There's a very good article by Noam Chomsky which I dig out whenever the Great Man has said something stupid about Camobodia, or got caught in posession of a dodgy fact, to remind me that he is not entirely bad. It reminds us of two important points from Sen and Dreze's Hunger and Public Action, one of which is approaching a platitude and the other of which is an equally well-substantiated claim, but one which is incendiary enough to quite easily get you accused of the equivalent of Holocaust denial for mentioning it. The two facts are:
- Mao's forcible "modernisation" of Chinese agriculture which caused between 25 million and 40 million deaths from famine in the period 1958-61, the so-called Great Leap Forward, could not possibly have taken place in a liberal capitalist democracy.
- The inequality of distribution of incomes, medical resources and food in India, which by Sen and Dreze's estimates resulted in an average "excess mortality" of 4 million deaths per year (compared with China, a country starting from an equivalent position at the beginning of India's "experiment" with democracy in 1947; the estimates were for the period 1947-79), exists as a direct consequence of India's liberal capitalist democracy.
We all know who to blame for the 40 million Chinese who died of famine and disease between 1958 and 1961; Chairman Mao, who is recorded as one of the great monsters of the twentieth century chiefly for this reason. But where should our righteous anger be directed on behalf of the 128 million Indians who died in a similar manner between 1947 and 1979? Whose face do we imagine looking out over this pyramid of corpses?
Perhaps the smiling countenance of Gandhi, the original author of the Indian state? Or perhaps Nehru and his family, who might have done more? Or the face of some British colonial administrator, who left the nascent state holding such a bad hand? Or the face of Adam Smith, who would still tell us that this inequality of resources is the only possible path to development? Or is this nobody's fault? Are we really so sure of the doctrine of acts and ommissions that we think 128 million people can be dead from entirely predictable consequences without it being a very terrible crime indeed?
Or maybe, we should grow up a bit and accept that History is just one Damned Thing after another; it is a horrendous engine that eats unrealised possibilities. We the living are the tiny, lucky tip of an enormous iceberg of disastrous outcomes and missed opportunities, and there is more or less nothing that anyone can do about it. To accuse a man of one murder is to say something concrete; to accuse him of twenty million is just to make a political statement of your own. If we want to condemn Stalin, Hitler or Mao, then we have ample material to do so, because we know what kind of people they were.
importing old comments
ReplyDeletedatetime Thursday 2002-08-29 21:55:11 /datetime
name Mark Rickling /name
email /email
uri /uri
If I understand your post correctly, you're echoing the same sentiment voiced by Bobby McFerrin, yet he accomplised the same feat in only four words. /
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datetime Thursday 2002-08-29 22:18:45 /datetime
name Scott Martens /name
email sm[at]nospam-kiera[[.]]com /email
uri /uri
Considering how difficult it is to attribute deaths to policies (barring genuinely abnormal cases like the Holocaust) I've always thought the kinds of factors used in criminal trials ought to be taken into account. Was mass death the intended outcome of the policy, or merely a byproduct? Were any measures taken to alleviate the situation once it became plain? Was there any plausible logic to justify the policies in question?
In the case of Hitler, there is little alternative to the conclusion that his mass murders - at least those in the camps, not those that were the consequence of the war itself - were the premeditated intentional result of policy.
For the other traditional names on the 20th century's mass murder list, the verdict is less clear. To what degree were the mass deaths under Stalin - not the gulag deaths - the intended result of policy? If so, is there a plausible reasoning to justify them? The questions apply to Mao. Were the millions of dead the result of poorly designed policies intended for other ends, or the result of circumstances that got out of hand? I have heard a few people claim that the deaths of millions of Ukrainians were the intended result of Stalin's policies, but I have also heard a fair number of voices to the contrary. I don't know. I don't know what documentary evidence exists. In Mao's case, I've never heard anyone attribute the millions of dead to an intentional state policy to kill them, although a certain disregard for people's lives certainly plays a part.
In both cases, I'm not sure there's evidence for anything beyond second degree mass murder. Both men had plenty of blood on their hands from people that they had intensionally killed - I hardly wish to defend them from their crimes - but there are at least some mitigating circumstances in the cases of the millions who died under their reigns..
The Khmer Rouge ultimately also fall into the same category as Stalin and Mao. The numbers of dead attributed to them generally come from statistical projections of Cambodian population growth and claiming that any difference between that number and the real population constitutes mass murder. That's pushing it. The Khmer Rouge did kill, oppress and enslave, but the number who died directly at the hads of the state can hardly number in more than the 10's of thousands. Starvation and disease killed a lot of people in Cambodia, and that hardly constitutes an endorsement of the Khmer Rouge, but the numbers of dead laid at their feet is out of proportion with all reason. Chomsky is right to compare Cambodia to the Suharto's Indonesia, which bragged of killing - by explicit intent - hundreds of thousands of leftists and dissident communities.
This does not constitute a justification for bad policies or disregard for lives, it's just that numbers are so easy to fabricate, and disentagling the policies and thinking behind each corpse can be very hard, unless you can trace the bullet back to the gun, and to the soldier who fired it and to the orders he received.
