Remembering the Victims of Communism
Nick Gillespie | June 12, 2007, 7:07am
The Victims of Communism Memorial is being dedicated in Washington, D.C. today, in a service featuring Reps. Tom Lantos (D-Calif.) and Dana Rohrabacher (R-Calif.). Other events later in the day include a roundtable discussion with Richard Pipes, Paul Hollander, and Harry Wu; and a dinner with William F. Buckley and Elena Bonner (Andrei Sakharov's wife).
Details here.
Via Arts & Letters Daily comes this piece in the New Statesman that asks whether brutal repression is a feature not a bug in communism. Writes Robert Service, author of Comrades: A World History of Communism,
In all cases of durable state communism, there was some approximation to the Soviet "model". A single party kept itself in power without concern for electoral mandate. A nomenklatura system of personnel appointment was introduced. Religion was harassed. National traditions were emasculated. The rule of law was flouted. The political police was ubiquitous and ruthless; labour camps were established. Foreign travel permits were made hard to come by. Radio and TV broadcasts from abroad were banned. A prim public culture was installed.
This was the pattern despite the many national differences....
Service notes that, with the exception of Pol Pot's Cambodia, these same regimes industrialized quickly, expanded education, and did other things that helped to explain their staying power (and their good press in the liberal West). More here.
Alan Charles Kors took a long look at The God that Failed (the 1950 anthology and the ideology) for Reason here.
rob | June 13, 2007, 5:06pm | #
"Rob, there are no 'sides' to the individualist. There are only individuals."
Um, ok... Next you'll say "Only a Sith Lord speaks in absolutes." Just because you are an individual doesn't mean you'll be any more or less dead when a group of people attacks you. Just because you don't want to be at war, doesn't mean that you won't be if there is a group of people dedicating their lives to waging war on you and the group they lump you into (with or without your consent).
"Just because a government in my part of the world attacks your part of the world, you have no more right to kill me than if some criminal gang with members living down the block from me attacks you it gives you the right to blow up my neighborhood."
Sure, as an individual I don't. But the military does. That's how it works, and wishing it wasn't so doesn't change the reality.
"The US government has been meddling in the Middle East for decades."
True, no argument.
"It has been the main aggressor in the conflicts between America and the Muslim world."
Not true, but once you've swallowed that whopper you're more than ready to play the rousing round of "blame the victim" you engage in.
"the US government slaughtered far more Middle Easterners -- most of them civilians -- than the Japanese slaughtered Americans."
When was this?
"Indeed, if you believe in collectivist ethics, Japan killed a few thousand Americans and the US retaliated by killing hundreds of thousands of them;"
Yup. How wars are won, sadly.
"whereas the US government killed hundreds of thousands of Middle Easterners and terrorists retaliated by killing thousands of Americans —- this would mean 9/11 was far more proportional and thus defensible than Hiroshima."
Proportionality is just one part of the equation regarding whether or not a target is legitimate. Again, sorry, but that's just the Law of Armed Conflict.
"But I don't believe in collectivist ethics. I see only individuals. And so I see both as acts of murder."
Well, that's an opinion.
"As for Ward Churchill, those who blindly adopt American nationalism have far more in common with him than I do"
Yup, because American nationalism is the major force for evil and all that's wrong with the world - in bizarro world. In this universe, though, the U.S. is far more a force for good than for evil.
rob | June 14, 2007, 10:43am | #
"But certainly nationalism is a problem regarding the US, the biggest government in world history."
Exactly how would that be possible as long as China exists?
"As a libertarian, I happen to think that government is the embodiment of violence."
Really? Sounds more like an anarchists' point of view to me. As a minarchist, I certainly see that gov't should play a role - y'know in that John Locke, rule of law fashion. Without the rule of law you get settling crimes with honor killings and vendettas.
"The US is a majorly aggressive empire."
Actually, there still isn't a consensus among historians regarding whether the U.S. actually is an empire. If it is an empire, it is an empire only if you stretch the definition to include characteristics that aren't included in the traditional definition of empire. It's a cute bumper sticker to hang on the U.S.'s bumper when it suits people who dislike the foreign policy of the U.S., but it's really sloppy thinking to assume that even experts would agree with you about the "U.S. is an empire" schtick.
"When did it kill many, many thousands of Middle Easterners? The sanctions in Iraq."
You mean the United Nations sanctions? File a complaint with them, don't hang it on the U.S. Also, it’s funny that none of the 9/11 terrorists were from Iraq. How does A lead to B, again? Only by blaming the victims.
"Support for both sides of the Iran-Iraq war."
Again, none of the 9/11 terrorists were from either of those countries. How does A lead to B again? (Also, I think you need to do some research on where support came from for both sides of that war and in what proportion instead of just believing whatever you’ve been told.)
"Support for Saddam going back to the early 1960s, and including active support of him during his greatest crimes against humanity."
That's realpolitik. It's ugly, but it's the nature of international relations. The U.S. has turned a blind eye to some pretty heinous things in its own self-interest, no argument. You probably do the exact same thing every time you drive to work using gas that is refined from Middle Eastern and South American oilfields or use a cellphone that includes circuitry that wouldn't be possible without items mined in areas of Africa that would turn your stomach. It's a sorry state of affairs, but short of invading every country where there is injustice, about the only thing the U.S. can feasibly do is hope that the guy running the country isn't Chavez/Kim Jong Il and/or doesn't go from being the Hussein of the 80s to the Hussein of the 90s.
