A response by a faithful reader to a posting about Correa I made raises some questions in my mind.
Lord knows, I'm about as nonviolent a person as one is going to come across. I love to talk ideas, especially with those with whom I disagree. But what are we to realistically do about any ideology that, when implemented, results in the deaths of literally millions of people? Here are some numbers for us to contemplate:
USSR (1917-1987) -- 61,911,000 people murdered
Communist China (1949-1987) -- 35,236,000 people murdered
Cambodia (1975-79) -- 2,035,000 people murdered (out of a population of 6 million -- making it far worse, percentage-wise, than any other Communist country)
Yugoslavia (1944-87) -- 1,072 million people murdered
Nazi Germany (1933-45) -- 20,946,000 million people murdered
The first four are all communist countries.
In the article from which I got these statistics, it is also noted that communism resulted in 55,000,000 people dying from famine caused by the implementation of communist ideas. In total, communist countries murdered over 100,000,000 of its own people. One can find another accounting of the murders of communists here that shows the number of murders by communist countries to be closer to 150 million.
We have instance upon instance of a communist government taking over a country, followed by mass murders and mass starvation. There is not a single instance of a successful communist country (from either an economic, or a justice POV).
So what should we do when faced with a group of communists either having taken over or trying to take over a government, knowing what we know about the results of communists taking over a country? Should we just stand by as millions more are murdered and starved to death? Considering the track record of communists around the world, it is insanity to believe that they will act any differently with each country they take over. Maybe I'm wrong to make such a cold calculation, but doesn't it make sense to kill a few hundred to save the lives of millions? I'm not talking about your university Marxist whose only sin (as dire a sin as it is) is to fill your child's head full of lies about how the world works. I'm not talking about people who merely believe in communism. I'm talking about those who fight to overthrow a government, or who have already seized a government. Do we not have the obligation to remove such people from power -- by any means necessary -- to ensure people not only can live lives of liberty, but are allowed to live at all?
Am I completely wrong about this?
4 comments:
I have about as much use for Marxism as you do. I dated a Czech girl for 4 years and lived in Brno, Czech Republic for 1 1/2 years. The economic, environmental, cultural and spiritual damage inflicted on that part of the world and others by communism is sickening. Three generations of people were absolutely miserable. Countless lives were ruined. And the Czechs had it relatively easy compared to the countries, like Russia and Cambodia, that you mention in your post.
Trying to succeed in the global market place using a centrally planned economy is like trying to win a swimming race with cement blocks attached to one's feet. Likewise, socialist realist art is fraudulent and obscene.
Maybe people who seize control of governments should be taken out of power by force. And if they have to be killed for that to happen, then the costs should probably be weighed very carefully against the benefits on a case by case basis. I'm sure we both agree, however, that generally speaking it's preferable to educate people than to shoot them. The glaring errors and gaping holes in the Marxist account of reality aren't a matter of opinion, after all, but of fact.
I love the fact that the Czech people didn't want communism because it wasn't beautiful -- aside from all the other reasons to hate it. I'm jealous that you not only have been to but lived in the Czech Republic. I very much want to see Prague.
Now, just because you seize power, that doesn't mean it's a bad thing. It is possible to seize power from a corrupt government, then set up a good government (or at least a better one) in its place. I don't agree with Pinochet killing all the nonviolent Marxists in Chile, but he did set up a vastly superior government and economy than what he took over.
What needs to be considered, all in all, is if your government has any basis in reality when it comes to its plans and methods. When you have to start killing people because they don't work in the system, that might be a good indication that your system is deeply flawed. I would love it if we could educate FARC, but I strongly suspect we can't. The next best thing, then, is to kill them all. I also suspect that Chavez is not educable -- I also think he's in it for personal power, so wouldn't be interested in being educated. Now, since Chavez has not -- at least, obviously -- been killing his citizens (though there have been some suspicious raids on Jewish homes) as of yet, does that mean we should wait around until he does, on the off chance that he will be the first communist in history to not commit mass murder? That seems to be a tough question, sort of like the question of if you had a change to go back in time to be able to kill Hitler before he ever killed a single person, should you do it? (There are other issues with that that are of a more philosophical and metaphysical nature that I won't go into here.)
Prague is gorgeous, but unfortunately it's full of drunk, whoring American, British and German rich kids who have no respect for the Czechs, their language, their culture or their women. Brno, Cesky Krumlov and Olmouc are also nice. The whole place has a weird magic to it, even though people can be shockingly uncivilized in their everyday dealings with each other, especially during business transactions (communism's legacy, I think).
Yeah, I meant to say "People who seize power unjustly." Capping Chavez would have the rest of the world in an uproar, though. I wonder about possible isomorphisms between domestic libertarianism and communitarianism and interventionist/noninterventionist foreign policy. Do we owe it to liberty loving people to remove unjust, corrupt and cruel dictators and oligarchies from power, or should we let other countries clean up their own messes and only intervene when such governments threaten us?
For an American, this is probably an old debate. Most Canadians assume (possibly naively and self-righteously) that less intervention is better, but it probably has more to do with our pathologically passive-aggressive national character than our being particularly wise or well informed. We really do live in a liberal cloud-cuckoo land up here.
If I were to espouse a non-ironic foreign policy opinion (vs. the ironic one I espoused regarding Correa), this is what I would suggest (in broad outline):
Complete withdrawal from the UN and the World Bank and all of those other kinds of organizations that do nothing more than perpetuate 3rd world poverty/dictatorship and are run by idealistic idiots who have no nothing of how the world works or, especially, how wealth is created.
I would withdraw all foreign aid and only give money when those countries provided private property rights protections and an independent judiciary that would protect those rights so the people would have freedom and security so they could prosper.
I would have open and free trade with every country. The more open the trade we have had with communist countries, the quicker they collapsed. Cuba is still a communist stronghold, while China is liberalizing economically.
You will note that all my foreign policy reforms are economic in nature. The reason is that when you have free markets, social and political freedom is typically not all that far behind. At least, that's what history teaches us.
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