I agree, we’re both just espousing opinions.
But it’s fun.
Errr… just a comment on what happened with the fascism:good/bad angle. I simply don’t accept the idea that there is a logical progression that fscism was good. In all honesty, by that logic, nothing “bad” ever happened, so long as something good happened after it. The Marshal plan had no logical source in fascism except in the most indirect of ways. It was a reaction to the poverty of Germany and the political realignment of the emerging Cold War. Fascism indirectly created the situation, but there is no real reason to give it credit for inadvertantly making a scenario where Germans found some good.
I suspect those '60’s Historians that Blake mentioned would not have been so happy about fascism as he thinks. They quite probably had friends or family who had been in the military and got killed, and may well have seen action firsthand. Remmeber how many Germans died, too.
I’m wondering why the “major adversities” requirement of the OP.
AFAIAC, the GOP platform these days is pretty radical, yet there was no ‘adversity’ forcing first Gingrich, then GWB, to take the US to the right in ways that Reagan & Co. never dreamed of, with new tax cuts each year (deficits be damned), a remarkable sequence of military adventures, packing the courts, and so forth. By the OP’s definition, it won’t work either.
Such, in fact, is the argument of Gordon S. Wood in his The Radicalism of the American Revolution ( 1991, Vintage Books ), which won a Pulitzer. Though his work is a little more focused by what he sees as the phenomenal social change engendered by the Revolution, rather than just the political aspect. An interesting book, though I think he overstates his case.
As for radicalism - Was Ghandi a radical? Was Martin Luther? Howabout Muhammed? Certainly they all fit under some definitions. Just depends how you define the word.
- Tamerlane
Tam:
Thanks fo the reference. I’ll check it out.
Actually, I should’ve been more direct in my first post. I do think it is clear that the US was founded on radical political ideas.
I’d put Ghandi in a radical category-- his tactics were novel and very effective. Luther was absolutely a radical, for his time (he might have been a bit nutty, too).
Define your terms:
Anti colonialism means what? Is Vietnam an anticolonial failure or a communist failure both or neither? Is every decolonization success story automatically not radical? India? Ireland? The Phillipines? The United States?
Facism means what? Salazars Portugal was semi-facist and was a response to grinding poverty and was at least semi successful. Was facism or aggressive nationalism the problem in Italy - if starting gimme wars to maintain political popularity is a flaw of facist states it is almost certainly also a flaw of democratic systems as well (and monumental misjudgement of the probable course outcome of a war is certainly a universal issue).
When you state religious fundamentalism is a failed radical idea, what do you mean? What are you indicting? The Taliban won Afghanistan because while they were brutal religious zealots, they were marginally preferable to the alternative. Are Calvinist Geneva or Puritan Massachusetts failures because they mellowed out eventually? Religious fundamentalism hardly seems a spent force.
Communism means what exactly? Are you arguing that but for the communist revolution China would be a moderate liberal democracy with a large and prosperous middle class? Would residents of kibbutz in Israel class their experiments as a failure?
Pan Arabism does seem a failed concept, with neither the Arab League nor the one-time UAR particularly successful or united. But for most of the past few hundred years the idea of a voluntary pan-European state was a pie in the sky ideal as well.
I think that many radical ideas become logical and obvious after the fact - it is difficult to discern between the inconceivable and the inevitable.
So you would honestly rather be in tsarist Russia in 1917 than Soviet Russia in 1989? In tsarist Russia, you would have likely been a peasent in a system just years removed from feudalism in a country whoes poverty makes our modern third world seem cushy, likely to die young if you arn’t outright shot by the unabashedly autocratic government. In late Soviet Russia you would likely be an office worker working for a thouroughly second world superpower, living in a small but adequate apartment with a car, a doctor to visit when you get sick and plentiful albeit repetative food. Come on, people’s biggest complaints in late-Soviet Russia is that they couldn’t get Levis and American rock-and-roll. Really horrifying stuff happened during the Soviet regime, but it’d be quite a stretch to say the people were worse off than they were before.
I think the more apt comparison might be Tsarist Russia in 1917 and Soviet Russia in 1937. I’m picking a time 20 yrs later so tht communism has at least had a chance to “work”. Wasn’t that the time when millions died during a forced famine to break the backs of the “non-prolitarian” farmers? I may have my exact dates wrong, but I think you get the message. It’s really not fair to compare anything across so long a period of time. Stds of living often improve somewhat in a bad system, if you let enough time pass.
