Dictatorships And No (Intellectual) Standards
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Catching up on news from the last few days, I came across this Gingrich gem as I was following the ongoing pseudo-controversy about Obama’s handshake with Hugo Chavez at the Summit of the Americas. The interview was unremarkable FoxNews chatter, complete with calls for more domestic oil drilling, except for Gingrich’s hilariously ahistorical reference to the Carter administration as “pro-dictator.” In reality, it was the Reagan administration that was rather more obviously pro-dictator, if we must use such simplistic descriptions, and this was on balance a good thing for U.S. interests. Indeed, one of the main, largely correct criticisms of Carter from the right was that he was too willing to sell out anticommunist and other allied dictators for the sake of maintaining a foolish, self-defeating consistency on democracy promotion and human rights advocacy. In the event, those who suffered most were the Iranian and Nicaraguan peoples, and all the moralistic cant in the world didn’t make the revolutionary governments that replaced the dictatorships better at governing or at treating the population more justly. By just about every measure, the revolutions made these nations worse off.
It was no less than Jeane Kirkpatrick, who later became Reagan’s ambassador to the United Nations, who authored the famous and genuinely important article in Commentary, Dictatorships and Double Standards, in which she made this observation:
As if this were not bad enough, in the current year [1979] the United States has suffered two other major blows–in Iran and Nicaragua–of large and strategic significance. In each country, the Carter administration not only failed to prevent the undesired outcome, it actively collaborated in the replacement of moderate autocrats friendly to American interests with less friendly autocrats of extremist persuasion. It is too soon to be certain about what kind of regime will ultimately emerge in either Iran or Nicaragua, but accumulating evidence suggests that things are as likely to get worse as to get better in both countries. The Sandinistas in Nicaragua appear to be as skillful in consolidating power as the Ayatollah Khomeini is inept, and leaders of both revolutions display an intolerance and arrogance that do not bode well for the peaceful sharing of power or the establishment of constitutional governments, especially since those leaders have made clear that they have no intention of seeking either.
Kirkpatrick’s interpretation of the revolutionary governments that were being established thirty years ago in those countries was on the whole accurate. She explicitly pointed to the counterproductive and self-defeating nature of U.S.-backed democracy promotion in states that were challenged by domestic subversion:
In each of these countries, the American effort to impose liberalization and democratization on a government confronted with violent internal opposition not only failed, but actually assisted the coming to power of new regimes in which ordinary people enjoy fewer freedoms and less personal security than under the previous autocracy–regimes, moreover, hostile to American interests and policies.
In her essay, which holds up remarkably well thirty years later despite her preference for referring to modern authoritarian governments as “autocracies,” the “pro-dictator” administration was being castigated for being unwilling to back pro-U.S. dictators. Whatever else one wants to say about the Reagan years, no one can accuse President Reagan of a consistent or intense hostility to dictatorships as such. Neither was Reagan always insistent on attempting to prop up allied dictators if their peoples were trying to compel major political change. There are times when permanent national interests and relations with other states clearly trump past working relationships with a specific ruler or regime. The Reagan administration treated different states differently, providing aid to Hussein to contain Iran and consume Iran’s attention with his aggressive war against them, but also accepting the popular repudiation of the South Korean and Filipino dictatorships. Kirkpatrick was representative of thinking popular on the right at the time, which has now been all but banished to the margins as veritably anti-American, that was extremely skeptical of the possibility of rapid and successful democratization:
In the relatively few places where they exist, democratic governments have come into being slowly, after extended prior experience with more limited forms of participation during which leaders have reluctantly grown accustomed to tolerating dissent and opposition, opponents have accepted the notion that they may defeat but not destroy incumbents, and people have become aware of government’s effects on their lives and of their own possible effects on government. Decades, if not centuries, are normally required for people to acquire the necessary disciplines and habits.
This is essentially indistinguishable from arguments made by conservative critics of the so-called “freedom agenda” and the project to work political transformation of the Near East through regime change in Iraq. These were the same arguments that the Bush administration and its defenders dismissed as “racist” condescension when they were used to cast doubt on the prospects of the grand project in Iraq.
Gingrich was just coming into national politics in the Reagan years, and he could hardly have been unaware of Kirkpatrick’s essay or the views espoused in it, because these views were quite common on the right prior to the end of the Cold War. He could not have been under the impression that the failures of the Carter administration in foreign policy were the product of excessive chumminess with dictatorships, and so this recent babbling about the “pro-dictator” Carter is simply inventing a new history of that period and completely reversing the terms of the debate back in the late ’70s and early ’80s as modern partisan need demands. By freakish political accident and bizarre ideological fixation of its foreign policy elite, the GOP has become the party of democratization and international instability and more Democrats have settled into a slightly more realist-oriented bias against regime change, whether it is imposed from within or without. As I have noted before, when it comes to this dictatorship/democracy question today’s GOP interventionists are eerily, ironically akin to Carterites on foreign policy, which shows how far from Kirkpatrick neoconservative foreign policy arguments have traveled. Framing it simply as favoring dictatorship or democracy obscures the complexities of this question, but this is how democratists have always insisted on framing it.
What is so laughable about Gingrich’s interview is that Gingrich is held up as one of the main idea men in the GOP, and he actually has a doctorate in history, so one might think he would be somewhat embarrassed to be making such obviously stupid statements on national television, but clearly he isn’t. Viewing this clip, I am reminded that this is the person to whom Mark Sanford unfortunately claimed to defer in matters of foreign policy, and it occurred to me that the most damaging thing about Sanford’s statement is that it has lent credibility to someone whose foreign policy views as as ill-informed (or deliberately dishonest) as they are dangerous and aggressive.
Update: Regarding the ludicrous pseudo-controversy, Steve Benen asks:
Since when does the GOP find it useful to promote the idea of American weakness?
I believe the changeover occurred three months ago today. From that time on, it has become extremely useful to them. Of course, if anyone were to suggest that America is no longer as relatively predominant in global affairs as it was in 1945, he would be ridiculed by the same crowd as a “declinist” and a “post-American.” What is imperative and much more important than emphasizing U.S. weakness is manufacturing foreign threats, which Obama then supposedly “fails” to confront and overcome. Having cooked up the Venezuelan menace where no significant threat exists, Obama’s critics will then decry his “appeasement” of this menace, by which they will mean that for the most part Obama does not seem interested in hysterical alarmism in the conduct of foreign affairs.
The main problem I have with the handshake with Chavez, to the extent that I have any problem at all with it, is that it might be seen as raising the profile of a weak and strategically unimportant head of state. In reality, the handshake doesn’t matter because Venezuela doesn’t matter all that much one way or the other, and it needs us to buy its oil exports a lot more than we need them to supply it, but there is potentially a problem in engaging Chavez because it reinforces the impression that Chavez is important and needs to be engaged for the sake of broader U.S. goals in the region. The problem is not that Chavez is some regional menace who threatens real American interests, but that he is and ought to be almost entirely irrelevant to how we shape Latin America policy, but for some reason he has become a central figure in Washington’s approach to the entire continent. I am hopeful that this is why Obama laughs off the meeting with Chavez and ignores the hectoring of Daniel Ortega: because neither of these leaders matters very much at all. If in the process America’s reputation and our relations with the rest of Latin America are thereby improved, so much the better.
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61 Responses to “Dictatorships And No (Intellectual) Standards”
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“By just about every measure, the revolutions made these nations worse off.”
Well, every measure except the actual opinion of the people of those countries.
And Kirkpatrick’s essay is a tour-de-force of Orwellian doublespeak.
“In each of these countries, the American effort to impose liberalization and democratization on a government confronted with violent internal opposition not only failed, but actually assisted the coming to power of new regimes in which ordinary people enjoy fewer freedoms and less personal security than under the previous autocracy–regimes, moreover, hostile to American interests and policies.
