China has continued to become much more free since 1989. The comparison with Russia or the East European states is particular interesting, because China's growth rates have been much better.
As for Tienanmen, every single mob revolution in the history of the world has caused far more deaths than the number of people who died at Tienanmen. Imagine how many millions of lives would have been saved if Louis the XVI had acted in the same way as Deng. The Chinese government did the right thing in putting in forcefully dispersing the mob. Any government, when faced with a armed, violent rebellion, needs to put it down. Revolutions and civil wars are the worse than any government. (And yes, the protesters had weapons: http://www.amazon.com/gp/reader/0385482329/ref=sib_dp_srch_p... )
Imagine how many millions of lives would be freer and richer if Deng had acted in the same way as Gorbechev, Yeltsin, or even Egon Krenz.
Had Louis XVI acted in the same way as Deng, continental Europe may still be under the heel of absolute monarchism today, with all the stupid pointless wars that entails. The French Revolution was a step forward for humanity, no matter how messy it was.
Imagine how many millions of lives would be freer and richer if Deng had acted in the same way as Gorbechev, Yeltsin, or even Egon Krenz.
Gorbechev was fairly similar to Deng. He liberalized the economy and increased freedom of speech, but he did not allow democracy. Yeltsin introduced democracy, and what was the result? A terrible economy, a dramatic rise in suicide rates and alcoholism, and now under Putin, even speech is becoming less free. If only there could have been two Dengs, one for China and one for Russia!
The heel of monarchism? What heel? The fundamental problem of monarchy was not that it was oppressive (it wasn't), but that it wasn't a very good military Schelling point. Were taxes higher under monarchy? Was their less freedom of speech? Were there more wars? No, no, and no. Where do you get your history?
Look at the history of free speech for example. Pretty much every country that has gotten free speech, originally got free speech while under non-democratic government (Britain under the monarchy, France under Louis the XVI, U.S. under British Colonial rule, Germany under Allied military command, Japan under allied military command). Democracy has generally either been neutral or corrosive towards freedom ( the French Revolution, the terrorizing of the loyalists in America http://books.google.com/books?id=SZccAAAAMAAJ&printsec=f... , Nazis, etc ).
And pointless wars? The Wars of the French Revolution killed far, far more than any monarchist war. Not only that, they invented the usage of mass slave armies to fight the war. The French Revolution Wars and the Napoleonic Wars presaged the great Democratic total wars that followed - the Civil War, WWI, and WWII.
Had Louis the XVI put down the mob, the nationalization, conscript armies, and total war may have never been invented. Prussia would have never felt the need to unify to protect themselves against France. It's almost impossible to imagine World War I or World War II without the Wars of the French Revolution.
Gorbechev did not kill the people gathered at the White House to demand their freedom from communism--he dissolved the Soviet Union and allowed liberalization. Deng may have not had the power to dissolve the communist system in China, but a recognition of the rights to free assembly and free political speech, combined with a concrete plan towards devolving power away from the Communist Party, would have been a better option than killing people for asking for it. Russia's economy has grown leaps and bounds in the last several years--while they had a contraction immediately after the fall of communism, this was mainly due to Soviet overproduction of unnecessary and unwanted goods.
The British monarchy was a constitutional monarchy with almost all of the real power devolved to the nobles and the commons by the time of the French Revolution, quite unlike the French monarchy prior to the revolution. It's a fallacy to compare the two. The American revolution was an issue of home rule, not an issue of democracy vs. monarchy. And not the first such conflict the British Empire would face.
The Wars of the French Revolution were monarchist wars, waged to protect Europe's monarchs from the seeds of dissension spread from the revolution. So, technically, were the Napoleonic wars, as Napoleon was an emperor. However, the Napoleonic Code was a step forward for civil rights in Europe.
The aggressors in WWI and WWII were either monarchies or dictatorships: Germany under the Kaiser, Austia-Hungary under the Habsburg monarchy, the Ottomans under their monarchy, Germany and Italy under fascist dictatorships, and Japan under a monarchy. At best you can pin Nazi Germany under the banner of democracy, since the Nazis were technically elected to parliament (after their street thugs started the Reichstag fire and beat up all the opposition). But since the Nazis were outspoken detractors of the very idea of democracy, even that is a stretch.
would have been a better option than killing people for asking for it.
The people who died were people who refused to vacate a public area after occupying it for weeks, accumulating automatic weapons, defying orders to disperse, and burning buses and using them as blockades. These were not peaceful reformers, but power seeking revolutionaries, in the mold of revolutionaries that have destroyed nations for the past three centuries. At some point, a protest becomes an outright rebellion, and the government has every right and duty to put it down. The Tienanmen protesters crossed that line.
The Wars of the French Revolution were monarchist wars, waged to protect Europe's monarchs from the seeds of dissension spread from the revolution.
No, the French were the aggressors. The political leaders exaggerated the threats from the other countries ( as politicians are want to do), stoked the fears of the mob, and France declared war on the monarchies.
