28 Oct 2009

The Myth of "Independent Thinkers"

The Economist's Democracy in America blog has a nice little piece on the reasoning behind why so many Americans deny that there is, in fact, any global warming. A fairly straight line is drawn between global warming deniers (and their mindsets and backgrounds) and support for the torture of terrorist suspects. Part of the scientific answer:

"People's pre-existing personality biases, they find, actually shape their beliefs about the factual reality of the world; more information is unlikely to produce consensus, because people tend to reject information that does not cohere with their worldview."


The Economist blogger's further reasoning:

"A substantial number of Americans came to insist that torturing suspected terrorists was acceptable because it was a practice identified with the people they had voted for, and because it was behaviour that American troops had engaged in. The same process occurred with belief in the existence of WMD in Iraq, and, in some countries, with the 9/11 "truther" scenarios, which retain an irrational hold in many quarters; and it also seems to have occurred with climate change. We have a dynamic of political discourse that produces absolute belief in things that, often enough, aren't true. I don't believe there is any further data that could cause people who still deny the reality of anthropogenic global warming to change their minds."


Basically, people believe in irrational theories because the people who they want to lead them become associated with irrational theories. And, at this point, there is precious little that can be said that would actually convince these people otherwise, as they hold that they are "bucking the trend" or "fighting the consensus". In other words, they are being different because they want to be different and think that they are being individuals, instead of being "sheeple". It reminds me of something Ricky Gervais once said about why conspiracy theorists are obnoxious, because they think that they are just too smart because they've figured out what's "really" going on. Instead of proving how much smarter they are, they usually end up doing the opposite...

27 Oct 2009

Stalinism in Kyrgyzstan

This is a well-written - and rare - dispatch from Scott Horton, an American journalist visiting a former Stalinist gulag at Chon Tash in Kyrgyzstan. The message is simple: never forget the crimes committed by the dictators of the 20th century, but also do not lightly throw around comparisons where they are not due.

I think that the work of remembering the crimes committed by Stalinism in Central Asia are particularly important. As the article notes, in 1937 Stalin conducted a purge (ie a mass murder) of "bourgeois nationalists" in Central Asia, Kyrgyzstan and Kazakhstan included. These subversive elements were largely nationalist figures in the arts, sciences, government and politics who for the most part had reconciled themselves to communist rule. As such, in Stalin's paranoid mind they were suspect elements and needed to be treated as such. Their deaths helped to essentially cause a cultural and veritable civilizational collapse in Central Asia: all that comes after is largely Soviet colonialism.

I am happy that Kyrgyzstan so openly and officially recognizes this crimes, as it is a first step on a long road of healing. In my experience, most other Central Asian states could care less, beyond the perfunctory rehabilitation of these victims. The governing elites of these countries are largely Soviet holdovers, and the last thing that they would want to do is to help their people remember martyrs who believed in national independence, a strong culture, and even (gasp!) perhaps democracy. Kazakhstan's treatment of the Alash Orda movement, which established an independent Kazakh state during the Russian Civil War, and which promoted Kazakh nationalism, education, and scientific development, and whose leaders perished at the hands of Stalinist firing squads is a case in point. Likewise the Stalinist-caused famines of the 1930s, which killed half of the Kazakh population at the time (something like more than a million people) are mentioned only in passing. Far more energy is given to praising the Soviet victory of the Second World War, much as is done in Putin's Russia. Apparently a forthright examination of the past, and a grappling of its questions is too much of a social threat - it might lead to a developed, democratic society.

Their Man in Tashkent

Here is a compelling testimonial from the former British ambassador to Uzbekistan in 2002. It seems to be a pretty damning narrative of the extent of torture in Uzbekistan, and the lengths to which it was allegedly utilized by the Americans and British to outsource "enhanced interrogation" of terrorist suspects.

I find the author's observation that a totalitarian state feels remarkably different from even a run of the mill authoritarian state (I am much more familiar with the latter, less so with the former). I would find his argument much more solidaly presented if he avoided the neo-marxist rant at the end about a small coterie of businessmen engineering wars in Central Asia and the Middle East in order to gain contracts for fossil fuel extraction (such as the alleged link between Enron attempting to win a contact in Uzbekistan and its declaration as a major ally in the so-called "War on Terror".). But then again perhaps such theories are par for the course in the British civil service - I don't know. I do know that this testimony is still strong evidence against a particularly sadistic and bloodthirsty regime.