Columnistas invitados/Guest columnists

Kristian Niemitz, Head of Political Economy at the IEA, wrote a book last year in which he explores the reasons why the idea of socialism persists as a viable economic system. In “Socialism: the Failed Idea that Never Dies” Niemitz notes that whenever real-life events demonstrate, yet again, that socialism, in all its guises as an economic system, simply doesn’t work, its ever-faithful adherents in the West declare that what failed wasn’t “real socialism”.

We should note that the “fake socialism” epithet is only ever attached to a project after the event; when a socialist project is still under way, or in its early stages, no one ever claims “what we are doing isn’t real socialism”. As Niemitz shows, every socialist project goes through a honeymoon phase during which prominent Western intellectual liberals praise it enthusiastically. Only when the project’s grandiose ideas are seen to founder “in shallows and in miseries” does it get reclassified as “not real socialism”.

Led by personal reflections

I have pondered this conundrum long and hard for many years. As I have explained in earlier essays, both my parents were lifelong communists, and when the South African Nationalist government made life intolerable for them, as anti-apartheid activists rather than mere communists, our family emigrated to England.

It was then, as a teenager, that I took the trouble to read the texts that underpinned my parents’ Marxist beliefs. This was a revelation. At that point, for me, those beliefs lost all credibility. In fairness to my parents, I believe that their detestation of apartheid had developed into a fully-fledged embrace of communist principles. I, by contrast, had no difficulty in distinguishing between the utterly abhorrent apartheid regime and equally abhorrent, albeit different, tenets of communism. Consequently there was no risk that, as happened with my parents, these ideas might elide into a single belief system. I also had the advantage of learning the full import of Khrushchev’s 20^th Congress revelations about Stalinism, which my parents and their closest “comrades” simply couldn’t countenance.

The distinction between communism and socialism isn’t usefully pertinent to this debate. Whether the former is an extreme form of the latter, or the latter a milder form of the former, is merely a question of degree, not of destination: the trajectory of both finishes up in varying degrees of societal impoverishment or worse. 

Kristol pasa primero de trotskista a demócrata anti-comunista y finalmente a neo-conservador. Se consideraba a sí mismo como un progresista “asaltado por la realidad”.

¡De trotskista a soldado, a profesor universitario y a demócrata y luego a neoconservador!

El Padre o Padrino del neo-conservadurismo estadounidense, nace en una familia judía ortodoxa en Brooklyn, Nueva York, el 22 de enero de 1920.

Reconocido intelectual, escritor, periodista, editor y pensador social.

En 1940 obtiene el Bachillerato en Historia en el City College de Nueva York, donde milita durante unos años en un grupo afiliado a la Cuarta Internacional de León Trotsky. Es decir que el primer Kristol fue marxista y trotskista, por lo tanto adversario del régimen soviético. Ya en su madurez dijo no arrepentirse de esa etapa y que más bien fue un honor ser parte de dicha organización revolucionaria.

En esa etapa y en ese centro de estudios conoce y se casa con la escritora Gertrude Himmelfarb con quien procrea dos hijos.

De 1941 a 1944 pertenece al ejército de los Estados Unidos y luego es profesor en la Universidad de Nueva York.

La democracia supone idealmente una cierta ‘convicción’ o ‘fe democrática’ de carácter ‘práctico’ –no ideológico–, aceptada y compartida como fundamento común de la convivencia social por los diversos credos o familias políticas, filosóficas y religiosas existentes en su seno, cualesquiera que ellas sean y al margen de los vaivenes de las mayorías y las minorías.

Este principio es el único que hace posible, aunque no sin dificultades, el diálogo, el consenso y la colaboración al servicio del bien común, sin renunciar a las legítimas diferencias intelectuales y espirituales que los separan y contraponen.

Desde tal punto de vista, la democracia supone el reconocimiento, aceptación y respeto del hecho mismo de ‘la diversidad política, intelectual y espiritual’, como manifestación directa de la dignidad de la persona humana y de la vigencia de sus derechos inalienables. Sin ello, la democracia no es más que una apariencia destinada a desaparecer de la faz de la tierra.

¿Cuál es la realidad actual de las democracias?

Hay varios hechos, perfectamente sincronizados, que indican que la situación actual no puede ser más grave.

Every night on my TV screen, Alan Shore stands up in defense of a quixotic quest in the "Boston Legal" TV series. Sometimes he defends the clearly guilty; sometimes he protects the innocent. But in each episode full of courtroom magic, he bends the jury to his will.

As a lawyer working in Pakistan, I have no shortage of interesting cases. But it is difficult for me to re-enact my Lahori version of Boston Legal because we have no jury trials in Pakistan.

Interestingly, the case which led to the end of jury trials in the sub-continent was certainly worthy of a Boston Legal episode, if not several.

In 1959, Kawas Nanavati, a commander in the Indian Navy, was stationed at Bombay. Married to an English beauty by the name of Sylvie, and universally described as handsome, the 34-year-old mariner seemed to have it all. Unfortunately for him, his wife was sleeping with his best friend, Prem Ahuja.

On April 27, 1959, Nanavati confronted his wife and learnt of her adultery. Pausing only to sign out a revolver from the Navy’s storeroom, Nanavati then dashed off to Ahuja’s house where his friend was lolling around in a towel. Nanavati asked him if he would marry Sylvie and take care of the children. Ahuja’s somewhat undiplomatic response was blunt:

“Will I marry every woman I sleep with?”