Botond173
23hr ago
The Soviets didn't use Hungarian or Czech soldiers to put down the uprisings in those countries; they chose people not from those areas specifically because painting the people in those areas of the Soviet Empire as a simple adversary is more effective that way.
Although this is an issue largely unrelated to the one being discussed I'd like to mention that there was no such specific choice made. Deploying local units was Plan A from the beginning for the Soviets. See the period of martial law in Poland from 1981 as reference. When the situation escalated to the point where local units were insufficient or unsuited to repress the rebellion, Plan B was put into action.
Botond173
1d ago
Over the years I have often heard cosmopolitan liberals express a sentiment to the effect "the United States has no culture".
And if you press them on this they'll probably go on to clarify that the US of A as a whole has no unified national culture transcending all class, racial and regional differences, which seems like a reasonable opinion. And they'll probably concede that Appalachians or Southern whites, Mormons, prairie ranchers, New Englanders etc. do have distinct cultures of their own, even if it carries the legacy of structural racism or something. This also has parallels in Europe. There's probably no leftist there who will deny that Bavarian identity exists or that the Bretons have a culture, for example. But this has the potential to open up further cans of forms. For example, can a Somali goat herder become a Southerner or an Appalachian hillbilly? Should he even? Can a Syrian farmer become a Saxon or a Swabian? Can a Senegalese become an Alsatian?
Botond173
2d ago
As far as I know, Kim Il Sung was absolutely willing to negotiate as early as 1951 because it was clear that his original war goals were out of reach. Continuing the war was not only pointless but also rather detrimental for North Korea. It was Stalin who insisted on continuing the war and supplying the Chinese to do so with Mao's acceptance because both of them decided to make the return of POWs a central issue in order to block any agreement (because there was no way the enemy was going to forcibly repatriate all North Korean and Chinese POWs) and thus prolong the war as long as possible as they apparently thought this'd harm American interests or something (or a case of commie 4D chess, maybe). It's no surprise that a ceasefire was only reached after Stalin's death. In fact, it's reasonable to assume that Kim was willing to negotiate a truce as soon as the winter of 1950 had MacArthur not insisted on continuing the UN offensive beyond all of its original aims.
Botond173
2d ago
Cubans are too lazy for revolution
Unfortunately for the US this did not seem to have been the case in 1959.
Botond173
2d ago
I have rather cursory knowledge of the pre-1979 Iranian monarchy but based on this I can say that whatever level of economic growth it was showing was not sustainable. It was rather uneven and had a distorting effect on multiple sectors. Also the Shah was mortally ill and had zero inclination to rule as a monarch and to raise his son to be his heir, and at the same time the monarchy was losing legitimacy overall. The population was being subjected to rapid cultural and economic change that it was unable to adapt to. (One American scholar likened it to trying to make people drink water from a fire hose.) Iran was not and was never going to be South Korea or any Asian Tiger.
'I'm not mad at you!', even better. Should go to the same list as 'Bless your heart' (LOL), 'i'm sorry that you feel this way' (the way Japanese prime ministers 'apologized' for war crimes, I guess?), 'I hope one day you'll be able to feel less hated and persecuted' (h/t darwin2500).
Botond173
3d ago
OP's point was specifically about scenarios where the Left goes too far, which is arguably what happened under Allende's rule. My critique regarding this is thus that "we" do have at least one example of an antidote.
Botond173
4d ago
This reminds me of Peterson’s complaint that we have a lot of antibodies for when the right goes too far but none for when the left goes too far.
Why does he discount the rather obvious examples of Pinochet and Franco, for example? Genuine question, as I'm not familiar with his work in detail.
Botond173
4d ago
In fact, the only major Marxist nation that was truly, terrifyingly totalitarian in the 1984 sense was East Germany.
Romania and Albania were definitely worse (Albania was never major by anyone's standards for sure, but the GDR was also not somehow more major than Romania). Anyway, since you brought up the issue of state capacity, I'd point out that since member states of the Soviet bloc were modeled alike, so their state security agencies had roughly the same capacity as well; it's that some of those regimes enforced a less rigid system of conformity than the others that made a difference.
ungovernable shitholes are there in the world in which criminals, gangs and others run riot, with the central government hopelessly weak, corrupt or otherwise powerless to stop them
The central government, sure. On the other hand, they are also characterized by vigilantism, militia building and the emergence of organic local power structures.
On a different note, I'm not sure what exactly your argument is - is it that more people suffer from tyranny than from anarchy in absolute numbers, or that anarchy is overall a bigger threat to individual human flourishing, or both?
Botond173
4d ago
The Khmer Rouge murder rate was something like 7,000 per 100,000 per year.
I don't what method you used to arrive at this figure but I'd mention that according to the Pol Pot biography by Philip Short, about 3/4 of all excess deaths in Cambodia attributed to the Khmer Rogue were due to malnutrition and disease, in turn caused by government negligence and incompetence, plus the wholesale collapse of state capacity after five years of brutal civil war during the US-aligned military dictatorship.
With regard to Somalia I won't disagree with your point outright but would mention that the repression during the last years of Barre's rule was pretty damn bad by anyone's standards: the wholesale slaughter of "treasonous" clans, indiscriminate aerial bombing, mass rapes, the destruction of water reservoirs and livestock.
I have only rather cursory knowledge of the history of eugenics but based on nothing but this I think some things need to be pointed out. Eugenics was ascendant in the specific historical context of the post-WW1 Western world as a response to the disruptive consequences of the war. Huge numbers of healthy and virile men were killed and wounded which was bound to result in long-term demographic decline. Traditional moral codes were collapsing, divorce rates skyrocketed, promiscuity was on the rise, cultural decadence was everywhere, as was alcoholism, drug addiction etc. The finances of most nations were in disarray, as was international trade.
As a result, proponents of eugenics were generally concerned that a) the birthrate of socially desirable elements will decline, both an absolute numbers and in relation to the birthrate of socially undesirable elements (the feeble-minded, people with hereditary mental illness and disabilities, alcoholics etc.) b) the foundering national economy was going to be burdened by the ever-rising social costs of feeble-minded, morally imbecile social groups growing in number.
It’s small wonder that positive and negative eugenics usually went hand in hand in every nation and federal state which adopted it. (Did it not?) Those who believed in eugenics wanted to curb two larger negative trends overall. It didn’t have that much to do with ideology. Eugenics was even popular in liberal democracies.
With respect to the Nazis I think there’s a politically motivated tendency to gloss over two aspects. One is that there was a secret state campaign to kill the mentally ill and people with hereditary diseases, as others have mentioned, generally called “Merciful death” (Gnadentod) – the expression “Aktion T4” was only invented after the war – specifically aimed at freeing up healthcare resources and diverting them to the war effort (the armed forces were going to need doctors, nurses and hospital beds), plus reducing state healthcare expenditures overall.
It thus had a practical (but of course wholly unethical) purpose and was unique in the world in the sense that it meant extermination and not only sterilization of socially undesirables (which was also a state policy enacted earlier). For this reason I’s argue that it cannot be considered an example of eugenics, which wasn’t even a word the Nazis used (“racial hygiene” was used instead). It has also become common to call this particular policy a case of “euthanasia” which is completely dishonest BS, of course. Another aspect of the Nazi policy of mandatory sterilization was that it specifically targeted people with black ancestry, which is not something that eugenics as such entailed in any other nation, as far as I know.
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