In fact, the exact opposite was the case. The CIA toppling of Mossadegh and installation of the Shah set back any hope of further liberalization or democratization in Iran. Somoza recieved consistent support from the U.S.
As for Carter’s supposedly ill-guided democratization program, it was ill-guided only in that it didn’t go nearly far enough to eliminate the levers of dicatatorial power in both countries.
Much of the “conservative” blogosphere seem to posting the picture of Obama shaking hands with Chavez as if it is the only exhibit needed to to make their political points. It’s really sad because it means that the complex work of foreign policy has been reduced to the level of sophistication of teenage girls watching who sits with whom in the high school cafeteria.
It doesn’t follow that Obama is succeeding with his foreign policy, but when the criticisms have no more substance than to say [valleygirlvoice]“Like, OH … MY … GAWD … can you believe that he was seen, like, talking to Hugo … that’s SOOOO grody to the max!”[/valleygirlvoice] then it becomes just one more piece in the moutain of evidence that we have no credible opposition.
Overthrowing Mossadegh is a different question. I agree that this shouldn’t have been done, and a great deal of grief would have been avoided later on had this not happened, but once the Shah was in power and absolutely identified with the U.S. it was a terrible idea to give any support, even merely rhetorical support, to his political opposition.
The internal terror of the Iranian revolution and the invasion by Iraq that the revolution triggered clearly worsened conditions for millions of Iranians. There’s no question that Iranians loathed the Shah and his security apparatus, as well they might, but that doesn’t change the reality that the revolution inflicted enormous suffering on the Iranians. A majority dislikes the current regime now despite the fact that Iran has been at peace for 20 years. What are the odds that bloody purges and a disastrous, costly war made the regime more popular then?
I have an old post on how realist-sounding the “neoconservative” Kirkpatrick was compared to today. It seems evidence that political discourse has simply gotten crazier with time.
Gingrich and intellectual standards is oxymoronic. The thrice married Gingrich was also giving pointers to the Roman Catholic priest president of Notre Dame on who he should invite as commencement speakers. The various comments by Gingrich and Ensign were basically childish and petty and merely confirmed that this is not a serious and competent party. Was Reagan acting dangerously when he embraced Brezhnev, or Nixon when he shook hands with Mao or Chou, or how about Eisenhower and Khruschev. Basically it’s all comic strip. A few thoughts on Iran and the Shah. I was working in the oil business in that part of the world at the time and take it from me that Iran was a bomb waiting to go off. Detestation of the Shah and his regime was well nigh universal as far as I could tell. Kirkpatrick was fantasising if she thought this could be turned back. What were they going to do massacre people in the streets, let Savak torture more of them. The millions that came onto the streets when Khomeini retured didn’t happen by accident. Even the army wasn’t loyal to the Shah and he and the US had pumped millions into it. Carter just had the ill luck for it to happen on his watch. Once the hostages were seized there was little he could do in practical terms. Attacking the ocuntry would have meant their certain death, the rescue mission which Carter got blamed for was actually military incompetence, and at the end of the day they did all survive. You’d have to say that overall the US backing of dictatorial regimes has been a very mixed bag. Sometimes it’s been succesful but often it hasn’t. The inevitable result has been the creation of immensely rich and corrupt local oligharcies sitting atop vast amounts of poverty and injustice. Ultimately, this is unsustainable because govt can only govern by the will of the people and if they don’t go along they find ways to cripple the system. In the Soviet Union it was “we pretend to work and they pretend to pay us” while in Iran it was violent revolution. The whole of South America has moved left in the last 20 years largely as a response to repressive and conservative economic policies. Bush basically ignored the region because his various fiascoes sucked all the oxygen out off the room. Obama is just dealing with a new reality.
What are the odds that bloody purges and a disastrous, costly war made the regime more popular then?
I wonder if there’s actually a way to answer this question definitively. It doesn’t strike me as obvious that the regime would have been less popular in the late 70s and early 80s than it is today.
The popularity of a bloody purge probably depends on the popularity of the people being bloodily purged. And you’ve written quite a bit about the tendency of citizens to rally around their regime when the nation comes under attack or is subjected to sanctions. Whatever role the revolution may have had in precipitating the Iran-Iraq War, it was started by Saddam Hussein, an American client who waged the war using Gulf Arab money and American/European weapons.
I’m not saying you’re wrong, but it doesn’t strike me as obvious that the average Iranian in the early and mid-1980s would have seen the war as a reason to hate the regime. There were plenty of genuinely dangerous external enemies that the regime was presumably excoriating in its propaganda.
All that said, the regime’s incompetence in waging the war and its enthusiasm for martyring its own soldiers may have undercut Iranians’ natural tendency to rally around their government in wartime.
“There’s no question that Iranians loathed the Shah and his security apparatus, as well they might, but that doesn’t change the reality that the revolution inflicted enormous suffering on the Iranians. A majority dislikes the current regime now despite the fact that Iran has been at peace for 20 years. What are the odds that bloody purges and a disastrous, costly war made the regime more popular then?”
Perhaps having a superpower actively support a nasty dictator, enabling him to rule more harshly, was not a Good Thing for the Iranian people.
“What is so laughable about Gingrich’s interview is that Gingrich is held up as one of the main idea men in the GOP, and he actually has a doctorate in history, so one might think he would be somewhat embarrassed to be making such obviously stupid statements on national television, but clearly he isn’t. ”
Which is important; the only real idea that the GOP has is that lying more effectively will reward them.
I’d add that there’ve been three econ professors in Congress that I know about, all GOP (Gramm, Armey and Archer), who also were disgraces to any conception of economics as other than propaganda for the elites.
Why is it wrong to shake hands with Hugo Chavez, but it is perfectly fine to provide extensive diplomatic and financial support to Hosni Mubarak, King Abdullah (of Saudi Arabia), Islam Karimov (of Uzbekistan), and numerous other dictators in Africa, the Middle East, and Central Asia? Perhaps Newt Gingrich could explain that to us? Oh, and how is Hugo Chavez any more a dictator than Mikheil Saakashvili? (At least Chavez never started any wars.)
I agree that installing and propping up the Shah was not a particularly good thing, especially when compared with the alternative in 1953. Compared with what turned out to be the alternative in 1978-79, it was arguably the lesser of two evils. We see this repeatedly in the history of the 20th century. Tsarist Russia was no picnic for a lot of people, but Soviet Russia was undeniably worse for everyone. Batista was brutal, but Castro was worse. Acknowledging that revolutionary regimes are worse than the repressive authoritarian and monarchical systems they replace is not to say that the earlier system was all that laudable or the best possible regime in that country.
Virgil has a good point, and brings us back to the most important double standard, which is the consistent neglect of any of the human rights violations of allied authoritarian regimes while harping on the villainy of authoritarian regimes that do not play ball. Hussein is a classic example of a dictator who played ball and received extensive support, only to become Washington’s top villain when he ceased to be useful. Noriega is another example of the same process. It is usually just a matter of years between being a country’s officially-approved new Ataturk, leading country X into the modern world, and turning into its officially-demonized new Hitler. Of course, authoritarian modernization cuts both ways, and modernizing authoritarian regimes are almost always filled with ambivalence about Western influence and power, on the one hand admiring and coveting as a model to emulate and on the other despising and resenting as an opposing force to be resisted.
In many respects, Chavez is far less abusive than several of the rulers on that list. I drew the Chavez-Saakashvili comparison back in ‘07 after Misha had ordered his police to smash up an anti-government protest and put 500 people in the hospital. This was taking place at roughly the same time that Chavistas were fighting with anti-referendum protesters. At present, it is probably also true that Saakashvili is responsible for more physical violence and loss of life than Chavez, but Misha is still considered the “democratically elected president” and Chavez is somehow supposed to be nothing more than a dictator. If Misha had oil reserves, I suspect he would be even more authoritarian than he is now, and if Chavez did not have oil wealth to fall back on it is possible he would be less obnoxious in his public outbursts (then again, maybe not).
