A couple days ago, I went out to dinner with a group of Japanese law professors here in Tokyo. One of the Japanese academics, who today is generally libertarian, told me that he had previously been a Marxist. I asked him what led him to change his mind. To my surprise, he said that it was a result of reading Isaac Deutscher's books on Leon Trotsky. Deutscher was a Western Trotskyite who wrote a famous three-volume biography of Trotsky seeking to prove that Stalin had taken Soviet communism in the wrong direction, but that things would have gone much better if only Trotsky had won the power struggle between them in the late 1920s. The Japanese professor, however, deduced that Deutscher's critique of Stalin was applicable to communism more generally, not just the Stalinist variant. Thus, he quickly moved from Trotskyism towards giving up Marxism entirely.
Upon reflection, maybe I shouldn't have been surprised that Trotskyism played such a role in his transition away from Marxism. Trotskyism was also a way-station for many Western intellectuals who became dissatisfied with the Soviet Union in the 1930s and 40s, but wanted to cling to communism. Eventually, many of them gave up communism entirely (Irving Kristol is a particularly famous American example). It would seem that at least some Asian intellectuals followed a similar path. In this very limited sense, Trotskyism had a positive impact on the world.
On balance, however, I still don't understand the fondness for Trotsky shared by many Western leftists (and even a few formerly leftist conservatives I have met). The truth about Trotsky is that he was a brutal mass murderer. Trotsky was responsible for the deaths of hundreds of thousands of innocent people during the era of War Communism (1918-22 [corection: 1918-21]). Together with Lenin, he (not Stalin) established the Gulag system, the secret police, and other major institutions of Soviet repression. Trotsky also played a leading role in engineering the first, abortive collectivization of Soviet agriculture - which led to a deliberately engineered famine that killed several million people in 1920-21. Richard Pipes' book Russia Under the Bolshevik Regime has a good discussion of Trotsky's role in these and other early Soviet atrocities.
As bad as Stalin was, it's possible that Russia and world would have been even worse off had Trotsky defeated him in the late 1920s. After all, Trotsky broke with Stalin in the 1920s in large part because he thought Stalin wasn't going far enough in repressing "bourgeois elements," collectivizing agriculture (which eventually led to an even bigger deliberately engineered famine in the early 1930s), and promoting communist revolution abroad. In exile in the 1930s, Trotsky argued that the Soviet Union should not ally with the western democracies against the Nazis because both were "capitalist" powers, and neither was preferable to the other. Had Trotsky won, life would have been better than under Stalin for members of the Communist Party; Trotsky was less interested in purging the party comrades. But it might have been even worse for everyone else.
Western admirers of Trotsky often praise him for his criticism of Stalin's purges of the 1930s. However, as Leszek Kolakowski points out in the chapter on Trotsky in his comprehensive history of Marxism, Trotsky had no objection to political repression as such. He was very much in favor of ruthless persecution of non-communists, including even non-communist socialists. Trotsky merely objected to the repression of his own followers. Praising Trotsky for opposing Stalin's purges is a bit like praising the Ku Klux Klan as champions of free speech because they oppose laws banning racist hate speech. Obviously, The Klan would have no objection to censorship if they could be the censors themselves. The same point applies to Trotsky - except that he murdered, repressed, and censored far more people than the KKK ever did.
Related Posts (on one page):
- Leon Trotsky Was a Really Bad Man:
- A Small Positive Effect of Trotskyism:
It may simply have been easier to claim it was a good idea gone wrong, instead of a fundamentally-flawed system.
When someone was never in power, you can assume what would have happened was awesome. With Che, it's an actual mass murderer, no need to read into his philosophy at all.]
That's a strange criticism, given that the real Soviet government was friendly to Nazi Germany up until Barbarossa. Trotskyite even-handedness would have been a more anti-Nazi policy than the one adopted by the SU.
