The Volokh Conspiracy

A couple weeks ago, I criticized a CNN article that stated that North Koreans “revere” recently deceased communist dictator Kim Jong Il, without noting that those who fail to show officially mandated reverence for the “Dear Leader” are likely to face severe sanctions from the government.

To its credit, CNN went on to publish a piece by John Sifton of Human Rights Watch’s Asia division that takes a more realistic view of the reasons why North Koreans express support for their brutal government:

Since Kim Jong Il’s death was announced...., many people have marveled at the mourning scenes featured on North Korean state television, made viral on the Internet: North Koreans prostrate, weeping, hitting the ground. Many have asked whether the anguish is genuine. How could citizens mourn the passing of a totalitarian, such a gross abuser of human rights?

The answer may be found in the human rights abuses themselves.

It is a lamentable characteristic of totalitarian regimes that they often demand acts of deceit from those they oppress. Often it is a matter of simple survival. Those who hate the regime are obliged to demonstrate patriotism. To fail is to risk persecution. The only alternative is to flee, a choice made by tens of thousands of North Koreans in the past two decades.

North Korea is unambiguously a totalitarian state. An estimated 200,000 North Koreans are held under brutal conditions in remote forced labor camps called kwan-li-so. Citizens are deprived of the freedom to speak, to dissent, to assemble, to seek remedies for grievances. Perhaps worst of all, there is no freedom from fear — knowing that one can be imprisoned and tortured for minor trifles, sent to a kwan-li-so for being related to someone who displeased the state, or face a kangaroo court trial and possible public execution for a long list of political or economic “crimes.”

The great Czech dissident Vaclav Havel, who died on the same day as Kim Jong Il, wrote about the phenomenon of coerced expressions of public support for totalitarian regimes in his classic book The Power of the Powerless. Enforced conformity is even more draconian in North Korea than it was in the USSR and Eastern Europe.

As I noted in my previous post on this issue, the fact that many North Koreans expressed support for Kim Jong Il out of fear does not prove that he didn’t have any genuine supporters. Some people really do love Big Brother, especially after decades of indoctrination. However, expressions of popular support for totalitarian rulers should not be taken at face value.

In addition to being the last day of the year, today is also the twentieth anniversary of the official end of the Soviet Union, when the last Soviet government institutions shut down. Today’s quasi-authoritarian Russia is far from admirable. But, despite Mikhail Gorbachev’s lame and self-serving claims to the contrary, it is still a vast improvement over the USSR. In addition to the benefits for Russia and other parts of the former Soviet Union, the fall of the USSR also created important benefits for the rest of the world. I covered the many advantages of the end of the USSR in more detail in this post.

With the demise of the USSR, we were spared a regime that slaughtered millions both within and outside its borders, inflicted numerous other human rights violations, and created a threat of nuclear annihilation that hung over the entire world. Compared to that, the very real dangers of the post-Cold War world seem minor by comparison. I recognize, of course, that the USSR in the last years of Gorbachev’s reign was much less dangerous and oppressive than it had been previously. But had the regime survived, it is far from clear that Gorby’s reforms would not have been reversed. Previous episodes of Soviet liberalization in the 1920s and 1956-64 had been followed by waves of repression at home and expansionism abroad. Moreover, Gorbachev himself was not as much of a liberal democrat as he is often portrayed in the West. He used force to try to suppress the independence movement in the Baltics, and otherwise sought to preserve the Soviet regime, not end it. He was certainly much less ruthless and repressive than his predecessors. But that is judging him by a very low standard of comparison. Nonetheless, it is fortunate that Gorbachev’s efforts at limited liberalization spun out of his control and led to a beneficial outcome that he did not intend.

This otherwise reasonable CNN article about recently deceased North Korean dictator Kim Jong Il claims that he was “revered at home” by his people, despite a negative reputation abroad:

Regarded as one of the world’s most-repressive leaders, Kim Jong Il always cut a slightly bizarre figure. His diminutive stature and characteristically bouffant hair have been parodied by some in the West....

But for the citizens of his Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, Kim was well regarded....

Analysts say it is easy for outsiders to demonize Kim Jong Il, a dictator who spent an estimated 25% or more of his country’s gross national product on the military while many in his country went hungry.

But in North Korea, closed off from outside influences, fearful of threats from its neighbors, and subjected to decades of political socialization on top of a long tradition of a strict hierarchical system, Kim Jong Il is viewed positively by most people, said Han Park of the Center for Study of Global Issues.

“The level of reverence for Kim Jong Il in North Korea is quite underestimated by the outside,” Park said. “He is regarded by many as not only a superior leader but a decent person, a man of high morality.

How do CNN and Han Park know that North Koreans “revere” the late “Dear Leader”? It’s true, as the article notes, that many North Koreans routinely say they revere him, and recently publicly lamented his death. But any North Korean who fails to express such support for the regime (or, worse, expresses even the slightest criticism) is likely to end up in a concentration camp or worse. So such expressions of support cannot be taken at face value.

