Yes, our pile is somewhat smaller. Good for us!
There is an important difference, isn’t there?
(Please note, my discussion here involves some leftists and leftist groups, and probably excepts present company.)
The failing of some politicians or leaders or policy makers or opinion leaders in dealing with some of the strongmen you noted wasn’t that anybody fell for their act. Everybody knew they were bastards. Everybody knew there were folks in the prisons that shouldn’t be there.
The problem was that, early on, very few countries in the world were at all democratic, and even the ones that were weren’t terribly enlightened when it came to the treatment of people who weren’t of the right sort.
Later on, of course, that excuse didn’t wash as well, but we still had the problem that sometimes you had to, on realistic grounds, deal with the bastard who was there. Maybe you didn’t put him there, but there he was, and to get your ore or bananas or whatnot you cut a deal. Besides, you were in a part of the world without a democratic tradition anyway, so what’s the difference.
After that, of course, it changed, and you shifted to supporting the guy, giving him arms, and even willingly supporting him against other guys perhaps more legitimate for the job. Now, however reprehensible this was (and it was plenty) it was done with eyes wide open, and it was done with the expectation that another guy there would have been a sicker nastier exploiter of his people and worse would have shipped the revolution next door. As nasty as these autocrats were, for the most part they stayed put, which we liked just fine.
Now, there is much to criticize here, and we could write a book, probably (although several have been written already, so I’ll pass). But the Left is different in a very important way, especially in its heyday. While the Right usually didn’t lose sight of the fact that they were backing bad guys, the Left would delude themselves periodically into thinking they were backing good guys.
College students would form little Maoist cliques, or call Chairman Ho the George Washington of his people, or put Che Guevara on tee shirts. Hell, Cameron Diaz just got stung with this, she wore a bag with Maoist slogans in Peru and upset plenty of people, especially since the Shining Path were inspired by Mao.
(I do realize Cameron Diaz isn’t any kind of Communist, but it is a funny world where kind of bag would be trendy. It ought to be treated like a bag with a swastika - essentially like the Peruvians treated it.)
Back to the timeline of the OP here, Stalin had a lot of people in the 1930s thinking he was the wave of the future. Walter Duranty defended both his agricultural policies and his show trials in supposedly unbiased articles in the New York Times.
So there you go. It is the difference between supporting a bastard because you think you have no choice, or because you think you can get some good out of it, or supporting a bastard because you think he’s the next George Washington.
Now, personally, I’d prefer to find George Washingtons. Affter that, though, I’d like to make my decisions, even if they are unpleasant ones, clearheadedly.
And that does not mean waving a red book around.
Perhaps so, and certainly not within your country. But within your sphere of influence you’re certainly responsible for quite a number of corpses.
No gilding the lily around those facts.
Mote, beam, eye and all that…
Wow.
I’m finding myself agreeing (somewhat) with both Mr. Moto and John Mace in GD. I’m going to have to turn in my pinko liberal card.
Back when I was about ten years old – I don’t remember how old exactly, only that I was a wee mite – a group came to my school and asked us what we thought our perfect government would be. After some discussion amongst ourselves, we all came to the conclusion that racism was bad and that starving people needed food and homeless people needed homes and everyone needed jobs and money wasn’t important. People should share like they taught us in kindergarten.
That’s great, said the group. You’ve just described communism.
Now, as a parcel of red-blooded American children, we were quite shocked. We knew communism was the Russians and they were Bad and Un-American. We set about trying to find a way to fund all the programs we thought necessary and ended up taxing our citizenry at 50% at best. We were quite distraught. I, at least, came out of there with a keener understanding of capitalism and why we have it.
