They Killed My Lawyer
foreignpolicy.com
foreignpolicy.com
It is difficult to convey the depth of my disgust after reading the above sentence from the first paragraph of the article. I share both Russian and Jewish heritages and to my dismay I frequently encounter writings that belittle the history of Holocaust. In comparison, Stalinism and gulags are less known to the Western audience. It is just as despicable to use Holocaust as Stalinist atrocities to score points against political opponents. A death of a single lawyer behind bars or the deaths of numerous enemies of the modern Russian state should never be compared to systematic killing of millions of innocent people.
To borrow from a comment by rms further in this thread, it is "an argument about a difference of orders of magnitude". However morality of killing human lives should not be counted in orders of magnitude -- there is a qualitative difference between killing a man, a family, an ethnicity or a race. Saying that "Stalinism and the gulags are alive today" establishes a false moral equivalence.
Foreign Policy magazine editors should resign for allowing to publish drivel hurtful to lives of so many people.
EDIT: With respect to comments by 'cema', I also have family in former Soviet Union. None of them would compare the famine, repressions, kidnappings, prisons or gulags under Stalin to what is happening in Russia today.
On the other hand, he was not afraid to say it over the phone, so the situation is not 100% like it was in the USSR (then I guess he would have been really afraid to say it anywhere anyone could have overheard him). But in some important ways it is similar.
Are you using Kofi Annan's point to claim that Russia government has a policy of genocide against lawyers?
Stop giving them ideas ;-)
Secondly, in America everyone knows about the Holocaust, and the right wing's been using it for months now to bash healthcare reform and their own twisted definition of socialism. People will mangle history because it suits their purposes, not because of some little article in Foreign Affairs.
Outside of specific narrow areas our society is still more predicated on convincing people with power than those without it. Elections tend to ride on a tiny number of issues like abortion and outside of major issues like Chinese trade and Iraq there is little point to convince a Midwestern voter that you are correct.
In addition to a publication in Foreign Policy, the author managed to produce a very polished video which is also available from YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ok6ljV-WfRw
The current politicians of Russia became popular precisely for what they've done to Bill Browder -- they have taken back the money that was stolen from people in the 1990s.
I also find it hard to believe someone would behave as the lawyer in this story did merely over ill-intentioned greed.
What about Al Capone? The guy was caught on tax evasion charges, was US government's rule of force justified in his case?
He seems to be alleging that the author of this piece is potentially responsible for as much misery and destruction as the people who killed the lawyer in the story, and that this undermines the moral legitimacy of the article.
Whether osipov himself condones what happened is completely irrelevant.
If everyone is doing it, why does the hypocrisy matter?
There also seems to be a lot of presumptive sorting into binary opposition; osipov disliking the author of the article doesn't mean he supports the "other side", and my objection above doesn't mean I agree with osipov (in fact I don't, though it sounded like you and rbanffy assumed I did).
I would also add the corruption of the 90's benefited some of the same government officials that ate being accused here.
This of course is just as irrelevant to what has happened with the laywer as your attack on Browder.
You're obviously using the hyperbole at the start of the article to score points. You go on to impugn the character of the author, while not directly addressing the thesis at any point in your responses. You're relying on people to yield so as not to offend you -- but that's crap, they really shouldn't care. "hurtful" indeed...
What they can argue is that because of a bit of hyperbole at the start, you've implied the article can't make any valid points. It must be entirely wrong. Nice rhetorical trick, but quite insane -- and I argue much more disgusting than what is frankly an understandable gaff by the author at the start.
Further, why are you so being so defensive that you feel the need to call my opinion crap? If I feel offended by how the author belittles most horrific events of the 20th century I will let people know about it. It is up to the readers to form their opinion about my reaction to the article.
While my claim doesn't attack the character of the article, you are explicitly defending him by interpreting his intentions to label the leading statement a hyperbole. How do you know that the author wanted to set up a hyperbole?
> A death of a single lawyer behind bars or the deaths of numerous enemies of the modern Russian state should never be compared to systematic killing of millions of innocent people.
Could you specify the difference between "numerous enemies of the modern state" and "innocent people"? I was under the impression that most vicious people believe the people they kill/imprison/torture/etc are enemies of the state.
I'm sure that the privatisations of the 1990s went horribly wrong. But the idea that the rule of law and democracy make it impossible to right those wrongs is a symptom of that authoritarian tradition.
Anyway; I think your latching on to one phrase for your own aims. "Belittle the holocaust"; well if that isn't a sentence to garner a sympathetic audience I don't know what is....
I read the sentence not as an assertion that Russia suffers the same atrocities as those of the Stalinist era - but rather as a statement about how people in power still have not learned all of the lessons and still commit acts of crime and violence against others.
The conditions described (if accurate) are certainly pretty severe and the level of corruption (again, if accurate) awful - only one section of Government seems to have replied seriously to any of the accusations.
So, no, it is not Stalinism and not the Gulag; but the strong similarities are there. And the obvious connection must be drawn.
I have travelled in Russia both personally and on business and some of the areas of government I have seen are extremely corrupt and brutal. The association to Stalinism would seem justified in my limited experience.
From that point of view, I think the author felt this was his clearest method of communicating his point. Not that I think it needed to be communicated (how many FP readers really think Russia is not corrupt...?) but that is seperate from your point.
From that point of view, I feel that what was written is sensible... though I freely admit that I'm not able to take into account how hurtful this might to some people.
In my comment I wasn't addressing point #1. With respect to point #2, I think there is a better analogy than Enron: imagine that NYT publishes an article about a cop tasering a Jewish man to death. If the article started with a line about "Holocaust by police force is alive and well", it would be entirely fair to call out NYT for false moral equivalence and bad judgment in publishing the article.
Why shouldn't we keep Foreign Policy to the same standard?
The point of my Enron example is to show what the Stalinism/gulag example is trying to do. In my view, they are trying to say "things haven't changed as much as you think." Of course, there are other ways to put this, but the author needed to balance out the sadness/horror/etc... he felt with being historically accurate[1]/sensitive.
[1] As some here have argued, he may have thought the historical analogy was accurate enough. Just from some of the replies, it can be argued that this view isn't totally nonsense.
"The rule of law" is not an unmitigated good, like clean air. Laws can be and are written to benefit the lawmakers, their pets, and their puppetmasters - as they were in 1990s Russia.
Wealth and Power
Making wealth is not the only way to get rich. For most of human history it has not even been the most common. Until a few centuries ago, the main sources of wealth were mines, slaves and serfs, land, and cattle, and the only ways to acquire these rapidly were by inheritance, marriage, conquest, or confiscation. Naturally wealth had a bad reputation.
Two things changed. The first was the rule of law. For most of the world's history, if you did somehow accumulate a fortune, the ruler or his henchmen would find a way to steal it. But in medieval Europe something new happened. A new class of merchants and manufacturers began to collect in towns. [10] Together they were able to withstand the local feudal lord. So for the first time in our history, the bullies stopped stealing the nerds' lunch money. This was naturally a great incentive, and possibly indeed the main cause of the second big change, industrialization.
A great deal has been written about the causes of the Industrial Revolution. But surely a necessary, if not sufficient, condition was that people who made fortunes be able to enjoy them in peace. [11] One piece of evidence is what happened to countries that tried to return to the old model, like the Soviet Union, and to a lesser extent Britain under the labor governments of the 1960s and early 1970s. Take away the incentive of wealth, and technical innovation grinds to a halt.