Re: Neo-liberalism

At 05:01 PM 5/3/2000 -0300, you wrote:
>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.

Consequently we might want to compare Latvia with, say, Denmark. Without any
brutalization by any kind of unrepresentative dictatorship, the Danes did
not engage in pogroms when the Nazis took over Denmark; they had a
reasonably good record in helping Danish Jews escape to safety, despite
lamentable anti-Semitism and occasional collaboration. I think that the same
records apply in Norway and Finland, too.

>>Andrew Austin
>>Knoxville, TN

Randy McDonald
Charlottetown PE
Canada