[PEN-L:7585] Re: Re: Re: Re: RE: DeLong Compares Mao to Hitler

[Eugene Coyle <eugenecoyle@xxxxxxx>]

If Suharto is a bad person, what does that make the President(s) of the USA
that backed him?
    (List as many others here as you like.)

Gene Coyle

Brad De Long wrote:

> >Brad, while I certainly do not endorse the cited ad hominems (I think Jim
> >lost his cool and with it, his point) - there is a certain quality of your
> >style of analysis that is at least ethically questionable, and very likely
> >moot on methodological grounds.
> >
> >That quality constist in using varying and arbitrary levels of abstraction
> >to balance and equate opposites as to make them suit a particular point you
> >are trying to make.  As my French friends say, 'with sufficient
> >assumptions, you can fit Paris is a bottle.'
> >
> >Your strategy rests on assuming away or abstracting from relevant
> >historical contexts and leaving only general, abstract qualities as th
> >enumber of persons that perished, to balance the accounts of the dead and
> >then pronounce your moral verdict.
>
> Gee. Other people complain that I do not abstract enough--that I argue too
> much from relevant historical contexts  and so,as some put it, wind up
> making the same arguments that justify the Nazi New Order.
>
> Let me try to distinguish between two kinds of "relevant historical
> context." The first--which I reject completely and utterly--is that there
> is a difference between people killed by the Okhrana, shot by Franco's
> police, or starved to death because the Czar was uninterested in famine
> relief and the landlords were interested in exporting wheat through Odessa
> on the one hand; and people killed by the NKVD, or people starved to death
> because the soldiers took all their grain (and no one would dare tell Mao
> that the harvest was low) on the other hand because people who fall in the
> second group are counterrevolutionary scum or enemies of the people. Dead
> is dead. To deny the humanity of some of the dead seems to me to simply be
> anti-human.
>
> The second--which I think everyone has to admit is valid--is that great
> crimes can be... not eliminated or justified or excused but, I think,
> accepted as in some sense a regrettable sacrifice demanded by necessity...
> if they are necessary steps on the road to Utopia.
>
> Whether the enormous death toll of Maoist China or Stalinist Russia (or
> Suhartan Indonesia) could be justified if these projects had wound up
> building Utopia is a very hard question to which I don't have
> answers--although I do recommend reading Trotsky's "Their Morals and Ours,"
> Lukes's "Marxism and Morality," and Le Guin's "The Ones Who Walk Away from
> Omelas" as things form which I have profited.
>
> But in this world we don't have to deal with that question. *None* of these
> projects constructed anything like Utopia.
>
> You can blame the failure to construct Utopia in Russia and China on the
> structure of the Communist Party as a sick and perverse institution, or you
> can blame it on renegades in high places--that Mao was in the end defeated
> by a conspiracy of his aides (Deng Xiaoping, Liu Shaochi, Chou Enlai, Peng
> Dehuai, Lin Piao) and that Stalin's good works were blocked by successive
> conspiracies of *his* peers and aides (Trotsky, Radek, Zinoviev, Kamenev,
> Kirov, Mikoyan, Beria, Khrushchev, and so forth). But if you go down that
> line, you soon conclude that the whole Communist leadership throughout the
> twentieth century was dominated by renegades and counterrevolutionaries--in
> short, you blame it on the structure of the Communist Party as a sick and
> perverse institution (even though your definitions of "sickness" and
> "health" are opposed).
>
> And without Utopia at the end of the road, the (valid) questions of means
> and ends simply do not arise. "You can't make an omelette without breaking
> eggs." But eggs are broken. The habit of breaking them grows. Yet no
> omelette appears...
>
> Brad DeLong
>
> -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --
> "Now 'in the long run' this [way of summarizing the quantity theory of
> money] is probably true.... But this long run is a misleading guide to
> current affairs. **In the long run** we are all dead.  Economists set
> themselves too easy, too useless a task if in tempestuous seasons they can
> only tell us that when the storm is long past the ocean is flat again."
>
> --J.M. Keynes
> -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --
> J. Bradford De Long; Professor of Economics, U.C. Berkeley;
> Co-Editor, Journal of Economic Perspectives.
> Dept. of Economics, U.C. Berkeley, #3880
> Berkeley, CA 94720-3880
> (510) 643-4027; (925) 283-2709 phones
> (510) 642-6615; (925) 283-3897 faxes
> http://econ161.berkeley.edu/
> <delong@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>