There is actually plenty of evidence suggesting that most North Koreans do not in fact support their regime, or revere the Dear Leader who subjected them to starvation and mass murder. The fact that hundreds of thousands risk their lives trying to escape to China, Russia, or South Korea is a powerful data point, just as in the similar case of Cuba. It’s a safe bet that people who risk their lives to flee a regime probably don’t revere its leaders. No doubt many more would flee if not for the fact that the regime kills or imprisons any would-be refugees who are caught.

The fact that the government maintains a police state even more repressive than the USSR is an indication that the regime’s leaders themselves do not believe they have broad popular support regardless of what they may say in public. If they did, they wouldn’t feel as much of a need to resort to repression to keep themselves in power.

It’s difficult to say how much genuine popular support the North Korean government enjoys. But if I had to bet, I would guess that the majority of the population would be more than happy to rid themselves of the Kims and their cronies at the first opportunity. Indeed, I doubt that North Koreans are much different in this respect from the people of the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. Many Western observers took the latter’s statements of support for communism at face value too, and were therefore surprised when communism collapsed in a wave of popular unrest after the shackles of repression were loosened in 1989-91.

This is not to deny that there are North Koreans who genuinely revere the Kim dynasty. Every regime has at least some beneficiaries, and decades of indoctrination have surely had an impact. Some people really do love Big Brother. But a great many others are only pretending to do so for the sake of self-preservation.

Unfortunately, it is all too common for Western observers to take professions of loyalty to repressive regimes at face value. In previous posts, I discussed cases involving Cuba and Iran. The latter was a 2007 study that came just two years before a large-scale popular protest movement against the regime revealed that the regime was far less popular than surface appearances suggested.

UPDATE: In the original version of this post, I forgot to link the CNN article that inspired it. The problem has been fixed.

UPDATE #2: This more recent CNN video describes some of the North Korean government’s mechanisms of repression and social control. Perhaps the author of the first article should watch the video and consider its implications for his own piece.

For readers who may be interested, many of Vaclav Havel’s writings and speeches are available for free in English translation at his official website. Havel, who passed away on Sunday, was a great writer and the leader of the anti-communist dissident movement in Czechoslovakia. In addition to such classics as The Power of the Powerless, there are lesser known works such as “Stories and Totalitarianism” (1987), which includes the following interesting discussion of economic liberty:

The history of the system I live in has demonstrated persuasively that without a plurality of economic initiatives, and of people who participate in them, without competition, without a marketplace and its institutional guarantees, an economy will stagnate and decline....

When he can no longer participate with relative autonomy in economic life, man loses some of his social and human individuality, and part of his hope of creating his own human story.

I mention this now because although the standardizing and therefore nihilizing impact of political and intellectual centralization is clear, the analogous impact of economic centralization-as one of the indirect methods of manipulating life in general-is far from being so obvious. And that is what makes it more dangerous.

Where there is no natural plurality of economic initiatives, the interplay of competing producers and their entrepreneurial ideas disappears, along with the interplay of supply and demand, the labor and commodity markets, and voluntary employer-employee relations. Gone too are the stimuli to creativity and its attendant risks, the drama of economic success and failure. Man as a producer ceases to be a participant or a creator in the economic story, and becomes an instrument. Everyone is an employee of the state, which is the one proprietor of economic truth and power. Everyone is buried in the anonymity of the collective economic “non-story.”

When economic plurality disappears, the motives for competition in the marketplace of consumer goods disappear with it. The central power may talk all it wants about “satisfying differentiated needs” but the pressures of a nonpluralistic economy compel it to do exactly the opposite: to integrate production, standardize goods, and narrow the range of choice. In this artificial economic world, diversity is merely a complication.

Not only do consumers have to depend (as all who live in modern industrial societies do) almost exclusively on commodities they have not produced themselves; they do not have a choice of different commodities, and cannot express their individuality even in this limited way. All they have is what has been allocated by the monopoly producer: the same things that have been allocated to everyone.

Havel was no libertarian, and he favored a much larger economic role for the state than I would. But because of his experiences under communism, he understood the importance of economic liberty much better than most Westerners.

Another of my favorite Havel works is his 1990 speech delivered soon after becoming first post-communist president of Czechoslovakia:

For forty years you heard from my predecessors on this day different variations on the same theme: how our country was flourishing, how many million tons of steel we produced, how happy we all were, how we trusted our government, and what bright perspectives were unfolding in front of us.

I assume you did not propose me for this office so that I, too, would lie to you.

Our country is not flourishing. The enormous creative and spiritual potential of our nations is not being used sensibly. Entire branches of industry are producing goods that are of no interest to anyone, while we are lacking the things we need. A state which calls itself a workers’ state humiliates and exploits workers. Our obsolete economy is wasting the little energy we have available. ...

We had all become used to the totalitarian system and accepted it as an unchangeable fact and thus helped to perpetuate it. In other words, we are all – though naturally to differing extents – responsible for the operation of the totalitarian machinery. None of us is just its victim. We are all also its co-creators....

