LAST DITCH OF DEMOCRACY - Majority Rights

of shysters in Washington, in Wall Street or in Mexico? And who,
according to Sumner, is to be allowed to get what? And who is to be
allowed to GROW what they want to eat in their own garden? That
would seem to be one whale of a question. Aye, aye, sir, very like a
whale or an octopus.
The agricultural districts hardly ever start wars. Lack of food may start
people roving. It may in the last analysis provoke nomadic migrations.
BUT people living in abundant farmland very seldom start out to raid
someone else’s bare fields. And then this problem of bilaterality. This
question of justice having two sides. Where does Sumner get THAT
subject? How much local control does Sumner allow to the local
communist party or to the LOCAL party of any kind?
Europe seems rather inclined to have a bit of local control. It seems to
me the seven league advance, which Lenin advocated toward the cultural
attitudes, might rather include this idea of local control. Especially as
Stalin understands Senator Vandenburg and Mr. Welles so much better
than they understand Mr. Stalin. Mebbe that is because he was so much
more moral. I mean in his earlier writings. Why, 20 years ago Stalin was
writin’ about foreign imperialism “devoid of all moral authority and
deservedly hated by the oppressed and exploited masses of India.” I
suspect the local parties in Washington are as ignorant of Stalin’s past
life, as they are of Europe, of European life during the past 20 years.
#104 (July 3, 1943) U.S.(C68)
COLORING
Ideas are colored by what they are dipped in. There was a young
Chinaman the other day, nearly accusin’ me of havin’ invented
Confucius. He had been UNeducated by contact with half-baked
occidental ideas. Lost his own cultural heritage, didn’t think Confucius
was so modern, that was because he hadn’t read him, of course. Mencius