In a message dated 12/18/1998 9:26:27 AM Eastern Standard Time, [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes: << On the plus side we have a somewhat smaller set of countries spending a generation or two under the rule of Communist regimes of varying quality--from Pol Pot or Mao or Kim Il Sung at the bottom end to Castro at the top end. Whether U.S. post-WWII foreign policy was--broadly speaking--a good (or at least a not-so-bad) idea depends on whether the plus side outweighs the minus side. And so you cannot say that the quality of life in South Korea relative to North Korea is an "entirely separate issue." It just isn't. >> I am a democratic socialist and have a pretty strong moral and theorectical proclivity towards opposing what I consider apologies for authoritarian regimes of the right or left, so I won't (unless giving ample prodding) jump to the conclusion that Brad's position is "crude anti-communism." Personally, the effects of Communisn, I would contend, are deucedly hard to sort out, even if I have little preference for it as an ideology or a system of government. In part, this is because development whether under capitalist or communist auspices has been an ugly, brutal process. Did Communism make the process worse by speeding it up and erecting hulking state apparati in the process? Maybe, probably. Did those same regimes, bring a degree of material enrichment and cultural progress, that were, especially early in the process, an attractive alternative to what the world market offered them. Sometimes, probably yes. Did Marxist revolutionary ideology make those regimes more oppressive than they had to be by foisting on ruling elites an unrealistic sense of what could be accomplished along with a near messianic belief in the legitimacy of their own authority? I suspect that is true as well. But frankly, I don't consider myself, or for that matter, anyone so wise as to have known how it all could have been much different. What we often forget to realize is that the ideology didn't make the history, but the other way around (at least most of the time). That said, I am amazed at the answer above. Surely Brad is correct, as much as there is a correct position, in deciding not to separate the issues of nuclear war and post-colonial development. You can sum up the pluses and minuses as you like. The whole point, if perhaps put a little too ironically in my last post, is that the consequences of the nuclear issue (i.e., survival of human civlization, at a minimum) far outweigh even the most dire reading of the effects of communism in world history. You can calculate the weight of Chevy's and feathers all you want, it is just hard to come up with a convenient unit of measurement for them both. Truman and the architects of the Cold War could only have been justified in putting all of humanity at risk if they expected that the Soviets were about to over- run the entire world. (And even then, better red than dead, I say.) It is not clear that even they believed that, and if they did, they were scandalously wrong.