If we realize this, then all the horrors that the new Czechoslovak democracy inherited will cease to appear so terrible. If we realize this, hope will return to our hearts.

In the effort to rectify matters of common concern, we have something to lean on. The recent period – and in particular the last six weeks of our peaceful revolution – has shown the enormous human, moral and spiritual potential, and the civic culture that slumbered in our society under the enforced mask of apathy. Whenever someone categorically claimed that we were this or that, I always objected that society is a very mysterious creature and that it is unwise to trust only the face it presents to you. I am happy that I was not mistaken. Everywhere in the world people wonder where those meek, humiliated, skeptical and seemingly cynical citizens of Czechoslovakia found the marvelous strength to shake the totalitarian yoke from their shoulders in several weeks, and in a decent and peaceful way.....

We had to pay, however, for our present freedom. Many citizens perished in jails in the 1950s, many were executed, thousands of human lives were destroyed, hundreds of thousands of talented people were forced to leave the country. Those who defended the honor of our nations during the Second World War, those who rebelled against totalitarian rule and those who simply managed to remain themselves and think freely, were all persecuted. We should not forget any of those who paid for our present freedom in one way or another....

We must also bear in mind that other nations have paid even more dearly for their present freedom, and that indirectly they have also paid for ours. The rivers of blood that have flowed in Hungary, Poland, Germany and recently in such a horrific manner in Romania, as well as the sea of blood shed by the nations of the Soviet Union, must not be forgotten. First of all because all human suffering concerns every other human being. But more than this, they must also not be forgotten because it is these great sacrifices that form the tragic background of today’s freedom or the gradual emancipation of the nations of the Soviet Bloc, and thus the background of our own newfound freedom.

UPDATE: Unfortunately, many of the links to individual items on the Havel website don’t seem to be working properly. However, you can find these works yourself simply by going to the site yourself and looking for them.

In an interesting historical coincidence, brutal North Korean communist dictator Kim Jong Il has died on the same day as heroic anticommunist dissident Vaclav Havel.

Kim presided over the world’s most repressive regime, the closest ever to a real-life version of Orwell’s 1984. Even Soviet communism was relatively mild by comparison. He was responsible for hundreds of thousands of deaths, many of them as a result of the politically-created famine of the 1990s, which he facilitated in order to reinforce the regime’s power. He was also known for various strange obsessions, such as his plan to solve North Korea’s government-created food shortages by breeding giant rabbits. This literally hare-brained scheme was cut short when the “Dear Leader” ate the first few giant rabbits imported from Germany at his birthday party.

The interesting question for the immediate future is whether the North Korean government will survive Kim’s death relatively unchanged. Kim tried to install his son as his successor, just as his father Kim Il Sung did with him. Hopefully, things will not go as the Dear Leader planned.

Today is a very sad day. Vaclav Havel has passed away. Havel was a great writer and playwright and became the leader of Czechoslovakia’s anticommunist dissident movement in the 1970s and 80s. He spent several years in communist prisons. After the fall of communism in the Velvet Revolution – to which he made a crucial contribution – Havel became the first president of the newly democratic Czechoslovakia. His book The Power of the Powerless is one of the greatest-ever works on life under communism and the dynamics of political oppression more generally. I discussed it in slightly greater detail in this post on the books that influenced me the most. One of Havel’s less-known achievements was presiding over the peaceful and efficient “Velvet Divorce” between the Czech Republic and Slovakia. This was one of the least painful and most successful secessions in recent world history, with both countries benefiting from in the long run. Even though Havel wasn’t happy about the “divorce,” his leadership helped minimize its potential negative effects.

The New York Times has a detailed obituary here. A variety of tributes are pouring in from all over the world. No one could be more deserving of them than Havel.

UPDATE: In this 2009 post, I discussed Havel’s powerful critique of the UN Human Rights Council.

Bryan Caplan has a interesting post on George Orwell’s portrayal of democracy in his classic work Animal Farm. As Bryan notes, the initially egalitarian and democratic regime established by the animals gets subverted in large part because of political ignorance. Like Bryan, I would be interested to know more about Orwell’s view of real-world democracy. Did he believe that the problem of political ignorance could be overcome by education or some other means? Or perhaps he thought that the problem of ignorance was irremediable, but democracy was still the best form of government. Given that he remained a socialist to the end of his life, Orwell obviously could not adopt my and Bryan’s preferred solution of limiting and decentralizing government in order to mitigate the problem.

It’s also interesting to note that Orwell’s portrayal of democracy at Animal Farm was actually far more positive than the Soviet history he based the novel on. Unlike Animal Farm, the USSR was a brutal totalitarian state from the start and was never democratic. Opposition parties (including even left-wing socialist ones) were suppressed from the beginning, and there were never any free elections or any direct democracy of the kind Orwell depicts.