So, technically, were the Napoleonic wars, as Napoleon was an emperor.
Napoleon was a popular tyrant, a result of a revolution. A regime is defined by its succession process, not the names it's leaders go by. Succession processes that involve mobs and/or violence result in disaster.
Germany under the Kaiser, Austia-Hungary under the Habsburg monarchy, the Ottomans under their monarchy, Germany and Italy under fascist dictatorships, and Japan under a monarchy.
Almost all the main participants of World War I were at least as Democratic, if not more so, than the modern U.S. Germany had a democratically elected parliament that approved the war, as did France, Britain and Austria.
Stefan Zweig lived through Austria's tranisition from being a monarchy/aristocracy to having a universal suffrage parliament. He wrote:
Hardly had this [Universal Suffrage] been granted, or rather obtained by force, before it became apparent how thin though highly valuable a layer of liberalism had been. With it concilliation disappeared from public political life, interests hit hard against interests, and the struggle began.
But soon a third flower appeared, the blue cornflower, Bismarck's favorite flower, and the emblem of the German National Party, which -- although not then recognized as such -- was counsciously a revolutionary party, and worked with burtal forcefulness for the destruction of the Austrian monarchy in favour of a Greater Germany under Prussian and Protestant leadership, such as Hitlers dreams of. Weak in numbers, it made up for its unimportance by wild aggression and unbridled brutality. Its few representatives became the terror and ( in the old sense ) the shame of the Austrian parliament. Hiter also took over from them the anti-semitic racial theory - "In that race lies swinishness" his illustrious prototype had said. But above all else, he took from the German Nationals the beginning of a ruthless storm troop that blindly hit out in all directions, and with it the principle of terroristic intimidation by a small group over a numerically superior but humanely more passive majority.
I suggest you read the whole thing, it's from "The World of Yesterday". The introduction of universal suffrage to Austria, Germany, France, and Britain, etc., created the Fox News effect. Also known as the Yellow journalism effect. Also known as "Jingoism". Politicians competed with each other to blame problems on the leaders of other countries. Newspapers ran sensationalist headlines, selling copy by playing off prejudice and hatred.
Stefan Zweig visited France, and wrote about his experience attending a movie:
It was a small suburban cinema, utterly different from the modern palaces of chromium and glass; a sparsely fitted hall, filled with humble folk, workers, soldiers, market women -- the plain people -- who chatted comfortably. The third picture was "Kaiser Wilhelm visitis the Emperor Francis Joseph in Vienna." The train came on the screen, the first coach, the second, and the third. The door of the compartment was thrown open, and out stepped William II in the uniform of an Austrian General, his moustache curled stiffly upwards. The moment he appeared in the picture, a spontaneous wild whistling and stamping of feet began in the dark hall. Everybody yelled and whistled, men, women, and children, as if they had been personally instuled. The good natured people of Tours, who knew no more about the world and politics than what they had read in their newspapers, had gone mad for an instant. I was frightened. I was frightened to the depths of my heart. For I sensed how deeply the poison of the propaganda of hate must have advanced through the years, when even here in a small provincial city the simple citizens and soldiers had been so greatly incited agaisnte the Kaiser and against Germany that a passing picture on the screen could produce such a demonstration.
It was these hatreds that created World War I. Historian Carroll Quigley writes:
The influence of democracy served to increase the tension of a crisis because elected politicians felt it necessary to pander to the most irrational and crass motivations of the electorate in order to ensure future election, and did this by playing on hatred and fear of powerful neighbors or on such appealing issues as territorial expansion, nationalistic price, "a place in the sun," "outlets to the sea," and other real or imagined benefits. At the same time, the popular newspaper press, in order to sell papers, played on the same motives and issues, arousing their peoples, driving their own own politicians to extremes, and alarming neighboring states to the point where they hurried to adopt similar kinds of of action in the name of self-defense. Moreover, democracy made it impossible to examine international disputes on their merits, but instead transformed every petty argument into an affair of honor and national prestige so that no dispute could be examined on its merits or settled as a simple compromise because such a sensible approach would at once be hailed by one's democratic opposition as a loss of face and an unseemly compromise of exalted moral principles.
Hitler came to the power as the result of mob violence, which perfectly backs my point about the need to put down mob violence. If only the German generals had cracked down on the street thugs as Deng had put down the Tienanmen protesters.
As for Japan, even leftist historians admit that FDR provoked Japan into war. They just think that it was justified, in order to get the U.S. into the war against Germany. The Japanese government made numerous peace attempts that were all rebuffed. When the U.S. cut off their oil supply they basically had no choice, die slowly, or make a desparate gambit to knock out U.S. military capabilities. I suggest reading this: http://mises.org/books/perpetual.pdf
If only the German generals had cracked down on the street thugs as Deng had put down the Tienanmen protesters
Wow.
