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 naïve 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]
