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Mark Steyn joins the conservatives against containment chorus:

Choosing to "contain" the Soviet Empire over four decades did enormous damage not just in terms of the vassel populations and the millions of ruined lives ("stability" looks a lot better from the western side of the Iron Curtain than if you're stuck on the eastern side) and the difficulties those societies are having in recovering (not least demographically) from half-a-century as a prison state, but also in the enervation of the free world and its decay into relativist mush. That's one reason our "victory" in the Cold War is not felt as a victory by the populations of almost every Nato member state, although technically they "won" it. And it's part of the reason why we're disinclined to rouse ourselves for what the Administration calls another "long war".

This is preposterous. Of course Cold War stability looks better from west of the Berlin wall than east of it. But the prospect of a massive war between the United States and the Soviet Union likewise looks a lot better from Mark Steyn's armchair than it would have to anyone who would have been asked to fight in such a thing, or have his hometown turned into a battleground for it. The implication that the population of Eastern Europe just spent those decades praying for a snap American invasion is insane, but also reflective of the sort of mentality in which one needs to bother pointing out that few Iranians want the United States to attack their country.

Photo by Flickr user Edwin11 used under a Creative Commons license

Comments

Ronald Reagan's nurse must be turning him over in his grave.

Posted by steve duncan | October 15, 2007 9:25 AM

What the crazies forget is that, for most people behind the Iron Curtain, LIFE WENT ON. And for most people, life going on is preferable to life NOT going on.

Most people weren't in prison. Hell, the US currently has a greater proportion of its population in prison than Stalin ever did--and we're still below 1%. For most folks, history is something that happens far away. It has minimal impact on their day to day lives--they still milk the cow, talk to the neighbor, go into town to get some cheese. Except in the case of war, which utterly devastates their day to day lives.

Posted by Will Roberts | October 15, 2007 9:38 AM

Am I reading Steyn right? Does he close his post by stating that the reason we can't fight a longer, Cold War-style conflict with terror (rather than razing every country where more than a handful were born) is that we just fought a long Cold War? It sounds as though he thinks, psychologically, we need to alternate hot and cold in our war-faring ways in order to make victories feel more like victory.

This is asinine.

Posted by jhupp | October 15, 2007 9:43 AM

Er, Will, I have absolutely no sympathy for Steyn, but Stalin's imprisonment figures were a LOT higher than 1%. Best guesses I've heard were between 5% and 10%.

Posted by MFB | October 15, 2007 9:45 AM

Doncha see, there ain't no problem that a little shootin' and bombin' can't make better. There's always the possibility that instead of a problem that is complicated and ambiguous, a heaping helping of pow pow can make it simple and certain.

Posted by clb72 | October 15, 2007 9:47 AM

MFB: Of course you're right. During the 30s-50s, Stalin probably had an imprisonment rate 4-10 times ours. That's what I get for typing before thinking.

Posted by Will Roberts | October 15, 2007 10:29 AM

"The implication that the population of Eastern Europe just spent those decades praying for a snap American invasion is insane"

oh, i'm sure steyn would agree with this.

what they were *really* praying for was to have megaton hydrogen bombs rain down on their heads, followed by the same raining down on north american, followed by the extinction of all mammalian life on the planet.

that would have been *so* much better than that tedious, enervating, spineless "containment" stuff.

just ask steyn.

Posted by kid bitzer | October 15, 2007 10:45 AM

In "Crime Control as Industry", the famous Scandanavian criminologist Nils Christie argues that the current U.S. imprisonment rate is about equal to the post-WWII imprisonment rate under Stalin. The Soviets did keep records of the total gulag population, he finds these imply rates somewhat close to ours.

But I'm not an expert on the subject and I haven't really checked Christie's numbers, I just saw this. So caveat emptor and all.

Posted by mq | October 15, 2007 11:04 AM

I would totally side with anyone who said life behind the Iron Curtain was horrible and that Communism was as evil as Nazism. Now that that's out of the way:

looks a lot better from Mark Steyn's armchair than it would have to anyone who would have been asked to fight in such a thing

You could make all sorts of arguments: that the US should've stayed out of WWI and let the Germans finish off the communists after they won in the West, that the US should've encouraged the Japanese to fight the Russians while we fought the Germans, and even that we shoudl have immediately gone to war with the Russians while we had the army in Europe ready to go. But that's the thing: Mark Steyn would have had the US fight the Germans in WWI even though that created Hitler and Stalin, and he would have had the US fight the Japanese and the Germans and the Russians in WWII. His viewpoint is that of a British Empire Imperialist and his job is to point; it's the job of the Sons of Erin to go off and fight and die. That makes the world a better place for Mark Steyn.

If the US had been conquered by the communists, of course, Steyn would've certainly be driven to find a way to convert to Marxism, because that would make the world a better place for Mark Steyn.

max
['These narcissitic authoritarian dude are all pretty much the same and pretty predictable.']