I’m not sure whether Orwell deviated from Soviet history on this point in order to make a statement about democracy or because he was in thrall to the view (common among anti-Stalinist Western leftists in his day) that the Soviet experiment only went awry under Stalin. His modestly favorable portrayal of Snowball – the pig who serves as an analogue to Trotsky – is compatible with the latter idea, though Snowball is not a completely positive figure in the novel. Some degree of rot is evident even in the “pre-Stalinist” era at Animal Farm, though the animals are described as “happy as they had never conceived it possible to be” during this period. In reality, large-scale totalitarian repression began under Lenin, not Stalin. And the real Trotsky was almost as bad as his rival, in some ways even a little worse.

Co-blogger David Bernstein links to Polish Jewish scholar Stanislaw Krajewski’s article on the relationship between Jews and communism in Eastern Europe. As Krajewski emphasizes, this is an extremely sensitive subject. Right-wing anti-Semites have long claimed that communism was really just a “Jewish conspiracy” intended to subjugate gentiles for the Jews’ benefit.

I agree with most of Krajewski’s analysis. It cannot be denied that Jews were disproportionately represented among early Eastern European communists. Several prominent early communist leaders were Jewish, most notably Leon Trotsky. At the same time, Krajewski is also right to emphasize that the vast majority of early 20th century Jews were not communists, and that most communists were not Jewish. Overrepresentation of a group in a political movement does not prove either that the movement was “dominated” by that group or that it primarily serves that group’s interests. The idea that communist oppression was somehow Jewish in nature is belied by the record of communist regimes in countries like China, North Korea, and Cambodia, where the Jewish presence was and is miniscule.

At the same time, I am not entirely convinced by Krajewski’s claim that Jewish communists “became communists because of general social trends” rather than because of any distinctively Jewish factors. Obviously, such general trends played a role. But the overrepresentation of Jews in the movement was also caused by at least two specifically Jewish factors. First, communism disproportionately appealed to intellectuals generally. They liked its utopian nature and its seeming logical rigor. While the vast majority of Jews are not professional intellectuals, Jews are disproportionately represented in that group. Any movement that appeals to intellectuals will also tend to have a relatively high proportion of Jewish members.

Second, Jews’ status as an oppressed minority in early 20th century Eastern Europe also played a major role. The government of the Russian Empire (which ruled over most of Eastern Europe’s Jews until World War I) was highly anti-Semitic and oppressed Jews in innumerable ways. It also encouraged anti-Jewish violence, such as pogroms. Krajewski briefly mentions employment discrimination against early 20th century Jews; but that was only one small part of the prevailing anti-Semitism.

Because of this persecution, Jews were more likely to be attracted to radical anti-regime movements than most other groups. A movement that seeks to overthrow the government that oppresses you and promises ethnic and racial equality has obvious appeal to persecuted minorities. Obviously, the communists were far from the only opposition movement in early 20th century Russia that was attractive to Jews. Many of the others also had disproportionate Jewish representation. For example, the Constitutional Democratic Party, which sought to transform Russia into a Western-style liberal democracy, had a number of Jewish leaders, including the majority of Jews elected to the Russian parliament. Before 1917, there were many more Jewish Kadets than Jewish Bolsheviks in Russia.

The fact that many Jewish communists joined the movement in part because of anti-Semitism does not excuse them. There were far more constructive ways to oppose anti-Semitism than by joining a brutal totalitarian party. It does, however, help explain their actions, even if it does not justify them.

Although Jews were disproportionately represented among early communists, they were also (as Krajewski points out) disproportionately represented among the victims of communist regimes once the latter seized power. Unfortunately, Krajewski neglected to mention that in the 1970s and 80s, Jews were also disproportionately represented among the anti-communist dissidents in the USSR and Eastern Europe. Several of them played key roles in the eventual overthrow of communist rule (e.g. – Adam Michnik, one of the leaders of the Solidarity movement in Poland). Ironically, Jews were disproportionately represented among anti-communist dissidents for much the same reasons as an earlier generation had been disproportionately represented among communists: the dissident movement appealed to intellectuals, and it opposed highly anti-Semitic regimes.

The Swedish government recently apologized to its Baltic neighbors for its previous whitewashing of Communist atrocities in the region:

Sweden owes its Baltic neighbours a “debt of honour” for turning a blind eye to post-war Soviet occupation, Swedish Prime Minister Fredrik Reinfeldt told his counterparts on Monday. During a ceremony in Stockholm attended by the prime ministers of Estonia, Lithuania and Latvia, Reinfeldt spoke of “a dark moment” in his country’s history.

“Sweden was among the first countries to recognise the Soviet occupation of the Baltic countries” in 1944, he said at a celebration marking the 20th anniversary of the three countries’ independence....

“For decades, Sweden did not acknowledge Baltic suffering,” the conservative prime minister said.

“I hold in my hand a Swedish school book used during the 1980s. It makes no mention at all of the destiny of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania after the Second World War. Not one word,” Reinfeldt said.

