The liberal conscience, which used to be affronted by extremism on the Right, has more recently been affronted by extremism on the Left, Democratic capitalism has today become the object of extremist emotions and wildly unreasoned rhetoric as a testimony to moral virtue. Dorothee Sölle, for example, a distinguished theologian at Union Theological Seminary, recently wrote as an aside in an article in Christianity and Crisis (July 23) a phrase heated enough for Earl Butz, Spiro Agnew, Andrew Young, Daniel Berrigan, or William Stringfellow. In fact, she quoted without disavowal a phrase of the last two: “the mad capitalist murder machine.”
On the subject of murder, one would have expected a socialist to be rather more circumspect. Ignoring the unforgettable details Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn has provided on the millions who languish in the Gulag Archipelago; ignoring the “boat people”; ignoring heaps of corpses in Cambodia; ignoring millions dead in the various socialist republics of Africa—Dr. Sölle seems to be claiming to discern murder at work in the twenty or so examples of democratic capitalism. From which parts of the world do people flee? In which do they seek refuge?
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