequences. History well expresses that reality. Even without a revolution, there will be serious consequences -- wasted talent, children who feel cheated all their lives even when they grow up... Every society churns out people who out of their own narcissism and cruelty wish that they could be another Lenin, Hitler, or Mao... but if people like what they have or expect improvement in their lives through their own efforts, such sick dreamers have no chance. When opportunity is a norm and not a privilege, life is better for far more people. Maybe not those who profiteer off human suffering -- but f--- such people.
One cannot escape the economic culture, one that has developed over forty years and that used to be very different. This is in part a consequence of the generational cycle in which Boomers who have always had things good have decided that any economic failure makes such people deserving of even more failure and hardship. The Silent and GI elites were not like that. To be sure, there are many Boomers who have never oppressed and exploited and would never do so if they had the chance. Such Boomers got kept out of the economic elite because the elites did not trust them. The generational cycle suggests that the political culture will change without prompting from those who wield the power.
The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated Communist but instead the people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists -- Hannah Arendt.