What to do when the Russians come. (History According to) Bob reads extracts from this Cold War classic (?). Not good news if you're a Maoist or a Trotskyite. But if you're a Nazi things are not nearly as bad as they could be. And if you're a psychopath...

I was watching Roger Simon’s YouTube piece on Walter Duranty - the New York Times correspondent who covered up the Ukrainian famine in the 1930s.  I thought: “Well, I wonder if the reporting in the (London) Times was any better?” And so I looked through some old editions online.  And then I found a really interesting letter - one that uses Duranty’s very own words to make the point that - at very least - food was very scarce in Russia.

This is something I have found myself when writing about railways.  One of the best writers around is Christian Wolmar who I am pretty sure is some sort of socialist.  However, time and time again he would come up with the facts to support the libertarian argument.

By the way, in terms of reporting, although there are dark hints, the Times didn’t really come to terms with the fact that there had been a famine until a couple of years later.  We have to bear in mind that it had no correspondents in the Soviet Union, all its reporting was done out of Riga in Latvia and its main source was official Soviet reports.

I've only just got round to listening to Michael Jennings's interview with James Waterton in Hanoi. And I'm glad I did. So, the Vietnamese are a lot more relaxed than the Chinese? I didn't know that. And Australians move away because Australia's too clean? I didn't know that either.

I even liked all that honking in the background.

To do evil a human being must first of all believe that what he’s doing is good…

Alexander Solyhenitsyn whose death was announced today.

Went to see the Lives of Others the other day. Thought it very good. So did Adriana who has some personal reflections on life under communism.

Uh oh, this looks bad:

Individual freedom is the dream of our age. But if one steps back and looks at what freedom actually means for us today, it’s a strange and limited kind of freedom.

And:

It will show how a simplistic model of human beings as self-seeking, almost robotic, creatures led to today’s idea of freedom. This model was derived from ideas and techniques developed by nuclear strategists during the Cold War. It was then taken up by genetic biologists, anthropologists, radical psychiatrists and free market economists, until it became a new system of invisible control.

They’re taking our word.  The bastards.  I suppose it is a compliment to the 19th century liberals that the Marxists had to take their word and make it mean something quite different.  Confucius may or may not have said: “When words lose their meaning, people lose their freedom.” But what happens when freedom loses its meaning?

The Trap: What Happened to Our Dreams of Freedom, Sunday, 2100-2200, BBC2

One of the good things about someone dying is that you get to hear all sides of the debate.  I can’t say this has changed my view of the guy but it has clarified it:

• He was right to launch the coup
• He was right to champion free market policies
• He was wrong to torture and kill unarmed opponents

The trick is to avoid falling into the trap of backing everything he did just because you agree with some of what he did.

Having said that - and this is mostly an intellectual exercise - is it possible to justify the torture and murder? Well, put as starkly as that, obviously not.  But is it possible that this was a package deal: that Pinochet could not have launched the coup in the first place had he not had the support of some pretty unsavoury characters ie, people who got a kick out of torture and murder?