-----Mensagem original----- De: owner-lbo-talk at lists.panix.com [mailto:owner-lbo-talk at lists.panix.com]Em nome de Brad De Long Enviada em: terça-feira, 23 de maio de 2000 01:03 Para: lbo-talk at lists.panix.com Assunto: Re:Confusion
I agree with you that Afghanistan would be much, much better off had the U.S. never used it to try to inflict a Vietnam-in-reverse on Russia. But is that supposed to be an argument that Kim Il Sung and Kim Jong Il are nice guys?
If you can't even call a totalitarian megalomaniac a totalitarian megalomaniac, you have no business trying to do global politics.
Brad DeLong
-I´ve never said Kim Il Sung and Kim Jong Il were nice guys, despite there were a remarkable improvement in NK living standards from 1950 to 1985, when the NK economy started its collapse. I think North Korea is a living example of the Stalinist bureaucratic degeneration and the absurd idea of "socialism in one country". The results were obviously catasthrofic. I think Marx and Lenin would be shocked if they lived to saw a government based in hereditary sucession calling itself marxist (Eric Hobsbawn also said something like this in his Age of extremes). -On the other hand, US troops are not in NK to defend democracy, they are there to defend their own interests in a strategic area. Pre 1990 South Korea can´t be called democratic by any parameters you want. However, sometimes we can have a collateral "humanitarian benefit" from foreign intervention, like the Vietnam in Cambodja (probably the greatest "humanitarian war" of this century, but neither the USA neither the USSR had a very good records on those matters. Do you disagree?
Alexandre Fenelon