From the same essay:
We in England underrate the danger of this kind of thing [AL: totalitarian conquest of the world], because our traditions and our past security have given us a sentimental belief that it all comes right in the end and the one thing you most fear never really happens. Nourished for hundreds of years on a literature in which the Right invariably triumphs in the last chapter, we believe half-instinctively that evil always defeats itself in the long run. Pacifism, for instance, is is founded largely on this belief. Dont resist evil, and it will somehow destroy itself. But why should it? What evidence is there that it does? And what instance is there of a modern industrialised state collapsing unless conquered from the outside by military force?
The USSR and Eastern Europe collapsed without being invaded. Does that invalidate this? Somehow I dont think so, but I’d love to hear what folks think.
Date: 07/19/2002 00:00:00 AM
Kenneth, you put your finger on a basic falsity of early Communism here (one I had specifically in mind when I mentioned Marx getting some things wrong).Marx obviously assumed that industrialization and capitalism would be a simple overlay on agrarian society, and increase the disparity between rich and poor without alleviating the condition of the latter. Thus, the conditions for the inevitable Communist revolution would be laid.What of course happened was the two improved the lot of the poor (whether it increased the disparity between them and the wealthy became irrelevant), and made the working class disappear as a discrete entity. It moved up into the bourgeoisie, and as such lost any incentive to challenge the state. Why seek a radical solution when things are improving anyway?It was in largely agrarian Russia where Communism took root, and despite aggressive attempts to export it via workers’ movements largely stayed there. It did not take root in any industrialized nation unless it was forcibly imposed from outside.Incidentally, in reference to the above post on Hitler’s narrative not being tested, the Communists in Germany refused to make common cause with less radical leftist parties, largely on orders from the Soviets. The Communists wanted to keep themselves “pure,” and would not compromise. There was also a belief that the worse things got, the better their chances for revolution. So Hitler was assisted, at least in an indirect way, by the German Communists.
Date: 07/18/2002 00:00:00 AM
Demosthenes, I don’t accept that Communism was not inherently exspasionist – it certainly wasn’t in Marx’s theoretical laboratory (aside from its historical inevitability), but he got lots of basic assumptions wrong. Communism, as realized by Lenin, Trotsky, and Stalin, was expansionist. The fallout between Stalin and Trotsky (leaving aside the personal aspects of the power struggle) was whether to de-emphasize promoting revolution outside the USSR or to focus on “Communism in one nation,” which many Communist theorists thought was self contradictory. Whether you think your ideology will inevitably displace every other on the planet without conquest, or believe it’s incumbent on you to force it on every nation, it’s still an expansionist philosophy. The only difference is how aggressive you will be in promoting it.But even Stalin expected to be able to export Communism once the USSR was a stable economic entity. And so he tried, either by imposing it through the Red Army, or by subsidizing foreign Communists (one reasom Gus Hall and Angela Davis dropped off the politcal radar was they had to answer all sorts of embarrassing questions from the IRS – such as “why didn’t you ever declare as income the money you got from the Soviets? We found the cancelled checks in Gorby’s desk”.And while the Warsaw Pact nations certainly were a buffer zone for the USSR, they were much more than that. They were economic resources, in fact their national economies were under centralized control of Moscow.And I won’t demonize Gorby – but it absolutely sticks in my craw to see him lionized. He was no democrat, he was a Soviet style efficiency expert. I don’t think he was so stupid that he didn’t see liberalizing Communism wouldn’t destroy it, but he didn’t see any other method to make it competitive with the West. He rolled a pair of loaded dice, knowing they were loaded, and lost. Give him points for guts, but he’s no hero.
Date: 07/18/2002 00:00:00 AM
The governments collapsed in the Warsaw Pact nations, but the states remained largely intact – except for East Germany, which was an accident of history more than a ‘real’ nation. Still, the example does to a certain degree undermine Orwell’s position of needing war. The Cold War was fought defensively on our side, building up enough to deter an enemy invasion, but ended in the equivalent of an offensive victory without the actual offensive. I actually think that Fascism would probably have ultimately collapsed in the same way, as it finally did in Spain and Portugal, had England & France maintained enough military strength to deter World War II.
Date: 07/18/2002 00:00:00 AM
What’s with the demonization of Gorby lately? Goldberg I can understand, as he’s pushing the “Reagan won the cold war and wasn’t an senile, corrupt old bastard, really he wasn’t”, but it isn’t just from those quarters. Anyway, there are many examples of repressive regimes collapsing from within (as Joe pointed out), although it isn’t nearly as cut-and-dried a process as some seem to think it is. Joe is also right in that repressive regimes can (and often do) use foreign conquest in order to prop themselves up, but I disagree with the notion that they’re doomed to self-destruction… the only ideology that really, absolutely, positively required expansion by warfare was Fascism, and most repressive regimes are not in fact fascist. A dictatorship can be perfectly insular, and in fact a relatively good neighbour. Communism is different.. it was based on the idea that people would revolt from within, instead of having it imposed from without. Soviet expansionism had a lot less to do with Communism and a lot more to do with pure Russian interests… they wanted “buffer states” to protect them from another WWII-style invasion. I imagine that Russia, as a superpower, would have wanted those states whether it were communist or not.
Date: 07/19/2002 00:00:00 AM
Orwell, whom I revere, might have noted that when he was writing the modern industrial state was in its infancy (in historical terms). Other than Great Britain, I don’t think there was an “industrial” state (which I take to mean one in which agriculture and/or trade do not drive the economic system) in Europe much before l870. This may have been too brief a time period for so ambitious a generalization.
Date: 07/18/2002 00:00:00 AM
Evil usually does collapse on itself… IF confined to its own sandbox. The core problem, of course, is that it often ISN’T so inclined. Not only is aggression an excellent way of displacing the frustrations it generates within, but the wealth seized from those without undergrids a spoils system that will keep its apparatus functioning smoothly.To refuse to oppose systems like this is therefore to be complicit, in a very direct way, with those systems’ essential aparatus of survival. Orwell once referred to pacifists as “objectively pro-nazi”… but the linik may actually be closer than that.
Date: 07/17/2002 00:00:00 AM
Jonah Goldberg had a terrific remark about Gorbachev: he was the sort of person who thinks he can remove one brick from the bottom of a dam, and nothing’s going to happen until he’s ready for it.Had Gorbachev not tried to “liberalize” Communism the implosion would have happened a lot later, and more slowly, and been more bloody, and would likely have involved some defensive military action by the West.And let’s not forget, one reason Gorby wanted to make Communism more “efficient” was that the decadent West was able to maintain a large, high tech military establishment to counter the USSR, plus provide cars and housing and VCRs and Disney vacations for more than the five percent of us who were Party members (oops, forgot, everyone could have those things, regardless of party affiliation).Had the West adopted a pacifist response to the USSR I expect that Communism would not today be confined to a few isolated areas (it remains to be seen to what degree the Chinese are going to be able to permit private enterprise in a Communist framework, because one or the other is going to have to go eventually – and the current leadership is likely to choose ideology over practicality). The Red Star over DC? I doubt it would have gone that far, but we might have seen an isolated US hemmed in by Soviet client states. The self destruction of the USSR would probably have been deferred for at least a century, and we might not have survived it.But we did confront the Soviets militarily, as well as diplomatically and economically. The war may have been cold, but glaciers are none the less powerful for their slow movement.Just the two cents of a rampaging militarist.