The main difference seems to be that Chavez is hurting his country with economic mismanagement, and Misha is wrecking his with stupid foreign policy decisions, but in many other ways they are quite similar. Saakashvili’s ranting against the perfidy of Moscow is not much less hysterical and paranoid than Chavez’s ranting about the evils of “North American imperialism.” Both complaints have some truth to them as well, but for some reason Chavez’s ranting earns him a description as a clown and buffoon, while Misha is taken seriously by most major figures in our political class. Go figure.
Hoping for an Orthodox opinion on the latest Noonerism:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/04/19/pundits-whitewash-torture_n_188756.html
“Sometimes you need to just keep walking.”
Same sack of flesh, on The Passion:
“It is a film that leaves the viewer indicting not Jews and not Romans and not cynical bureaucrats. It leaves you indicting yourself: it leaves you wondering about what your part in that agonizing drama would have been back then, and what your part is today.”
Well, like many Noonan statements her remarks are a bit confused, but in general I think her response is one of denial induced by shame. These things were authorized by people she cheered on for a very long time, and she didn’t distinguish herself by becoming an early or vocal critic of detainee treatment and interrogation practices, so I suppose I can understand why she would want to walk on down the road. She doesn’t want to call for holding people accountable for what they did and what they ordered others to do, perhaps because she is embarrassed by her own general silence on this matter before now and would feel strange demanding that justice be done when she was never terribly exercised about the injustices that had occurred.
Unlike Christ’s Passion, revelations about the torture regime do not indict all of us, but they indict only those who continued, in face of evidence of the crimes being committed under the color of authority, to pretend that nothing was wrong or that these were isolated incidents rather than a systematic abuse of power. Of course, those who actively apologized for and defended these methods as legitimate and good are in another class all their own.
I don’t know if that is an Orthodox opinion, except that I am Orthodox and it is my opinion, but there is a short response.
I think srv expressed it rather well. Christ knew a thing or two about “stress positions” and I don’t think he wants us to do it to anyone, no matter how great we might gauge their guilt to be relative to ours.
Every single one of these perps, from top to bottom, is going to walk off scot free. Pardon me my moment of revulsion.
Noonan makes a living as a right wing shill. Sorry it’s that simple. If you wanted evidence just look at the furious backpeddling when she was caught on a live mike pointing out what a loser Palin was. There’s nothing wrong with a career as a right wing shill but let’s not pretend she brings any objectivity or profundity to discussion of topics. Her function is to spin. She sometimes brings a neat turn of phrase but that’s very different. She and the right wing commentariat cheered on all this stuff for years because that what their paychecks, invitations to events, and tv gigs depended on. Most of them were so committed they’ve just kept up the storyline now that the dirt is all coming out. Noonan having an ounce or two of sensitivity knows that it’s beyond the pale but she can’t turn on her friends or put at risk her livelihood so she punts. For the religious she crosses to the other side of the road like those travellers to Damascus. That’s the Noonan situation in a few sentences.
Obama, as ever, has handled this very deftly so far. He did what was perceived to be and is in fact the right thing by releasing the memos which merely confirmed a lot of what was in the public domain anyway. He also carefully guarded his flank with the professional intelligence community who were split on torture anyway because at the end of the day he has a govt to run. It seemed to have worked judging by his reception at Langley today. Finally, he forever stained the reputation for probity and integrity of the Bush/Cheney administration, and seriously dinged the professional reputations of the lawyers who wrote those memos. Astonishingly Cheney, who has already overstepped the mark in my opinion, is responding with interviews with Fox or someone friendly but he’s opening a Pandora’s box from which could come truth commissions and god knows what. He’s doing it because he clearly understands the damage Obama has inflicted even if Bush doesn’t. Even without this there’s going to be a steady drip of stuff for years all of it damaging to the previous admin and the authors of these notes. Jetan and those who think this has done no harm to the reputations of these guys is totally wrong. Bybee: a senior jurist who authorised torture. Gonzales is still looking for a job. Yoo is going to end up at Regent or some similar establishment…not at all what he had in mind.
“Batista was brutal, but Castro was worse. ”
Daniel, what empirical evidence do you have to support that statement. Both their records are ugly, Castro can say he was doing it for the people while Batista was doing it for a rich and corrupt oligarchy. The Cubans seem to agree, he has after all been in power for nearly 60 years. I’m not carrying a banner for Castro by any means but US policy towards Cuba has been utterly ridiculous. If we’d killed him with kindness he’d have been overthrown years ago. Cuba is actually a very good example of how myths and the power of a small clique can damage US interests.
I think arguing that the kind of orgasmic violence and purging that occurred during the revolutionary fervors that swept across many countries is a mixed bag is a fair assessment. But I think it also overly simplifies that various tensions and impulses that coursed through those revolutions.
When the Iranian revolution occurred, or the Soviets, or any other, there were a wide variety of factions and ideologies at play. Its notable that the Iranian revolution featured a broad support from exiled Communists and trade unionists, who, mistakenly evidently, pledged support along class lines to the religious leaders of poor areas. Same could be said for the people who lost against Lenin/Trotsky/Stalin as they came to power. This is less an argument against social change than it is for immediate power vacuum which can be filled by anyone, and not necessarily the guys you want.
I’m not a believer that America can simply drop in and reform countries, but there is more of an impulse for democracy flowing through many foreign countries than people give them credit for, and it’s NOT simply a bunch of exiles looking in from far away, though there are certainly THOSE vultures (the Ahmed Chalabi’s of the world). I think America, on the whole, should be supportive and interested in building the sorts of institutions and mechanisms that can allow these things to happen. But I think the biggest thing is to simply get out of the way.
Minus government intervention into various right-wing autocrats, theres the potential that stabler, democratic countries could have come out of these situations. Instead we’ve ended up with a potentially more explosive situation that has blownback in our face.
Evidence that Batista was much better than Castro here.
The Cubans seem to agree, he has after all been in power for nearly 60 years.
And look how long the North Korean regime has been in power! I completely agree with you on U.S policy, but your notion that we can infer much about volonte generale from the continued existence of a regime is evidence to me that you’ve taken La Boetie far too seriously.
If you want to compare the murderousness of pre & post revolution regimes, I believe R. J. Rummel’s statistics of democide contains numbers for people killed by their governments in many countries over the years.
“Tsarist Russia was no picnic for a lot of people, but Soviet Russia was undeniably worse for everyone.”
Well, this is emblematic of our different political views. Soviet Russia was extremely nasty, but it was far, far better than Tsarist Russia, though given your conservative, anti-democratic, Orthodox ideology I don’t expect you to agree. The Whites could never muster any popular support, which is why their struggle against the Bolsheviks was doomed. In the end, they could not articulate a program that appealed to the Russian public, and the Red could.
Certainly at some point most of the dictators we have, with a few exceptions, commanded popular support. Arguably many of them still do from ethnic and tribal ties, to the wide support of lower classes or a bloated state bureaucracy. Even the most tyrannical strong men cannot rely upon simply the brutality of coercion, and the smartest one’s very rarely do.
As a hard left person who disdains the support for autocratic regimes based off their lip-service to the poor I find myself agreeing with Daniel, but for very different reasons. The revolutions he speaks of had, at some point, strong left-libertarian (the original users of that word mind you) components, and a push for bottom up democracy. The fact that many of these movements could not exert enough strength vis a vis the more autocratic forms that sprung up is something those looking back through history have anguished over for a long time. But the chance of failure, however, is not a significant deterrent to trying to change things. And in many ways the remnants of these movements are the only things that may prove to benefit the people who ARE there.
