> Behalf Of K.Feete
> Gautam Mukunda wrote:
> >Ronald Reagan, at least, did consciously and deliberately plan to
do
> >exactly that.
>
> Er, Reagan planned something? I always regarded him as sort of the
Tin
> Man of Presidents... "If I only had a brain...."
Liberals _always_ believe that conservatives are dumb, Kat. In this
conservative's opinion, it saves those liberals from the effort of
actually thinking about what we say - because if they did, they'd
realize we were right :-) Anyone who reads Ronald Reagan's quite
remarkable body of speeches and works from before his Presidency,
recently published for the first time in the marvelous _Reagan in His
Own Hand_, will realize that he was a very intelligent man with a
coherent vision of the country and the world. In fact, quite a few
_liberal_ opponents of Reagan from the 1980s have come out after
reading this book and admitted that they were quite wrong in their
assessment of his intelligence.
> >During many of his speeches during the 1970s he
> >repeatedly stated his belief that a Communist government was
incapable
> >of running an economy with any degree of competence and would be
> >forced into collapse if the United States pressed it. Jeanne
> >Kirkpatrick (his UN Ambassador and a close counselor) herself told
me,
> >in fact, that he repeated those sentiments during private meetings
> >during his Presidency.
>
> And ran us how far into debt doing it? I don't know much about the
Cold
> War (as I think I've effectively demonstrated) but it hardly seems
worth
> it. *Why* was it so important to drive communism into the ground?
>
> No, really, I'm asking. Why?
>
> Kat Feete
Kat, why do you think countries give themselves the capacity to go
into debt? If you were designing the ideal state, as, say, the
Founding Fathers were trying to do in 1788, would you give it the
chance to go into debt? They thought about this issue consciously,
and they decided that you should be able to do that. Many things that
a country spends its money on will benefit future generations at least
as much as the present one - so that country _should_ go into debt, as
those future generations will be more easily able to pay it off. Just
as companies go into debt to invest, countries should go into debt
when they are doing something that is very expensive, of a finite
duration, and pays long-term benefits. The obvious example is, of
course, fighting a war. The United States went deep into debt during
the Second World War. So it made sense to pay for large portions of
the Cold War with debt. And, it can be pointed out, we're paying off
that debt with ease - the US government now runs a yearly surplus
larger than the total budgets of most of the countries in the world.
This because we were able, because of the defeat of Communism, to cut
the defense budget by _50%_ in real terms.
Which brings us to the question of why it was so important to drive
Communism into the ground - in other words, was it worth the money
that we spent. I honestly find it difficult to answer that question,
because it is, to me, a question on the line of "Why was it a good
idea to defeat Hitler?" If you don't know, it's a little tough for me
to explain, I think. Like Dizzy Gillespie's famous answer to the
question, "What is jazz?" But, I guess, I would argue that there are
two reasons that the defeat of Communism was imperative - one purely
moral, and the other moral but also self-interested.
The purely moral one is that when Ronald Reagan described the Soviet
Union as "The Evil Empire" he wasn't exaggerating. We do not yet have
firm figures on the number of people killed in Stalin's death camps,
but most reliable estimates put the number at upwards of 20 million.
Stalin was by far the worst of the rulers of the Soviet Union, but his
successors were little better. In 1968 the people of Czechoslovakia
attempted to establish a free and democratic government. The Soviet
Union responded by invading the country and massacring Czechs in the
streets of Prague with machine guns. They occupied the nations of
Eastern Europe and treated them as conquered territories - which they
were, for all practical purposes - for almost fifty years. People in
the Soviet Union lived in constant fear for their lives against an
all-pervasive security apparatus that monitored them constantly and
used torture and arbitrary murder with complete freedom. Outside of
the Soviet Union, the East German Stasi used _one-third_ of the
population of East Germany to spy on the other two-thirds. Every
Communist country denied all of its citizens all human rights - no
elections, no freedom of speech, no freedom of the press, no freedom
of anything. George Orwell's _Animal Farm_ and _1984_ were both
meant, at least partly, as descriptions of life under a Communist
regime. He had a wonderful phrase about it - he said "It's like
living with a boot in your face...forever." Estimates of the number
of people killed by Communist governments in the 20th century approach
100 Million. See _The Black Book of Communism_, which has been
published to pretty much rave reviews, for the details. You have
spoken about the injustice of leaving the Kurds under Saddam Hussein.