Those are my reasons for claiming Hitler represented something worse than Stalin or Mao, and that Mao represented something worse than India's less than wonderful rulers. To plot the deaths of millions requires a level of evil beyond not caring who dies for something you believe is necessary. The former requires a true sickness, the latter happens every day in every democratically elected government in the world. Beyond even governments, it takes a greater order of viciousness to plot to kill thousands in terrorist acts than to not care if thousands more die as you hunt down the terrorists. The first requires premeditated intent, the second only callousness.
This thinking, however, goes against the US and it's allies as often as for it. The Sandinistas never demonstrated the murderous intentof the Contras, and I can not see how America's harbouring of Orlando Bosch can be anything but more evil than Castro's imprisoning a few journalists. The murderous anger of Hamas is far easier for me to pardon than the calculated killings of Ariel Sharon. Where Soviet client states of the Krushchev and Brezhnev eras killed some of their opponents, they also built schools and hospitals and generally kept the people fed and housed, even when that took huge flows of money from Moscow. America's favourite clients - say, Pinochet, Galtieri, Marcos - killed as many or more and built nothing.
I've rambled on enough. To conclude on a wholly different topic, this is exactly why we need the International Criminal Court. Rules, precedents, evidence, and clear reasoning should determine the relative guilt or innocence of states and state actors in the deaths nations cause, not Noam Chomsky or Amartya Sen or right-wing journalists with political agendas. /
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datetime Sunday 2002-09-01 22:30:52 /datetime
name zizka /name
email emersonj at easystreet dot com /email
uri vanitysite.net /uri
When NAFTA was going into effect some time ago I read an optimistic interview with a banker/economist. Most of his optimistic conclusions have turned out wrong from a Mexican point of view, I think, but what I remember is a passing comment.
What he said was, "I don't seen any place for the Indians in the Mexico of the future". I believe that about 20% of Mexicans are Indians by the Mexican standard (much stricter than the American standard. And correct me if my number is wrong).
What did that statement mean?
First of all, that all political and economic institutions which were specifically Indian would be destroyed. Second, probably that the Indian villages would be almost entirely depopulated as the inhabitants died or migrated to shantytowns. And third, that there would certainly be a large amount of excess mortality.
So anyway, a plan was put into effect, to be enforced by police or military violence as necessary, which would end up having lethal results. But no one ever declared that the lethal results were the purpose of the plan. No one even sat down and asked whether the results would be lethal.
I'm with Sen and Chomsky. ONE (not the sole) test of a political actor should be the actual results of his actions, judged without regard to whether the (lethal) results were intended, knowable but incidental, or simply the result of a failed bad policy. For one thing, this sort of judgement allows you to estimate the magnitude of the events you're considering.
Don't understand your animus against Chomsky and especially Sen, who do not deserve to be paaired with right-wing journalists with agendas.
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datetime Monday 2002-09-02 12:07:18 /datetime
name dsquared /name
email /email
uri /uri
I don't think I have an animus against Chomsky, and I certainly don't against Sen; I think he's a decent candidate for one of the greatest men of the 20th century. But I have a more bleakly determinist view of history than either of them; I don't think that anyone can be held responsible for anything on a macro scale, because something just as bad would almost certainly have happened. /
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datetime Monday 2002-09-02 23:11:41 /datetime
name Scott Martens /name
email sm[at]nospam-kiera[[[.]]]com /email
uri /uri
My animus towards Chomsky has to do with his linguistics (although the Old Man doesn't make me half as nuts as Pinker), and sometimes his politics, which stirke me as frequently silly. I don't have anyl problem with Sen. I haven't actually read them much.
Actually, I did not actually intend to group Sen and Chomskly with the American right. My animus towards Chomsky has nothing to do with this. In linguistics temrs, I failed to consider the pragmatic interpretation my audience my give my remarks when I wrote them. I stand by the literal meaning of my remarks - I find it irritating when editorial writers tell me who's guilty and who's innocent before the trial even starts, and the only reason I tolerate it in discussions of international affarrs is that no credible forum for laying blame usually exists. /
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datetime Monday 2002-09-02 23:14:05 /datetime
name Scott Martens /name
email sm[at]nospam-kiera[[[[.]]]]com /email
uri /uri
"I haven't actually read them much."
I haven't read Sen much. I have read a good deal of Chomsky, both on politics and linguistics. (He's a lot more readible on politics. Stay away from his books on language.) When I type here, it's in about 4 point font as I type, so it's hard to correct. /
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datetime Saturday 2002-09-07 01:16:30 /datetime
name Jason McCullough /name
email jason[at]hronk[[.]]com /email
uri http://zebco.blogspot.com/ /uri
'First of all, that all political and economic institutions which were specifically Indian would be destroyed. Second, probably that the Indian villages would be almost entirely depopulated as the inhabitants died or migrated to shantytowns. And third, that there would certainly be a large amount of excess mortality.'
That's a pretty damn big thing to read intoa one liner. /
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