AND POL POT SOLVED THE PARKING PROBLEMS IN PHNOM PENH:

Can Any Good Come Of Radical Islam?: A modernizing force? Maybe. (FRANCIS FUKUYAMA AND NADAV SAMIN, September 12, 2002, Wall Street Journal)

Could [Islamism], like both fascism and communism before it, serve inadvertently as a modernizing force, preparing the way for Muslim societies that can respond not destructively but constructively to the challenge of the West?

The question is not as absurd as it may sound. Comparisons are especially tricky here, but the Bolsheviks succeeded in creating an industrialized, urbanized Russia, and Hitler managed to get rid of the Junkers and much of the class stratification that had characterized prewar Germany. Through a tortuous and immensely costly path, both of these "isms" cleared away some of the premodern underbrush that had obstructed the growth of liberal democracy. There are, of course, much safer and more peaceful routes toward modernization, such as those taken by countries like South Korea or Britain or the United States, and less expensive paths to modernity were surely available to Russia and Germany. But one has to deal with what one has, and in Islamic cultures, in any case, there is arguably much more underbrush to be cleared away. If Islamism is directed as much against traditional forms of Islam as against the West, could it, too, be a source of such creative destruction?

What the heck has gotten into Mr. Fukuyama lately; have the fights with the clonophiles addled his brain? This is diabolical nonsense. Can he really be saying that Russia is in better economic shape today, thanks to the Bolsheviks, than it would have been had it continued the gradual reform that folks like Richard Pipes have demonstrated was already well underway in Tsarist times? In fact, considering that Russia is in just about the worst economic shape of any European nation, how much worse could the situation be if the Tsars were still ruling there without having ever reformed? In what sense is Russia today a healthier polis than it was in 1917?
Posted by Orrin Judd at September 13, 2002 3:00 PM