Originally Posted by
EastsideAl
This discussion is growing well outside of the scope of this thread, and indeed of this board, so I'm not going to engage in it much further than this. But before Mr. Shea gets too happy putting words [[and ideologies) in my mouth, I think I have to state that I am neither a pacifist nor sympathetic to Communism or Leninism. And the charge that the "American left" [[whatever that is - does he mean the tiny ranks of American Communists, or just anyone to the left of Ronald Reagan?) is, or was, somehow in love with Soviet-style Communism is a scare tactic that has been used to stall political change, roll back social progress, frighten people into supporting hugely wasteful and deadly military adventurism, and drive the flow of our funds to giant defense contractors for decades.
All this even though it is the American "left" that consistently stood on the side of greater expansion of political participation, social freedom, economic opportunity, expansion of democratic freedom in other countries, de-emphasizing of the military in foreign affairs, freedom from state and police intrusion into our private lives, and expansion of civil liberties in general - hardly stuff that a Communist state would tolerate - against an American right that continues to this day to to fight these things every step of the way.
One needn't have gone as far as Ms. Herz [[who, whatever the power of her convictions, comes off as somewhat mentally imbalanced in the very small amount of her own writings that are available), or even be a pacifist or some sort of apologist for Communism, in order to have opposed the enormously wasteful and deadly excesses of the Cold War era, such as the hugely wasteful flood of politically-motivated funds into the mostly non-productive defense sector, support of massively murderous foreign wars - whether fought directly by the U.S. or by our proxies - of dubious purpose, and our support of brutally repressive regimes around the world in the name of ideological stability [[and continued opportunity for American business interests). And almost all of us who opposed those things were neither Communists nor potential self-immolaters.