However, Trotskyism's diagnosis of the problem was that Stalinist repression arose because the Bolshevik Revolution was confined to a single country, thus forcing the USSR to become (state-) capitalist and militarist to compete with its Western rivals.
As a result, the cure that Trotskyism prescribed was worldwide Bolshevik Revolution.
And speaking for myself, a spiel that boils down to "True, when we took over one part of the world we turned it into a vast graveyard-cum-slave camp, but if you let us take over the entire world we'll turn it into a libertarian-socialist utopia, honest" is a hard sell.
I have no particular appreciation for Trotsky, but Variations on the Death of Trotsky was kind of amusing when I saw it at a theatre festival.
The reasoning goes: Trotsky opposed Stalin, who was evil, therefore he was good. Che opposed brutal, repressive regimes all over Latin America and Africa, therefore he was a hero.
I trust that similar manifestations of this manichean idiocy on the right are obvious.
And then, it shall be Sarcastro who is not worshiped casue the right only worships actually cool people like Regan!
It is hard however to see how Trotsky could be materially worse given that Stalin made everything that Trotsky wanted (and then some) including helping another world war to happen.
You can't be serious! The West had nothing to compare with the brutal repression in Russia - nothing even close. Economically, the West may have been in depression, but Russia was engineering famines that killed many millions.
The attraction had to do with sticking to an ideological viewpoint and ignoring the real world. Trotsky offered that - one could remain an ivory tower ideological Marxist while pretending that the evils of Russia were caused by Stalin, not Marxism.
We Americans stack up pretty well v. Stalin by that measure. And, given that we both used exactly the same method, no surprise.
I would like to know who, other than Trotsky or Stalin, you guys would have put your money on. It isn't as if there were a lot of attractive would-be despots in Russia in those days.
I would like to put in a word for Deutscher's prose. His 'Life' is beautifully written. Many a night I walked the floor with my colicky newborn daughter reading aloud to her from 'The Prophet Unarmed.'
My conclusion was not that Bolshevism is bad (though I think that's so), but that I am glad I am not a Russian.
It's hard out there for a villain these days.
Hitler killed millions. He gets on the list of villains by that criterion alone. Another commie who makes the list of villains on that criterion alone is Pol Pot.
When considering Pinochet the alternative of Allende must be considered. He was a communist and would have almost certainly disappeared just as many people as Pinochet, probably more. Pinochet should have paid for his crimes and he did not, but just like when we allied with Stalin against Hitler, with Pinochet we were choosing between two evils. In international politics that choice must often be made. The law of the jungle is the rule in international politics and it is time more people appreciated that fact.
Do you think his influence is still quite meaningful in their ideas of the forceful spread of r
evolution, oops i meant democracy ?As for that Hitler character, I could be wrong, but the internets lead me to believe Stalin/Mao got him by a factor of like 100. And, honestly, can you call 1% of Stalin so bad? That's pretty watered down.
I heard something about Kerensky.
Much better in that everyone would be speaking German and Japanese? Good luck winning World War 2 with a czarist agricultural backwater.
I won't defend Stalin for a second. But I'm not sure history would have been so good to the Allies otherwise.
Captain, I'm doing all I can but the sarcastium crystals have broken down and we're on 1% impulse power.
Is there somebody out there doing massive business in Pinochet t-shirts that I'm not aware of? Or is Sarcastro just being more intellectually dishonest than usual today?
It's not obvious to me, unless you think that "the Klan is a bunch of bad people; bad people support bad things; the Klan supports bad things; censorship is a bad thing; the the Klan supports censorship" is a valid argument. I'm not saying the Klan hasn't showed a willingness to support censorship (e.g., they may have supported banning the Communist party, back when that was a live option), but it isn't so obvious that it can be taken as a given, without any actual evidence.
