Pacifists say, "Absolutely nothing." Their slogan is
"War Is Not the Answer," for all times and all places. It's a lame slogan, if a well-meant one, on which younger right-wingers have zeroed in, looking for an easy target.
Protest Warrior claims that the group invented a counter-slogan:
The Right's counter-slogan, however, is as lame as the pacifist slogan that it attacks. Rightists, who would have been
Copperheads or on the Confederate side in the era of the Civil War in the United States, and who would have supported Franco in the
Spanish Civil War, can't take credit for solving slavery, fascism, and Nazism. Besides, what put an end to
Communism (aka state socialism) wasn't war but the decision of the Communist Party elite (see David M. Kotz and Fred Weir,
Revolution from Above: The Demise of the Soviet System, Routledge, 1997).
But it is a little sad to think that, among slavery, fascism, Nazism, and Communism, only the last
vanished from the pages of history without being militarily defeated by an external enemy. State socialism created its own
grave-diggers, the
bureaucratic power elite, but capitalism hasn't. Historical materialism must account for this problem and propose a new solution.
1 comment:
The capitalist decay is not overdue yet. The rate of decay is slower, but imminent.
The materialist cushion of Capitalism will wear out by mere reduction of "materials". The capitalist system has been fairly successful in shifting the commodity from material to virtual, but in so doing it has also set in place the infrastructure for virtual dissent. Hence the ideologic warfare.
I don't think communism was inherent to human nature, but I think fascism is, so is nazism. They have survived because they tap into the deepest and most animal human instinct (animal desire for supremacy and survival), hence the complacency of the masses who do not rebel against them until they (fascist rules) have begin to challenge the human survival.
The German people, for example, may have lost the Nazi's power structure, but have they lost the inherent desire for supremacy? It didn't take them long to throw themselves in the arms of the next superpower, to become more American than Americans themselves, to abandon half of their populace in order to be able to salvage what they lost in war: their supremacy!
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