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I was led to understand that history began with the written word, which began in about 3000 BC with the Ancient Egyptians.
But now, barely a year after one of the worst crises in all financial history, we seem to have returned to the Gilded Age of the late 19th century?the last time bankers came close to ruling America. A few Wall Street giants, led by none other than -JPMorgan, are back to making serious money and paying million-dollar bonuses. Meanwhile, every month, hundreds of thousands of ordinary Americans face foreclosure or unemployment because of a crisis caused by ? a few Wall Street giants. And what makes the losers in this crisis really mad is the fact that there's now one law for the small debtors and another for big ones. If you lose your job and fall behind on your $1,500 monthly mortgage payment, no one's going to bail you out. But Citigroup can lose $27.7 billion (as it did last year) and count on the federal government to hand it $45 billion.
I have no problem with generous remuneration for high-performing CEOs. There was a big outcry in Australia a few years ago when Macquarie Bank's CEO Allan Moss was paid USD24.8 million as part of his retirement package. This reaction ignored the fact that from the humble beginnings 14 years before when he had taken the helm of the company, he forged the company to what it is today: Macquarie Bank is a multinational corporation with 12, 700 staff in 28 countries, and last year announced a profit of AUD479 million for the half year to September 2009.However, I do believe that when a CEO underperforms, as reflected in the performance of the company, they should not be entitled to massive payouts. Their salary and any bonuses they receive should be linked to how well their company is performed.
The Soviet Union's brand of communism differed from Mao's “communism with Chinese characteristics.” China comprised mostly peasants and hence Marx's vision of a socialist revolution for a country with a large urban working class was unsuited to a country like China without some appropriations.Beijing encouraged other communist movements, in Asia and beyond, to emulate China's model of peasant revolution, rather than Russia's model of urban revolution.Khrushchev's denouncement of Stalin shocked Mao Zedong, who had supported Stalin ideologically.Mao considered Khrushchev as too conciliatory towards America, particularly when he met with Dwight Eisenhower. USSR was alarmed by both the Cultural Revolution and the Great Leap Forward instigated by Mao.In the Sino-Indian War, the USSR continued to maintain moderate relations with India, which angered the Chinese. Mao criticised Khruschev's backing down in the Cuban Missile Crisis as capitulating to the Americans.The Chinese insisted on historical injustices done to them by the Russians in the Treaty of Aigun (1858) and the Convention of Peking (1860), but the Soviets ignored them. The Sino-Soviet rivalry extended to Africa and the Middle East, where both Communist powers funded and supported competing political parties, armed movements, and states, including during the Ogaden War, the Rhodesian Bush War, the Zimbabwean Gukurahundi, the Angolan Civil War and Palestinian factions
One should recall a quote from another speech that Churchill made to the House of Commons in November 1947:Many forms of Government have been tried and will be tried in this world of sin and woe. No one pretends that democracy is perfect or all-wise. Indeed, it has been said that democracy is the worst form of government except all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.
I think the roots of the Cold War were sown at the Potsdam Conference, and Winston Churchill drew the line between the capitalist, democratic West and the Marxist-Leninist Soviet Union in his “Iron Curtain” speech. The Cold War had already begun by the time of the Berlin Blockade, but it was nonetheless a momentous period in the Cold War because unlike Potsdam or Churchill's “Iron Curtain” speech, it was a direct physical confrontation that entailed casualties, but ultimately showed Stalin that the West would not just fall over if the Soviet Union tried to bully its way into expansionism.
I am a real history and current affairs buff. I have been a member of a political discussion forum called Political Wrinkles since May 2008, and before that Utopia Temple since February 2004, until I saw that the general discussions thread had pretty much died, and decided to defect with another member. However, I recently realised that in order for a society to succeed, one must not only keep abreast of current events, but also what occurred in the past. Only then will we know how our present state came about and how we can use the lessons of history to shape our future. I'm a finance student in college, but my interest in history remains. So I typed in “historical discussion forum” into Google and found this great site! I hope to be an earnest contributor in the months and years to come.
Was it this quote?
Put more force into the terror . . . shoot every tenth person, place all the suspects in concentration camps!- Lenin
Or perhaps you were thinking of this:
It is better to kill one hundred innocents than to let one guilty person go.
Dolores Ibarruri ("La Pasionaria"), Spanish Communist[ibid., p. 343]
In our system of capitalism and meritocracy, you have to work to succeed in life. If you don't study, you end up in a lacklustre job. If you are lazy on the job, you get fired. Not so with communism. There was 100% employment, which was good, I suppose, but this also meant that chronic laziness was a problem, as people had no incentive to work harder without rewards for doing so. This is in stark contrast to our capitalist system, where the longer hours you work, the more you get paid, and the more training your job requires (e.g. a neurosurgeon or lawyer vs. a construction worker or cleaner), the more you will be recompensed. Perhaps this could be one of the reasons for nostalgia for communism.In East Germany, there was universal health care and education - same as in Cuba today. Even if it was sub-standard, it was still there. Contrast this with, say, America, where only now, under Obama's universal healthcare initiative, blanket health coverage is coming to America, and parents have to start saving from birth if they want their children to go to a good college.However, I don't think it is an indictment of capitalism per se, but the transition process from communism to capitalism. I am a fervent believer in capitalism, but in the transition from a state-controlled economy to a market economy, there are inevitably going to be some transient difficulties. Those countries - like Russia - which are no longer communist and are ostensibly a market economy/democracy, but under Putin backtracked from the civil liberties associated with liberal democracy, has also seen political turmoil, mismanagement, graft and corruption. Corruption in Russia is at sky-high levels - quite possibly the Russia is the most corrupt country in the world. Under Putin, and followed by Medvedev, Putin's anointed successor, democracy has become a farce. The Russian Mafia has its tentacles spread everywhere. Perhaps it is unsurprising that many Russians pine for the days of the Soviet Union, with its universal employment, healthcare and education, when Russia was a superpower who were the first to put a man in space.On the other hand, Poland, another ex-Soviet bloc country, has made great strides towards a market economy and has a vibrant democracy; and has significantly less nostalgia for the days when it was under the thumb of the Soviet Empire.
It's interesting because I have heard that in Germany, Hitler is highly despised. Why not so with the Soviet leader among Russians? To my knowledge, total deaths under Stalin exceeded those under Hitler. But it's not only in Russia where we find this lack of outrage, but everywhere; when is the last time we saw a movie which probed Stalin's abuses? Meanwhile, Hitler movies are a dime a dozen.
Well, when Stalin passed away and Khrushchev assumed power, a process of de-Stalinization took place, and Khrushchev did make his famous secret speech to the Central Committee denouncing Stalin. Perhaps the reason is that outside of Russia, people may know of Stalin, but beyond that, unless you have studied Russian history, which I did in senior high school Modern History, you would not know details of the extent of his atrocities. Also, the Russians were allies in WWII, whereas Hitler was actively attempting to expand the German empire through invasion and other perfidious means. Things like the Holocaust also worsened his notoriety. It is true that Russians became the enemy after WWII in what came to be known as the Cold War, but Stalin died in 1953, almost 4 decades before the Cold War came to an end. I too worry about this trend of Russians putting Stalin up on a pedestal instead of reviling what he did. One just has to consider his purges and the Ukrainian famine that Stalin instigated to see the evil in this man.
