Doug: You say communism is almost always worse than fascism, I disagree. At least a communist insurgency _can_ have been motivated by idealism - an attempt to improve the circumstances of a destitute people. Fascism is almost always about greed and power. Which is worse, an attempt to improve the lot of your people with a flawed economic system or a attempt to brutalize and impoverish your people in order to make yourself more powerful? Even in your example of Stalin and Hitler, The communist was the bad and the fascist was the worst, though I don't think that there was much of a difference between the two. There were people that understood that at the time and thought we should have finished the war in Moscow.
Me: I would say that, in fact, it's that idealism that makes things worse, usually. Fascism demands control of political life. Communism demands that the government control every facet of the life of a society. If you just want to count genocides (one standard) - you've got one by a Fascist (the Holocaust) and how many by Communists? Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot - at least three. But there have been more Fascist governments than Communist ones. Doug: And what about Castro. The real reason he garnered so much hatred from the U.S. is that he confiscated U.S. property. Cuba was being and had been raped by U.S. businesses (and U.S. organized crime) and by U.S. backed dictators. If we had played the role of the benevolent neighbor, allowing the popular leader his economic experiment but encouraging him all along to see the wisdom of our system, how long would have communism lasted in Cuba? This is an outstanding case of how we didn't have faith in our own system. Me: Except, of course, that when Batista was the ruler of Cuba, it was the wealthiest state in the Carribean. It's now the second poorest. Before Castro, Cuba was (by Third World standards) a fairly decent place to live. Now, every time Castro stops imprisoning people who try to leave and persecuting their families, they flee by the thousands and tens of thousands. That, to me, suggests something. Why do you credit a blood-stained mass murderer like Fidel Castro with good intentions, but not your own government? Doug: And what if we had played along with Ho Chi Mihn? Could things have turned out any worse than they did? Me: No, but that's because _he won_. If he had lost, things would have turned out a lot better. No totalitarian police state, for one thing. Even more strikingly, if we had won, no Pol Pot in Cambodia. When we left Southeast Asia we abandoned the people of Cambodia to hell on earth. Our failure to act, not our action, was what allowed that genocide to take place. The ruthless realists like Kissinger and Nixon would have prevented it - they did delay it for some years. The idealists who wanted us out - they sat on their hands while millions died. So when we followed your advice and left, things got not just worse, but catastrophically worse. Doug: And how much military effort did we expend trying to get rid of the Sadinistas when all it took was a democratic election? And in any case, was Ortega worse than Samoza? And how do we know if Allaende was worse than Pinochet if we send the CIA in to shoot him before he has a chance to lead the country he was elected to? Me: Well, we expended almost none to get rid of the Sandinistas. Had we not done what we did I think there's no possibility that there would have been a democratic election. Ortega was at least as bad as Samoza, and he supported the USSR. Since Castro had (and, for that matter, continues to be) a cause of significant strategic problems for us, it seems logical to think that another Soviet satellite would have been the same. As for Allende - there is considerable evidence, first, that Allende committed suicide - there's no credible evidence that I'm aware of that we had him shot - second, that he was planning to establish a dictatorship in Chile (Hitler was elected, after all), and third, and probably most strikingly, that we didn't have much to do with it. I don't believe in American omnipotence - every bad thing that happens in the world is not our fault. In Iran, for example, during the fall of the Shah, we didn't even have a single agent on the ground who spoke Farsi. So I find it hard to believe that we were responsible for that. But that doesn't stop people from saying, constantly, how we toppled the Shah. If it happened, we must have had something to do with it. Same thing in Chile. The coup would have happened whether we supported it or opposed it - that's usually what happens, actually. We see something inevitable and say, hey, these guys will run the country with or without us - do we want them to be on our side or opposed to us? There's a fairly obvious answer to that question. Doug: There may be times when we have to choose between bad and worse, I agree, and I'm not saying we have made a wrong decision in the most recent crisis. I think we can do good things for Afghanistan and have a positive influence in that part of the world. But there are times in the past that we made shameful decisions and we should have the courage - the moral fortitude to admit to ourselves that we were wrong sometimes - that we should have made discussions based on what was best for the people directly involved and not on our own economic interests. Finally, we should learn from our mistakes make every attempt to make the right decisions in the future. I don't think we're that far apart, Gautam, I really don't. I do think you have a hard time admitting _anything_ the U.S. has done was flawed. -- Doug Me: I actually think we are, because while there are certainly places where I criticize the US (Guatemala and Colombia in this discussion alone, for example) I don't believe every leftist piety about the virtue of our enemies. I think the real difference between us is that I believe that the people we were working against were _really bad_, while you seem to have a fairly idealized notion of them. In this post alone you've at least implied that Ho Chi Minh and Castro weren't that bad - you've certainly given both far more benefit of the doubt than you give us. But they _were_ that bad. When given the opportunity they both promptly established dictatorial police states that used secret police, torture, and mass imprisonments and executions. Both were worse than any right-wing dictator we've supported, with the exception of Guatemala, and both were _much_ worse than the people we supported whom they replaced. In Iran, another example that's often cited, we supported the Shah for a long time. When we stopped, he was replaced by Khomeini. The Shah was much, much better. But somehow I keep hearing that we're at fault for both supporting and overthrowing the Shah - that these criticisms are mutually contradictory and often made simultaneously never seems to bother anyone, for some reason. I see the results of what happened when the government did as you would have it do - one such result was the Cambodian genocide - and I don't like it. My way would have avoided that. On _that ground alone_, my way would seem to work a lot better. We should be ashamed of what happened in Guatemala. We should be a lot more ashamed of what happened in Cambodia, where we had the chance to do something and didn't - and it wasn't because of people like me that we didn't. Gautam
