"Why don't you lib guys relate that to what your brethren did to their own populations in the Soviet Union (Stalin), PRC (Mao) or Cambodia (Pol Pot) in stead?"
What a BS statement. Stalin, Mao and Pol Pot, along with Milosovich, Idi Amin, the people in Rwanda, and Papa and Baby Doc, didn't need an ideology to do what they did. They did it because they had the power and didn't mind breaking eggs.
"That was socialism at work, the predecessor of modern US liberalism. "
Nonsense. Don't you know anything about history? American liberalism grew out of the Populist Movement. The Populist Movement was in reaction to the excesses of unrestricted capitalism that existed in the US. While Marx and Engels were contemporaries and were reacting to similar forces in Europe, to say that they founded what was happening in the US is a gross mis-representation of what happened. The Populists led to the Labor Movement, which is why Labor Day in every place but the US is celebrated on a day which marks an event in US history. In the US, we'd prefer to forget the Haymarket Riots, most Americans don't know they even existed, so we picked a different day.
"Or do you still claim the liberal credo is in no way related to past different takes of the same master idea?"
Why make a false claim? Now true, the two did have their origins in a similar point in time and both were born as a result of similar excesses. But to say that socialism was the foundation of modern American Liberalism is about as correct as saying fascism is the foundation of modern American conservatism. |