“In fact, it is hard to find any reference to the fact that there had ever been any Baltic countries. This was the reality when I went to school,” the 46-year-old leader said.

“Sweden has a debt of honour to the people of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania. We owe it to ourselves — and we owe it to the Baltic peoples — to remember the past, but also to build a common future,” he added.

Soviet repression in the Baltic states went far beyond merely ending their independence. For example, they killed some 3% of Estonia’s population and imprisoned or deported several times that number. Latvia and Lithuania didn’t fare much better. The Swedish government deserves credit for recognizing its errors and striving to correct them. Unfortunately, this is just one small step towards rectifying the broader neglect of communist crimes that still persists in many countries.

Today is the 50th anniversary of the erection of the Berlin Wall. In November 2009, I wrote a post on the 20th anniversary of the Wall’s destruction. What I said then is also appropriate to today’s less happy anniversary:

In several ways, the Wall and its collapse are fitting symbols of communism. They demonstrate several truths about that system that we would be wise not to lose sight of.

First and foremost, Cold War-era Berlin was the most visible demonstration of the superiority of capitalism and democracy over communism and dictatorship. Despite the fact that East Germany had one of the highest standards of living in the Soviet bloc, it had to build a wall to keep its people from fleeing to the capitalist West. By contrast, West Germans and other westerners were free to move to the communist world anytime they wanted. Yet only a tiny handful ever did so. Decisions to “vote with your feet” are often even better indicators of peoples’ true preferences than ballot box voting, since foot voters have better incentives to become well-informed about the alternatives before them. Even more powerful evidence is the reality that many East Germans and others fled from communism even when doing so meant risking their lives.

Second, the Berlin Wall was an important symbol of the way in which communist governments violated the human right to freedom of movement, one of the most important attributes of a free society. If people are forcibly trapped under the rule of the government in whose territory they happen to be born, they are not truly free; rather, they are hostages of their rulers.

Finally, the sudden collapse of the Berlin Wall in 1989 vividly demonstrated the extent to which communist totalitarianism relied on coercion to maintain its rule. Some Western scholars and leftists contended that most Russians and Eastern Europeans actually supported communism or at least preferred it to the available alternatives. The events of 1989 gave the lie to this notion, though a few writers still defend it today.....

Despite all of the above, I am somewhat conflicted about the status of the Berlin Wall as the symbol of communist oppression in the popular imagination. My reservations have to do with the underappreciated fact that the Wall was actually one of communism’s smaller crimes. Between 1961 and 1989, about 100 East Germans were killed trying to escape to the West through Wall. The Wall also trapped several million more Germans in a repressive totalitarian society. These are grave atrocities. But they pale in comparison to the millions slaughtered in gulags, deliberately created famines in the USSR, China, and Ethiopia, and mass executions of kulaks and “class enemies.” The Berlin Wall wasn’t even the worst communist atrocity in East Germany.....

It is important to remember the Berlin Wall and the lessons it teaches. But doing so is only one small part of the task of rectifying the longstanding neglect of communist crimes.

UPDATE: I have corrected a few formatting errors in this post.

Yelena Bonner, the widow of Soviet-era dissident Andrei Sakharov, and a prominent dissident in her own right has passed away:

Yelena Bonner, a rights activist and widow of Nobel Peace Prize winner Andrei Sakharov, has died, her daughter said Sunday. She was 88....

Bonner grew famous through her marriage to Sakharov, the Soviet Union’s leading dissident, but she carved out her own reputation as a tireless human rights campaigner in the face of relentless hostility from Soviet authorities....

Both suffered constant harassment, and Soviet officialdom regularly made caustic, personal attacks against Bonner, accusing her of being a foreign agent who bullied her husband, the father of the Soviet atomic bomb [actually hydrogen bomb - IS], into turning against his country.

But the attacks only seemed to strengthen their resolve, and neither ever stopped calling for greater personal freedom for Soviet citizens despite the huge personal cost.,,,

After Sakharov died in 1989, and the Soviet Union collapsed two years later, Bonner continued to champion human rights, but was less and less visible, and her health began to deteriorate.....

Nonetheless, she edited her husband’s memoirs, which were released in 1997, and still occasionally spoke out against President Boris Yeltsin’s government, denouncing Russia’s bungled war in Chechnya and the shortcomings of the country’s young democracy.

In recent years, Bonner lent the weight of her voice to those opposing the leadership of Vladimir Putin, a former KGB officer who has restored many of the Soviet-era powers of the security services. In March 2010, hers was the first signature on a petition calling for Putin to go.

