Re: Rossi-Haggman debate

[Giles Peaker <G.Peaker@derby.ac.uk>]

Dear Gary (et al)

You know from off list mails that I am not interested in an 'each as bad 
as the other' argument, and I want to leave aside the various arguments 
about the cold war, despite having started it (the argument, not the cold 
war). 

However, there was one comment in your post that I had to respond to. The 
reasons why I felt I had to will become clear. There is, I think, a 
difference between arguing for an equivalency, and using the disparity in 
terms of numbers dead to avoid certain problems. You wrote:

>It is possible, of
>course, for a people on the defensive to become hardened and commit
>greater atrocities than a people on the offensive, but McCarthy does not
>equal Vyshinsky and Chile does not equal Czechoslovakia.  It astonishes
>me that there is still a desire to push a moral and political
>equivalency argument in regard to the Cold War.

One question, without prejudice to the rest of the argument. 

How does Chile differ from Czechoslovakia, apart from the tanks on the 
streets? In both cases a government with a popular mandate was undermined 
by another power in favour of a repressive regime. Each 'outside' power 
acted to bring about 'favourable' regimes within its sphere of influence. 
If anything, Chile was 'worse', because the Allende govt. was 
democratically elected and undermined by a power which vaunted its 
support for democracy; which could only be said about Dubceck and the 
Warsaw pact respectively with a considerable stretch of the imagination. 
I don't know the body counts that each entailed, but the aftermath in 
Chile was bloody and brutal, and thousands died. I would also be 
interested to know how Chile counts as part of 'being on the defensive'. 
What was the threat to the US?

I have to declare a personal, as well as political, interest. A dear 
friend was executed by the Pinochet regime. Nonetheless, I am not sure 
that an argument in terms of 'fewer bodies overall = greater morality' is 
one that any of us would want to hold to. Lesser evils are, after all, 
still evils.

How does one measure the morality in these matters? The depth of the gulf 
between political ideology and action? In that case, the Soviet Union 
certainly comes first (last?). But that does mean that the two can be 
measured on the same scale. As we all know, one of the aspects of the 
cold war was that one had to 'be on one side or the other', so that to 
criticize or oppose one side was, ipso facto, to be on the other. It 
seems that such an argument still persists retrospectively. If not, I 
apologise, but if this is the case, I find it worrying.

I hope this is not too unduly bound up with personal concerns.

Yours

Giles