When I was in college, I lived in a co-op. I highly suggest the lifestyle, especially to a college aged person – they’re called the poor man’s fraternities for a reason. Some are more studious than others (we only had the OCCASIONAL party until four in the morning. Like, just twice a semester or so) and some are larger than others but they all work on the same system: you pay vanishingly small amounts of money for rent and utilities and food (as I recall, a single room about the size of a standard American bedroom goes for $650/month including food, utilities, the whole shebang. Having a roommate makes things much cheaper) and you do chores around the house to keep it reasonable. You might cook two nights a week for the whole house or clean the living room a few times. You might sweep. If you failed to do a duty you had to pay someone else to do it or trade with them. I think the going rate was $10/hour for most housework. Bigger tasks included everyone, and you had to take part or you were penalized somehow – you had to do some other unpleasant task by yourself, for example. I once missed a big day of work for some reason and ended up scrubbing paint drips off the front porch.
It was communal living. We all did our work not just because we wanted it done but because everyone else wanted it done, too. If you didn’t do your task you’d be taken to task – heh – by someone else because they wanted to live in a clean house. In a limited sense, it can work.
I just don’t think that it can work on a grand scale. We could kick people out of the co-op for not working. We could get rid of a psychotic autocrat and break away from the main group if we seriously thought they were a bunch of jerks. There was no nuclear option in the ICC.
Moto, you’re right in that we liberals are often very idealistic. We don’t knowingly make deals with the Devil because, well, he’s the Devil. So we convince ourselves that he’s not the Devil much. Conservative folk are willing to do so for long-term stability, but as we all know it don’t always work.
But I believe that it’s possible to believe in a socialist ideology of equality and food and housing and clothing and health care for everyone without being evil. If a person thinks that’s what communism is, they might well love their country so much that they believed this system was better.
Okay, if the U.S. is evil, what countries, if any, have ever qualified as good?
I can never seem to get a firm answer to this.
Isn’t it obvious? The answer is no country at all!
You must either skip off dreamily whilst singing “Imagine” or march away shouting the “Internationale”.
That’s about how I see it. I’ve lived in those types of arrangements, too, and they can work pretty well on a small scale (as I noted earlier).
However, there is an interesting lesson to be learned here. In a society with a capitalist economy you are free to self-organize as a communist at whatever scale you so choose-- be it a family, a club, a company, or even a whole town. In a country with a communist economy, you could not self-organize as a capitalist, since you are not able to own property or “the means of production”. (I suppose that no actual communist country outlawed all property ownership, but if people in a society are allowed to acquire substantial amounts of property, then that society cannot be said to be operating on a communist model.) A communist country that allowed unlimited ownership of property would probably be transformed into a capitalist society in no time.
Or do neither. Live with the facts of what humans are, and what they are capable of, and not try to blame an ideology, which has not hands, nor wills, to bloody.
Moto, what grave threat was posed by the Nicaraguan revolution, or Guatemala, or any of them? Cuba has survived, are we dead? Outside of a vital resource of bananas, what threat was posed to justify the brutality? You posit that I might be grateful for the hard-headed realists who dealt with the Devil in order to make us secure, I am not, I curse thier cynicism. In the words of Jefferson:“I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just.”
And why is this sauce of forgiveness exclusive to the goose, and not the gander? Why is it that the Sandanistas cannot lay claim to such realism to escape guilt? Why couldn’t they say, as you do, that we did what we must, we dealt with bad guys in order to preserve ourselves from a worse evil? We did evil things, yes, but only to protect ourselves from an evil ideology, you say, why can’t they make the same claim?
Actually, your second paragraph was needless. You got it in one in the first. Talking Empires here, and history certainly does repeat itself. Certainly not a good record by any account. Ironically though, as a kid/young man, I was expecting better from yours. Just comes to show how youth is wasted on the young.
And Bryan, like it or not, can you refute what’s on that page? Because I’ve actually lived through some of it – Trujillo and Franco, as bloody and vengeful as dictators get no matter what side they are on.
Cheers?
Disclaimer: I wasn’t directly affected by either regime due both to family influences and a tender age. Doesn’t mean I am not aware of the atrocities that happened in both. It’s a matter of historical record anyway.
Let me pose some questions in return, especially given your admiration of the Sandinistas earlier for their (partial) relinquishing of power.
