Week of October 26, 2009
Jonathan Brent expresses surprise—if not shock and disgust—at what he sees as the rehabilitation of Soviet leader Joseph Stalin in contemporary Russia ("Postmodern Stalinism," The Chronicle Review, September 25).Pray tell: Is there an analytical difference between the phenomenon he perceives and the glorification and hagiography that bedeck the slaveholding"founding fathers" of his own United States (not to mention those that founded the settler colonies upon which this slaveholding republic was based)? Or is the difference that in this latter case, after all, we are discussing the brutalization of only Africans, and in the former case, non-Africans—and we all know that the lives of one are worth more than the lives of the other? Or is the difference that Stalin's rule lasted 30-odd years while North American enslavement was a process that stretched over centuries?
Greg Scoblete at Realclearworld.com takes me to task [1] for my item on the Baghdad bombing, in which I urged readers not to lose sight of the bigger picture — namely that the situation in Iraq has improved markedly over the past couple of years. He writes:"Iraq’s population is currently 29 million. A bombing that kills 155 Iraqis is the proportional equivalent of a bombing that kills 1,600 Americans. I wonder, in the wake of such an attack, if Boot would issue similar calls for context and urge us to recognize that America remains overwhelmingly safe and secure despite the occasional terrorist atrocity."This misses an important distinction. The United States has not been locked in a war on its home front for the past six years. Iraq has. At times that fighting became debilitating. In 2006 and early 2007, large swathes of Baghdad looked like a ghost town as residents fled in the face of Sunni suicide bombers and Shiite ethnic-cleansing squads. Today, by contrast, the capital is full of people, stores (including liquor stores) are open, and amusement parks are thronged.