Ed,
The posting you comment on seems to have been misunderstood by a lot of
people. It was intended as irony and as a demonstration of how laying the
blame for a wide range of woes and human failings on a single group or class
can lead to absurd and dangerous conclusions. My point is that the world
was in a sorry state long before there was an identifiable capitalist class.
My reference to the Jews was intended to illustrate that, if you can trump
up enough charges and make them sound credible, you can get away with just
about anything. Historically, many charges were trumped up against the
Jews. In ancient times, they killed Christ. In medieval times they
desecrated the host and participated in blood libels, and worst of all,
poisoned wells and thereby brought on the plague. The 19th century
witnessed things like the Dreyfuss affair, and in the 20th we had the
trumped up Protocols of Zion. The fact that some Jews, including Trotsky
and some other leading Bolsheviks, were communists did not help them either.
As Goldhagen demonstrates, convincingly in my opinion, so many nefarious
labels had been pinned on the Jews by the 1930s that they became easy
victims. Translate that into some of the things posted on the internet
recently and you could have a crusade against anyone you label a capitalist,
including the guy who operates a Macdonalds or Starbucks franchise in
Seattle. I'm not saying that the Seattle protests were such a crusade, but
some of the so-called protesters could easily have become one.
So, to summarize, my quarrel is not with Jews or capitalists or any other
group, but with pinning labels on people and unjustifiably blaming them for
things they may not have had much to do with. Crusaders did not kill Jews
and other infidels because the crusaders were capitalists. They killed them
because within medieval society they had been conditioned to do so. It
assured them of a path to heaven. Right now, Russians are not killing
Chechyns because of capital. They are doing so out of animosity going way
back into czarist times, because they're afraid that if the Chechyns go,
much of the Caucuses could follow and perhaps also because they want to
demonstrate to the world that they are still a military power (a very sorry
way of doing it!!). To justify what they are doing they've pinned a
convenient label on the Chechyns, that of "terrorists".
Hope this clarifies what I was trying to say.
Ed Weick
