Haim
Posts:
7,807
Registered:
12/6/04
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Re: How Bad it Is
Posted:
Jun 18, 2012 11:51 AM
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Lou Talman Posted: Jun 1, 2012 3:47 PM
>What is amusing is the lengths to which you will go to
>rationalize your convictions. Admittedly, your
>rationalizations are much more subtle than Tanner's, and
>therefore much more entertaining. But, in the end, like
>Tanner's, they are rationalizations.
Lou,
I meant to thank you for that kind comment and I want to assure you that I do not have the imagination for subtlety, but I got distracted.
Well, in my losing battle against the entropy of my household, I stumbled over the book, "Communism: A History," by the indispensable Richard Pipes,
http://www.amazon.com/Communism-History-Modern-Library-Chronicles/dp/0812968646/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1340033377&sr=1-1&keywords=richard+pipes+communism
I quote from page 20,
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Unfortunately for them, the socialists and their International proved utterly powerless to prevent the general European war that erupted in the summer of 1914. Talk of a general strike led nowhere. To make matters worse still, both German Social Democrats and French Socialists, contrary to their solemn pledges, voted for war credits, thereby completely discrediting the notion of international worker solidarity. National Loyalties overcame class loyalties, a fact not lost on ambitious demagogues like Benito Mussolini and Adolf Hitler, who would rise to power after the war on platforms that fused socialism and nationalism.
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I can assure you that "Communism" is not the only place, and this was not the first time, I encountered this assertion. After all, for people who are not considering socialism for the first time, there are some large questions to ponder. For example, how did it happen that it was Benito Mussolini, a leading light of the Italian Socialist Party, who founded the National Fascist Party?
(The answer, contrary to socialist propaganda, is that fascism is a dialect of socialism, not its polar opposite as the socialists would have you believe. They offered much the same social program and, as political parties, they fought for much the same constituencies. In other words, Mussolini did not walk a long ideological road from socialism to fascism.)
Haim
Shovel ready? What shovel ready?
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