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Posts Tagged ‘Soviet Union’
February 22nd, 2011 at 11:52 pm
Gorbachev Speaks Truth to Power
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As post-communist Russia has drifted further and further towards authoritarianism, one seemingly insurmountable obstacle has thwarted would-be reformers: the lack of an opposition figure who can challenge Vladimir Putin’s moral legitimacy without inviting swift reprisals from his government. That challenge is now coming from a seemingly unlikely figure: the final President of the Soviet Union, Mikhail Gorbachev. As the UK Guardian reports:

Russia under prime minister Vladimir Putin is a sham democracy, Mikhail Gorbachev has said in his harshest criticism yet of the ruling regime.

“We have everything – a parliament, courts, a president, a prime minister and so on. But it’s more of an imitation,” the last president of the Soviet Union said.

Speaking at a press conference ahead of his 80th birthday, Gorbachev criticised Putin for manipulating elections.

In response to the prime minister and former president’s comments that he and his protégé, President Dmitry Medvedev, would decide between them who would run for office in March 2012, Gorbachev said: “It’s not Putin’s business. It must be decided by the nation in elections.”

He called Putin’s statements a sign of “incredible conceit”.

Asked how he thought the regime approached human rights, Gorbachev said: “There’s a problem there. It’s a sign of the state of our democracy.” He was echoing statements made by Navi Pillay, the UN high commissioner for human rights, during a visit to Russia last week.

Gorbachev said United Russia, the ruling party founded with the sole goal of supporting Putin’s leadership, was a throwback.

“United Russia reminds me of the worst copy of the Communist party,” he said. “We have institutions but they don’t work. We have laws but they must be enforced.”

The aging Gorbachev won’t be the figure to lead the political opposition to Putin. But his authority can provide a beacon of hope where there was none before. Bravo, comrade.

February 18th, 2011 at 12:18 am
Noam Chomsky Helpfully Explains the Reagan Legacy
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As commemorations and retrospectives continue to accompany the centennial of Ronald Reagan’s birth, the far left is taking its chance to recycle the anti-Reagan propaganda it’s had to keep on ice for the last quarter century. And when it comes to radical revisionism, no one’s better that MIT linguist Noam Chomsky, the dean of wise old leftists insulated from reality by the tenure system.

In an appearance on the program “Democracy Now”, Chomsky offered this summation of the Reagan Legacy:

 “What happened after Reagan left office was the beginnings of an effort to carry out – this Reagan legacy to try to create from this really quite miserable creature as some kind of deity and amazingly it succeeded,” Chomsky said. “I mean, Kim Il-sung would have been impressed. The events that took place when Reagan died, the Reagan legacy, this Obama business – you don’t get that in free societies. It would be ridiculed. What you get it is in totalitarian states.”

Apart from the fact that this world-renowned linguist has all the syntactical finesse of a five year old, what’s most telling is Chomsky’s bogeyman invocation of totalitarianism. Remind us again, Noam, what was your role in bringing down the Soviet Union? And what is it exactly that Hugo Chavez finds so appealing about your books?

October 25th, 2010 at 9:43 pm
Remembering When Liberals Had Guts
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As we ramp up to the midterm elections with liberals claiming that the threat of Iran is overstated, that all we need to accomplish peace in the Middle East is for Israelis to stop building condos, that terrorism is better defined as “man-caused disasters”, and that Afghanistan can be won with a publicly-defined date for withdrawal, it’s worth remembering a time when Democrats produced some of the fiercest of our cold warriors.

Forty-eight years ago today, we were in the midst of the Cuban Missile Crisis. At the time, Adlai Stevenson — the failed presidential nominee of the Democratic Party in both 1952 and 1956 — was serving as President Kennedy’s Ambassador to the United Nations. In recent years, Stevenson’s name has been most frequently invoked in comparison to President Obama — another liberal Illinois politician with a reputation for haughtiness. But Obama’s arrogance could be forgiven if he could ever produce a moment like the one Stevenson generated in Turtle Bay on October 25, 1962:

Oh, for just one more national Democrat (Joe Lieberman doesn’t count) like this.

August 16th, 2010 at 1:59 pm
The Unstoppable Bomb
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I’ve been writing in this space for months now that Western policymakers who believe Iran can be contained or deterred by conventional methods once it goes nuclear are deluding themselves. As I wrote in a commentary nearly a year ago:

In the 1930s, Winston Churchill – virtually alone – called for swift action to remove Hitler before he could wreak havoc.  What was the source of his clarity? Churchill simply understood that Hitler meant what he said in “Mein Kampf” and was developing the capacity to act on it. Meanwhile, the rest of Europe’s political sophisticates believed that Hitler’s rhetoric was purely for domestic consumption – a tool used to exploit the grievances of the demoralized Weimar Republic.
 
Today, a similar debate rages over Ahmadinejad and the mullahs whose regime he leads.  But the sincerity of their beliefs should be in doubt to no one.  The Iranian President is a man who, during his tenure as the mayor of Tehran, ordered the city’s streets widened in anticipation of the return of the Twelfth Imam, a figure who accompanies the apocalypse in Shiite Islamic theology. The American left would call for the head of any mayor in the United States who wanted to widen Main Street to prepare for the return of the Christ. Yet they apparently think a similar figure in the world’s biggest hotbed of religious fundamentalism can be expected to be a benign wielder of nuclear launch codes.

