Dissident Veteran For Peace: Lenin's Foresight

Dissident Veteran For Peace

"I know of no country in which there is so little independence of mind and real freedom of discussion as in America." —Alexis de Tocquevile. Democracy in America, Book I, Chapter XV.

With a nod to the Most Rev. Dom Helder Camara: When I support Palestinians some call me an 'anti-Semite', when I try to explain why I stand in solidarity with Palestinians they call me a Nazi.

"WAR is a racket. It always has been. It is possibly the oldest, easily the most profitable, surely the most vicious. It is the only one international in scope. It is the only one in which the profits are reckoned in dollars and the losses in lives." —Major General Smedley Butler, USMC (ret.)

"... no one ever seizes power with the intention of relinquishing it. Power is not a means; it is an end." —character of O'Brien in 1984, part 3, ch. 3 by George Orwell.

"Every prophet has realized that nobody loves you for being the enemy of their illusions. Every prophet has realized that most of us want peace at any price as long as the peace is ours and somebody else pays the price. That is why the prophet Jeremiah said, ' "Peace, peace," they say, when there is no peace,' ..." —The Rev. William Sloane Coffin. "Not to Bring Peace, But a Sword."

Monday, April 20, 2009

Lenin's Foresight

In Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy John le Carre has the Soviet double agent Bill Haydon say: "In capitalist America economic repression of the masses is institutionalised to a point which not even Lenin could have foreseen ..." (p. 365 of the 2002 Pocket Books paperback edition). A listener referenced this line in an e-mail comment to the Diane Rehm Show during a segment with William Greider (48:39). This view has much to commend itself given the taxpayer-financed bailout of corporate giants, growing homelessness, the mortgage foreclosure crisis, the dismal state of America's corrupt labor unions, and the fact that the US has the largest prison population in the world.

See also: "In hard times, tent cities rise across the country" by the AP.

Labels: art and literature, class, Lenin, poverty, repression, United States