Re: Liberalism (Was Re: Nietzsche)
On Jul 3, 2007, at 4:22 PM, wrobert@uci.edu wrote:
Last time I checked you called yourself a socialist. Lots of 20th century socialists believed in one-party dictatorship, cults of personality, mass murder, secret political police and torture of “enemies of the people,” huge concentration camp systems, forced labor, guilt by association, preposterous paranoid charges and show trials, widespread censorship, and other unsavories. Do you think we should give up that term — socialism — and find an expression that no one has sullied — until it gets dirty?
I think attack on liberalism ought to have gone out of style around the time of forced collectivization, the Moscow Purge trials at the latest.
Seems that a lot of the folks that you were offering so much praise
for in the free speech and civil rights movements had some rather
trenchent words about liberalism.
Yeah, I’m really wondering who these liberals are who advocate
liberalism? These days you’ve got to be pretty far to the left - like
NLG/CCR - to resist the imperatives of the terror war, for example.
Maybe a third of the Democratic House delegation? None of the major
presidential candidates. Civil rights? Where? Unions, forget about ‘em.
Doug