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> haven't gone through the kind of reign of terror that Scott's interlocutors claim they should have I'll comment on this separately because it goes deeper int
by pdonis 3y ago
> haven't gone through the kind of reign of terror that Scott's interlocutors claim they should have
I'll comment on this separately because it goes deeper into the central claim of the arrticle. If you're going to make this claim, you need to ask whether the UK and US have actually avoided such things, or merely made sure they happened in other countries instead.
The US under Woodrow Wilson enabled the Soviet Union to exist by failing to support the Kerensky government, even though the US had troops in the area, and by discouraging the other allied powers from helping on the grounds that everybody was already too exhausted after four years of war. (Not to mention that Communism wasn't of Russian origin; it was exported to Russia by American and British intellectuals, such as Jack Reed. And one of their reasons for doing so was that Communism was supposed to be more "democratic".)
The US, UK, and France created the conditions for the Nazis to take power in Germany by imposing such harsh terms in the Treaty of Versailles (terms which were nothing like what the Armistice had implicitly promised).
The UK under Chamberlain, along with France, enabled Hitler's Germany to conquer Eastern Europe by pursuing a policy of appeasement.
The US under FDR allowed Stalin to take over all of Eastern Europe at the end of WW II (which, btw, made WW II a failure in Europe since the stated objective was to free Eastern Europe from tyranny, and Stalin by any measure was a worse tyrant than Hitler) because FDR wanted to suck up to Stalin and be his friend. (For example, read the historical book Stalin's War.) And even before that, FDR and his administration (and the press, such as the New York Times) systematically lied to the American people about the true nature of Stalin's regime, which was well known to the US government (and to reporters who were there) in the 1930s. If the American people had known what was actually happening in Stalin's Russia, they would never have agreed to having the USSR as an ally in WW II or allowing the USSR to take over Eastern Europe.
The US allowed Mao and his Communists to take over China by withdrawing support for Chiang Kai-Shek. If the US had supported Chiang, the entire country of China would have a government that's basically the government Taiwan has now (since Taiwan is where Chiang and his supporters went when Mao drove them out of China). Imagine how much better the geopolitical situation would be if that were the case.
Sure, if you want to make hairsplitting distinctions, none of these counted as "state-sponsored violence" against the people of the US or UK. But Scott's central claim in the article is that it is repressive monarchy, not "democracy", that causes reigns of terror. Before making such a claim and exonerating "democracies", one should at least examine the possibility that the "democracies" actually enabled the reigns of terror. And when you examine that claim historically, you find that, yep, "democracies" were doing exactly that.
- wharvle 3y agoI think you'd have to make some outlandish claims if you wanted to connect most of the material you're trying to bring in to the direct topic of this piece. Re-read the pieces Scott is responding to if you want to see what I mean—the topic of this piece is fairly narrow, and most of what you're proposing to bring in is non-sequitur without some pretty wild connective tissue added, which connective tissue I doubt you'd want to try to defend. Stuff like "leftward-trending liberal democracies tend to become more and more permissive of egregious domestic political violence in other countries over time" would be the minimum to make any kind of even oblique sort-of connection to the actual topic of the piece, and... surely not, right?
- pdonis 3y ago> I think you'd have to make some outlandish claims if you wanted to connect most of the material you're trying to bring in to the direct topic of this piece. I disagree. See the other comment I just posted upthread about what happens when you compare the actual historical events in the cases Scott cites to the two models he describes, the "Reactionary model" and his "alternate model". The fact that the particular "liberal democracies" Scott references, the US and UK, do their "state-sponsored violence" by proxy instead of directly is not a coincidence: it is what allows those countries to claim that they are "liberal democracies" and don't have "state-sponsored violence" for the benefit of their voters, while blaming those "repressive regimes" for all of the mayhem in the world--when in fact the "liberal democracies" themselves are just as much to blame. > Stuff like "leftward-trending liberal democracies tend to become more and more permissive of egregious domestic political violence in other countries over time" While I think this is actually true (the US has caused far more mischief recently in the name of "spreading democracy" than it did in the 19th century, for example), it is not the argument I was making. The argument I was making is simpler than that, and is summarized above.
- wharvle 3y agoBut the argument you'd prefer to focus on isn't connected to the topic in Scott's piece, because Scott's writing to address specific claims with predictive power (as in: we can "replay the tapes" of history and see if what we'd expect to see, if they're true, is evident—and they're strong and confident claims, so we'd expect it to be pretty clear if it is) in a couple other pieces, to which pieces the argument you want to make also isn't connected.