I also agree with Ilya that Trotsky was, in fact, a very unpleasant character who probably would have led Russia/the USSR in a dictatorship roughly as bad as Stalin's. I would add to Ilya's list of Trotsky's flaws his early endorsement of "democratic centralism" -- the highly anti-democratic idea that there is only one true party with the interests of the people at heart, that disagreements must be worked out within the party to form a "party line," and that all members of the party must then follow the party line (with rather severe punishments for dissenters and of course people not in the party). I don't know if it was inevitable that the Russian leaders would adopt this approach (some folks point to Bukharin as a more moderate alternative), but Trotsky was all for it until he finally found himself on the outs with Stalin.
I wonder, though -- does Trotsky have any real intellectual influence today? I know many western liberals and leftists, and none would call themselves Trotskyists or consider themselves influenced in any significant way by Trotsky.
What we do have is some former Trotskyists kicking around -- and some of these folks have traveled the path from extremist, ideologically-rigid leftist who thinks nothing of lying shamelessly about political enemies to extremist, ideologically-rigid rightist who thinks nothing of lying shamelessly about political enemies.
Don't forget to mention the grand total of zero killed by McCarthy.
Putting McCarthy in the same class as Trotsky, Stalin, or even Pinochet reminds me of what Ayn Rand said when the 1964 Democratic party platform said that it condemned extremism in all forms, whether from the Communist party, the Ku Klux Klan, or the John Birch Society. So what are they all guilty of, she asked. Well, the Communist party is part of a conspiracy that has killed tens of millions of people since 1917 (including American soldiers killed in Korea), the Klan was guilty of domestic terrorism that killed a smaller but still significant number of people, and the JBS was guilty of, what exactly? Apparently the worst that could be pinned on the JBS is that Robert Welch once called Eisenhower a conscious agent of the Communist conspiracy. So the Democrats' suggestion that Welch's libel (in most American jurisdictions, not even a misdemeanor but merely a tort) deserved condemnation on a par with condemnation of murder was just a tad laughable.
Except that if Lenin and Stalin had never been born, there wouldn't have been a Bolshevik Revolution, and without a Bolshevik Revolution, there's no reason to assume Hitler would have come to power.
But Sarcastro's point, I believe, is that some on the right actually got the U.S. government to support creepy right-wing dictators, actually causing deaths and related suffering. The fact that Pinochet killed fewer innocents than Stalin isn't the point, since people aren't wearing Stalin t-shirts. And even if you think Che did/would have killed more than Pinochet, wearing a t-shirt is arguably not as bad/significant as organizing a coup against a foreign government that winds up installing a dictator.
Speaking as an historian, that strikes me as a rather bold statement. First, no Bolshevik revolution in Russia absent two leaders? What would have happened? A continuation of the Czarist system? Mensheviks triumphant? Or maybe Bolshevism led by others? And would those others necessarily have been better or significantly different?
Second, are you confident of how tightly the rise of Hitler was tied into Bolshevism in Russia? How would WWI have turned out in any of the various scenarios in the previous paragraph? Would the treaty ending the war have been significantly different? Would Germany have been more prosperous? Less nationalistic? Less militarist? Less anti-Semetic? If so, why?
Just because the left in this country sports an impotent foreign policy and resorts to wearing t-shirts instead of affecting changes they would like to see abroad does not exculpate them from the moral responsibility of supporting opressive regimes.
When Michael Moore is waxing poetic about how awesome life in cuba is, he is not morally superior to someone who makes a calculation and supports one scumbag (Pinochet) over another (Allende).
There was also Stolypin (who unfortunately had been assassinated a few years before the Revolution), not to mention the Cadets.
1. Unless you kill something on the order of 10^7 people, you are no villain, just some kind of sad wannabe.
2. Unless you put the face on a T-shirt, you are not really endorsing someone.
Liberals have been elected into power in the U.S., so judge Obama's foreign policy on its merits as opposed to taking shots at a handful of college kids in t-shirts.
