JB,

If you imagine that activists taking to the streets stopped the
Vietnam war, your ignorance of history is truly appalling!

As to this evil America of ours (i.e., your typical leftist
all-or-nothing moralistic view of this nation's history), I
wonder why it is that people from practically every place in
the world will risk their lives to come here.  Must be the
water. ...  No, JB, our bourgeois liberalism is one of the
best products of world history.  As to US policy causing
thousands of deaths of the innocent, etc., why don't you
compare those numbers to the hundreds of thousands
slaughtered in third-world countries?  (There are, of course,
plenty of ignoramuses who will say the US caused all that
too.)  Anyway, if you really don't think we have a meaningful
degree of democracy in this country, you wouldn't dare voice
your opinion in public--here or to your next-door neighbor.
I lived in Spain for three years under Franco, and let me tell
you, kid, you don't know what you're blustering about.

I see in your attitude a similarity to that of Pound, who,
disgusted with the Great War, came to detest bourgeois liberalism's
ninny-ness and gravitated to fascist ideology.

Ol' Dan, the boozhy-liberal man

At 09:06 PM 8/12/00 EDT, you wrote:
>In a message dated 08/12/2000 1:10:45 PM Eastern Daylight Time,
>[log in to unmask] writes:
>
><< If you want to give up on the democratic ideal and tolerate
> resort to violence from either left or right, no matter how
> nobly motivated, be my guest.  The idea that everything is
> "rigged" by the Right is the cliche of the total dropout
> from the democratic process--which, may I remind you, can
> be painfully slow and demands the fullest participation by
> a citizenry.  If violence is the answer, JB, then the Right
> will win.  They got bigger and better guns.
>
> ==Ol' Dan
>  >>
>
>as I said, this isn't a new argument: to compare a little street ruckus with
>the wholesale slaughter by the right-wing goons in charge of American foreign
>policy in order that one may show how evenly balanced one is downright silly
>and exposes those who make such comparisons as little more than political
>ninnies.  for example, the vietnam war would probably still be going on if
>tens of thousands of committed activists had not taken to the streets and
>rioted.  that's what stopped the war -- it wasn't a lot of liberals
>tut-tuting with their neighbors on the phone, it wasn't a phony appeal to
>*painfully slow democracy*, and it wasn't the body bags.  but then, like now,
>the liberals denounced the demonstrators with cliches such as*violent
>extremists* and generally went on making a living and going to the movies.
>well, old DP can stand atop his imaginary house of democracy -- anyone who
>thinks we have anything like a democracy in this country is stumbling around
>in a political blackout -- & piously scorn the actions of these heroic folks,
>like his friend's bright son, while thousands of women and children are
>condemned to brutal and premature deaths as a direct result of American
>foreign policy, but in order to do so he has to ignore the ugly reality
>around him.  in a sense he's doing what liberals have always done; leaving
>the dangerous work of trying to rectify the wrongs to others willing to get
>their heads busted, while pooh-poohing their tactics as offensive to their
>bourgeois nostrils.
>
>joe brennan
>
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