> Carrol Cox wrote: Three points. The post I was responding to suggested that a third party could prosper only by being "between" the two parties. But as many recognize, there is no room between the two parties. My image was being between Hitler & Goebbels. I said nothing of Stalin. And now a more substantial point. The oligarchy that rules the U.S. through its single party with two faces is, on the whole, less harsh on the population of the U.S. than Hitler was on the population of Germany. But from the viewpoint of the *rest* of the world, certainly the U.S. today (and for the last 50 years) has been a far greater threat than the Third Reich was. And while I made no reference one way or the other to the USSR, I will add now that whatever one may think of the domestic policy of the Soviet Union, it was never a serious threat to the remainder of the human species, as the U.S. Empire certainly is. So supporting *either* Bush or Gore is the equivalent (from the perspective of world history) of supporting Hitler in Germany in 1933. >> Forgive me, but this approaches gibberish that only embarrases the left. The Hitler comments are unsupportable; to say that the US gvt. is "on the whole less harsh" on its population than was the Nazi Reich gravely underdescribes the evils of Nazism. And Nazism was of course a crazed and aggressive form of imperialism that "threatened" with enslavement and the extermination of large groups of people pretty much all of Eastern Europe, much of Western Europe and, potentially, any other damn place within the reach of the German army. Hello?!! It took a half dozen nations and rebels in countless occupied territories all out war to stem Nazi expansionism at the cost of, what, 30 million lives? Had the Nazis developed the A-bomb first or developed the V-2 rocket the death toll could have been many tens of millions more. The devestation of US imperialism is no doubt extreme. But to equate the intent and methods of rule of Nazism and the US is both unnecessary and absurd. Please, learn something about German history and the history of the Holocaust before hazarding such claims. And recommending so is not a retreat into privilege. Yes, for those suffering most directly the oppressions of our system, the system's evil is absolute. Death is death, murder is murder, and these exist as abslute, not relative categories. But as a matter of historical and sociological judgement differences in quantity and quality do matter. Also, to say that the Soviet Union did not "export" terror is also specious. The Russification of the Soviet Union under Stalin was a kind of war by "white Russia" on ethnic, racial and religious minorities within the territorial USSR that amounted to the persecution of "foreign" peoples; that is, the USSR was forged, arguably, thru a kind of "internal" imperialism with partially racialized enemies. Jeremy
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