PROMETHEAN ANTAGONIST

 (An edited repost from long ago):

If you ask a socialist (hard core or, “lite”) if they think it would have been better if the Soviet Socialist police state had won the cold War, they’ll pause. They may not answer you. If they do, they’ll inevitably add, “but…”

Many on the left are disappointed that the socialist “experiment” in Russia failed, that a free economy (i.e.  capitalism) won its battle with collectivist tyranny. Many of them will look at Cuba’s decrepit one-party state and insist that it’s successful, usually suggesting that Castro improved the lot of Cuba’s citizens by replacing one dictator with another and drastically diminishing the country’s standard of living.  Such authoritarians make no secret of their disdain for Coke, McDonald’s, Starbucks, or Apple. One could speculate that, if they could, they’d close down a kid’s lemonade stand to honor their hatred for free commerce. Remember, their ultimate hatred is for self-striving and human nature itself. Hatred of a free-market is virtually indistinguishable from a hatred of freedom in general (as economist Milton Friedman so insightfully observed). 

America has played a dominant role in spreading the attributes of open society – a widening diversity and availability of products, services, ideas, and cultural / artistic expression.  (One could unfortunately argue that those days are over as America increasingly tows the line of global socialism). 

Decrying the supposed horrors of, “cultural hegemony” and “McWorld,” is an attempt to conjure a fictional crisis that isn’t there. While screeching the standard socialist whine that bland uniformity is engulfing the world, quite the opposite is actually taking place. (Remember, such criticisms are coming from the same clowns who actually believe “diversity” is something fostered from the imposed edicts of government clerks). 

Go to any major world-city today and you will find a surging dynamism unseen in human history. The lights, colors, shapes, and sounds being mere symbols of the underlying energy of human creativity unleashed; beautiful architecture, products, ideas, and aesthetics from around the world, low cost food, transportation, and entertainment. While some note the signs that say McDonald’s, they seem to miss the one’s that say Toshiba or Renault. While some see, The Gap, they miss the fact that everyone around them is wearing a variety of garb in a variety of styles from different times and places. Look around you – poor, rich, and middle class, all alive in a way unseen before our time. As you watch people walking about with cell phones, digital cameras, and I-pods, you may realize that those old comic book sci-fi images of an imaginary future have actually fully materialized, cars looking more like space ships, gliding on delicate ribbons of modern engineering design. Did this all come about from some unseen vibrancy in the plans of socialist bureaucrats? – Hardly. The US and the system which honors the creativity of free society has been the prime catalyst to this new world. If all this is “hegemony” then hegemony is hardly a just target for complaint. 

# posted by Promethean Antagonist @ 12:23 PM