On 8/14/2011 11:01 PM, Rich Cooper wrote:
> Would you characterizeChe Guevara's andFidel Castro's killings,
> imprisonments and torture acts as non socialist? How about Lenin,
> Stalin,Khrushchev,and so on. Remember that Hitler's party was called,
> in German, the National Socialists. (01)
There are a huge number of interacting factors. If you want to
represent them in any kind of ontology, you have to disentangle
them one by one: (02)
1. To understand socialism, you have to look at the purest and
simplest forms. Start with the nuclear family -- mom, pop,
and kids. There you have the ultimate pooling and sharing
of resources -- pure socialism. (03)
2. To analyze socialist societies, start with the simplest ones.
Native American tribes, for example. Another example would be
the Amish. And if you read Marx, you would find that he also
believed that socialism would lead to a withering away of the
government -- not the growth of government. That is a hopelessly
naive idea, which can only work for very small societies. (04)
3. Unfortunately, Ron Paul shares that same naive idea with Marx.
Both of them have identical hopes that if you establish a perfect
system (in their sense), governments will magically wither away.
That just will not happen -- never has, never will. If you create
a power vacuum in the center, you'll get a coup -- either by the
military or by the corporations (the "military-industrial complex"
that Eisenhower warned us about). (05)
4. Dictators are nothing more nor less than monarchs -- kings.
There have been good ones and bad ones, but remember:
"Power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely."
That is why there are more bad dictators than good ones,
and ones that start out good tend to become worse as
they remain in power. (06)
5. The Soviet Union took over the Tsarist bureaucracy and
administrative procedures. That is why they did not need
a period of "nation building" when they took power -- they
just adopted the existing system. The Soviet government was
first and foremost Tsarist, and only incidentally socialist.
And by the way, many Russians still have a nostalgic longing
for a strong Stalin-like leader. (07)
6. Hitler's "Nationalist Socialism" was first and foremost
*nationalist*, and his strongest opponents in Germany were
the Communists. One of his excuses for wiping out the Jews
was that many of them had Communist sympathies. Hitler's
government was definitely *not* socialist -- it was
*corporate* nationalism, in which the government was very
strongly allied with the largest German corporations.
In that sense, the Nazis had a lot in common with modern
China, which is also a corporate nationalist government. (08)
7. And if you note, some of the strongest right-wingers in the US
are the White-Power extremists, who idolize Hitler and his
tactics. They are very strong supporters of a Hitler style
of corporate nationalism. If Ron Paul ever succeeded in
weakening the central government, the worst threat would
be what Hitler did to the weak German democracy. (09)
All these points, of course, are broad generalizations, and the
details are much more complex. But at least they show that you
can't use one-word labels or simple slogans to characterize
any kind of government. (010)
When you do ontology, you have to analyze all the components
that go into a concept and look at all possible combinations. (011)
John (012)
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