At 04:38 PM 09/03/2001 -0500, you wrote:
>Does anyone suggest that the Left of today should issue a blanket
>apology for the crimes of Lenin, Stalin, Mao, and the rest?
I'm sure that there are people floating somewhere on the Internet who will
apologize for these tyrants, just as there are (a much larger number of)
people who apologize for US imperialism and worse. (Strictly speaking,
Lenin never really became a "tyrant," since his personal power faded as the
Russian/Soviet state became more powerful.)
(I hope that we don't into the crap of labelling any effort to attain a
nuanced understanding of such people as Lenin a "blanket apology." This
kind of either/or thinking -- the insistence that other leftists denounce
Lenin or whomever -- is simply the Cold War form of "political correctness.")
>I would be
>hesitant to agree. How can activists of today be responsible for what
>some of our intellectual antecedents did when most of us weren't even
>born?
My point was that the word "communism" was being abused (and not only by
the anti-communists).
Jim Devine [EMAIL PROTECTED] & http://bellarmine.lmu.edu/~JDevine