I don't entirely agree - while I would _prefer_ that we topple the
Iraqi government, I'm not really willing to ask American soldiers to
die by the hundreds or thousands, and occupy a country for decades,
when there is not a compelling American interest at stake. But it
seems to me that if you _object_ to us leaving the Kurds under Iraq -
well, I have posted on the list my belief that Saddam Hussein is
clinically diagnosable as a sociopath - but I think the Soviet
government was just as bad, and it ruled _hundreds of millions_ of
people. So I think the moral case for destroying the Communist
governments in the world was basically beyond question to any person
with eyes willing to see the true nature of those governments.
The second reason, I think, was morality tinged with self-interest.
The _official_, _publicly expressed_ intention of the Soviet
government was world domination. They wanted to destroy the
governments of Western Europe, and eventually that of the United
States as well. There was a world leader in the 1930s who said that
was what he wanted to do - people didn't believe him until it was too
late. Perhaps it was a good thing that Harry Truman took Joseph
Stalin a little more seriously? The story of the Cold War is the
story of almost constant Soviet aggressions, sometimes turned back,
and sometimes not, by the Western Alliance. Revelations from the
Russian archives are demonstrating, in fact, that Soviet influence
around the world was far more pervasive than we earlier believed.
They funded terrorist and subversive organizations all around the
world in the attempt to topple democratic governments and replace them
with Soviet satellites. Soviet forces in Eastern Europe were
_supposed_ to establish democratic governments and withdraw after the
Second World War. Let's just say that they took their time. They
constantly outnumbered the combined forces of the NATO allies - I
think it is reasonable to think that their intentions were highly
aggressive. So the second reason was self-protection. Which is a
moral end - you have a moral right to defend yourself. But it was
also self-interested, of course. By the choice of the Soviets
themselves, the Cold War was either us or them.
Either of those reasons would, by itself, have justified our actions
during the Cold War. After all we _never_, not _once_, attacked the
Soviets or any allies of theirs. We _defended_ South Korea (not in
any way a disaster, by the way - South Korea is a stable democracy.
North Korea may be the world's most brutal dictatorship. That's a
good trade by any standard). Whether you agree with our actions in
Vietnam or not, we were genuinely attempting to defend South Vietnam
from conquest by the North. Anyone who thinks that the North
Vietnamese government wasn't that bad needs to explain why _after the
fall of the South_ there were thousands of refugees from South
Vietnam - not before, when the war was going on. We helped the
Afghans defend themselves from Soviet conquest. Twice during the Cold
War an allied government asked American soldiers to leave - France
under De Gaulle, and the Philippines in, umm, the late 1980s I think.
Both times we left immediately. The Soviets, of course, never even
gave the countries that they conquered the chance to make that choice.
Winston Churchill described the Battle of Britain as the finest hour
of the British Empire. I'm not sure I agree - Britain's stand against
Napoleon qualifies as its equal, I think. The Cold War was not a
moment. But I think it will be remembered as one of the finest
achievements of democracies in general, and the United States in
particular. The US spent trillions of dollars, and tens of thousands
of lives, in a long and largely thankless task - defeating what was,
in my opinion, the second most evil government in human history. In
this it was joined by the people of every democracy in the world save
India - and even India was a neutral. This was an immensely difficult
task. For 44 years we had to maintain a purely reactive policy -
responding to Soviet aggression with our own blood and treasure time
and time again on every corner of the globe. When it was over,
instead of establishing an empire over our prostrate opponents, we
attempted (again) to help rebuild them. This time, sadly, with
somewhat less success. Nonetheless, this was nobility as has rarely
been seen in anyone's history. Not all of our actions during the Cold
War were correct - there are many that I regret, and more that others
feel were mistaken. None of them, however, even begins to detract
from the central justice of our case. We and our allies, the free
people of Germany, France, Italy, the Netherlands, Iceland, Canada,
Japan, and many other countries - have, in our defeat of an immense
and relentless threat to the very existence of human freedom -
something of which we can be truly proud.
********************Gautam "Ulysses" Mukunda**********************
* Harvard College Class of '01 *He either fears his fate too much*
* www.fas.harvard.edu/~mukunda * Or his deserts are small, *
* [EMAIL PROTECTED] *Who dares not put it to the touch*
* "Freedom is not Free" * To win or lose it all. *
******************************************************************
