> -----Original Message-----
> From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]]On
> Behalf Of [EMAIL PROTECTED]
[snip]
> But the mass-murders weren�t. Take again Argentina, with
> a minuscule population, that mass-murdered about 30,000
> people in less than 10 years, because of political crimes.
> There�s no Eastern European country that comes even two
> orders of magnitude to that. Even "Democratic" Germany
> killed _hundreds_ of people.
>
> Me:
> I'm fairly certain that this is not the case, actually. Hungary lost
> thousands, if not tens of thousands. Czechoslovakia the same in 1968
> _alone_, and certainly many more in the decades before and after. Romania
> - easily into the tens of thousands. The Soviet Union, of course,
> somewhere between 20-40 million. On the whole, I'd rather have lived in
> most Latin American countries. At least there you had a chance to leave,
> if nothing else. You couldn't do that from Eastern Europe.
Alberto was talking about these crimes relative to the size of the
population. You make an unfair comparison with the absolute numbers. It's
quite a different thing for a country of a couple of million to kill
thousands for political reasons than for a country of tens or hundreds of
millions.
And I have to ask that if you must bring up the sentiment that "sometimes we
have to make hard choices," bring it up in a way that acknowledges that
you're talking to many people who have had to make hard decisions, perhaps
harder than you ever have. It's better to discuss *how* to make those hard
decisions; simply saying that we have to make them is stating the obvious,
at least to me.
For example, how does one decide if the democratically elected government of
Guatemala, sympathetic to communism, is morally inferior to a right-wing,
anti-communist military dictatorship? Yes, it is a hard decision, if one is
frightened of an enemy whom the democracy seems to be friendly with. I'm
old enough to have had to practice nuclear attack drills in elementary
school and have nightmares as a result, so I have a fairly visceral
understanding of the cold war mentality. But it is very, very hard to bring
about brutal but anti-communist dictatorship over democracy even in the face
of that fear.
It's easier to talk about the facts of Latin America because a lot of the
secret documents about those days have been declassified, but we're still
faced with such decisions.
Nick