We see this among the labor movements in Iran, whom as the major breadwinners of the formal economy and hard earned foreign exchange, exert a significant economic influence on the government, a large reason why the state has tried so hard to put them down. We see it in the Chinese New Left, which is asking for more than reform for the new Chinese middle class. Whether any of these movements will be successful is another thing, but we shall see.
I have always found Peggy Noonan to be a bore (along with the rest of ABC’s Sunday political pundit lineup). These particular statements are just pathetic, an example of the banality of evil. Instead of the truth setting us free, Noonan would rather hear no evil, see no evil, speak no evil, and then hope it disappears is the shroud of time. Noonan finds it hard to be shill for the state when she has to actually acknowledge the crimes of the regime she apologizes for. All I can say is shame on Ms. Noonan.
Soviet Russia was extremely nasty, but it was far, far better than Tsarist Russia
What? The Soviets are really grand champs at murdering their own people. On what basis were the Soviets better?
One reason the Whites lost was that they weren’t as unified. There were monarchists, liberals, other varieties of socialists (such as Mensheviks, who probably outnumbered Bolsheviks) up against a more unitary Bolshevik force. Kerensky also inadvertently dropped power right into the Bolshevists’ laps.
Gilligan is totally of mark to say Soviet Russia and its enslaved nations were better off under Tsarist Russia. Tsarist Russia was brutal, suppressed its subject nations’ literature, language, and culture, and clamped down on personal freedoms.
Hovewer, the Soviet Union blew the tsars off the map when it came to Mass Megadeaths (Brzezinski’s terms) and genocides (Ukraine’s 7 million in the Holodomor in the thirties). Young Stalin easily escaped the tsar’s exiling him to Siberia for punishment. NOBODY could escape Stalin’s Siberian Gulag, however.
The choice wasn’t simply Red or White, there were liberal Russian Kadets, there were patriotic armies in the national republics (the Ukrainian Central Rada). The Reds basically did not have a “from the grounds up” popular revolution but performed a sneaky coup in October. The Whites did not want to hear from any of the minority nationalities in fighting Bolshevism together( a great loss).
The Russian Coup arguement has most forcefully been made by Dr. Richard Pipes (neocon Danilel Pipes’ father no less) professor emeritus at Harvard. Pipes, though a strong anticommunist, also argued that there was Continuity in Russian History from the tsars to Communism (Russia as the great patrimony, the secret police, no property protection). He presented his dissertation making this case to the late Solzhentsyn in the 70s. From then on, Solzhenitsyn disliked Pipes for equating tsarism with Bolshevik Russia as Solzhenitsyn believed ethnic Russians were not responsible for the Russian Revolution ( a simplification here on my part) but Western Marxist believers and their acolytes in Russia.
Another fierce anticommunist like Pipes, who wrestled with Pipes in the 50s to get a chair at Harvard on Russia, was the late Martin Malia, whom I met at an academic conference in Toronto. He despised the Soviet Union on moral grounds as much as Pipes did. Malia always believed Russia was part of Europe and that one could not equate tsarist Russia with Soviet Russia as continuations in Russian autocracy. Conquest too make this point the both regimes contained differences of kind not degree. 50,000 or so perished under the tsars before WW1; How many tens of millions under the Soviets?
Not to belabor the point, but you certainly can make the case that Castro was worse than Batista. Batista (who was also the only non-White or mixed race ruler in Cuban history) was democratically elected in 1940 and actually gave up power (reluctantly) in 1944, then coming back in a military coup in 52. Batista pardoned the young revolutionary Fidel Castro after less than 2 years in prison – under Castro people trying to do the same thing – overthrow the government – were executed or sentenced to decades in prison. Castro’s repression led to the migration or expulsion of over 10% of the country’s population – they couldn’t have all been oligarchs!
TGGP, on April 20th, 2009 at 5:59 pm
And look how long the North Korean regime has been in power! I completely agree with you on U.S policy, but your notion that we can infer much about volonte generale from the continued existence of a regime is evidence to me that you’ve taken La Boetie far too seriously.
Oh I don’t draw too much inference from it. Once you have a totally ruthless regime in power it’s very hard to dislodge them. But some are easier than others and as I indicated even in communist regimes people have a way of circumventing the system. Given that Cuba is 60 miles from our shores, and is basically a small and weak country, it is an amazing failure of policy that we haven’t been able to dislodge Castro basically by killing the Cubans with kindness. Instead we strengthened him by creating a climate of siege.
Bustrofedon, on April 20th, 2009 at 10:33 pm Saidthey couldn’t have all been oligarchs!
….Nearly all the oligarchs made it out when Castro took power. I know a few of them or their kids who are now plump old men.
SidRoman, on April 20th, 2009 at 9:54 pm Said:
Soviet communism is one of the greatest tyrannies in history and can hardly be compared with Tsarism despite its repression, conservatism, anti semitism, income inequalities and obscurantism. Tsaris Russia was all these things but it was tempered by incompetence and some sense of respect for human rights. In Stalin’s Russia there was none. I suppose we have to recognize there are gradations of tyranny. For example the Czechs regarded the Hapsburg monarchy as a tyranny but in fact the Hapsburg imperium was what prevented all those races and religions falling upon each other and murdering their fellow citizens. To some extent the same was true of the Tsarist regime although it was infinitely more repressive. The destruction of the Hohenzollern, Romanov and Hapsburg dynasties was in retrospect a disaster for the peoples of Russia, and east/central Europe. Only now with the emergence of the EU that in some respects bares a passing resemblance to the Hapsburg polity has peace and prosperity returned to the east/central/southern continent. Russia and it’s dependencies remain in a state of flux and will until Russia reabsorbs its component parts that were mistakenly broken up at the time of the collapse of the Soviet Union.
I can’t believe I’m going to defend Soviet Russia, but when even the commentors citing historical comparisons get it wrong, I kinda gotta…
First, the obligatory disclaimer: The Soviet government was awful. Really awful. There was Lysenkoism, genocide, mass starvation, turning ordinary people into informers, repressing free thought and creativity, and on and on and on. I do not dispute those things.
Here’s the “however,” though: Compared to its predecessors, the tsars, Soviet Russia was a vast improvement. Unequivocably.
The tsars created a largely illiterate, technologically backward, deeply superstitious people living in a gigantic, mostly rural country where what very few institutes of higher learning even existed for reserved for the aristocracy (itself mostly illiterate, savage and superstitious)…
The Soviets took that and in less than two generations turned it into a country with very nearly universal literacy (thanks to an increase in academia rivaling that of the US after the GI Bill), cutting edge scientific research (particularly in the cosmological sciences), and a military which was absolutely essential in defeating Nazi Germany (just contrast the WWII era Soviet military to the god-awful military showing in WWI and you get the picture) and which was, for another two generations, equal in capacity to the US military.
You show me any other country whose rulers pulled it – forcibly – from being an 18th C culture to a 20th C culture in less than 30 years. Offhand, I can’t think of any.
Oy. That should be “The tsars created a country that was largely illiterate…”
If you really want to make the case that mass industrialization and mass literacy were sufficiently great improvements to offset the nightmare of tens of million dead and millions imprisoned in the gulag, ecological damage on a massive scale and three generations of people living in a vast and pervasive police state, I’m not sure what you expect anyone to say. My first response is to doubt that you really believe this and are trying to play devil’s advocate, but that seems like a waste of time. As I said above, ” By just about every measure, the revolutions made these nations worse off,” and this statement applies to the Bolsheviks and Russia. You may have found the one measure–literacy–where that it technically false, but I’m not sure what the point is.
