I may disagree with most of your policy desires for reasons that have nothing to with your position on contact.

But I wanted to focus more on revolutions.

As someone who nourishes himself in reactionary politics, I am one to speak against change. Especially when it looks to be change for the sake of change without regards to how actions have consequences, and traditional institutions have reasons why they have survived for long enough to become traditional institutions.

On the other hand, us reactionaries tend to downplay the legitimate achievements in revolutions, the more so the more we hate their players or the revolutionary regimes built.

I believe it should be unquestionable that the USSR 1991 was better off than Imperial Russia 1917. At a very high cost, yes. Too high? That is a valid debate. Since even his successors repudiated Stalinism, the argument that Stalinism was too high a cost is rather convincing. But other than that period, the USSR comes out as rather successful in improving, generally, the lot of Imperial Russian subjects. And a lot of the seeds of that improvement and even the first sprouts, were there by the mid 1920s, before Stalin took over.

I believe the same about Cuba. Cuba 1991 (fall of the Soviet sponsor) was unquestionably better off than Cuba 1958. It becomes harder to defend the regime since, but the revolution itself was an improvement over the mega corrupt and highly oppressive Batista regime.

Cambodia and North Korea are indefensible.

Eastern Europe is mixed. In the more advanced countries, East Germany and Czechoslovakia, it is reasonable to argue Communism was a setback. But in the most backward, Yugoslavia, Bulgaria, and Romania, there is a decent argument that Communism made the country progress further faster. The story is probably somewhere in the middle for Poland and Hungary.

The only true Islamic revolution, as in, having both an explicitly theocratic ideology and an explicit government plan for the future, is Iran. The Awakening revolutions of this decade may have created a more Islamic aligned environment and political systems, aside from the terrorist groups that have sprung too, but they are not explicitly theocratic in the sense Iran (or for that matter the Taliban) is. With that said, Iran is better off now that it was under the Shah, and it really only doesn't look so to Westerners because of ideological glasses. But there are countless indicators which don't lie.

Of course, a big problem with revolutionaries, which institutional politicians suffer to a lesser degree, is not knowing when to quit.



Cuteness is to die for
Cuteness cannot fail
Cuteness knows no limit
Cuteness will prevail