Rightly so, of course. (I've already been chastised in anonymous e-mails!) As a matter of cultural and political norms, though, it is interesting that my rather benign comments about the collapse of the Soviet Union should be thought refutable-simply-by-quotation by someone on the American Right. Perhaps they forgot that Stalin died in the 1950s?
UPDATE: So I’ve now waded through maybe a third of the 100+ comments from the above link, which are mostly at the intellectual and moral level one would expect from the readers of the Volokh blog. To be sure, there are exemplary instances of condescension from below (the nobodies who comment anonymously on blogs seem to have perfected that art), though in general they call to mind Gore Vidal's reply when asked to respond to Michele Bachmann's criticism: "too stupid to deserve a response." (Mysteriously, despite the Volokh Blog’s official comment policy, they somehow never manage to moderate out the irrelevant insults and abuse directed at their political enemies—ain’t that the strangest thing?)
More substantive is a follow-up item by another Volokh blogger, a somewhat curious mix of the reasonable, the fanciful, the irrelevant, and the quite revealing. The commenters here do a better job, noting his curious interpretation of my comments and his misrepresentation of his own sources (which actually confirm my point). I'll just comment on four odd aspects of the reply: (1) although the Berlin Wall fell in 1989, and the Soviet Union in 1991, Professor Somin credits all the new democracies in Eastern Europe to the latter (surely this is a harder question about historical causation than Professor Somin lets on); (2) he makes the extraordinary claim that "[e]ven the more authoritarian post-communist successor states are all far freer than their communist predecessors were," which doesn't seem a very plausible claim about Uzbekistan or Turkmenistan, just to take two obvious examples; (3) the economic and human catastrophe of the early-to-mid 1990s is just glossed away as "a difficult transition" (!); (4) what is most revealing is Professor Somin's description of the criminal war of aggression against Iraq, in which hundreds of thousands were killed and some four million dislocated: "Without getting into the rights and wrongs of the Iraq War, I think it’s not at all obvious that it counts as a 'world-historic crime.' Although the war may not have been worth its cost from a US point of view and was often badly conducted, the replacement of a mass-murdering despot by a relatively democratic government is very likely a net gain for Iraqis themselves." Curious that one is supposed to be able to assess whether an event is a "world-historic crime" without "gettings into the rights and wrongs," and ignoring all the human costs (I am assuming that Iraqis are humans too). (Surely the stronger response would be to question whether the Soviet Union, had it survived in enfeebled form, really would have deterred the U.S. aggression against Iraq.)
I'll conclude with a literate, if presumptuous, e-mail from someone who I take it arrived via the Volokh blog, and whose implicit reasoning seems to be similar to Professor Somin's:
Will you take the time to help me reconcile the disconnect between this observation: "Certainly everyone (except the despots) welcomes the end of totalitarian regimes...." and this one, " Finally, certain other world-historic crimes, such as the U.S. war of aggression against Iraq....' What confuses me some is the fact that you claim that everyone welcomes the end of totalitarian regimes and then, when a world-coalition ends a totalitarian regime you call it a "world-historic crime...." What's up with the doublespeak? Am I the only one who has noticed this wacky contradiction?
To which I replied:
I guess I am missing the contradiction. The “war of aggression” (a legal term of art in international law) against Iraq was a crime, in violation of international law and the principle laid down at Nuremberg forbidding military action against other countries except in cases of self-defense. That crime resulted in the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people, and the displacement of approximately four million others. That the fall of a despot is a good thing does not justify any and all means, criminal or not, to bring it about. In the case of the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, there was no morally or legally questionable intervening agency at work.
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