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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   32173 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 17, 2023

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But Hélène Carrère d'Ancoss, in 1979, wrote a book called "The Fractured Empire," in which she was wrong by just one year – she was expecting the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1990.

Whatever was good in her book she copied from Emmanuel Todd.

Very curious, but very frequent, is the attitude of some economists: after a little discussion of principle, they adopt the statistics provided by these soviet authorities who also prohibit the access of the three quarters of their territory to tourists, academics and western journalists.

Typical illustration of the elementary inconsistency of the model proposed by the communists to describe the soviet social system: if the U.S.S.R. had, as they claim, a stable social system, she would not be afraid of open its borders and allow free movement of people, almost sixty years after the revolution. We can, we must deduce from the closing of borders that soviet society is considered fragile by its leaders. If it is fragile, there are internal tensions fundamentals.

So how do we inform ourselves? The figures that describe the economic relations between communist and western countries - exports, imports - are verifiable. Those numbers must therefore be privileged for the analysis of communist economic systems. External exchanges can provide extremely valuable information about the inner workings of an economy.

Soviet statistics are sad and false, not totally hopeless. There are holes in the abundant production of the official statistics of the Soviet Union. Characteristic example: demography. The eras of purges, which should result in demographic terms, by an increase in the mortality rate age and a decline in the birth rate, appear clearly, in hollow one might say, as an absence of statistics. Collectivization, a period of civil war, of deportation tations and famines led to a disappearance of the complete information on death and birth statistics. Between 1924 and 1930, the birth rate hovered around 38-40 per thousand. From 1931 to 1935, the services of statistics did not provide this simple demographic index. Statistical holes, especially when they follow at a time of relative abundance in numbers, mark Stalinism. In China, the great leap forward was quickly followed by a big leap backwards from the previous abundance of statistics that alert us to the extent of "errors” of the Chinese Communist Party.

The age pyramid keeps encrusted, for decades, the mark of the "errors” of Stalinism, Maoism or any other totalitarian variety, who treat human society as a field to be cleared and left fallow, a blank page, like a game of massacre. We realized, a little late, that there was a shortage of 30 to 60 million inhabitants in the U.S.S.R. We notice, in 1975, that China is short of about 150 million.

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