Choosing a 20 year cut off date for the USSR is fairly arbitrary, but in 1937 the Soviet Union hadn’t ended in ruin and wasn’t in any imminent danger of ending in ruin. In fact, while Russia had scarcely any sort of industrial base in 1917, the USSR in 1937 had become a major industrial power. Millions had of course been murdered in purges, famine, or forced labor, but as a nation the USSR in 1937 was a good deal stronger than Russia had been in 1914 (a 1917 comparison would be unfair, as Russia had lost the war and was in the middle of revolution).
That is not even close to what I am saying.
There is no reason to belive that the WWI allies were ever willing to forgive Germany. There is no reason to beleive they were ever to going to lift the Versalles restrictions. After 20 years germany was still in the same state it had been in in 1918.
The only reason Germany escaped these penalties was because a government came to power that bullied the allies into ignoring its blatant breaches of treaty conventions.
This isn’t sying that fascism was good because something good eventuallu came of it. It was good because it produced a benefit in the short term and the long term.
On the contrey. The Marshall plan grew out of the obvious results of the punitive reparations and assset seizure imnposed on Germany in 1918. The allies realised that such impositions and the resulting privations were likely to result in another totalitarin regime coming to be. So instead of reprations they preached reconstruction.
This isn’t my opinion, this is was among the major reasons stated for the initiative.
Germany’s problems post WWI were in no small part self-inflicted. The German government printed vast quantities of money rather than make meaningful reparations payments.
A facist government wasn’t required to stand up to the allies as England rarely backed France in confrontations over treaty enforcement.
The social chaos that facism solved was a problem that again was largely due to the governments refusal to deal harshly with militants and revolutionaries on the right - once the militants were in power social problem solved (sort of)
Whether the problem’s Germany faced were partially self inflicted seems irrelavant. The problem was real, and a solution was required.
As for whether a facsit government was required, perhaps we could best answer that by looking at what had been achieved through 20 years experimentation with non-fascist governments.
Conceivably a non-totalitarian govt could have acheived the same outcome. Anything is possible. But as you noted, consecutive non-totailtarian, non-fascist governments had refused to deal effectively with the problem, and had made the economic problems worse.
Under certain conditions, radicalism is very helpful, especially when it scares the reactionaries into making concessions. To my mind, a good case can be made that Malcolm X was enormously helpful to MLK. He could say, “Well, cracker, who you want to negoatiate with? Me? Or him?”
I wouldn’t equate anti-colonialism with radicalism. If the Japanese had been successful in invading and conquering the US, Americans who fought in the resistance could hardly be defined as radicals - unless you assume that only the POV of the conqueror is valid.
The American Revolution was definitely a radical event. It involved armed rebellion against what was widely recognized as legitimate authority. It’s enlightening to note the differences in the way Revolutionary War is studied in the US versus the way it’s studied in Britain and other countries.
Any time period you pick is arbitrary. I gave a specific reason why I picked 20 yrs, and I’ll stick by it. We were discussing whether people were better off than before the change. Industrialization at the expense of 10s of millions of people dead is not my idea of “better off”. I’d be surprised if it was yours, either. Is it?
Also keep in mind they were going from a monarchy to Communism. Communism can’t compete with democracy, but stands up well to other forms of totalitarianism.
Adaher: Actually the communists were replacing a democratic government, albeit a very short lived one, because Kerenski’s government didn’t deliver the one thing most needed by Russia- peace with Germany. But in principle of course you are right - the several months old democracy hardly had a chance to establish a track record
Blake: I think the fact that the Nazi’s were part of the problem that the Nazi’s solved is relevent - making the right wing militant thugs now official government thugs is a solution on paper only. The Weimar government showed it could deal with left wing thugs well enough. I would argue that the economically successful parts of the National Socialist Program are extremely similar to what Roosevelt did in the US - massive government (deficit?) spending on public works and ultimately rearmament, which from a turn of the 21st century viewpoint hardly seems radical (although perspective is arguably the problem here)). In order to say that Naziism was the only or the best solutions to Germany’s problems really requires knowledge of the other parties platforms.
As to the failure of facism as a whole - it is difficult to assess. If you compare Spain at Franco’s death with contemporary (say) Italy, Spain is less well off materially. Take away the Marshall plan and is the discrepancy as great? I don’t know.
Care to offer some evidence for that asertion? I think the combined deaths due to Soviet and Chinese communist totalitarianism would be really hard to top. Wasn’t it on th order of 30M people each for those “experiments”?
You also have to take into account the relative wealth of Italy vs Spain in pre-fascist days.
The specific reason being to give communism time to work and that the standard of living between 1917 and 1989 had obviously improved? The USSR was far better off in 1937 than Russia was in 1914. Of course I don’t approve of the method by which it was accomplished, hence the use of the work ‘murdered.’ Imperialism, colonialism and feudalism were all rather brutal, but were they thus unsuccessful?