"Liberal" thinkers

[calbert at tiac.net]

KW:
> 
> To speak about totalitarism is useless without regarding the
> forerunners, and they were called "liberal" in their era...

This strikes me as a bit glib......."zemstvo" liberals in 19th cent. 
russia sacrificed considerably in their efforts to not only educate 
peasants, but to establish early credit facilities to assist in their 
conversion from chattel to farmers. As such, their REAL and 
MATERIAL contribution to the masses FAR exceeded anything done 
by either their menshevik or bolshevik successors, in fact, it could 
be argued that it was the educational contributions of the ZLs which 
provided the ground later tilled by Lenin, to wit, a skilled, relatively 
educated, urban proletariat...

I'm hard pressed to see how these could be considered fore-
runners of totalitarianism.....



love,
cfa
> Kurt-Werner Pörtner
> 
>