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Politics : Sharks in the Septic Tank -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: average joe who wrote (8234)	3/13/2001 10:34:24 AM
From: Win Smith	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 82486

What did Rand make of the good capitalists working on behalf of King Leopold, perchance? Hochschild's sketches of these three individuals are vivid, and his depiction of what they and many others were confronting is masterly. It shows, above all, that during Leopold's rule in Africa from 1885 to 1908, and in the years on either side of it, the peoples of the Congo River Basin suffered, in Hochschild's words, ''a death toll of Holocaust dimensions.'' This is not said lightly. The strategy adopted to plunder the area was, in effect, a war of enslavement against the indigenous population. Much of the death toll was the result of killing, pure and simple. Villages were dragooned into tapping rubber, and if they refused to comply, or complied but failed to meet European quotas, they were punished. The hands of dead Congolese were severed and kept by militias to account to their quartermasters for spent ammunition. And, as Morel said, the practice of mutilation was extended to the living. By far the greatest number of deaths, however, were caused by sickness and starvation. The effect of the terror was to drive communities from their sources of food. A Belgian Government commission estimated that from the late 1870's, when the explorer Henry Morton Stanley made his first forays into the Congo on King Leopold's behalf, until 1919, the year the commission published its findings, the population of the Congo Basin had been reduced by half. In 1924 there were thought to be some 10 million inhabitants -- which means, Hochschild says, that ''during the Leopold period and its immediate aftermath the population of the territory dropped by approximately 10 million.'' archives.nytimes.com:80/plweb-cgi/fastweb?view=book-rev&docrank=4&numhitsfound=17&query=Adam%20Hochschild&query_rule=%28$query%29&docid=25298&docdb=bookrev-arch&dbname=bookrev-cur&dbname=bookrev-arch&numresults=10&operator=AND&TemplateName=doc.tmpl&setCookie=1

To: average joe who wrote (8234)	3/13/2001 10:46:21 AM
From: Neocon	Respond to of 82486

Well, it is true that Marxism dominated the Intellectual Establishment. It is not especially true that Kant has held sway over the intelligentsia, nor that he was a mystic. The idea that "street corner evangelists" were of any influence is bizarre. Not all denounced the rich, or thought that money was the root of evil. The idea was that democracy required social equality, not merely legal equality, There were various theories floated about how to bring that about. The initiative that most affected the public schools was that of John Dewey, who de-emphasized course content in favor of cooperative activities, attempted to make the child more "free- thinking", and tried to make the teacher less if an authority figure. Otherwise, as I was growing up, the curriculum was pretty middle of the road, and fairly patriotic.