To: Tom Clarke who wrote (17017 ) 9/6/2000 5:27:38 AM From: GUSTAVE JAEGER Respond to Re: Hitler cracked down on the communists because they were competition, just like Capone had to knock off Bugs Moran. internecine foes! Lenin and Stalin, on the other hand, engaged in iron-hand purges within the Bolshevik party (against Trotsky, etc.) in the same way as Al Capone got rid of potential rivals.Anglo-Saxon intellectuals whose allegedly leftist persuasions were circumscribed to the Western (remember pre-WWII anti-Slavic racism) white man:Racism was a tenet of the left in the 20s and 30s. Recall that GB Shaw, HG Wells, Margaret Sanger, Bertrand Russell, et. al. were calling for legalized euthanasia of brown skinned people and "simple" people. mental horizon , pretty much as Plato's imaginary Republic didn't extend to metics, slaves and other "unsuited" minorities.... Furthermore, keep in mind that democracy itself was quite a new political brand in post-WWI Europe: to claim universal franchise for all adult male individuals was still viewed as an anarchist agenda by most conservative bourgeois --from both the Left and the Right. After all, women were only entitled to vote in 1945.... Before WWI, European suffrages still took place on the basis of property qualification, only to be later extended to "academic qualification". Such a mistrust toward an election free-for-all, even amongst Socialist leaders, was partly due to the Catholic Church's overwhelming ascendancy over society. With over 80% of the population living in the country and considering that attendance figures for Sunday mass were much higher than any modern TV-talkshow, both left- and right-wing politicos/freethinkers feared that the rural flocks would just vote the way they had been sermonized by the country priest, that is, for the Catholic Party (in Belgium) or its conservative avatar, further hampering the necessary aggiornamento of society --the Ancien Régime's ghosts were still haunting many spheres....
