The clash between liberal societies and communism was inevitable, not owing to Western leaders’ supposed belligerence but because the Soviet Union was an illegitimate regime. Communism had seized power in a putsch and held on to it by repression, famine and terror.
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Cognitive Behaviour Therapy aims to ease disturbing feelings by exposing the sloppy thinking that provokes them and, usually, this means unmasking exaggerations.
I found a good example of this same process in a political discussion.
Peter Hitchens complains that critics of Vladimir Putin are all too ready to compare him to Stalin and argues that in spite of Putin's faults it's ridiculous to make hysterical accusations. Here is what he says:
Mr Putin, as often discussed here, is no paragon. He is indeed a man of many very bad faults, and his state is corrupt and violent. But to mention him in the same breath as Stalin is simply to betray a complete lack of the sense of proportion.
For me, it’s simple. Mr Putin has not yet opened a vast archipelago of homicidal labour camps, nor crammed millions of his citizens into them, nor launched a great terror on his people under which anyone may be seized without pretext, and tortured into confessing non-existent crimes before being shot in the back of the head or despatched to a living death in Norilsk.
Mr Putin has not deliberately caused a gigantic famine in which millions have died.
Mr Putin has not murdered many of his close associates. He has not signed an unscrupulous alliance with Hitler, partitioned Poland, or established an iron secret police despotism over the whole of Central Europe.
Nor has he persecuted legitimate scientists, nor has he embarked on anti-semitic purges of doctors. Nor has he encourage a pharaonic personality cult, requiring the erection of thousands of images of him.
Nor has he encouraged a cult around a boy (Pavlik Morozov) who betrayed his own parents to the secret police, nor has he compelled his own immediate colleagues to endure in silence the cruel imprisonment of their close family members..
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There’s no doubt that the National Socialists came to power democratically and constitutionally, and continued to rule until 1945 without ever actually violating the Weimar constitution. Had Germany used the British ‘first-past-the-post’ electoral system, the national Socialists would almost certainly have commanded an overall majority in the Reichstag.
These facts seem to me to be an argument against placing too much reliance either on democracy or on constitutions, to protect you from despots. In my view, law, tradition, monarchy and heredity, combined with independent professions and a strong and prosperous middle class, are more reliable guarantees.
Would I have supported a mob overthrow of Hitler? I can’t see why not. By 1934, he had clearly closed off, through the Brownshirt terror of 1933 and the later night of the long knives, any possibility that he might be removed by constitutional or lawful methods . Constitutional as it regrettably was the Hitler state had no freedom of speech or the press, no freedom for opposition parties. Under these circumstances, extra-constitutional action becomes, I think, permissible
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From Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper's Speech in Jerusalem via The Globe and Mail
... the ideals of freedom, democracy and the rule of law. These are not mere notions. They are the things that, over time and against all odds, have proven to be the only ground in which human rights, political stability, and economic prosperity, may flourish.
These values are not proprietary; they do not belong to one nation or one people. Nor are they a finite resource; on the contrary, the wider they are spread, the stronger they grow. Likewise, when they are threatened anywhere, they are threatened everywhere.
And what threatens them, or more precisely, what today threatens the societies that embrace such values and the progress they nurture? Those who scorn modernity, who loathe the liberty of others, and who hold the differences of peoples and cultures in contempt.
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From: Pete Mansoor (edited)
The United States had to fight the war in Afghanistan but we took our eye off the real objective, which was the destruction of Al Qaeda.
The mishandling of the fight at Tora Bora in 2001 was incompetence at its finest. The Bush administration then took its eye off the ball again through its ill-considered invasion of Iraq, leaving Afghanistan to fester.
At this point the best the United States can hope for is to support an Afghan government that can keep the country together after 2014 and convince the Taliban that it cannot win the war in any conceivable time frame.
This will require the election of an Afghan president with some real leadership abilities, unlike Hamid Karzai. With good leadership and support from the United States and our NATO allies, anything is possible.
For a view of what winning might look like, look at Colombia. A decade ago the country seemed on the verge of disaster with the FARC on the ascendancy, but now the war there is all but over. Good Colombian presidential leadership and U.S. support were the keys to victory.
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From: Pete Mansoor (edited)
Three decisions in the spring of 2003 created the insurgency in Iraq:
1. De-Ba'athification. Many Iraqis believed it meant the de-Sunnification of Iraqi society
2. Disbanding the Iraqi Army. It was the only local that could have been used to secure Iraq after combat
3. Empowerment of an Iraqi Governing Council composed of highly sectarian politicians, many of them expatriates who did not understand the Iraqi people's concerns
After WW2, Germany was devastated from end to end and its armed forces annihilated. Millions of Germans died in the war and the Germany people were starving. Simply put, the level of distress made the Germans more open to cooperating with the occupying forces.
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Mandela is rightly much admired for having rejected hatred and making an accommodation with his erstwhile persecutors rather than seeking revenge.
This was indeed the behaviour of a statesman and a remarkable individual, and it would be wonderful if others could emulate that.
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From Sebatian Haffner via Chicago Boyz (edited)
During World War One, a generation of young Germans had become accustomed to having the entire content of their lives -- all the raw material for their deeper emotions -- delivered free, so to speak, by the public sphere.
Now that these deliveries suddenly ceased, people were left helpless, impoverished, robbed, and disappointed.
Everyone was cordially invited to concentrate on their personal lives, to arrange their affairs according to their own taste and to find their own paths to happiness.
But they had never learned how to live from within themselves, how to make an ordinary private life great, beautiful and worthwhile, how to enjoy it and make it interesting.
So they regarded the end of political tension and the return of private liberty not as a gift, but as a deprivation. They were bored, their minds strayed to silly thoughts, and they began to sulk.
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An Egyptian Ataturk might ask, “why not introduce a new religion?” One that emphasizes human freedom. One which teaches that nobody is going to save you but yourself. One which suggests that human government will at best be a necessary evil, to be limited and watched with great vigilance. A belief system that inculcates the idea that cumulative improvements to individual lives add up to a better society.
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