Which Side Are You On

[Jack Rabbit]

18. Brief reply

I don't believe we've had that discussion, and I'd like to keep this brief because this still isn't the place to have it. (As I prepare to send this, it seems that I've failed miserably to keep it brief.)

Western Europe after WW2 benefited from the Marshall Plan, which was quite a different thing than the IMF/World Bank "shock therapy" imposed on Russia after the end of the Cold War. Any benefit Russians enjoy today comes from oil production and transport, not the result of the austerity measures that is the trademark of dealing with the IMF. Since Russia has something it can sell, it was able to emerge from Communism into a relatively prosperous period. This is why Putin smells like a rose to a lot of Russians and is also the reason for Hitler's popularity in Germany in the thirties, which came after a period of economic hardship imposed by the Versailles Treaty.

The more prosperous Soviet satellites became even more prosperous after the fall of Communism. Even Cuba, which according to Wall Street and Washington would fall soon after the Soviet Union (remember how the salivated at the prospect of that?), kept afloat because of its ability to produce sugar and tobacco. In addition, Fidel Castro was wise enough to learn from the mistakes of past Communist leaders like Stalin and Mao and not completely collectivize farming in Cuba.

Your model that blames Russian Communists of the past for all of Europe's problems in the present breaks down further breaks down under the example of Yugoslavia, the one Communist state that didn't align with Stalin after WW2. It was better off under Tito than the Soviet satellites were under Soviet domination. It's problems of the present are due to the problems that are unique to Yugoslavia, starting with the fact that it was never one nation but six. Tito was able to hold the country together during his time, a truly remarkable achievement. It began falling apart soon after Tito's death and Milosevic, the Serbian leader, began armed conflict to try to keep Yugoslavia together under Serbian domination. Armed conflicts are even worse for a nation's economic growth than austerity.

The world has a history that goes back before end of World War II, and much of the problems we still face have roots in ancient conflicts and rivalries.

The world is not so easily divided between good guys and bad guys. For one thing, everybody I know is morally ambiguous, just like me. I don't know anybody who seems to have walked out of a B-Western wearing a White or Black cowboy hat. A philosophical discussion based on the morality of a John Wayne movie is doomed to be shallow. Even Hitler liked children and animals. Gandhi, who knew himself from the inside, didn't think he was a saint.

We will never build a Utopian society. Perfection is like a straight line: it's just an abstract concept with no corresponding reality in physical nature. What Christians call the Seven Deadly Sins are characteristics hard wired into us in order to survive. They cause us pain and grief, but if we didn't have them, we would have become extinct long ago. Some say humans are social animals and some say humans are aggressive, individualistic and selfish. I say we are both. Attempts to build a perfect world based on the idea that humans are one or the others but not both result in living nightmares like Hitler's Germany, Stalin's Russia or a Wall Street banker's global economy.

What we call morality is a kind social pragmatism. We didn't need a God to hand a list of commandments set in stone to a prophet on mountain to know we shouldn't murder or steal. I don't know of a society in the world, past or present, that hasn't had sanctions against the willful taking of a human life. Very few of them worshiped the Abrahamic God, or even heard of such a thing, but they all knew that we couldn't live together as a society and tolerate murder as a legitimate method of conflict resolution.

Consequently, no Utopian society can be be imagined that assumes that humans are both social and individual animals. Once we admit that we are both, we admit that each of us is imperfect. That which allows us to survive as an individual long enough to procreate the next generation of humans is also that causes us to murder and steal. A society with rules is as good as it gets, but some asshole is going to try to get around the rules, and if that were not the case, it would never have occurred to us that we need to have rules, even to protect us from those entrusted with the power to enforce the rules from abusing their power, like King who goes to war for no reason other than to conquer or who lives it up on funds raised from taxes that are supposed to build roads and canals or who murders or imprisons his subjects who criticize his errant behavior, like bankers who commit fraud, like politicians who allow themselves to be paid off by the banker to look the other way as the banker defrauds the bank's savers and borrowers.

Such people exist and always will. We just have to deal with them, even when they're not Russians.