Posted by max | October 15, 2007 11:33 AM

Any world where a no-talent ass clown like Mark Steyn has money and influence is already a "better place for Mark Steyn" than the world has any right to be. He shouldn't push his luck.

Posted by vanya | October 15, 2007 12:17 PM

Consider the GOP's presidential candidates who really faced the communist threat:: Hoover, Landon, Wilkie, Dewey, Eisenhower, Nixon, Ford, Reagan. Not one suggested that a proper role for the United States was to invade and occupy the Soviet Union. Now we know that they were all wussies, that none of them had the guts that Mark Styen has from his post-USSR armchair.

Steyn and Co. have essentially declared conservative values dead. They use the term "conservative" in an Orwellian sense, it now means bigger, more intrusive government and war-without-end, the policies of Big Brother, there's nothing remotely conservative about them.

Posted by west coast | October 15, 2007 12:31 PM

"that would have been *so* much better than that tedious, enervating, spineless "containment" stuff.just ask steyn."

Which goes to show, this isn't a political or cultural issue so much as a psychological (or more specifically, psycho-sexual) one.

Posted by Dan S. | October 15, 2007 12:36 PM

"psycho-sexual"

yup. nopod's racist screed about how black people made his penis small really is kind of the rosetta stone for the whole neo-con enterprise.

'this one time i was picked on by scary colored people and i felt weak and impotent.
ever since then i've supported bombing the shit out of foreigners so i can feel spasms of manly joy.
sorry--i meant to say "i support a robust, ideologically assertive foreign policy".

Posted by kid bitzer | October 15, 2007 12:58 PM

What is most interesting is the context in which all these "we should have invaded the USSR after WWII" post occured. They all stem from Peter Robinson asking the Elder (crazier) Pohoretz the really stupid question: why did Truman have a strategy for containing the USSR so soon after WWII (1947) when we are still searching for a strategy for dealing with the Jihadists? In this question, it is obvious that Robinson buys Podhoretz's premise that the Jihadist threat is equivilent to the soviet threat. And then you get people coming out of the woodwork saying we "should have..."

The point is that there are people out there who profess to believe that we face an existential threat from a few thousand Jihadists. Their answer to this threat is then: invade Iraq, Iran, Syria. These are actually smart people. THey can't all really believe that we face an existential threat. It has to be propaganda. SO they are propagandizing in order to stir up a desire in the American people in general to invade Iraq, Iran, Syria... But why? What does this particular segment gain? I'm starting to not believe it is all some ideological pipe dream, or chicken hawk war porn, but instead something concrete, something financial. Do they lots of stock in oil companies? Are they agents of the Isralies? Are they all Masons planing a secret second crusade? Someone should investigate Podhoretz and all the other propagandizers. It may all be just some kind of game of Risk for them, but you never know.

Posted by cw | October 15, 2007 1:05 PM

There is this insane branch of the right that has been there ever since WW II, the labels for them change, but they have basically the same mentality. Mostly the Republicans keep them locked up in the attic like some crazy uncle.

Now they have taken over the party.

Posted by Eric K | October 15, 2007 1:17 PM

Ronald Reagan's nurse must be turning him over in his grave.

"That's one heck of a nurse!"

Posted by Dilan Esper | October 15, 2007 2:05 PM

And for those of you who don't know that reference, I give you the best music video of the 1980's:

http://youtube.com/watch?v=gBdUz_IJ4VA

Posted by Dilan Esper | October 15, 2007 2:10 PM

Evidently Steyn has now decided to stop channelling Reagan and start channelling Gen. Jack D. Ripper. The only difference is that Steyn is more worried about our enemies contaminating our Precious Spiritual Values. (And, apparently, he's just as willing to trigger a nuclear exchange in the name of that crusade, since Steyn's demographic argument that the Moslem Hordes will drown Europe is elementary arithmetic hogwash and the one big danger the Moslem world does present us with is their possible accumulation of nuclear weapons -- which Pakistan already has in abundance.)

As for that "relativist mush", judging from Steyn's book it seems to consist entirely of failure to oppose contraception, first-trimester abortion, and gay rights. Who'da thunk that our failure to nuke the Commies was responsible for all that?

Posted by Bruce Moomaw | October 15, 2007 4:53 PM

All hail the great Steyn! Now, with his noteworthy call to arms, we can free Zimbawe from tyranny! We can free the vassal population and improve millions of lives while sparing ourselves the enervating effects of our decay into relativic mush. We must not delay; the people are obviously awaiting the American invasion!

The man apparently loves war in a good cause; I wonder why he didn't volunteer for Viet Nam. Probably had boils.

Posted by zak822 | October 15, 2007 5:17 PM

Nah - haemorrhoids since most of these nitwits are assholes.

I mention Transhumanism, I get pilloried for being a nut, but THIS nut gets published in a national magazine.

I mean, "we should have had WWIII, we'd be better off" - THIS is considered rational enough to publish in a national magazine?

Clearly shows how far down the national discourse has gone.

Not that it had far to fall at any time.

Posted by Richard Steven Hack | October 15, 2007 10:49 PM