Jewish Champions of First Amendment or something

[Paul Finkelman]

I think Prof. Somin fails to understand the extent to which American
policy and many Americans liked the repressive regimes in Cuba, Iran,
much of Central America, Taiwan, because they were very helpful to
American business interests. And he also fails to realize that we
supported these regimes BEFORE there was a Soviet threat; the "banana
republics" of Latin America were often our creations because they were
profitable.  

It is also hard to image why Prof. Somin thinks that the right wing
regimes in Chile, Argentina, and much of Central America were less
repressive than the left.  Perhaps we can do a comparative body count: 
who killed more people:  the military in Argentina and Chile or the left
in those countries?  How many death squads did Allende have in Chile? 
One does not have to be a communist or even like communist theory (I
surely don't) to realize that Cuban people have great literacy rates and
lower infant mortality under Castro than under Batista.  Whether Castro
has killed more Cubans than the thugs that ran Cuba before him would be
an interesting issue to study.  

On Sep 12, 2006, at 3:03 AM, Ilya Somin wrote:

> I think Mark is missing a crucial distinction here. Those on the  
> right who supported repressive foreign regimes during the Cold War  
> did as a purely tactical consideration: these regimes were  
> considered to be valuable allies against a greater evil and also to  
> be less repressive than the available alternatives in their own  
> countries (often communists or left-wing authoritarians). In much  
> the same way, both liberals and conservatives accepted the USSR as  
> an ally during WWII because the alternative of losing the war was  
> even worse. Such prudential  alliances of convenience may or not  
> have been justified (I think they were right in some cases but  
> wrong in others). But they are very different from a  belief that  
> the repressive foreign regime in question is actually a good regime  
> and a model for the US to emulate. The latter, of course, was the  
> view held by members of the CPUSA.
>
> Ilya Somin
> Assistant Professor of Law
> George Mason University School of Law
> 3301 Fairfax Dr.
> Arlington, VA 22201
> ph: 703-993-8069
> fax: 703-993-8202
> e-mail: isomin at gmu.edu
> Website: http://mason.gmu.edu/~isomin/
> SSRN Page: http://ssrn.com/author=333339
>
>
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: MARK STEIN <markstein at prodigy.net>
> Date: Tuesday, September 12, 2006 2:56 am
> Subject: Re: Jewish Champions of First Amendment or something
>
>>
>> If we are going to say that you are not a champion of the First
>> Amendment if you support a repressive foreign regime, that rules
>> out not only all Communists during the Cold War, but also the
>> entire Right and also the Cold War liberals in the center.  The
>> only ones eligible would be the democratic Left, which I suppose
>> makes sense.
>>
>> Actually, Right and Center during the Cold War should probably be
>> considered less eligible than Communists, under this criterion,
>> because they had government power in America and they used it to
>> keep foreign repressive regimes in power.
>>
>> Mark
>>
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Miguel Schor
Associate Professor of Law
Suffolk University Law School
120 Tremont St.
Boston, MA 02108
617-305-6244
SSRN Webpage http://ssrn.com/author=469730





Paul Finkelman
President William McKinley Distinguished Professor of Law
     and Public Policy
Albany Law School
80 New Scotland Avenue
Albany, New York   12208-3494

518-445-3386 
pfink at albanylaw.edu