Today is May Day. For the past several years, I have advocated that this date be transformed into Victims of Communism Day. My 2007, 2008, and 2010 posts on the subject explain the rationale for this idea. Here’s a summary from my very first post on the subject, which remains equally valid today:

May Day began as a holiday for socialists and labor union activists, not just communists. But over time, the date was taken over by the Soviet Union and other communist regimes and used as a propaganda tool to prop up their regimes. I suggest that we instead use it as a day to commemorate those regimes’ millions of victims. The authoritative Black Book of Communism estimates the total at 80 to 100 million dead, greater than that caused by all other twentieth century tyrannies combined. We appropriately have a Holocaust Memorial Day. It is equally appropriate to commemorate the victims of the twentieth century’s other great totalitarian tyranny. And May Day is the most fitting day to do so. I suggest that May Day be turned into Victims of Communism Day....

The main alternative to May 1 is November 7, the anniversary of the communist coup in Russia. However, choosing that date might be interpreted as focusing exclusively on the Soviet Union, while ignoring the equally horrendous communist mass murders in China, Camobodia, and elsewhere. So May 1 is the best choice.

In this post, I explained why the longstanding relative neglect of communist crimes is deplorable — not just from the standpoint of understanding the past, but also that of doing justice in the here and now and ensuring a better future. For a good summary of the extent of communist crimes, see this 2005 May Day post by political scientist Rudolph Rummel, a leading academic expert on mass murder.

Since my last May Day post, new evidence has emerged suggesting that the communist mass murders in China were on an even larger scale than previously thought, and greater than those in the Soviet Union. This strengthens the case for an international rather than Russia-centric date for Victims of Communism Day.

Much debate has focused on the question of whether communist mass murders qualify as genocide. In my view, some of them do qualify as such, but the entire distinction between genocide and mass murder has been vastly overblown. The mass murder of innocent people is equally evil regardless of whether it was committed out of racial, religious, ideological or other motives. I discussed this point in detail in this series of posts.

2011 is also the 50th anniversary of the building of the Berlin Wall, one of communism’s most notorious crimes, though ironically also one of its comparatively smaller ones. For my thoughts on the Wall, see here.

These days, there are innumerable books and articles which will tell you that at the 1984 Republican Convention, “San Francisco Democrats” were denounced, and that the term was understood by everyone as an attack on homosexuals. This is at most only a partial truth.

Suppose that in 2012, after the Republican Convention, a Democrat denounced the Republican Convention as consisting of “Sarah Palin Republicans.” The denunciation would bring to mind a wide variety of issues and themes. Now suppose that in 2040, a historian told you that the denunciation of “Sarah Palin Republicans” was understood by everyone as a criticism of the hunting of wolves. For some animal rights activists, Governor Palin’s greatest sin is allowing aerial wolf hunting. These activists, when they heard the phrase “Sarah Palin Republicans,” might immediately think of wolf hunting. But most people–including the audience of anti-Palin swing voters to whom the 2012 speaker was appealing–would not think first of wolves. Even if wolf hunting might happen to be among the dozens of things they loathed about Sarah Palin.

Similarly, in 1984, the term “San Francisco Democrats” raised numerous issues which were far more important to swing voters than were gay rights; this was especially so for the target audience–the voters who would become known as Reagan Democrats.

Beginning in the late 1960s, there had been an intense struggle within the Democratic party. On the one side were the heirs of Harry Truman and John F. Kennedy. They strongly believed in a powerful and affirmative federal government, and they were hawkish and staunchly anti-communist. This was the traditional party of Big Labor, the big city mayors, and the Democratic machine. Challenging them, as insurgents, were dovish anti-war activists, women’s rights advocates, and others on the cultural left. The overwhelming issue in the divide was the Vietnam War. The challengers fell short in 1968, when Vice President Hubert H. Humphrey defeated the Minnesota poet and Senator Eugene McCarthy.  Humphrey narrowly lost to former Vice Preisdent Richard Nixon in the general election.

1n 1972, George McGovern out-organized everyone else, and ran a brilliant insurgent campaign which captured the nomination. He defeated candidates from the traditional wing of the party, such as Humphrey and the very hawkish Washington Senator Henry “Scoop” Jackson. McGovern’s insurgency became the textbook model of how to beat the party establishment, and was closely studied by Jimmy Carter. But in the general election, McGovern lost to incumbent Richard Nixon 61-38, carrying only Massachusetts and the District of Columbia.

The Democratic party swiftly retreated from what it saw as the unappealing (to swing voters) excesses of McGovernism. McGovern’s party chair, Jean Westwood (the first female to lead the Democratic National Committee) was removed at the first opportunity. In 1976, the party nominated a southern governor, Jimmy Carter of Georgia, who at the time had the impressive skill of convincing liberals that he was a liberal, moderates that he was moderate, and conservatives that he was conservative.

Carter was defeated by Ronald Reagan in 1980, and then in 1984, his Vice President, Walter Mondale, won the Democratic nomination, at a convention held in San Francisco. Mondale had a long and solid track record with the entire Democratic base. Organized labor and the big-city mayors loved him; the civil rights groups knew him as a long-time champion. Women’s groups had by then become a core part of the Democratic establishment, and were strongly behind Mondale. By voting record, he had been the most liberal United States Senator, and so he was a broadly acceptable choice to the San Francisco Democratic Convention, including to the delegates who had supported his main challengers, Gary Hart and Jesse Jackson. The Democratic divisions over Vietnam were over; since the 1960s, the party’s center of gravity on foreign policy had moved substantially to the left, and so had Mondale. 

