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WHAT_ABOUT_THE_WALL

                                             September 14, 2013

                     http://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2012/07/in-memory-of-alexander-cockburn-as-he-deserves-to-be-remembered.html#comment-6a00e551f080038834016768ac8b98970b

   Will on July 22, 2012 commented:

   " ... The fact that [Alexander Cockburn]
   never really dealt, publicly, with the fall
   of the Berlin Wall and the USSR, and how he
   reconciled them with his longstanding
   commitments, also bothered me."


    There's a familiar pattern in that remark
    (I'm not yet ready to call it a "syndrome"):
    the left must regard the collapse of the          CHOMSKY_IN_CONTEXT
    Soviet Union as a failure of their ideas.



       In Cockburn's case, it is
       apparently defensible to      In '89 Cockburn argued that it was
       regard him as an apologist    absurd to put the number of Stalin's
       for Stalin--                  victim's as high as 20 million: as I
                                     understand it, the lowest plausible
       (Though, I get the            estimate is around 3 million, and
       feeling that a lot            depending on how you want to attribute
       of people want to             a famine or two, numbers like 20
       confuse Cockburn              million seem on the high end, but are
       with his dad, who             hardly absurd.
       actually worked for
       Stalin.)                         On the other hand, maybe it should
                                        be possible to discuss issues like
                                        this without being regarded as an
                                        apologist for the regime in question.

                                                E.g. Chomsky really and truly
                                                has never been on the side of
                                                the Khmer Rouge.

                                                     CHOMSKY_HATE


          When the wall came down in '89, this was
          supposed to be some sort of killer blow
          against the left that should send all into
          a crisis of conscience and re-evaluation
          of their ideas.


          But-- while it admittedly took a long
          time for some to get the word-- the
          romance with the Russian Revolution had
          gone sour long before then.

          The 20th Century saw two major
          nominally left-wing revolutions
          that degenerated into nasty        Just as the Nazi Germany
          dictatorships: that was enough     experience must make
          to make anyone step a little       everyone on the right
          carefully concerning left-wing     think twice about letting
          revolutions.                       government get in bed
                                             with corporations, yes?
          (Though for a time, the Cuban
          Revolution got some people
          interested in the idea again,
          hence the fashionable babble
          about revolution in the 60s).


               A few points:

               (1) It was the Right, not the Left, that
               acted as though the Soviet Union was a
               formidable military power, and they did
               that all the way up to it's collapse.          COCKBURN

               Why didn't anyone demand that the
               Right "reconcile" the end of the
               Soviet Union with their
               "longstanding commitments"?


               (2) if we heard tommorrow about a
               democracy somewhere that was swallowed
               up by a military coup; this would not
               immediately make most of us suddenly
               reject the idea of democracy.

               Similarly, a capitalist country that
               suddenly turned their back on markets
               would not make us all assume that
               markets were bad.



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