Re: Neo-liberalism

At 03:14 PM 5/3/2000 -0400, you wrote:
>On Wed, 3 May 2000, Cedric Beidatsch wrote:
>
>>Left to their own devices I just don't see the evidence for widespread
>>ordinary human brutality - brutalisation and participation yes, but the
>>organising and initiating has always come about as a function of
>>government policy.
>
>In Eastern Europe (for example in Latvia), as soon as Nazi disabled the
>local police, citizens began beating Jews to death with sticks and their
>bare hands.

But in the particular case of the territories annexed by the Soviet Union as
a direct result of the Nazi-Soviet pact of 1939, hadn't the process of
brutalization started long before Operation Barbarossa, with mass executions
and deportations of Balts (including Latvians, and certainly including Jews)
before or after the formal Soviet annexation? Latvia under Soviet domination
was hardly a stable liberal democracy akin to its Nordic neighbours.

>Andrew Austin
>Knoxville, TN