The Democrats were quite conscious of avoiding the appearance of McGovernism, so when Mondale delivered his acceptance speech, the hall and the delegates were bedecked in red, white, and blue–a change from previous conventions, in which there had not been such attention to patriotic appearance.

 Among the purposes of the Republican Convention was to divide the Democratic base. And so for the keynote address, the Republicans chose Jeanne Kirkpatrick. Formerly a Georgetown professor, she had worked closely with Hubert Humphrey and Scoop Jackson. She described herself as an “an AFL-CIO Democrat.” As an increasingly influential public intellectual in the 1970s, she criticized not only what she saw as President Jimmy Carter’s soft and naive stance on communism, but also the Nixon-Ford-Kissinger “detente” policy of accomodating to the Soviets as a rising power.

Ronald Reagan brought Kirkpatrick into his campaign, as he did with with many Democratic hawks who were dismayed with Carter’s foreign policy and the dovish position of mainstream Democrats. (Reagan almost won the endorsement of Dem. Senator Scoop Jackson, although Jackson ultimately demurred because he could not accept Reagan’s hard line on states’ rights.) In 1981, Kirkpatrick, remaining a Democrat, became Reagan’s Ambassador to the United Nations.

And so for the first time since 1952, the 1984 Republican National Convention chose a keynote speaker who was not a Republican. Kirkpatrick delivered a blistering speech, dealing exclusively with foreign policy. She ran through a litany of recent foreign policy contoversies: Grenada, Lebanon, the Soviet walk-out from arms negotiations, and Central America. On every topic, said Kirkpatrick, the Democrats “always blame America first.” For example: “When Marxist dictators shoot their way into power in Central America, the San Francisco Democrats don’t blame the guerrillas and their Soviet allies. They blame United States policies of one hundred years ago. But then they always blame America first.”

As Kirkpatrick made clear, it was not all Democrats she was criticizing; she reminded the audience that she was still a Democrat. Rather, her point was that the 1984 Mondale Democrats were not Hubert Humphrey Democrats, or Scoop Jackson Democrats. San Francisco Democrats were McGovern Democrats.

The 1984 Republican keynote was a speech entirely about foreign policy, delivered by a speaker who was known to the public exclusively for foreign policy, and whose obvious appeal was to national security Democrats.

Was the “San Francisco Democrats” line a dog whistle to people concerned about culture wars? One could make the argument, and perhaps there’s no way to be sure. But even if it were a dog whistle, it was, by definition, something recognized only by a subset of already-committed Republican activists who were especially keen on the culture war. Jeanne Kirkpatrick was not picked to deliver the keynote in order to rev up hardcore religious conservatives; they were not her people, and the religious conservatives had already been addressed by several other speakers at the convention. Kirkpatrick’s people were AFL-CIO Democrats who were terrified that if the American President did not understand the mortal danger of the Soviet threat, then nothing else mattered. Many of those voters had deserted McGovern in 1972, voted for Carter in 1976 (when Carter ran, in some respects, as more anti-communist than Gerald Ford), and abandoned Carter in 1980. The Kirkpatrick speech aimed to keep those Democratic voters on Reagan’s side in 1984–however much they might disagree with him on economic or cultural issues.

To describe the “San Francisco Democrats” line as mainly about gay rights or culture wars is akin to claiming that the central issue in King Lear is tax policy–as if “I tax not you, you elements, with unkindness,” were a complaint about unkind taxes, and the King’s central concern were just taxation. In 1984, there were some people who worried that homosexuals were the greatest threat to America, but there were many tens of millions more who worried the aggressive totalitarian Soviet slave empire was the greatest threat. It was to these voters, including Democrats and independents, that the Republican keynote appealed, and this was the appeal that helped Ronald Reagan win re-election with 49 states and 59% of the popular vote–a Democratic defeat exceeded only by George McGovern in 1972.

There are some great historical events where it’s difficult to tell whether their net effect was positive or not. Contra Brian Leiter, the fall of the Soviet Union isn’t one of them.

The fall of the USSR led to the establishment of numerous successful liberal democracies, including Poland, the the Czech Republic, the Baltic States, and others. Some of these were established before the USSR fully collapsed. But communist regimes in Eastern Europe would not have fallen were not the USSR itself already close to collapse, as it was in 1989-90.

Even the more authoritarian post-communist successor states are all far freer than their communist predecessors were. For example, all of them have vastly greater freedom of speech, freedom of religion, protection for property rights, and freedom of internal and external mobility (nearly all communist governments forbade emigration for most of its citizens, and most also severely restricted internal movement). I am no fan of the quasi-authoritarian government of ex-KGB colonel Vladimir Putin, but it’s a lot less repressive than the USSR was by any conceivable measure. For example, my relatives living in Russia feel free to openly criticize the government and vote for opposition parties. Even under Gorbachev, public criticism of the government was severely circumscribed and opposition parties were banned until just before the regime fell.