I must have missed all of those Pinochet t-shirts as well, just as I must have missed all of the right-wingers who flocked to Chile to work in the copper mines to support Pinochet.
The discussion isn't really about policy, unless you want to make it that. It is about ideology.
The CIA supports a right-wing dictator by helping him organize a coup, the college students support a leftist mass murderer by spreading propaganda.
Just because the CIA can get practical things done does not render che t-shirt wearing losers any less morally culpable for supporting che.
So a handful of (lefty) college students working in Nicaragua in the early days of the Sandinistas when an idealistic kid could sincerely and realistically believe they would be significantly better than Somosa is actually WORSE than a bunch of (right wing) experienced government officials engineering a coup to install a right-wing dictator?
That's an interesting way to try to dodge the real-world effects of actions. Conservatives in government organize coup and install right-wing dictator who then kills innocents and does other bad things; some lefty college students wear a t-shirt of a guy who did some bad things (and hey, I'll grant you probably would have done more had he lived), and the real world effect is. . . .?
It's also not really about ideology, because the kids that are wearing the Che t-shirts aren't consciously endorsing what you and I would agree were the bad things about Che. At best, they have a "romantic revolutionary" vision of him. Feel free to correct them if you want.
I'm guessing that the Social Revolutionaries would have won out. Being a non-Marxist socialist group, they would have come with much less of the international proletarian revolutionary baggage that the Bolsheviks came with and that the Nazis were able to exploit in their rise to power. The Marxist-Leninists wouldn't have split from the existing socialist parties in Europe to form Communist parties; thus, there would have been no KPD in Germany and no Comintern threatening world revolution. It's hard to imagine that things *wouldn't* have turned out much differently.
Interesting hypothesis, but actually, it's not that hard to imagine that Germany would still have instigated WWII even had Lenin and Trotsky not been around. But we'll never know.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not sure what would have happened. I'm just pretty sure that one can never be very sure about counter-factual history.
You cannot deny that there is a real world effect of propaganda. Although i will grant you that Che's image is so diluted right now that it lacks any meaning what so ever.
In the same vein one could argue that Trotskites are harmless academics. But you must remember that they are harmless only because they are powerless.
First, I was actually thinking about all the leftists (most of whom were not simply naive kids) who continued to flock to Cuba even well after the nature of the Cuban regime became apparent (of course, another example might be all of those who made pilgrimages to the USSR during the 1930's).
Second, as other commenters have noted, there is a difference between a policy maker preferring one SOB (Pinochet) over another SOB (Allende), and the quasi-religious devotion that some on the left have had for a long line of communist despots from Lenin and Stalin through Mao and Kim Il-Sung to Castro.
I don't think that Lenin or Trotski were all that critical as individuals, they just happened to be where they happened to be, as for Stalin, he was a thug and the Bolshevik party was succeptible for takeover by a thug.
Although i will grant you that Che's image is so diluted right now that it lacks any meaning what so ever.
I agree with that.
In the same vein one could argue that Trotskites are harmless academics. But you must remember that they are harmless only because they are powerless.
I'm an academic on the liberal side of things, and I honestly don't know of any Trotskyist academics in the U.S. these days. That doesn't mean there are literally zero, but I think they are very few and far between. I would agree with you that if anybody actually had the willingness and power to try to impose Trotsky's ideas, that would be a very bad thing.
Al:
I am unaware of any noticeable number of kids who are continuing to flock to Cuba. Did some folks (kids and adults) continue to support communist regimes after it was clear that they were horrid dictatorships? Sure. And they can/should justifiably be criticized. (Although one can quibble about exactly when it was clear that those governments were as bad as they were; I'm not sure the average US CP member in the 1930s knew enough; but after WWII they certainly should have).
Second, I'm not convinced that Allende would have been as big a son-of-a-bitch as Pinochet was, or even that if would have been, that it was the place of the U.S. to choose.
