Soy Famoso!!

Lo logré! Lo logré! Me citan en Revista Semana. Para los que quieran ver el documento completo, al que me refería antes, aquí está.

Antanas? Date una vuelta y hablamos.

En estos dias la pregunta obligada en Colombia es qué piensa uno de Antanas. Acabo de escribir un ensayo para algunos amigos en el Polo Democrático donde fijo mi posición. Resumiendo:

Aunque Antanas, en caso de ganar, podría llegar a formar un gobierno mejor que el del uribismo, esto no está garantizado porque él insiste en no definirse en torno a los temas fundamentales. Así, es mejor que el Polo espere un poco, hasta la segunda vuelta si la hay, y luego le entable a Antanas una negociación firme. Si en ese momento él se compromete con algunos principios saludables y que representen un avance para la izquierda democrática, pues adelante con la alianza. Pero si sigue con el desdén que ha mostrado hasta ahora, pues hay que pararse de la mesa. Al fin y al cabo, si sigue como va, Antanas va a terminar convertido en una versión hippy del uribismo y a eso el Polo no tiene por qué gastarle energías.

Voy a ver si aprendo a colgar archivos en el blog y entonces pondré mi ensayo. Entre tanto, este es el resumen ejecutivo.

From the Polish airplane crash to Stalinism and back.

This is one of those instances where blogging is real fun. I get to write stuff that just crosses my mind and take it wherever it leads unconstrained by the obligation of being right, consistent or anything.

So these days the Katyn massacre is again in the news. Apparently it is still the kind of event that qualifies as "forgotten." I can't speak to this because I have known about it for a long while. Anyway, the facts are there: the Soviet Army captured more than 20 000 Polish POW's, then Stalin and Beria decided that they could become the ferment of future anti-Soviet activities in Poland and, thus, decided to just shoot them one by one. All in all, probably one of the greatest violations of the "ius in bellum" ever (well, there's stiff competition for that...).

Of course, as we all can imagine, the Poles have been really upset about this, justifiably so. I'm not going to go into the whole discussion about the Soviet POW's starved by the Poles in 1918-1919. In Europe for pretty much every atrocity you can always find a previous one for which this one was seen as a retaliation. 

But I want to go elsewhere. It occurred to me to run a small "experiment." I have an Argentinean friend (wait, wait, it makes sense at the end) and decided to ask him some questions about Katyn. Why? Because in his youth he had very close friends in the Argentinean Communist Party and the Argentinean Communist Party was at that time made up heavily of Jews of, you got it, Polish background. Based on an observation of one (not a very scientific sample, I know) I can conclude that, by his recollection, this particular bunch of Poles simply did not care about Katyn. The issue was not even mentioned. Notice, this was the 1960s and 70s. At that point it was OK in the Communist movement to say that, you know, Stalin may have committed a few crimes. True, the official line was that Katyn was a Nazi atrocity so maybe that's what they believed. But even without Katyn the Soviet occupation of Poland was no picnic so you would have expected them to harbor at least a teeny-weeny grudge against the Russians. The interesting thing is they did not care.

Remarkable? From the point of view of American political culture it is remarkable because of one feature that I've noticed over the years: American anti-Communism. It is not like the anti-Communism of other places. In the US even the left is anti-Communist. What I mean with this is that in the US anybody in the Left must be able to prove that he or she is in no way at all associated with anything that can remotely, even in the most oblique way, be construed as related to world Communism. Belonging to a Communist party, or to a party that might have at some point being close to the Communist movement, no matter the time and place is considered in American public discourse a cause of moral opprobrium that puts the person beyond the confines of the acceptable. 

In my limited experience with the Latin American left, if I had asked anybody in any left-wing movement in the heady days of the Cold War to take a position about the Ukrainian famine, he would have, at best, turned a blank stare. The attitude there was "Let by-gones be by-gones. Right now we have more pressing issues to worry about." In fact, according to my Argentinean friend, his acquaintances were much more worried about US foreign policy in Latin America at that precise moment than with events that had happened in Poland 30 years ago. 

Interestingly, this is one exception in American political culture to its wonderful pragmatism. One thing I've come to embrace about public debate in the US is the way in which it tries not to get sidelined in discussions that do not pertain to the problem at hand. But there is "Cold War exception" to this. The monstrous history of Communist crimes is not over. It has to be replayed over and over again to be able to demarcate lines of alliances and so on. This is all the more interesting when you consider that of all the millions of victims of these crimes, only a handful were Americans (and this mostly as POW's). 

Just to put an example of someone I admire deeply, consider the eminent economist and historian Brad de Long, whose blog everyone should read. I won't point to specific instances, but you will find many if you go through his blog. Here is a center-left intellectual, a person with whom more often than not I agree (he describes himself as a "weak-tea social-democrat" and maybe that's the source of our substantive differences), but his attitude toward the history of Communism is hard to comprehend for someone who, like me, comes from a different political culture. I come from a milieu where it was normal to become a Communist and to stop being one while remaining a leftist without Stalinism, the Gulag, the Great Purge and so on looming too large in the debate. In the Colombian left, as far as I can remember from the distance of my non-committed college years, Communists were regarded as overbearing, dogmatic, boring, obsequious etc. but nobody in the Left saw them through the prism of events of mass murder that had occurred several decades ago thousands of kilometers away. If needed and possible, it was perfectly fine to associate with them.

Of course I do not wish to imply that there is something wrong with the American left. Over my years in the US (coming soon to an end, more on that later), I've come to admire it greatly. But the alternative reading, which I cannot accept, is that there is something morally corrupt with leftists in other parts of the world. I guess this is a cultural difference that points to deeper currents. I'll have time to think about this at more length.

In which I am a terrible, terrible blogger.

It's been more than two months without any post. Bad, bad blogger. In the meantime health care reform passed, Colombia had Congressional elections and its two-party system is now mortally wounded. And yet no blogging!! Yeah, guilt, guilt, guilt.

Problem is, I don't like blogging to repeat stuff that I'm picking up on other blogs. To me it's only fun when I have something to say that, to my knowledge, hasn't been said before or not with the nuance I want to give it. This has happened with these latest events. But as the dust settle, I might come up with new things to say. Let's see.