The 1914 standard of living for subjects of the Russian empire was not seen again in the USSR until the late 1970s. For most of its existence, in real *material* terms, the people of the USSR were objectively poorer than their ancestors who lived under the Tsars. That does not even begin to touch the cultural and spiritual devastation wrought by the Soviets, whose long-term effects the peoples of the former USSR are still experiencing.
One more basic point: if the culture of Russia under the Tsars existed in the 20th century, it was also a 20th century culture. The assumption that the culture of western Europe and North America in the 20th century is what defines what a “20th century culture” is serves a nice rhetorical turn, but it is designed to mislead.
The Soviets took a somewhat repressive, unjust and disorganized monarchical system and turned it into a living hell for decades. Frankly, it would not matter if they had managed to build interplanetary spaceships and discovered the cure for cancer–the Soviet regime was monstrously evil, and not simply in its Stalinist phase, and no modernization they were able to bring about changes that.
I have to say, this post is appalling, at two levels, historical and conceptual.
Leaving aside the question of whether the Carter administration in fact represented any kind of departure from the normal practice of American foreign policy, a claim Daniel doesn’t begin to justify (no doubt because…he can’t.), as well as the corollary issue, namely, why it is that intelligent person accept presidential propaganda at face value (Carter claimed an interest in human rights, so it must be so!)…
“By just about every measure, the revolutions made these nations worse off. ”
In fact, the Sandinista regime effected a number of internal improvements, including significant increases in the level of literacy, public health and capital investments in agriculture, according to Oxfam, which claimed that “only in Nicaragua has substantial effort been made to address inequities in land ownership and to extend health, educational, and agricultural services to poor peasant families.”
Nicaragua, between the years of 1980 and 1985, saw a net increase in GDP of 4.4 percent, “almost double the rate of increase of the Latin American GDP as a whole.” (Oxfam), leading the World Bank to call the Nicaraguan model of development “extraordinarily successful in Nicaragua in some sectors, better than anywhere else in the world.”
Of course, these gains were eventually reversed, thanks in no small part to the terror war organized and launched by the administration of Ronald Reagan, Daniel’s model statesman. Although I suppose the Contra hijinks were justified since, according to the prescient Kirkpatrick, Sandinista reforms did “not bode well for the peaceful sharing of power or the establishment of constitutional governments, especially since those leaders have made clear that they have no intention of seeking either.” The Inter-American Development Bank wrote that “Nicaragua ha[d] made noteworthy progress in the social sector…laying the basis for long-term socio-economic development”, but Kirkpatrick’s claims are True by Necessity, just as it is necessarily so that, as Daniel says, “those who suffered most” under Sandinista rule “were the Nicaraguan peoples.”
Conceptual confusion: The supposed misery of the Nicaraguan’s is justification for launching the Contra war, which killed tens of thousands (and reversed Nicaraguan development). On the other hand, Carter’s supposed crime was making morality a centerpiece of his foreign policy (which he did, because he said so). A wiser foreign policy supports friendly, right-wing dictatorship, no matter how ghastly (does Daniel know the figures on El Salvador?), morality be damned. And by the way, assisting (not invading?) revolutionary governments is wrong because said governments necessarily perpetrate misery on their people.
Incredible.
Casey L: Soviet Communism murdered 100million people, Nazism 25 million. What use for literacy if during collectivization tons of mothers lose their minds during the hunger and literally eat their own children. A regime that induces cannibalism is compared to the tsars?
On World War 2, do not forget that it was Stalin himself who signed a pact with the Nazis and brought Hitler to his borders. The Soviets ultimately triumphed not because of Stalin’s policies and his preparations (he murdered his entire military General Staff right before the war no less), but because of the ruthlessness of the Nazis. Most military historians claim that the tide on the war really did not turn until December 1941 when the Soviets, who until then were surrendering en masse to the Germans, realized that captivity under the Germans was death as they were considered untermensch.
Remember Stalin lead a two-front campaign during World War Two, one against the Nazis, and a second, no less bloody, against his own subjects in the Gulag with NKVD units situated behind the Red Army on the front to shoot anyone who dared retreat in the army’s penal battalions. Millions became cannon fodder for German guns.
On industrialization and collectivization Conquest makes a convincing case that these two could have been established just as well without Stalinism. Alec Nove also engaged in a well-known debate on this entitled “Was Stalinism really necessary”.
I, in meeting students and dissidents right after the Cold War who came to the West saw what communism did to these people. Without a doubt, living under a coercive atheist regime really did damage psychologically thousands of people. They grew up in a spiritual vacuum and any traces of idealism among many of them simply did not exist, as idealism was simply equated with Marxism.
Finally, pardon the verbosity, the Soviets (Khrushchev in particular) loved rattling the Soviet Rocket Forces’ nuclear warheads. And communism found millions of stalwart supporters in the West which always lead me to believe that while Nazism was more evil than Communism, out of the two it was Communism that was the more dangerous because of the sheer amount of fellow travelers in the West willing to help.
oops correction re above. Conquest makes a convincing case on industrialization and agricultural modernization (NOT collectivization) being achieved more efficiently without Stalinism. Pardon the mistake.
It seems to me that it is pretty uncontroversial to acknowledge that Carter raised the profile of U.S. interest in human rights abuses in other countries as a matter of formal policy, and he applied this standard to allied dictatorships. One might say that this was inevitable following the Helsinki Accords, and so Carter gets the credit/blame with post-Helsinki moves on this question, but it was definitely something more specifc to his administration. In fact, policy had changed in the mid-70s, and Carter was the first President to institute the change fully, which is a claim I didn’t think I needed to justify because I assumed it was common knowledge. Carter then used the violations committed by these dictatorships to justify calling for increased participation by members of the moderate political opposition, which then spun out of control as the more radical forces took control of the respective revolutions. This outcome should have been obvious beforehand and followed the pattern of every modern revolution.
As a matter of Cold War containment policy, it didn’t matter whether the Sandinistas were willing or able to provide certain improvements in services; the success of their movement represented the potential for increased Cuban and Soviet influence in the Western Hemisphere. Realpolitik, containment doctrine and traditional U.S. concerns about foreign interference in the Americas all tell us that making any moves to weaken or undermine Somoza to the advantage of such a political movement would be contrary to U.S. interests. Ideally, I would have liked to see direct U.S. involvement in central America be as limited as possible, and I don’t approve of the dirty war in El Salvador or the illegal proxy war we funded in Nicaragua. In other words, even though I think Carter blundered in undermining Somoza, that doesn’t mean I approve of what Reagan did in central America. I didn’t approve of the sanctions on Iraq, but that doesn’t mean that I thought the invasion was wise or just, either. You aren’t really arguing against me; you seem to think I am Ollie North.
I never said Reagan was a model statesman; I was using him by way of contrast with Carter, and pointing out the stupidity of labeling anyone as “pro-dictator.” If you want to valorize Sandinista rule, that’s your business, but I find it hard to believe that there is still a willingness to carry water for these people. Tens of thousands of people died in the course of the insurrection against Somoza–was that all worth it so that literacy might be spread more broadly? Are you then seriously going to lecture me on morality and being confused? Someone will have to explain to me how certain progressive ends justify wrong means. I am waiting for someone to tell me that Castroism has been good for Cuba because of their current health care system–please, do tell.
There does seem to be some confusion in this conversation: as some of you seem to see it, because certain awful regimes are not uniformly terrible and may have made some good reforms, we are supposed to pretend that they were an improvement over their predecessors and that these reforms would never have happened otherwise. I submit that this is nonsense.
Also, on the crudely material level, Nicaraguans were poorer at the end of Sandinista rule than they were at the beginning. You can pin *some* of the blame for that on U.S. policies directed against the government, and I don’t deny that, but don’t insult anyone’s intellignce by claiming that the Sandinista era was a time of *economic* expansion or prosperity, because it simply wasn’t. More to the point, the Sandinista response to economic difficulty and revenue shortfalls wasn’t to govern in anything like a fiscally responsible way, but to pursue inflationary policies that necessarily hurt the poorest most.