In the new issue of Commentary, the Wall Street Journal’s Bret Stephens, in a piece entitled “Iran Cannot be Contained”, comes to the same conclusion from a different angle, rebutting those who think that because containment worked on the Soviet Union it can work on the Iranian regime:

… The most important difference between the Soviet Union and Iran may be ideological. A credible case can be made that Communism is no less a faith than Islam and that Iran’s current leadership, like Soviet leaders of yore, knows how to temper true belief with pragmatic considerations. But Communism was also a materialist and (by its own lights) rationalist creed, with a belief in the inevitability of history but not in the afterlife. Marxist-Leninist regimes may be unmatched in their record of murderousness, but they were never great believers in the virtues of martyrdom.

That is not the case with Shiism, which has been decisively shaped by a cult of suffering and martyrdom dating to the murder of Imam Husayn—the Sayyed al-Shuhada, or Prince of Martyrs—in Karbala in the seventh century. The emphasis on martyrdom became all the more pronounced in Iran during its war with Iraq, when Tehran sent waves of child soldiers, some as young as 10, to clear out Iraqi minefields. As Hooman Majd writes in his book The Ayatollah Begs to Differ, the boys were often led by a soldier mounted on a white horse in imitation of Husayn: “the hero who would lead them into their fateful battle before they met their God.” Tens of thousands of children died this way.

The martyrdom mentality factors into Iran’s nuclear calculus as well. In December 2001, former Iranian President Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani—a man often described as a moderate and a pragmatist in the Western press—noted in his Qods (Jerusalem) Day speech that “if one day, the Islamic world is also equipped with weapons like those that Israel possesses now, then the imperialists’ strategy will reach a standstill because the use of even one nuclear bomb inside Israel will destroy everything. However, it will only harm the Islamic world. It is not irrational to contemplate such an eventuality.”

We are, quite simply, running out of time.  We can try to ignore reality, but reality won’t return the favor.

November 5th, 2009 at 5:48 pm
More Oval Office Dithering?

What if suddenly, after eight years of a “cowboy presidency” and the election of a worldly, foreign policy-hesitant President, America’s biggest nemesis voluntarily offered to deescalate tensions? As the Obama Administration waits for such a breakthrough moment with North Korea, Iran, Hamas, Sudan, Venezuela, and others, a new article in Foreign Policy by David E. Hoffman analyzes the actions of a different man in a similar moment.

Hoffman’s primary criticism of President George H. W. Bush during the tumultuous year of 1989 is that he failed to appreciate the scale and speed of change inside the Soviet Union. On more than one occasion, Bush took a cautious, wait-and-see approach when evaluating Soviet Premier Mikhail Gorbachev’s liberalization programs of perestroika and glasnost. It literally took the Berlin Wall falling down before Bush convinced himself that Gorbachev was serious about implementing fundamental changes both inside and outside Russia.

The title of the article, “1989: The Lost Year,” reflects the missed opportunities that, if realized and acted on, could have led to a much smoother Soviet transition from orthodox communism. Would President Obama be able to distinguish real reforms from empty platitudes, or would he make the same mistakes as Bush Senior? For all of the current president’s stubbornness in ramming through his domestic agenda, he’s shown a conspicuous lack of clarity when it comes to foreign affairs. From urging restraint during the Russian invasion of Georgia to dithering on Afghanistan troop levels, Obama shows signs of being caught off guard in the unlikely event his overtures to America’s enemies actually work.

September 17th, 2009 at 1:56 am
Andrew Sullivan Pulls Grenade, Throws Pin
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A reader sent me a link to this confused piece by Andrew Sullivan over at his Daily Dish blog on the Atlantic.

Sullivan — whose career in recent years has consisted of trying to find the most erudite style in which to whine — fixates on the revelation that Margaret Thatcher feared the implications of a reunified Germany and a disbanded Warsaw Pact in the wake of the Cold War’s end.

As Sullivan rightly notes, this was a rare example of the Iron Lady embracing foreign policy “realism”: the notion that states act only in a narrowly-defined sense of self-interest that is true regardless of regime type and ideology. And — though I rarely have cause to say it — Thatcher was wrong about this one. After two decades of peaceful German reunification, we have empirical proof that the catalyst for German expansionism was the nature of the regime and not the fact of German nationhood. While the former Warsaw Pact countries have been decidedly less stable, there is no question that the spread of liberal democracy throughout Eastern Europe and the Caucasus (along with the expansion of NATO) has made the world a freer, safer place in the years since the Berlin Wall came down.

What’s so peculiar about Sullivan’s take is his snide conclusion: “… what’s interesting is to see Thatcher, a neocon idol, acting in such brutally realist fashion. Toryism, even Thatcherism, is not neoconservatism, is it?” Well, in this instance, no, they’re clearly at loggerheads. But Sullivan, who seems to think he can win arguments these days simply by invoking “neoconservatism” as a pejorative, seems blithely unaware of the implications of his argument.

If neoconservatism stands athwart Sullivan’s lionized realism, does that mean he longs for a still-partitioned Germany and an expanded Soviet orbit? And if so, isn’t that a bit of a jog to go on just because you hate neoconservatives?