The Corner - ARAB DISSIDENTS [Cliff May]
Ammar Abdulhamid is a Syrian dissident and pro-democracy activist. A profile of him in today’s New York Times magazine is worth reading.
While he “harbors mixed feelings about the United States' decision to invade Iraq, he says he believes that the American presence in the region is vital to the prospects for reform.”
Writer Lee Smith also notes that for “the last half-century, the Islamist movement and Arab regimes themselves have pushed Arab liberals to the sidelines. As a result, the Arab world's democracy activists and intellectuals do not enjoy the same advantages their Central and Eastern European counterparts did back in the 80's: whereas the generation of Havel and Walesa was backed by the Catholic Church and its Polish-born pope, Arab activists enjoy no such solidarity with any established Muslim institutions. … Even so, the liberals seem to be gathering a little momentum.
Martin Kramer talks about Abdulhamid here.
Posted at 12:11 PM
BAD BOOKING [Jonah Goldberg]
Tim Russert had Pat Buchanan and Natan Sharansky on. Buchanan's a great talker and a great debater. Sharansky is neither, though I don't think he did that bad.
But what, exactly, was Russert's thinking? President Bush faces significant political opposition from the Democratic Party and its leftwing base -- not from the Buchanan wing of the Buchanan Party. Ted Kennedy or Michael Moore would be more accurate and representative of political reality. Is it that it's unseemly to have Democrats shown-up for their lack of democratic idealism? Or did Democrats simply refuse to come on? Or, was Russert more attracted to the box-office appeal of Sharansky and Buchanan trading punches? Of course, as anybody could have predicted, they ended up trading punches over Israel more than they did over Bush's foreign policy. Entertaining, maybe. But not exactly a debate which reflected where the policy-makers or the two parties are.
Posted at 11:56 AM
NOSTALGIE DE LA BOUE [Andrew Stuttaford]
Here’s a remarkable piece of economic illiteracy or, perhaps, something worse, from the Guardian in which Neil Clark appears to wax a little nostalgic for the good old days in Eastern Europe:
“The statistics speak for themselves. GDP in the former communist states fell between 20% and 40% in the decade after 1989 - an economic contraction which, in the words of Budapest economist Laszlo Andor, "can only be compared to the Great Depression of the 1930s".
Um, Neil, those old statistics were meaningless. Let’s take one simple example. An Eastern European factory in the communist era might produce, say, a refrigerator, and that would count towards its country’s production statistics. But if that refrigerator was typically faulty what did that ‘production’ really amount to? Nothing. My memory may be faulty, but I don’t recall Eastern European household appliances as models of reliability. Looking at the real world, as opposed to the dodgy math of socialist statistics (back in the 1970s I can remember people claiming that East Germany was roughly as prosperous in the UK), many factories in the old Soviet bloc were, in fact, value destroying. Their output was worth less than the cost of its inputs: the steel, say, was worth more before it was transformed into that faulty fridge.
Predictably (we’re talking the Guardian here, people), Clark also raises the question of inequality:
“Inequality has risen sharply. Countries that not so long ago prided themselves on their egalitarianism now challenge Britain at the top of the European income inequality tables.”
Oh, come off it. The old Socialist states were paragons (if that’s the word) of privilege and inequality, but that inequality was hidden, concealed beneath the privilege of access to scare goods and resources for the party elite. Yes, there is inequality now, but it’s open – and there’s less of it.
This is not to say that the transition from Communism has been easy; far from it, particularly for the elderly, but after half a century of economic insanity how could it not have been?
nationalreview.com |
