populism vs. Marxism (was RE: Frank Sinatra)

Wojtek Sokolowski sokol at jhu.edu
Mon May 18 14:45:04 PDT 1998


At 01:00 PM 5/18/98 -0700, Brad DeLong wrote:
>>Brad replies to Wojtek:
>>>>criterion that matters in evaluating them is the 'whose thug?' -- for
>>>>every national leader's closet hides plenty of skeletons. I do not think
>>>>these figures are any more or less reprehensible than Rosevelets, Trumans,
>>>>Nixons, or Reagans.
>>>
>>>Surely the magnitude of the body count matters?
>>
>>By the body count, how do FDR, Truman, Nixon, Reagan, etc. fare? Anybody
>>ever counted?
>>
>>Yoshie
>
>It depends on what you do with wars: whose "fault" is the death of roughly
>ten million Germans in World War II?
>
>I think the place to draw the line is at setting whole cities on fire.
>Bombing railroads and districts with tank factories in them is not a war
>crime. Trying to set whole cities on fire is.
>
>By that count Truman gets roughly 200,000 skeletons--say, one-fourth of a
>Suharto. Roosevelt gets half a Suharto. By my (rough) count Reagan gets
>perhaps a tenth of a Suharto, and Nixon and Johnson together make it up
>into the Suharto range.

-- snip --

What I miss in your tallying is how you attribute deaths to the leader's account. There are two problems here: who is to blame, and for whose death?

Clearly, if an army unit opens fire on a group of unarmed civilians, the commanding officer who gave orders is to blame. Arguably, some of the blame can be put on those who did the firing, according to the Nuremberg principles.

Things get much fuzzier when we get to large scale orchestrated campaigns, such as the Holocaust. Blaming Hitler alone is preposterous, because drafting and implementation of that policy requited an enormous bureacucratic apparatus and cooperation of politicians, laweyers, engineers, the military, etc. Yet, inasumuch as the Holocaus is the policy of intentional genocide, the criterion "for whose death" is still clear-cut.

But then we get to things like misguided policies and events that were not intended as genocide. That includes slavery, but also potato famine in Ireland, collectivization in the US, or the various "development" policies directly and indirectly forced by the IMF, Washington, etc. Here the criterion 'for whose death'beacomes really fuzzy indeed.

The US propaganda managed to equate the responsibility with national borders and for a good reason. That makes the US and Western European leaders squeeky clean because most of the skeletons from their closets are buried in the Third World couintries. They learned how to externalize not just the cost of economic development, but the social and human cost of capitalist prosperity as well.

This invisibility of the victims, because of their skin color and geo-politcal location, was aptly captured by George Orwell, himself a colonial functionary, in his essay _Marrakech_.

So the bottom line is to use a truly universalistic criteria to judge all national leaders, instead of ones that are tainted by class or national interests.

Regards,

Wojtek



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