"The first Gulf War."
Really? That was a coalition of nations that freed the Kuwaitis from an invading army. Ask the Kuwaitis (who are also Arabs, BTW) how they feel about the U.S.'s involvement there.
"These are not minor events. Had foreigners done this to America, even more Americans would be calling for nuking foreign countries right now."
You mean if the rest of the world behaved toward the U.S. the way the U.S. behaves towards the rest of the world? You mean providing more direct and indirect aid, defending its allies with its own blood and treasure, and living up (like no nation in the history of the world) to the idea of "no better friend, no worse enemy?" I don’t really see how that’s a scenario that results in Americans calling for nuking foreign countries.
“’Only a Sith Lord speaks in absolutes’ is a self-defeating statement. Mine wasn't. Poor example.”
No, it's a self-contradicting statement - just like yours, making it a spot-on example.
"You're right. Reality is that militaries see the world through a collectivist lens."
Like every group of people who have ever banded together since the first tribes of mankind… to be up in arms about this is to deny the reality of human nature, a common problem with all utopian pipe-dreams for making the world a perfect place. The trick, IMO, is to keep the group chugging towards making things better (like the U.S. does) instead of worse (the way the USSR, Mao's China, and Hitler's Germany did as an extreme example). It's a balancing act, not a real example of "all groups and all collectivism is bad and good things only flow from individuals." Most good in the world, just like most bad in the world, comes from groups. Guns are the same way - they can be useful tools of self-protection or harmful tools used to dominate other people. It's not that all groups are bad, it's that they have to have checks and balances in place to keep them from doing damage.
"Libertarians shouldn't be trying to emulate the way governments immorally approach the world."
True, individuals are internal members of a group who abide by the group's rules for the betterment of the individual or there is no reason for the individual to abide by the group's rules. Simple self-interest, there, which is simple human nature again. Utopian approaches often fail to take human nature into account and assume that if only they can overcome that nature that the world could be a perfect and perfectly good place. (See also, communism, socialism, etc.) But groups interacting with one another are rarely bound by the same rules as the individuals. Hence the difference between murder and war, a difference you seem incapable of discerning.
"The 'Law of Armed Conflict' is, to the extent it is collectivist, as flawed as the laws against drugs or guns or any other such positive laws."
Well, are you positing the world would be better off without LOAC? There seems to be a lot of that on these threads (an uninformed position, clearly, IMO). We could go back to the “30 Years War” approach, but I somehow don't think that's what you're positing since it would be far bloodier than the current LOAC system (which was established with the express intent of making things less needlessly bloody and less horrific for civilians). Again, the idea that you can make things better by abolishing all groups is just utopian clap-trap that is counter to human nature, but if that is what you’d like to see you should have some suggestion for what you would replace LOAC and international law with?
"But as it so happens, even the international law formed over the centuries, whether the Geneva Conventions or the theories of Just War, do not favor the US in such actions as the nuking of Hiroshima."
Says you. Again, I think that you're going to have a really hard time getting consensus on that even among experts and historians.
"As for proportionality, it is a matter of disproportionality if, for example, in retaliation for your punching me in the face, I stab you to death."
You are making the same mistake about applying interactions between groups to interactions between individuals within a group who have agreed to live by the rules of that group. It's hard for me to believe that your apparent inability to discern the difference is sincere - it seems almost like a philosophical position adopted for the sake of argument in a Philosophy 101 course. Also, again, proportionality is not the only (nor even always the primary) factor in establishing what is and isn’t legitimate use of military force.
"When aggressors attack you, you have a right to use force against them. Not innocent people."
Groups in conflict with other groups (like nation-states, for example) often find it hard to distinguish between those who are part of the group by choice and rugged individualists like yourself who think they live in a vacuum rather than in a nation-state that is one of many others. However, to bring it to the individual level example (since you seem to have troulbe understanding anything above the individual level of organization): you are justified in shooting someone who you believe is shooting at you in self-defense, and it is also a justified shooting if you shoot someone who wasn't attacking you but happened to be in the same group of people and you believed was shooting at you. It doesn't make it any less tragic and sad that an innocent person died, but the world is an imperfect place where people often must band together to make life better for themselves and the members of their group (whether that group is the Libertarian Party or the military arm of a nation-state).
"And if you think the US government, or any government, is overall a force for good in the world, it is you who are in Bizarro World, at least if you claim to have any libertarian philosophical views."
I'm basically a minarchist libertarian, and I don't see that my views conflict with that position. But you seem to be an anarchist libertarian - which has always struck me as hopelessly utopian at best and a bloody and unworkable regression to the law of might rather than the ruld of right that it implies.
I'm also an aspiring historian, so I recognize that human beings have pretty much always operated in groups and I have a pretty good impression of how previous groups have operated throughout the bloody history of mankind.
Placing the blame on an "-ism" is legitimate if that "-ism" is rotten at its core (communism, socialism, authoritarianism). But in the case of your disdain for your definition of "collectivism" (defined, as you seem to, as "any group of two or more people for any reason") which I don't share (my definition is far more specific than yours and is more a political definition) flies in the face of every techonological and social advance in human history.
In other words, no, the U.S. isn't the source of all good nor of all evil. But it is responsible - advertently or inadvertently - for far more good than any other nation-state in history, especially the empires you lump it in with.
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