lbo-talk-digest V1 #1173

jeff sommers jsommers at lynx.neu.edu
Wed Mar 31 12:07:49 PST 1999


My apologies. I should have made more clear that the quote at top was from Brad de Long's post and that my comments below were directed to him. I will post them again...

Jeff Sommers

So are you one of the people who thinks that Greece would have been a

happier place since WWII if its politics had been more like those of

Bulgaria?

Brad, from the looks of your comment above, sounds like you don't accept democracy (in this case, the will of the people), when you don't agree with the results. Greece probably would have gone Red, and by the will of the people, not through any Soviet intervention. Indeed, G. Kolko in the Politics of War makes a convincing case that the Soviets and Stalin had no hand in the Greek situation, other than discouraging it for fear of agitating the West. I sincerely respect your convictions about democracy, and on some level, share them. But why traffic in the canard that all Red movements would have ultimately been Stalin controlled, or authoritarian? The complex history of these underdeveloped areas under siege from day one, produced some unenviable results. Yet, it was the interplay of historical forces, and not any Heritage Foundation like simple faith in the "Power of Ideas" as Lee Eduards or William Simon would have us understand history. I don't mean to get too personal, but it almost appears as if you think the repeat of this history can be willed away through the adoption or rejection of certain ideas, yet without any understanding of the forces that generated them. I think your motives are good, and I would only counsel that this approach, no matter how sincere, is doomed to failure.

-- "Adam Smith started with a view of the forest but his followers lost themselves in the woods."

--John R. Commons, 1934--



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