“Russia and it’s dependencies remain in a state of flux and will until Russia reabsorbs its component parts that were mistakenly broken up at the time of the collapse of the Soviet Union.”
While I’m hardly one for nationalism for the hell of it, and the constant division and re-division of Europe, its hard to imagine such a scenario being any more useful to those in Eastern Europe. I don’t know the cultural or historical arguments, but if one was in the business of tying one’s economy to a sinking or rising boat, it seems like tying up to the European Union would be a better choice than any reconstituted Russia, even taking into account the recent economic setbacks that have hit the world.
I think on both sides of the sabre-rattling aisle is sort of ridiculous, since it is doubtful Russia will get anywhere near its one-time dominance, and the West, rightly or wrongly, is pursuing full-bore integration of many of its former satellite states.
The Soviets took that and in less than two generations turned it into a country with very nearly universal literacy (thanks to an increase in academia rivaling that of the US after the GI Bill), cutting edge scientific research (particularly in the cosmological sciences), and a military which was absolutely essential in defeating Nazi Germany (just contrast the WWII era Soviet military to the god-awful military showing in WWI and you get the picture) and which was, for another two generations, equal in capacity to the US military.
But was defeating Nazi Germany a good thing? Yes, the Nazis committed genocide, engaged in aggressive war and implemented policies that led to mass suffering and mass starvation. On the other hand, they took a society with a collapsed economy and a politics defined by factionalism and street fighting and, within just a few years, turned it into an economic powerhouse where civil unrest was all but unheard of.
With political and economic freefall reversed the German people were able to turn their attention to more productive pursuits. The results were one of history’s great public works programs, and technological advances in rocketry and jet propulsion–advances that had major benefits for the entire world and for the free societies of the West in particular. And keep in mind that many of these advances were achieved while Germany suffered under an aerial bombing campaign of unprecedented ferocity–just imagine what might have been achieved without foreign interference.
Yes, there were excesses during the invasions of Eastern Europe. But, just as CaseyL quite rightly excuses Soviet genocide and other crimes on the grounds that the Soviet state ultimately improved the lives of Soviet peoples, I’d like to plead that Nazi Germany’s policies in Eastern Europe and Russia deserve a grade of “incomplete” rather than an “F”. Perhaps, if the Soviets hadn’t been so determined to hang on to power, the war would have ended with much less loss of life, and the peoples of Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union could have enjoyed the same leap in economic security and quality of life that the Nazis brought to Germany in the 1930s. Sadly, we’ll never know what might have been.
The Soviets took a somewhat repressive, unjust and disorganized monarchical system and turned it into a living hell for decades. Frankly, it would not matter if they had managed to build interplanetary spaceships and discovered the cure for cancer–the Soviet regime was monstrously evil, and not simply in its Stalinist phase, and no modernization they were able to bring about changes that.
So what’s you take on US slavery? Weighed as a percentage of the population rather than raw numbers, the number of people murdered, raped, tortured, starved, etc. – for entertainment, mind you, more often than not! – surely ranks up there with the percentage of the population murdered, tortured, etc. by the Soviet government. Should we then discount any good that came of the American Revolution?.
Oh, wait – the slave bodycount isn’t the only mass murder to consider. There’s also the mass murder – genocide, actually; wiping out entire civilzations, actually – perpetrated on the indigenous peoples of this continent. As a matter of deliberate policy, no less. Deliberate, purposeful, and thought out policy.
Is that enough to discount any good that came of the American Revolution? What shall it profit us to have First Amendment Rights if we practice them in a country built on genocide?
Or, to quote your very words back at you:
If you really want to make the case that mass industrialization and mass literacy were sufficiently great improvements to offset the nightmare of [entire nations wiped out], ecological damage on a massive scale and [ten] generations of people living in a vast and pervasive [state of slavery], I’m not sure what you expect anyone to say.
How’s that shoe fitting now?
I’m not a Blame America Firster. I am a history buff – not one who merely memorizes events and names, but who tries to think about what those events mean for humanity’s ongoing evolution. Why do tyrannies arise? Why do they persist? These are questions demanding better answers than “People are stupid,” or “Because they don’t believe in God enough,” or whatever facile reasoning is popular among the ignoracenti these days. It does no good at all to look at history as a collection of pre-deterministic set pieces from which simple moralty plays can be deducted. Humans are complicated; we build societies equally complicated; and there are few – some, but not many – social models we build which are entirely worthless or entirely virtuous.
“If you want to valorize Sandinista rule, that’s your business, but I find it hard to believe that there is still a willingness to carry water for these people.”
That’s a strange accusation. All I’ve done is rebut a straightforward claim–that “by just about every measure,” the Sandinistas made Nicaraguan life worse off–by citing the work of contemporary observers. If you’d like to reduce their accomplishments (or is that word too valorizing: no accomplishments, by necessity!) to the raising of literacy rates, do so, if it gives you comfort. Objective observers will continue to say that the Sandinistas instituted broad programs of reform that dispersed land, raised health standards, invested in local agriculture, and grew the GDP. In sum, attempted to develop Nicaragua into a self-sustaining country rather than an export-based playground for absentee ownership. Whether it was worth civil war, I don’t know or care to speculate (not being Nicaraguan, although if I were a utilitarian I’d say yes), but mere red-baiting doesn’t obviate the facts.
Again, you are confused. You’re not Ollie North; you’re not a monster; that’s why I read you. But to write “someone will have to explain to me how certain progressive ends justify wrong means” (because anything that should happen after a civil war is, by virtue of its antecedent, sullied; take, for example, the founding of the United States), one paragraph after berating Carter for failing to sufficiently support Somoza (to whom in his last days Carter floated a 114 million dollar IMF loan)–because in doing so, he incurred “the potential for increased Cuban and Soviet influence in the Western Hemisphere”, a “fact” more important than concrete improved living standards for the indigenous population, as well as the elementary principle of self-determination–is to be in self-contradiction.
As for Carter and Somoza, read not right-wing fanatic Jean Kirkpatrick but Carter policy man Robert Pastor’s “Not Condemned to Repitition.”
P.s. does Somoza shoulder any blame for getting himself deposed? If so, what of the country that funds him?
It is not a question of saying that such-and-such a regime is “entirely worthless.” This discussion started off by comparing regimes against each other, and relative to its predecessor the Soviet regime was incalculably worse. That seems utterly indisputable. That doesn’t mean that the regime before it was “entirely virtuous,” which would be a silly thing to claim, but it does mean that on balance the injustices and evils of the new regime vastly outweighed any benefits it provided. More to the point, unless you believe that the ends justify the means, the mass killings of the Soviet regime cannot be justified and they taint everything else it did. You cannot begin to find slavery in the U.S. or the horrible treatment of Indians all that morally troubling if you don’t view the vastly greater crimes of the Soviet Union for what they are. No one is more hostile to treating history as a morality play than I am, and you would know that if you have been reading here very long, but part of historical inquiry is to have some sense of perspective and proportion. If you want to think about historical events, you can’t regard one of the most criminal, destructive regimes in history as if it were a big step forward over what came before. The death toll from purges, famines from collectivization and large-scale state violence in the USSR is enormous, and it was vastly more brutal than anything that had happened under the old system. That doesn’t minimize brutality and injustices committed under the Tsars, but keeps them in their proper perspective.
Your remarks about U.S. history are just bizarre. No one is saying that beneficial things are negated by morally abhorrent practices, but I am saying that we should weigh these things against each other. In the Soviet case, the evil outweighs the good by such a margin that I find it a little difficult to believe that we are even debating this. Please, just stop before you dig yourself in any deeper.
