1984 Foreword "fascistic disposition"

[jbor]

>> The great majority of people
>> living in Western democracies are "politically equal" and "intellectually
>> free". Injustices which affect a minority are generally transitory. In every
>> respect life in a totalitarian state is the opposite of this.

on 8/5/03 4:14 PM, Mike Weaver wrote:

> The "Western Democracies" cannot be separated from their client states/ex
> colonies over whom they (their corporations) maintain economic dominance.
> When you take the preterite populations of those countries and add them to
> the 30 - 40% of our populations for whom political equality and
> intellectual freedom is a joke, what have you got? Not the wonderful
> goodness of liberal capitalism that you believe in.

No need to get all polemical. I've been talking about democracy versus
totalitarianism, not "capitalism". Relatively speaking (and your stats are
ill-defined and lack even a pretence of validity, by the way), there is a
great deal more "intellectual freedom" and "political equality" in the U.S.,
Britain, European states (as well as in many former colonies which have
adopted democracy as a system of govt) than there is under totalitarian
regimes such as Saddam's in Iraq was. The Patriot Act is trivial when
compared to Saddam's purges. Further, most people in, say, Zimbabwe or
Sierra Leone were far better off when the British and French colonials were
there than they are at the present moment, which is lamentable and ironic
but also true. It's a question of degree, and of where international
humanitarian support and political (and media) pressure should be focused.
(And I think it's fair enough to demand that the former colonisers bear the
brunt of the cost and the responsibility for cleaning up the humanitarian
disasters which they helped to bring about.)

best