Lots of people fought alongside Castro in the hopes that Cuba after Batista would be democratic. How many free elections has Cuba held in the nearly fifty years since, and how many former Castro allies wound up later dead, imprisoned, or in Miami?
Meet the new boss, same as the old boss.
Accountability.
Democratic governments are (however imperfectly) accountably to their citizens for their failings. Nondemocratic governments aren’t accountable at all. And the Sandinistas through their actions have insulated themselves from a great deal of accountability - please note what I (and Freedom House) said above about their control of a corrupt judiciary.
Obviously I am not 'luc, but I’d like to take a stab at this.
First off, your lack of response to the prior questions posed to you in luc’s post is rather telling. As in having no reasonable answer to it. Secondly, I’ll let Fidel himself answer your query – in a round about way:
And more question for you Sir Moto, is there a Cuban mafia in Miami? If so, pray tell, whom do you think it is composed of?
Vigorous entrepreneurship.
Oh, I wouldn’t even dream of trying, since it’s utterly irrelevant to my unanswered question. I’ll cheerfully stipulate that any given microsecond in the existence of the U.S. is a million billion trillion times worse than the combined decades of Nazi Germany, Mao’s China and the Soviet Union.
Now that that’s out of the way, I’ll try again: what nation, if any, has ever qualified as a good nation? I’d like to know if success is even possible under the implied criteria.
I would say many of the Scandinavian countries and the Nertherlands, perhaps some of the pacific Island nations but what difference does it make? every nation is different and each has its own problems. you seem to think that because there is a zero success rate for communism so far that it cannot prove successful under any circumstances. The fact is that capitalism, while an older and more established philosophy than communism, does not, given the current state of the world, appear to be the be-all and end-all that its adherents claim.
Yes the communist countries of the past have made major errors and performed some horrendous acts although i would argue that it was the leaders of those countries who were responsible and performed them as much to maintain their own power as to advance any idealistic cause.
But, I would argue that, as the size of the globe becomes smaller and smaller vis a vis its population, and as the populace continues to deplete the world’s supply of energy and other materials, some form of communism will become the only way to maintain order and continue the existence of humans on this planet. I don’t think it will be in my lifetime, but capitalism and the concurrent need to exploit are ultimately doomed.
We have seen the nightmares that false utopias turn out to be here on earth. Personally, I will look for paradise in the hereafter, not here.
Well, the difference is between saying capitalism is evil (and there might be some valid arguments along those lines) and saying humanity is evil (which doesn’t really lead anywhere). When I ask for an example of a “good” country, I’m trying to establish where the claimant stands.
I’m always willing to be surprised. Heck, I’ve gladly admitted in past threads on this topic (there have been many) that communism can work in relatively small communities based on agriculture or simple industry. It just fails when the structures get sufficiently complex that a permanent bureaucracy is required. Centralized control of production inevitably turns into control of the population. If you like, I could round up a bunch of links where this discussion has been extensively hashed out (if not beaten to death).
Isn’t immigration one of the best indicators of what constitutes the “be-all and end-all”? As I understand it, waiting lists to get into the U.S., Canada, the U.K… (heck, the entire G7), are pretty long. How many people are voting with their feet and trying to get Chinese citizenship?
I just hope it’s not within my lifetime, and I intend to live forever or die trying. I’m looking forward to controlled fusion, lunar colonies, space elevators, flying cars, nanotech… frankly, I’m extremely optimistic about the future and I expect the capitalist democracies to lead the way.
Under the present circumstances as they apply to our country, I cannot help but wonder if you are not indulging in some droll irony.
The history of the betrayal of revolutions goes back long before Marx was even a gleam in his fathers means of production. I’ve heard something to the effect that power corrupts, I don’t recall any specific reference that communist power being more corruptive than any other.
But no matter. If you are eager to have me confess that, yes, indeed, many Communists are very bad people, I so stipulate, and await whatever conclusion you may base on this.
Now, if you have no further questions…what grave threat was posed by the leftist revolutions in Guatemala, or Nicaragua, or El Salvador, such that a deal with brutal and vicious regimes was essential for the survival of our nation?