The point that mkdelucas seems to keep missing is that I am berating Carter about Somoza, to the extent that I am berating him at all, in terms of what served U.S. interests during the Cold War. The ancillary point about the welfare of people under revolutionary regimes is just that–ancillary. It’s because I don’t believe that the ends justify the means that I tend not to endorse interventionist foreign policy moves, whether in its Cold War or later, but as of 1978-79 the question was not whether the U.S. was installing these rulers but whether we were going to preserve the status quo or invite the political destabilization and ultimately the loss of allied states. Those were the real choices at the time, and Carter made the wrong one.
Obviously, Somoza helped bring about his downfall just as the Shah did because of the injustices they inflicted while in power, which brings us back to the original point that the state of affairs under these authoritarian regimes, while quite bad in some respects, were preferable to the upheaval and destruction that resulted from overthrowing them. That doesn’t mean that their brutality and injustice were justified–they weren’t–but that the people in Nicaragua and Iran suffered more from toppling and replacing the regimes than they did under their rule. Violently changing government almost always does more damage than it prevents.
If the Sandinistas offset some of that damage they caused with some salutary reforms, I am willing to acknowledge that, but I don’t buy that this disproves my statement about the relative well-being of people under the different regimes. Saakashvili has also been responsible for successful economic reforms that have boosted GDP growth during the last several years, which doesn’t mean that the Georgians wouldn’t be better off had he never come to power.
My main purpose in citing Kirkpatrick was to show how wrong Gingrich was about Carter and how very different thinking on the right about U.S.-encouraged/backed democratization used to be.
“You can pin *some* of the blame for that on U.S. policies directed against the government, and I don’t deny that, but don’t insult anyone’s intellignce by claiming that the Sandinista era was a time of *economic* expansion or prosperity, because it simply wasn’t.”
That’s very generous of you Daniel. “Some of the blame.” Yes, some of the blame can indeed be attributed to the policies of the superpower that 1) funded and directed prolonged terrorist incursions into the country-side, driving away farmers and destroying farmland, 2) imposed a trade blockade and 3) mined Nicaraguan harbors, creating war conditions that wrought inflationary war spending. But surely the effect was so minimal, we can say with absolute confidence that the Sandanistas would have wrecked the economy anyway. And what a fine economy it was, at least, before the deposing the great Somoza!
More seriously, no one would contend that the time of the Sandanistas was one of great “*economic* expansion or prosperity.” This is a destitute third world nation we’re talking about. But it’s nevertheless true that the Sandanista economy did expand 4.4 percent between 1980 and 85, and increased exports by 11 percent, in comparison to a 19 percent decline among other Central American countries (ruled by the dictators it’s folly not to support, because revolutionary regimes necessarily perpetrate economic decline, or is it because of Cuban influence–morality of realpolitik; Daniel can’t decide which). Perhaps said gains would have reversed regardless of the international situation, but it remains true that as Oxfam remarked “Among the four countries in the region where Oxfam works [Guatemala, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Honduras], only in Nicaragua has a substantial effort been made to address inequities in land ownership and to extend health, educational and agricultural services to poor peasant families.”
You cannot begin to find slavery in the U.S. or the horrible treatment of Indians all that morally troubling if you don’t view the vastly greater crimes of the Soviet Union for what they are.
You completely missed my point – so completely that I think we’re operating in entirely different mental universes.
I AM NOT PUTTING COUNTRIES ON A GIANT BALANCE, TOTTING UP THEIR CRIMES AND DECLARING ONE OF THEM THE CHAMPION OF SOME WIERD CONTEST.
OK? Can you possibly get that? I’m not saying “Well, because the US had slavery and genocide, we lack the moral standing to be outraged by what the USSR did.”
You’re the one who insists that crimes of commission nullify anything else a regime accomplishes. It is your logical premise that holds a regime is judged entirely and only by the bad things it does, regardless of what good it has also done. It’s your reasoning that would logically hold everything the US has done to be worthless because of slavery and genocide.
I’m the one saying that while social constructs (i.e. in this case, nation-states) do evil things – horrible, evil things – it’s a rare regime that is only evil, that accomplishes nothing of any good at all. And therefore that it’s a mistake to judge a social construct based only on its evils.
I’m saying that universal literacy, better education, and better healthcare are not trivial matters; that the Russian Revolution did indeed accomplish amazing good things as well as atrocities.
I can’t believe this is a controversial matter.
I mean, good lord, Classical Greece had a lousy, appalling attitude towards women, and torture, and prisoners of war… that doesn’t mean we don’t owe them plenty for essentially inventing democracy, theater, and epic poetry. Roman regimes committed atrocities that beggar the imagination even today – yet we still, justifiably, revere and respect Republican and Imperial Rome for their advances in civil engineering, governmental infrastructure, and the first glimmerings of a “social safety net.” Gengis Khan wasn’t “either” a merciless conqueror and cruel despot or a visionary inventor of standardized currency and meritorious civil service: he was all those things – and in the long run, the world’s better off for his existance.
The unrelenting drive to reduce things – people, ideologies, nations – to “nothing more than” is juvenile, foolish, and ultimately counterproductive. I wish, oh how I wish, y’all would stop doing it.
“I tend not to endorse interventionist foreign policy moves, whether in its Cold War or later, but as of 1978-79 the question was not whether the U.S. was installing these rulers but whether we were going to preserve the status quo or invite the political destabilization and ultimately the loss of allied states.”
This is what I meant to address with the pithy p.s. Central American dictatorships seem to be destabilizing by virtue of themselves. Guatemala, El Salvador, Somoza Nicaragua were all kleptocracies of the first order. The history of Latin American political violence is so extensive, and so gruesome, because such methods are the natural resort of regimes that rule in the worst fashion and find it eternally necessary to trounce rebellion. It isn’t accurate to contrast Duarte rule, say, with moments of violent revolutionary overthrow (“violently changing government almost always does more damage than it prevents”) and call the former a time of peace. In fact it’s a regime perpetually at war with a sizable portion of its subjects.
You’re also not arguing with me, and you’re certainly not responding to any arguments I’ve been making in this thread. You’re in a fight with some non-existent person who reduces things to an oversimplified caricature, and even the slightest acquaintance with what I write would make clear that this is not what I do. No one, at least no one in this thread, is reducing the USSR to nothing more than its atrocities. I do refuse to treat them as just one part of the puzzle rather than as a defining part of what the regime was.
I know a fair number of highly educated, very impressive people who grew up in the USSR, so I can quite readily see that there was much more to the Soviet era than the crimes committed then. I just don’t see how anyone wastes so much time effectively defending one of the most criminal regimes in history as if it were better than what preceded it. It was very simply worse than what preceded it. That was all I said at the start of this thread, and somehow it provoked this weird argument.
If you dislike terrible simplifiers, I am right with you. If you still genuinely think that the Soviet regime was a real improvement over the Tsarist system, I agree that we must live in absolutely different universes. That’s the last thing I have to say about it, because it’s quite clear that there’s no point in continuing.
I’m sorry this topic petered out so soon. I had a couple of kind words to say about the Spanish Inquisition and The Children’s Crusade.
A former Japanese ambassador to Nicaragua has some papers on the Sandinista regime and afterward, including comparisons to the Somoza years. If you wanted to decide between the two, a tricky part would be “Who is responsible for 1979?” It’s the year of greatest negative GDP growth and also when power transitioned.
http://www.ide.go.jp/English/Publish/Download/Dp/pdf/119.pdf
http://www.ni.emb-japan.go.jp/katsudou/report-4.pdf
Glenn Garvin has a funny article in Reason where he recounts some of the silliness of the Sandinista regime, but I don’t know how seriously he can be taken (his perception of the future of Daniel Ortega was disproved by events).