Third, sure, I'll grant that historically, on the left, there has been a strain of folks that have over-romanticized communist dictators. And there have been strains on the right that have been horribly racist and, more relevant here, prone to do some unnecessarily nasty things in the name of anti-communism. I'm still thinking installing Pinochet is worse than having wearing a Che t-shirt.
We defeated the Japanese with some helpful but limited Australian and British support. No Russians were involved.
As for Hitler, the United States was by far the leading industrial nation in the world and immune from German attacks on our homeland. It would have been bloodier no doubt but England and the US would have defeated Germany. But without England and the US, Stalinist Russia would have been destroyed.
Not to mention the whole atom bomb thing.
I just finished Orlando Figes' book on the Russian revolution, its prelude and immediate aftermath. I thought it was a good book, but I would appreciate any critical comments regarding its tone or contents.
I also have Richard Pipes' book "Russia Under the Bolshevik Regime." Although Figes can be pretty hard on the Bolsheviks, he also criticizes Pipes several times in his book for being too one-sided. Do you think, after reading Figes' book, that Pipes' book is also worth reading? Or should I have skipped the Figes book and instead read Pipes' book and its prelude, The Russian Revolution?
Or neither?
This brings back to what I said about ideology vs. policy.
We installed Pinochet because of practical considerations. No one thought "Militaristic dictatorships are awesome, lets have more of them." You will also notice that most people who support the removal of allende also condemn pinochet's actions.
On the other hand people who support a symbol of communist opression do so out of ideological considerations whether they realize this or not, and as such they take responsibility for the actions of the ideology. They are in effect saying "I approve of mass murder of kulaks."
well every leftist intellectual is worth at least 12-15 russian peasants. :)
Deutscher, cf. the NonJewish Jew, states that the raison d'etre for Nazism was antiCommunism. Trotsky said that the basest emotions were brought up in fighting the communists but what did he expect after waging a savage reverse inquisition that denied people their lives, property and religion.
Donald Rayfield points out that the last 'spontaneous demonstration in Moscow in eighty years' occurred when Stalin had Trotsky removed from Moscow. The KGB people who performed the operation were roughed up a bit.
Stalin, perhaps reflecting his seminary training, seemed to like to ask people to believe in fantastic things. He had most of the original Bolsheviks killed after admitting to being capitalist agents. He had the sense not to try Trotsky directly. In the Whisperers though there is the story of a guy who had a workman//contractor bugging him for payment. Trotsky had been deported for years at that point. The guy being asked for the money 'informed' on the contractor and said that 'he hid Trotsky in his tool shed.' For this the contractor was given 2 years in a labor camp.
I totally agree. Can someone tell me why having an ideology and conforming your thinking to it are good things?
Are you saying you have no "principles" sirs?
Granted, Pinochet wasn't (although as much as you try to redeem him, he was infinitely worse than Allende--what Allende might have done, just because he was a socialist, doesn't count). But Suharto (minimum 500,000--probably close to a million executions--following the failed coup in 1965) and Idi Amin (who we initially supported in a coup sponsored by the British) certainly were.
Gee, you seem to be forgetting Hitler's Germany. And Hitler managed to kill more Soviet citizens in less than four years (at least 25 million between June 1941 and the first week of May 1945) than the communists did in seventy-five years in power.
McBain:
I must disagree with you when you say:
people who support a symbol of communist opression do so out of ideological considerations whether they realize this or not, and as such they take responsibility for the actions of the ideology. They are in effect saying "I approve of mass murder of kulaks."
No. The handful of students wearing Che symbols would be just as horrified at the murder of the kulaks as you or I. Your typical college kid with a Che shirt generally has no idea of the details of Che's actual life and deeds -- he's a symbol for something else. And given that, these students have no real "responsibility for the actions of the ideology." In contrast, folks who foment coups are responsible for the results of their actions.
Obama's strategy re: healthcare reminds me of Trotsky's idea to build industrial Russia off of surplus value extracted for the kulaks. Obama talked of building socialist healthcare off of savings from Medicare.
