RES: Confusion

[Brad De Long]

>
>-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

Actually, I think both the U.S. and U.S.S.R. have pretty good 
records: World War II makes up for a *lot* of Prague '68s or 
Guatemala '54s.

But I take your point and agree with you about the Vietnamese 
suppression of the Khmer Rouge. I suspect, however, that the 
humanitarian benefits played a major role in the Vietnamese decision 
to intervene...

Brad DeLong