It’s really hard to disentangle local causation of suffering from external meddling. It seems like an obvious fact to me that there would have been less suffering in the third world if the US and the USSR hadn’t been keeping score based on who had successfully couped / repressed a third world country’s government more recently.
More or less what I was going to say, with the addendum that the civil wars OW brings up—with the exception of Argentina—are not in the same reference class. In the 1970′s Argentina had a population of over 20 million, making its death rate the same, if not less, than Chile’s.
El Salvador’s troubles were brought on by a border dispute; Guatemala’s number includes a genocide of their indigenous Mayan people. The last three take place in countries with much higher population density and a much more severe history of political and economic instability. Chile’s economy does not run entirely on sugar, coffee, bananas and coke.
Argentina’s policies were very similar to Chile’s; they, like Pinochet’s Chile, killed thousands of revolutionaries in a brutal and oppressive offensive (notice that I made note of this in the comment). If you’re wanting to say Pinochet made the wrong decision because another country did better, Argentina is -not- the country to compare to.
(Note that I’m not particularly a fan of Argentina’s series of dictators, whose administrations inevitably ended in death or coup.)
It’s really hard to disentangle local causation of suffering from external meddling. It seems like an obvious fact to me that there would have been less suffering in the third world if the US and the USSR hadn’t been keeping score based on who had successfully couped / repressed a third world country’s government more recently.
Cf. Twilight Struggle (which is an amazing game, btw).
More or less what I was going to say, with the addendum that the civil wars OW brings up—with the exception of Argentina—are not in the same reference class. In the 1970′s Argentina had a population of over 20 million, making its death rate the same, if not less, than Chile’s.
El Salvador’s troubles were brought on by a border dispute; Guatemala’s number includes a genocide of their indigenous Mayan people. The last three take place in countries with much higher population density and a much more severe history of political and economic instability. Chile’s economy does not run entirely on sugar, coffee, bananas and coke.
Argentina’s policies were very similar to Chile’s; they, like Pinochet’s Chile, killed thousands of revolutionaries in a brutal and oppressive offensive (notice that I made note of this in the comment). If you’re wanting to say Pinochet made the wrong decision because another country did better, Argentina is -not- the country to compare to.
(Note that I’m not particularly a fan of Argentina’s series of dictators, whose administrations inevitably ended in death or coup.)
Nothing in my previous comment says this. Yawn.