Re: What's a life worth?

At 10:33 PM 4/28/2000 +0000, you wrote:
>I've been following the debate about "global Keynesianism" and 
>whether 20th century communism was worse than 20th century capitalist 
>imperialism.  Here's my contribution to the discussion.
>
>With the media giving some attention to the 25th anniversary of the 
>end of the US war against Vietnam, I devoted some time during the 
>last week of my classes to discussing the war.  To help students 
>understand that the US was not fighting to defend "South Vietnam" 
>against an invasion by "North Vietnam," I discussed the historical 
>process by which the US first supported and then attempted to 
>supplant French colonialism in Indochina.

True enough. As I stated elsewhere, the French used imperialism to draw an
imaginary line between the French and the Other (Algerians, Indochinese).
France limited its terror to overseas -- only when its imperialism reached
its final stage did imperialist terror openly manifest itself in the streets
of France with the OAS. For a time, the French could believe that
imperialism (in which the violence was limited to the colonies) was better
than totalitarianism (in which the violence would get the French _and_ their
colonial subjects), indeed was necessary in order to prevent totalitarianism
from taking over France. And a majority of the French population _did_ seem
to believe that, for at least a decade after the Second World War, before it
began to fade away. They even seemed to appreciate that. ("Look, we keep the
Arabs down, then we won't lose part of our homeland to the
Arab/Muslim/Communist/[fill-in-the-blank-here].")

That is what I meant.

>[deletia]
>
>Finally, it was the communist movement that fought to expel 
>colonialism from Vietnam and to oppose colonialism throughout the 
>world.  Notwithstanding the errors made by the communist movement, it 
>fought to free the majority of humanity from capitalist colonialism.  

In that sense, communism may have been a necessary partner to capitalism in
the dialectic. Hmm. Maybe we might get an ideological convergence in the
Kondratieff up-cycle after all.

>[deletia]
>
>I remember, as a graduate student at Brandeis, walking on a picket
>line in 1968 with striking Raytheon workers in Waltham, Mass.  They
>made the missile guidance systems that were being used in Vietnam. 
>They were exploited workers who had real grievances in their strike,
>and they welcomed support from college students.  But capitalists 
>were paying them to produce "weapons of mass destruction" for use 
>against Vietnamese revolutionaries.  Of course, Vietnamese were more 
>impoverished than Raytheon workers.  That's how imperialism works.

You have my sympathies, and my thanks.

>Steve Rosenthal