Socialist Appeal

As had been true during World War I, the sacrifices made by African-Americans in the Second World War dramatically altered the racial climate on the homefront. The racial issues of the war itself, in this instance, went even one better than Woodrow Wilson s pious declarations in the 1910s concerning a world made safe for democracy. As C. L. R. James wrote in the Socialist Appeal (1939), The democracy I want to fight for, Hitler is not depriving me of. ... 

For example, the EU recently cleared the herbicide glyphosate (Roundup), which is practically nontoxic to humans, for consumer use. Nevertheless, KEMI has notified importers and distributors that sales of glyphosate to the public will be severely restricted in the future. Faithful to its socialist traditions, the almighty Swedish State attaches no value to the billions of Swedish crowns invested by private homeowners in lawns, flowerbeds, rose gardens, and so on. An appeal to KEMI s decision will most likely be directed to the European Court of Justice. 

After refusing for years to examine and make use of the archives of the Eastern Bloc,149 the Federal German government finally overcame its reluctance in the wake of the 1964 Auschwitz Trial, and appealed to all nations of the world to make as much documentation about National Socialist crimes available to Germany as possible. Some parties even demanded that a European Legal... 

If such schemes have typically taken their most destructive human and natural toll in the states of the former socialist bloc and in revolutionary Third World settings, that is surely because there authoritarian state power, unimpeded by representative institutions, could nullify resistance and push ahead. The ideas behind them, however, on which their legitimacy and appeal depended, were thoroughly Western. Order and harmony that once seemed the function of a unitary God had been replaced by a similar faith in the idea of progress vouchsafed by scientists, engineers, and planners. Their power, it is worth remembering, was least contested at those moments when other forms of coordination had failed or seemed utterly inadequate to the great... 

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