Wrong Lessons From The Cold War

 

            The solar perspective means to look at humanity from the long view and the broad view, as someone from outside, with none of our individually distinct sets of prejudice, would see human history and/or human society.  To endeavor to adopt such a viewpoint is to pursue the solar perspective.  Solar, because that is where we are in the universe, from an outsider's point of view.  Sol, our star, is our signpost in the vast universe.  The solar system is our home base, from which we will evolve into a mature species capable of controlling our own fate and planning our own destiny.  Or not.

 

            The large, long view of the solar perspective is most usefully applied to large issues, large events in human history.  The Cold War and its outcome make prime subjects for such a point of view.

 

            From the solar perspective, the Cold War's specific outcome must be viewed as overwhelmingly positive.  Primitive centralized economies commanded by oppressive totalitarianism masked as modern "new waves", fell to the older forces of freedom born of preceding centuries.  Democracy, which spent over half of the 20th Century unsure whether it really could muster the discipline, first to outfight fascism in world war, and then to outlast communism in cold war, found its mettle and won the day.  Any clear victory for freedom of rights and ideas must be seen as a battle worth the cost.

 

            Victory for democracy in the 20th Century's hot and cold wars is clearly a contest well won.  And yet the fruits of that victory may yet turn sour if we learn the wrong lessons from the struggle.  Surges backward away from social responsibility in pursuit of allegedly easier, simpler times suggests the message of our trials is widely misconstrued.  If we take our win as a reason to rupture the tentative social contract, as excuse to take back what social responsibility we have recognized, we risk having to learn the lessons again, perhaps even more harshly, and certainly more dangerously, in the nuclear-armed 21st Century.

 

            Dangerous interpretations of the fall of communism in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union, and the major changes toward a market economy throughout the Third World and even in the ostensibly still communist People's Republic of China ignore the one great overriding question of the Cold War:  if communism was so bad, and capitalism was so great, why was it even a contest?  Why did peoples in over half the globe hand over their freedom to totalitarians, submitting themselves to brutal ideologies they little understood for promises of eventual utopia with little more likelihood within their own lifetimes than scriptural heaven?

 

            The habit of obedience is one argument.  Certainly, democracy finds little resonance either in Russia's millennium or China's five.  But tradition is a poor answer when the question is why did they submit to brutal change.  Traditional ways of life were uprooted far more severely by Stalin's and Mao's revolutions than by Jefferson's.  If democracy was strange to these countries, Marxism was strange squared.  Even Karl Marx himself expected little progress for the minuscule Russian delegation at the first International.

 

            The answer, is that capitalism in its purest form is every bit as harsh and brutal and terrible as its totalitarian opponents claimed.  The only thing conceivably worse would be a system in which the monopolists did indeed evolve into one huge monopoly, with no democratic government to ameliorate, which is what Stalin and Mao effectively gave their respective countries.  Far from creating workers paradises, the totalitarians demonstrated just how bad an essentially corporate state without democratic reins could be.

 

            Marx expected capitalism to get worse and worse, with fewer and fewer owners owning more and more of the total wealth, forced by the dictates of pure competition to drive the impoverished oppressed masses harder and harder until the workers had no choice but to overthrow the tyranny and establish the new socialist or communist order.  The factor he overlooked, or ignored, or minimized, was the real beckon of light that has now finally filtered through to Russia and may yet reach China: democracy.

 

            Democracy saved capitalism, not the other way around.  By many names:  welfare capitalism, the welfare state, social democracy, liberalism, the role of elected government in the 20th Century has made modern capitalism infinitely more pleasant, more tolerable, more livable for the vast majority of citizens than its crude forebear so often held up as the goal back out of decadence.

 

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