I have principles, ideas, whatever you want to call them. But they do not form a seamless worldview. I make judgments based on circumstances.
In the poll asking us whether we believed that 9/11 changed everything, I classified myself as being on the left but then wondered what that meant given my many stances that don't fit there. In fact, I really have no idea how to classify myself, given my mildly libertarian tendencies, my skepticism about the government, my cynicism about corporations, my distrust of people who go on and on about their constitutional rights without knowing much about what is in the Constitution, and my concern about people with agendas.
Are you seriously suggesting that Obama's health care reform proposals are equivalent to Trotskyism? Obama's reforms aren't even close to the single-payer or other national health service systems that the rest of the industrialized democracies in the word use, and those systems are nothing close to Trotskyism.
Unless you think that "progressive taxation for government programs that would likely disproportionately help poorer folks" is Trotskyism. But of course that would be silly.
1. He looked like a grad student;
2. He was in charge of the army during the Civil War. (See!, theorists can be tough, too!);
and
3. Getting assassinated is always a great career move
His total was low, but it wasn't 0.
I think symbols have meanings that you cannot whitewash, but whatever i won't stick an icepick in your skull for disagreeing with me.
While it is true that one can only speculate as to how many Allende might have killed had Pinochet not deposed him, there can be no doubt that in terms numbers killed, political repression, etc., the North Vietnamese dictator was far worse than his South Vietnamese counterpart.
I referenced
Both ideas have to do with taking property from those that might be said to own it or be entitled to it to give to others in the cause of building a greater society.
With regard to 'we don't know what Allende would have done.' Well Pinochet knew what Che' did and Trotsky did; so I wonder if that doesn't change the calculation of 'what should any moral person do if located in my situation.'
McCarthy's drinking himself to death doesn't count.
And same to you!
Anotherpsychdoc:
We'll have to agree to disagree re the Medicare/kulaks comparison, Also, I don't think it's at all clear that Allende would have been like Trotsky -- in fact, I think it's very likely he would have been better than Pinochet. Beyond that, one could argue it's not for you, me, or the U.S. to decide that Pinochet was better.
I don't go in for atrocity-mongering. Trotsky was evil. McCarthy was evil.
Do I have to chose between them? Don't I get a third choice?
Anyone who has used Marx to justify anything and actually succeeded has always killed innocents to some degree, directly or indirectly. A pox on them all. The moral failures of Marxism and communism make it impossible for me to forgive anyone for trying to make it work.
Some people have told me to go to hell or hell is where I am headed. If that is my end, hopefully I will be able to observe the special place where Marx and his acolytes hold their daily meetings.
I'll keep what I really think to myself.
The main difference between Pinochet and Allende is that never would Allende ever cede power as Pinochet did, nor establish a market-based economy and a free democratic process of government. Allende couldn't possibly do that.
Articulate contemporary Trotskyites are apparently not easy to find. You may have to ask Prof.Somin for the contact info of the Japanese professor he met :-). An example of a self-proclaimed T organization can be found for instance here. Their list of goals is standard hard-left (with Trotsky thrown in mostly for flavor and to be able to call all the actual experiments "the so-called socialism"). Their consulting guru seems to be Howard Zinn (surprise, surprise).
For a much funnier explanation of Trotskyism see this original source complete with a link to denounce enemies of the people online.
http://tv.nationalreview.com/uncommonknowledge/
Yes, sir. I have principles, but not "principles." The difference is important.
No. An Authoritarian Regime is prefered to a Totalitarian one. With caveat that the distinction is not easy to do in some circunstances.
There are many steps between a Dictator that wants just to preserve power and squaches every one that contemplates to get him and let everyone get on with their lives if they
don't try to fight ruling power,
and a Dictator or a System(in this case the Communism) that decides that you don't have any land or property and that the States decides for you what you are and what you will be and work.