Sean S., on April 21st, 2009 at 10:36 am Said:
Russia has legitimate claims on most of these small countries some of which have been part of Russia for centuries. Furthermore she is relative to everyone around her a superpower. When you create a situation like this which is an almost exact analog of that existing in Eastern Europe and he Balkans in the interwar years it is inherently unstable.
” But was defeating Nazi Germany a good thing? ”
……Sigh….no far better that they had achieved complete control of the Eurasian land mass and established their 1000 year Reich.
“CaseyL, on April 21st, 2009 at 11:00 am Said: ”
Totally facile comparisons from previous centuries. By the 1920’s the Western world was supposed to have moved beyond slavery, mass murder, breaking on the wheel, burning at the stake, the inquisition, gladiatorial contests, throwing Christians to the Lions and all these other examples of medieaval and pre modern practices. The Soviet Union and Nazis Germany didn’t, that was their offence.
“jetan, on April 21st, 2009 at 3:07 pm Said:
I’m sorry this topic petered out so soon. I had a couple of kind words to say about the Spanish Inquisition and The Children’s Crusade.”
….I also wanted to say word or two in favor of ducking stools, pricking for the kings evil, the black hundreds and the holy office.
I actually visited the Soviet Union a few times in the late seventies and early eighties. I knew it was doomed when I visited a giant tractor factory built for them by the Italians and observed women in their break pealing potatoes by the assembly line; a couple having sex in a curtained off welding area; and piles of engines stacked directly on top of each other and not in stillages. All true. There were other signs too. If you went 25 miles outside a major city it was like Tsarist Russia. The CIA couldn’t have made the trip but then the truth might have affected the budgets back home.
@Charlie-
I hope I am correct in crediting you with a very dry wit and an ironic sensibility
Lines like “just imagine what might have been achieved without foreign interference.” and a Germany “where civil unrest was all but unheard of ” don’t grow on trees.
@ottovbvs
Actually, you make the Soviets sound kind of pastoral and idyllic. But, then, I’ve always been good at looking past squalor.
@Charlie.
I stand in awe of your parodic gift. Bravo, sir!
jetan, on April 21st, 2009 at 6:23 pm Said:
“Actually, you make the Soviets sound kind of pastoral and idyllic”
……Certainly half the rural transport of goods seemed to be horse drawn……I’m afraid I don’t have your talent…..The tractor factory was hilarious….big but hilarious……it really was the old Russian joke “They pretend to pay us, we pretend to work” in reality…..And yet these were the guys who broke the Wehrmacht so go figure
Yes, that was a parody. I was a little thrown by the cost-benefit-analysis approach to assessing Soviet Communism, but decided that actually debating it head-on would be too exhausting.
“Russia has legitimate claims on most of these small countries some of which have been part of Russia for centuries. Furthermore she is relative to everyone around her a superpower. When you create a situation like this which is an almost exact analog of that existing in Eastern Europe and he Balkans in the interwar years it is inherently unstable.”
Around her doesn’t really matter, except for geo-political chicanery where international relations is nothing more than a game of Risk writ large, a point that Putin keeps insisting on driving home by playing games, provoked or unprovoked, with countries around its periphery that end up with its economy and foreign exchange getting pummeled. It reminds of a prominent jihadist who pointed out that the logic of al-Qaeda vis a vis “getting back” at America was horribly me myopic; for the act of bombing 3000, they’ve managed to get millions more killed and left a whole region in tatters.
In many of the same ways that America’s own foreign dalliances end up costing us significantly more than we ever wanted, so is it with Russia’s, regardless of any claims, historical or cultural. And its not especially coherent as to why reclaiming alot of these relatively minor countries would be worth the trouble. I mean hey, I might be missing out on something going on in Estonia by god, but I doubt its worth it enough to acquire it.
“And its not especially coherent as to why reclaiming alot of these relatively minor countries would be worth the trouble.”
There’s some merit in this argument but not a lot ultimately for a nation that basically wants it’s great power status restored and some of these territories are strategically and economically valuable eg. the Ukraine. Sean you’re philosophising but not really addressing my point that an agglomeration of weak successor states existing in the neighborhood of a 500 lb bear is an inherently unstable system. Russia could move on any of them and the west wouldn’t do much both because of an underlying feeling that they are basically part of the Russian body politic (like the Rhineland and Germany), and it’s not worth a major war. You mention Estonia, oddly enough I don’t think they are really interested in the Baltics which they regard as rather like Poland.
The mention of Estonia is even funnier, given that Estonia is, at least in a limited fashion, working with Russia; they were caught relaying NATO communiqués to Moscow soon after their admittance.
As far as the successor states go, it is my understanding that while they were in the USSR, the Central Asian states received a flood of money and supplies from Moscow. Their subsequent expulsion from Russia has led to a drastic decrease in quality of life, more so than what is seen in rural Russia. There’s an argument to be made that the Central Asian states are better off with Russian support, even if that means a loss of autonomy.
In fairness to the Estonians, this was the result of a security breach and not a deliberate policy move. Russian intelligence had infiltrated their defense ministry and bought off a top official, who handed over the information starting from the time Estonia joined the Alliance.
The historical ignorance in the West about late Tsarist Russia is astonishing. Russia in 1913 was an economically dynamic, culturally vibrant place. It had one of the fastest growing economies in the world and appeared to many contemporaries to have a bright future. To single out Tsarist Russia for being “oppressive” in an era when Great Britain was shooting Irish and Indian dissidents, Germany was forcing its Polish subjects to learn German, Japan was forcibly turning Koreans into second-class Japanese, and France, Holland and Portugal were all running brutal overseas empires, and America treated its Black citizens as brutally as Russian serfs were ever treated, seems a little biased. Late Tsarist Russia had a lot of flaws, but it also produced writers like Chekhov, Akhmatova, Bely, Tsvetaeva, and Mandelshtam composers like Prokofiev and Sibelius, engineers like Sikorsky, scientists like Abram Ioffe and politicians like Stolypin and Nabokov pere, on and on. Just reading any Russian literature from that period would give you a sense how much freer and open that society was than anything Russia has seen since. Pretty much any Soviet accomplishment was built directly on the foundations laid in the late 19th century. It’s no surprise that the history of Soviet arts, literature, science and industry is one of almost constant decline the further you move forward from 1918.
Tangentially, the wanna-be military types of the blogosphere are all up in arms because Russia has deployed its Black Sea fleet and asked that NATO discontinue military exercises in Georgia. They say this is evidence of a coming Russian invasion of Georgia. IMO, that the bar has been set so low for evidence of impending doom is a consequence of Bush-era idiocy, and I can’t wait until these people can relax again, for my sake.
Vanya, Sibelius would have bristled at being chacterized as a Russian composer ;-)
vanya, on April 23rd, 2009 at 9:24 am Said:
…..While not quite joining your somewhat rosy depiction of Russia in 1913, there’s no real comparison with Britain, certainly the injustice and brutality of the Czarist state pale by comparison with the Soviet Union. Sibelius was technically a Russian composer since Finland was part of the Russian Empire at the time but somehow I don’t think he’d have regarded himself as a Russian composer. Overall though the collapse of the Romanov imperium was a disaster as was the collapse of the Hapsburg and Hohenzollern monarchies.
Of course Sibelius wasn’t Russian, but he was a subject of the Tsar, the Russian Empire was actually far more “multicultural” than the Soviet Empire that followed. I don’t want to glorify the Tsars, but Americans’ rosy depictions of the British Empire ignore the fact that life for many in India and Africa, or even Ireland, wasn’t really any better than being a Ukrainian peasant or Kyrgyz herdsman under the Tsars, and was arguably worse. The fact that so many victims of the pogroms emigrated to the West in the early 20th century has created a somewhat slanted picture in the US of what late Tsarist Russia was really like.