So Mao was okay in killing millions, but a few thousand held up in a park constitutes "power-seeking revolutionaries"
In a democracy, you change up who is in power every so often. How could a supporter of frequently-changing power structures be "power-seeking"?
Created the Fox News effect ... It was these hatreds that created World War I
WWI was caused by a lot of pre-planned military manuevers that ran automatically.
The August Madness was real, but don't go blaming the entire war on that.
Hitler came to power as a result of mob violence
Once again, you overstate. Hitler was part of a highly-motivated and organized political party. He was as much part of a mob as he was a ballerina.
FDR provoked Japan into war
What?
It's great to have unusual views. But you are really way on the outside of left field with a lot of these views. It's almost like you already have the answer and are taking a historical hammer and banging away to make the facts fit into your preconceived worldview.
I mean, hey, we all do the same thing, but at some point if you're making a dozen points that are all extremely debatable perhaps your logic isn't on such solid ground, you know?
I think it suffices to say that you have a lot of revisionist views. Not that you're wrong, per se, but that you go heavily against the common understanding of these events.
Yes, history (or "the common understanding of these events") is written by the winners. The democrats (small d) won the wars and conquered the world. Now, democratic schools teach pro-democracy views, which constitute the only acceptable mainstream position. Surprise, surprise.
I think this is one of those things where neither of us is going to change his opinion based on what some guy wrote on the internet, but if you haven't read it yet, I recommend Edmund Burke's "Reflections on the Revolution in France". Burke was a British Whig MP who supported the American Revolution, but opposed the French. It's an interesting contemporary account of the early days of the French Revolution. You can read it here: http://www.constitution.org/eb/rev_fran.htm
I'd love to read some pro-Revolution writings if you can recommend any.
Yes the tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants, but then liberty might be a biased western concept.
No, Jefferson was wrong, plain and simple. The American Revolution led to a net decrease in liberty. By the 1790's taxes were higher than they had ever been under the British. The war itself force tens thousands of loyalists out of their homeland. Tocqueville wrote: "I do not know a country where there is in general less intellectual independence and less freedom of discussion than in America. .. . In America the majority builds an impregnable wall around the process of thinking."
How can you quantify the amount of liberty in America???
Let's say taxes were higher, that doesn't mean a decrease in liberty. They fought because of taxation without representation, not because of high taxes.
So you're saying that majority rule in USA tends to prevent the smarter people from getting any power? I think what generally happens is that people who are smarter, and do things better, will do it. At least they have the ability to. Reality will prevail and reveal how much better they are, and then the majority will pursue the new method/idea.
I consider taxes to be a decrease in liberty, because I am no longer able to dispose of my income in a way that I please. Instead I am forced to hand some of it over, at pain of imprisonment. I have no actual power to prevent this.
We all have to sacrifice some liberty. You sacrifice your right to shoot someone so that you in turn will not be shot by someone else. Laws are instituted so that we sacrifice some liberty in order to better preserve other liberties.
As far as the war of independence goes, they were being taxed and not being represented properly, and this was an infringement on liberty. Were they doing it so that they can tax themselves higher later? No, of course not. That's not the reason why they wanted independence. They wanted independence to oppose that specific tyranny. So you can't argue that it was a bad decision because they ended up later having higher taxes anyways. You can't say independence was unjustified, because the act of fighting for independence does not by default lead to less liberty by taxation
Likewise the statement that blood of tyrants must be shed to preserve liberty is not necessarily wrong by your reasoning because the current act to preserve liberty by bloodshed committed by the Americans was not done with knowledge that it would lead to higher taxation--and less liberty-- later on. So Jefferson saying that bloodshed is necessary to oppose any current liberty restraining powers is independent of any future infringements on liberty, because if such future infringements occur, simply reapply Jefferson's commandment and kill your oppressive leaders.
The idea that the government should kill protesters might seem far too disrespectful of human life, but then, doesn't the word "messy" in the above quote evoke the same reaction?
That was a bit of verbal slight-of-hand, yes. I meant to imply that if you're willing to say "the ends justify the means" to kill people at Tiananmen Square, you don't have very good standing to criticize the French Revolution, because it's in fact easier to make that same argument about the French Revolution than it is about Tiananmen Square.
> it's in fact easier to make that same argument about the French Revolution than it is about Tiananmen Square
No, it isn't, because your argument depends on the "end" being an escape from "absolute monarchism" into democracy. Even if you believe the ends justify the means in general, the argument doesn't work when the end result is not very good.
As for Tienanmen, every single mob revolution in the history of the world has caused far more deaths than the number of people who died at Tienanmen. Imagine how many millions of lives would have been saved if Louis the XVI had acted in the same way as Deng. The Chinese government did the right thing in putting in forcefully dispersing the mob. Any government, when faced with a armed, violent rebellion, needs to put it down. Revolutions and civil wars are the worse than any government. (And yes, the protesters had weapons: http://www.amazon.com/gp/reader/0385482329/ref=sib_dp_srch_p... )