Leftists continue to lie about Democrats sabotaging El-Sayed.
Again, that ego issue where they can never accept any responsibility is very Republican. Worth thinking about.
Anyway, I had alluded to a belief in socialism being connected to an inability to admit error in Tuesday's post; let's get back to that.
In theory, I love the idea of everyone giving what they can and receiving what they need.
The conservative mode of rejection focuses on most people being lazy and bad, so the system falls apart if you don't reward the true wealth creators by letting them exploit labor. This, as much as anything, is why Republicans keep on supporting racist and sexist policies: we keep the people already on top there by pushing everyone else down.
(That's dominator culture.)
In truth, this has not been what has caused various governments to struggle in their apparent attempts to embrace a bounteous economic equality.
In fact, they end up suffering from a lot of the same problems that plague capitalism.
Even though this is not one of my Friday media posts, I am going to give books to go with my three examples.
(You could reasonably argue that two of these countries are Communist, not Socialist. I tend to think of Socialism as the later stage of capitalism, but I think there are enough similarities that treating them together is reasonable. There is room for respectful disagreement.)
The reading recommendations are not as good for Cuba.
Part of that may be that you often get a sharp divide in writings from Cubans. There are the ones who stayed and might have a hard time criticizing Castro, and who can be harder to hear from for a variety of reasons.
We mainly hear from the ones who left who (and their children) who are very bitter about having been called "gusano" (worm). Hatred of Castro is an issue and it isn't even an unreasonable one, but these are also often people who were wealthy and doing well under the previous dictator, Batista... that has its own skew.
I recently read a book featuring parents who hated both Batista and Castro, but a big part of it was that they would not talk about it because the memories were so painful. Probably that allowed the author to not take a side without further analysis, so I don't really recommend it for that. (That was Cuba 15 by Nancy Osa, and it was a little on the annoying side anyway for teenage reasons.)
The book I will recommend is The Memory of Silence by Uva de Aragón, where two sisters are separated by the war, and their husbands. The Communist believer and the one who left and supported the Bay of Pigs invasion both had serious issues and unhappiness. You can be grateful that the relationship of the sisters ends up enduring (possibly helped by both husbands dying), but you get both viewpoints.
That includes harvesting sugar cane in Cuba.
Castro wanted to prove that they could still be productive under his leadership. They could be even more productive. Therefore, everyone needed to help with the sugar cane harvest.
Sugar is a tough crop. People who had no experience or familiarity with it found it pretty miserable, but if you didn't do it, you were betraying the cause, right?
Except, if the point of the revolution was to help everyone, is harvesting a lot to export the right goal, or should you be focusing on independently growing a variety of staples?
That question came up earlier.
Okay, there is some disagreement on whether Stalin deliberately starved Ukrainians during the Holodomor, or whether that was a side effect of the push to collectivize farming but also continuing to export grain, because how else can you prove the superiority of your system?
While it is not merely about that, there is some great (and heavy) reading on this in Timothy Snyder's Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin.
There is not disagreement about lots and lots of people dying, including outside of Ukraine. Would not have exporting grain, focusing on feeding their own people helped? Well, experiments in collectivism can have other problems.
Communist China had a stronger focus on getting people fed, but they still had problems doing so because of problems with farming techniques and inefficiencies with the system. Again, there was a laboring class and people who ordered them around that was not necessarily fair, but they did know what they were doing. That was cataclysmically disrupted.
There may have been extenuating factors at times, like weather, but they were exacerbated by Mao not being willing to take responsibility for any mistakes.
Deng Xiaoping was actually a bit better at figuring out how to make things work, but Mao saw that as a threat, causing Deng to be purged twice.
That could have been worse -- in Deng's case it meant becoming a laborer in a tractor factory -- but he is probably lucky that Mao didn't live longer.
A good book to read on this is Wild Swans: Three Daughters of China by June Chang. In the schooling that she and her siblings got, you can also get some real insight into the personality cult built around Mao, with Mao's own contributions, but she has another book, Big Sister, Little Sister, Red Sister, about the Soong sisters.
Big Sister and Little Sister married, respectively, Sun Yat-sen and Chiang Kai-shek. Red Sister became a prominent Communist adviser. Their story gives a good exploration of personality cults and how people starting at the same place can end up so differently. (Also, marrying the guy at the center of a personality cult has some serious downsides, but so does communism.)
The point is that even if you are intending to have a strong collective that takes care of its members, feelings of ego and competition can lead to terrible decisions. At first some of those missteps can be very understandable, but the ego ensures that they keep getting worse.
Remember, bad intentions are not an absolute necessity for disaster.
I sure do wish that as a country we had been immune to personality cults, but then a lot of that was based on the racism. We never did the necessary work on that.
Sigh.
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