We just have to check Human History. We Humans have been under Authoritarian Regimes more than any other system.
Renaissance and many civilizational advances were born under Authoritarian Dictatorships - i don't know any relevant innovation under Totalitarian Dictatorships. With a billion of persons and 50 years of rulling they produced nothing relevant except AK-47 and millions of deaths. No Medicine, no Technology, no nothing, almost zero. Medieval World easily build more for Human evolution, than Communism. It can be said that Communism was really the time History stopped.
I think lot of steps in good direction like disease research, economy and technological advances could have been made already if Communism didn't existed.
Millions of persons instead of living inside that kafkian world could have been making great contributions with freedom. Maybe you already could have got Cancer cure.
Comparison of Allende or Pinochet to Suharto or Idi Amin is apples to oranges, due to differences in regional culture and population size. The relevant comparisons would be to Communist regimes in the same region in countries with similar population size.
Indonesia is one of the largest-population countries in Asia, and had one of the largest Maoist parties outside China when Suharto pre-empted the PKI's coup attempt in 1965. Given what Mao had done in China (killed about 10% of the population) and what Pol Pot later did in Cambodia, the PKI could easily have killed 10% of the Indonesian population. With a 1965 population of 104,611,000, that would've been a total of about 10 million deaths; Suharto's death toll is about 1% or less of that.
For Idi Amin's Uganda, the death toll was about 200,000. I'd compare it to Ethiopia, where Mengisto's regime killed about 1.5 million, making Amin's democide less than one-seventh that of the most relevant Communist alternative. (Actually, of course, Amin's death toll belongs in the Communist column, since he was an ally of the Palestinians, who were Soviet puppets, and Palestinian terrorists provided much of the muscle for his brutal regime.)
And even if you think Che did/would have killed more than Pinochet, wearing a t-shirt is arguably not as bad/significant as organizing a coup against a foreign government that winds up installing a dictator.
Those who consider the democratically elected Allende a victim of the US and CIA have examined the historical record in a very superficial manner. Three weeks before the coup, the also democratically elected House of Deputies passed by 81-47 a resolution titled the “Declaration of the Breakdown of Chile’s Democracy.” An excerpt follows.In general and in specific, the resolution could be interpreted as an invitation to a coup. Allende himself called it such. The democratically elected members of the House of Deputies would not have passed such a strongly-worded resolution by a commanding 63- 37% majority if their constituents, the Chilean people, were not also disgusted with the Allende government’s repeated violations of law and democratic procedure.
You keep italicizing "democratically elected" as if I had used that phrase. I did not, and I realize the record is complicated.
You did not, however, answer one of my points which is to wonder exactly why some U.S. leaders thought it was our responsibility to install our favored leader.
Tim Starr:
Again, as a historian, I marvel at the certainty other posters in this thread have in their counter-factual speculations.
I still remember one of my law school professors remarking that the Bolshevik revolution was a good thing for the United States, because prior to the revolution the Russian economy was growing at 150% the rate of the U.S. economy, and that if that revolution had not occurred, Russia would have become the dominant world power today.
In the absence of Communism, Russia in 1941 would have been a far more formidable power than the Soviet Union was - likely one that Hitler would not have even tried to invade.
Since Pinochet was *our* bad guy, nothing you say will convince the left that he was anything less than one of the worst despots of modern history - and until the USSR fell, they thought he was worse than any of the communist ones.
It's a religion, you see...
He is also one of only two I can think of who knowingly arranged to transform their brutal dictatorships into democracies, and, unlike the other one (Franco), Pinochet didn't put off the transformation until he was safely dead.
I don't see how any reasonable and decent person can avoid having a decidedly mixed opinion of Pinochet.
I won't stick an icepick in your skull for disagreeing with me.
And same to you!