On the economic front, after a difficult transition in the mid-1990s, there have been massive increases in incomes and standards of living. For example, per capita GDP in Eastern Europe (including Russia and Ukraine) rose from 33% of Western European levels in 1992 to 45% in 2008. Those countries that adopted free market policies most rapidly and completely (e.g. – Estonia, Poland, and the Czech Republic) had the highest growth rates and least painful transitions. These figures greatly understate the true amount of economic progress because much of the 1992 GDP consisted of military spending (at least 20% of Soviet GDP at the time) and shoddy communist products many of which did not meet any real consumer demand.

Finally, the fall of the USSR lifted the specter of global nuclear war arising from a confrontation between the two superpowers. Although US-Russian relations are sometimes tense today, there is no realistic chance that the two nations will go to war.

What can Leiter stack against these massive improvements? The following:

[W]hether the collapse of the Soviet Union should be considered a good thing is a separate question. Certainly everyone (except the despots) welcomes the end of totalitarian regimes, though some of the former Soviet republics have remained thoroughly undemocratic, and Russia itself has moved strongly back in that direction. Then, of course, there was the enormous human cost to the collapse (increased mortality, a decline in longevity, and massive economic and thus human dislocation and suffering). Finally, certain other world-historic crimes, such as the U.S. war of aggression against Iraq, are unlikely to have occurred if the Soviet Union had remained intact.

I have covered the points about economic well-being and political freedom above. The evidence of huge improvements in both is overwhelming, even though some of the post-Soviet successor states are far from admirable.

What about life expectancy? It is true that life expectancy in Russia and Eastern Europe fell in the early 1990s. But as this German Max Planck Institute study describes, life expectancy in those countries began falling in the mid-1960s, with a brief acceleration in the early 1990s, that was soon reversed. One can’t blame the fall of the USSR for a trend that long predated it. The same study also shows that life expectancy in Eastern Europe (and to a lesser extent Russia) began to rise again in the late 1990s, possibly because of increased economic growth and improvements in standards of living. Moreover, most of the fall in Russian life expectancy in the 1990s predated privatization of the economy and was probably caused by rising alcoholism (due in large part to falling vodka prices) rather than by economic shocks.

In this context, it’s important to remember that communist-era health statistics and economic data are extremely unreliable and in many cases falsified for propaganda purposes. For example, official East German data absurdly claimed that East Germany had higher per capita income than Italy by 1970 and had nearly equaled Britain. Thus, the above data probably underestimate the extent of post-Soviet progress because they likely overestimate life expectancy and living standards in the Soviet era.

Finally, we have Leiter’s claim that the survival of the USSR might have averted “world-historic crimes” such as the US invasion of Iraq. Without getting into the rights and wrongs of the Iraq War, I think it’s not at all obvious that it counts as a “world-historic crime.” Although the war may not have been worth its cost from a US point of view and was often badly conducted, the replacement of a mass-murdering despot by a relatively democratic government is very likely a net gain for Iraqis themselves. It’s also worth noting that the Cold War era was far from free of bloody proxy wars, many of which had worse outcomes than Iraq. Such conflicts would likely have continued had the USSR survived.

Perhaps more to the point, the USSR had a tendency to commit “world-historic crimes” of its own, such as the mass murder of millions of its own people and – most recently – the 1979 invasion of Afghanistan, which ended up killing over 1 million people. Had the USSR survived the 1980s, it is very likely that such atrocities would have recurred. Previously in Soviet history, periods of liberalization (e.g. the mid-1920s and early 1960s) were followed by periods of heightened repression at home and expansionism abroad (e.g. – the Stalin and Brezhnev eras). Had Gorbachev’s reforms fizzled out or been reversed, the same pattern would likely have recurred as more hardline communist leaders returned to power and tried to suppress liberal tendencies.

We cannot know exactly how history would have unfolded if the USSR had survived to the present day. But the overwhelming weight of evidence suggests that the world is far better off without it.

UPDATE: I recognize that Leiter wasn’t suggesting that the fall of the USSR was necessarily bad, merely that the issue is a close call. But even the latter claim isn’t defensible.

University of Chicago Professor Brian Leiter isn’t so sure, and gives his reasons:

I should add, of course, that whether the collapse of the Soviet Union should be considered a good thing is a separate question. Certainly everyone (except the despots) welcomes the end of totalitarian regimes, though some of the former Soviet republics have remained thoroughly undemocratic, and Russia itself has moved strongly back in that direction. Then, of course, there was the enormous human cost to the collapse (increased mortality, a decline in longevity, and massive economic and thus human dislocation and suffering). Finally, certain other world-historic crimes, such as the U.S. war of aggression against Iraq, are unlikely to have occurred if the Soviet Union had remained intact.