Michael Keaney wrote: > Charles Brown wrote: > > This is a futile, if not facile, debate. Was the USSR a socialist country? > Not in my book, but obviously in many others'. So what is socialism? I equate > socialism with democracy. How democracy can be achieved via authoritarian > means is a conundrum we might do well to consider. It would perhaps be useful > to dispense with the separation of means and ends which has allowed demagogues > of "Left" and "Right" masquerading as liberators and > progressive revolutionaries to dispense summary justice to all those > perceived (or portrayed) as obstacles to enlightenment. Figuring out whether > Mao, Stalin or Jeane Kirkpatrick outperform each other in the cynical > instrumentalism stakes won't get us very far. > There are several problems of definition with the above statement. Yet as a personal statement, it is legitimate. The thrust of the debate on this thread was with regard to DeLong's contention that it was not objective search for the proper solution in the specific context of national development, but evil intent that motivated Mao and Stalin to murder millions, as the Western World have generally accepted to be the case with Hitler. So the issue was not even whether one agrees that what Stalin or Mao was struggling to build soicialism and democracy (with a small d, not Western Democracy), but the whether Mao and Stalin were using that struggle to achieving some personal evil aim. At least with Mao, whose effort I am very familiar, cannot be equate to Hitler on that level. As for Kilpatrick, she is merely an ideologue opportunist. Comparing her to Hitler would flatter her by elevating her name recognition. Henry C.K. Liu