Anotherpsychdoc:
We'll have to agree to disagree re the Medicare/kulaks comparison, Also, I don't think it's at all clear that Allende would have been like Trotsky -- in fact, I think it's very likely he would have been better than Pinochet. Beyond that, one could argue it's not for you, me, or the U.S. to decide that Pinochet was better."
"Joseph Slater (mail):
Gringo:
You keep italicizing "democratically elected" as if I had used that phrase. I did not, and I realize the record is complicated.
You did not, however, answer one of my points which is to wonder exactly why some U.S. leaders thought it was our responsibility to install our favored leader.
Tim Starr:
Again, as a historian, I marvel at the certainty other posters in this thread have in their counter-factual speculations.
8.12.2009 9:53pm"
It was certainly in the US national interest at the time to have a non communist government in Chile. Considering that both Castro and the USSR were certainly aiding Allende in his marxist takeover to question of our responsibility in aiding the overthrow of an illegitimate communist regime in the making seems a bit rich.
As the used to say in the fifties, the only good communist is a dead communist.
Here are some Allende quotes from Georgie Ann Geyer’s autobiography, Buying the Night Flight, to show why people living in a democracy might not have felt themselves comfortable with Allende.How many supporters of democracy think a one-party state will be good for their country? Just wondering.
I suggest that you READ THE DECLARATION IN FULL, to get an idea how fed up most Chileans were with Allende. The very strongly worded Declaration, passed by a strong 63% majority of the Chamber of Deputies, would not have been passed if a strong majority of their constituents were not fed up with Allende. The Declaration was an invitation to a coup. Allende thought so. Pinochet acted with the implicit support of the majority of the Chamber of Deputies, as shown by the Declaration. Some have said that the coup occurred not when Pinochet deposed Allende, but when Pinochet dissolved Congress. Patricio Aylwin, who led the movement for the successful NO vote against Pinochet in the 1988 referendum, and who became the first elected President after Pinochet, also played a leading role in the writing of the Declaration.
You need to get out of your gringo-centric world, where all revolves around the United States, where all occurs from the say so of the United States, where the United States is responsible for all. ¿Me entendés?
As an example of the widespread support for the coup, consider that Allende was elected in 1970 with 36% of the vote. The 1988 referendum, which asked if Chilean voters wanted to have Pinochet remain in power or have Presidential elections, resulted in 43% voting to retain Pinochet. More Chileans preferred Pinochet after 15 years of Pinochet hell than voted for Allende to become President in 1970. Even after Allende had been dead for 15 years, Pinochet got that much support. Think on that.
We are all glad that democracy has returned to Chile. While leftist coalitions have governed Chile since 1990, they have not nationalized a la Allende, but have privatized a la Pinochet.
Some quick summaries of the Allende era are found in the January and March 1974 issues of Encounter.
Perhaps I was giving the CIA too much credit. They had some role in the coup no doubt, but given their general incompetence I don't think it could have been all that critical.
What I was arguing was that by supporting Pinochet the US made a choice, just like by supporting Che, or Castro, or Chavez the left makes a choice.
The difference is of course that in the general narrative the right says "Pinochet was a bastard, but he was our bastard" while the left claims that the aspiring totalitarians like Che or Chavez are not that bad.
Oh and trying to hang Idi Amin on the US is just stupid.
There is, to repeat, no evidence that the CIA had any role in Pinochet's coup, though they had previously tried without success to encourage a coup. You can argue that the evidence has been successfully concealed, but you will look just as gullible and/or dishonest as someone who assures you that Saddam Hussein knew about 9/11 in advance and actively helped accomplish it, and then successfully concealed every single trace of his role.
Thanks for your posts. you anticipated a question I was going to ask. I suppose there is no getting the U.S. off the hook for Iran in 1953, though.
Nope - but was it a bad thing? Or is the US on the hook for doing a good thing (in the context of the times)?
The CIA certainly claimed credit for overthrowing Allende in American newspapers at the time.
Prove it.
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