RE: Ender's Game (was thinking about the unthinkable)

From: Lee Corbin (lcorbin@tsoft.com)
Date: Fri Aug 01 2003 - 12:03:35 MDT

  • Next message: Lee Corbin: "RE: thinking about the unthinkable"

    Robert writes

    > On Thu, 31 Jul 2003, Damien Broderick wrote:
    >
    > > and then to Rafal:
    > >
    > > >Do you think that you might have been a follower of Lenin in
    > > >the early days?
    >
    > Rafal may be better qualified to comment on this than I...
    > but... The problem was not Lenin so much as Stalin.

    Well, (and I do not think my question contained any
    discourtesy), there is a danger in adhering to highly
    ambitious schemes having to do with highly complex
    systems.

    Imagine St. Petersburg in 1917, put yourself back there.
    Given all the evil and corruption in the Czar's
    regime, it would have seemed to many that a worker's
    paradise could be established if only the idealists
    could seize power. The remarkable thing was that
    some people were living at the time who knew better,
    or at least sensed it.

    The problem *was* Lenin and his complete revolution.
    (That he himself developed in the early 20's into a
    Stalin and was succeeded by a Stalin is easily
    predictable (just study the course of the French
    revolution).

    > Having seen first hand what the Russian "collective"
    > society was capable of (e.g. the Moscow subways, the
    > defeat of Hitler's armies, the reliable space program
    > and rocket engines we (in the U.S.) use even today
    > (as Spike admits)) -- the question seems to come back
    > to "what does one get?" and "what does it cost you?"
    >
    > The question I would like to ask is "How much of what
    > Russia achieved in so short a span of time could have
    > been achieved without Stalin or Lenin?" [1]

    One hell of a lot more without those revolutionary wreckers!
    In 1914, Russia had the most advanced steel mills in all
    Europe, capitalism was firmly rooted, and its science and
    engineering were absolutely first rate.

    > 1. It is worth understanding that Russia went from essentially
    > a feudal state to a superpower in less than 100 years.

    Japan did it in even less time.

    > Estimates of the combination and Stalin and Hitler on
    > Russia range from 10 to 100 million lives lost. One has
    > to wonder what might have been accomplished without the
    > unextropic vector (but under a similar "command" economy)?

    In the seven years between 1921 and 1928, the U.S. economy
    grew by forty-nine percent. And it was solid growth, based
    on trade and massively greater productivity. The Russian
    economy during the same period fell further and further
    behind their 1914 levels.

    The book "Power and Prosperity" by Mancur Olsen is absolutely
    necessary reading if you want to understand the economic
    successes of Stalin compared to his subsequent replacements
    as heads of the Soviet Union. He extracted the maximum amount
    of work out of the people by making sure that they didn't
    "collude" in any way to improve their lives. This was accomplished
    by incessant purges, which his replacements perhaps just didn't
    have the stomach for.

    Lee



    This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Fri Aug 01 2003 - 12:11:44 MDT