scripsit Tom: > You conveniently ignored the quote by the Indian fellow who complained > about how there are too many political parties.
I guess it didn't occur to me you were offering it as a serious argument. I confess I didn't pay too much attention to it, as I misread it to be coming from a USian, and thought it was offered as an example of absurdity. > In my personal opinion, the culture which is most similar to America > is India, although we took different routes to get there: they've been > through Democracy, Theocracy, Tyranny, Oligarchy, Nothingorcracy, and > Sillyocracy, and so they really don't take much of anything too > seriously nowadays. Americans don't take anything too seriously > either. This is not a comparison I would make, but it is interesting to contemplate. > The "anarcho-syndicalist" comment was hopefully a self-conscious ironic > reference to Michael Palin in The Holy Grail, I hope, and not serious. No -- I actually had in mind the Catalonian workers' militias in the Spanish Civil war (the ones who considered the Comintern-allied Communists to be right-wing). It was not really serious, though; I appreciate some aspects of their political thought, but I don't think it really workable. I tend to describe myself as an anarcho-syndicalist only when talking to Americans who think that Howard Dean is a radical leftist, only to illustrate just how centrist the `left' of American politics really is. > http://gi.grolier.com/presidents/ea/side/whig.html: > "The term Whig came into common use in 1834, and persisted until the > disintegration of the party after the presidential ELECTION of 1856. [...] I tend to associate `Whig' either with the liberal opposition in Britain (dating from the 17th century; their descendents are today's Lib-Dems) or with a rather na�ve progressive view of history as the story of continual progress. The latter is the way the term tends to be used generically by historians. Either way, the term evokes a rather old-fashioned classical liberalism. -- Pax vobiscum; pax cum omnibus. Thanasis Kinias tkinias at asu.edu Doctoral Student, Department of History Arizona State University Tempe, Arizona, U.S.A. -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
