I.F. Stone on transparency and the cold war and its applicability to the current political situation in Burma (c. 2006)

Brad De Long's blog quotes from the cold war era independent journalist I.F. Stone. He highlights the shortcomings of the Communist economic system of the Soviet Union:

No society is good in which men fear to think--much less speak--freely. I don't care how many tons of steel the Russians produce.... This society is a paradise only for a rather stupid type of Communist party member.... If you believe everything you read in the papers, lack imagination, and feel no need to think for yourself, you can be happy in the Soviet Union. Or you can shut yourself up in a scientific laboratory and work on your own scientific problems and close your eyes and ears to what is going on outside or maybe even to your unlucky colleague next door....

Lack of transparency is a major theme:

The present leaders of the Soviet Union are dishonest... with their own people.... If they want to make a clean break with the Stalinist past, they can best demonstrate it by telling their people what they are doing and why.... No one outside a very small circle at the top really knows why Beria was executed.... Only persons rendered permanently idiotic by complete submergence in party-line literature ill take at face value the charge that he was a British or imperialist agent. This is how Stalin operated... first slander and then the firing squad were his answers. And everybody turned out to be a foreign agent!...

To blame the evils of Stalinism on Stalin is obviously inadequate.... Stalinism was the natural fruit of the whole spirit of the Communist movement. The wanton executions, the frame-ups, the unjust convictions and exiles--these would not have been possible except in a movement whose members had been taught not only to obey unquestionably but to hate.... This was the spirit the Communist movement bred. Stalin embodied that spirit. To change it one must do more than hang Stalin in effigy, or defame him in self-serving panic as Khrushchev is doing....So long as there is only one party, and it has a monopoly of government and controls all expression, there cannot be freedom."

Then I.F. Stone writes in 1954 of McCarthyism and how it has stifled all thought in the United States:

"To doubt the power of the devil... is... to incur suspicion of being oneself in league with the powers of evil. So all the fighters against McCarthyism are impelled to adopt its premises... Ther are some charges which must be laughed off or brushed off. They cannot be disproved. If a man charges that he saw Eisenhower riding a broomstick over the White House, he will never be convinced to the contrary by sworn evidence that the President was in bed reading a Western....

Nowhere in American politics is there evidence of any important figure (even Stevenson) prepared to talk in sober, mature, and realistic terms of the real problems which arise in a real world where national rivalries, mass aspirations, and ideas clash as naturally as waves of the sea. The premises of free society and of liberalism find no one to voice them, yet McCarthyisms will not be ended until someone has the nerve to make this kind of fundamental attack on it...

Finally, I.F. Stone notes that there were lost opportunities for peace and world prosperity, a wasted window of opportunity for detente, glasnost, and end of the cold war:

"[T]he ferment that began with Stalin's death... events whose momentum [the oligarchs] may not be able to control... **opened Russia's windows on the West... given us a chance to resume contact with this huge and wonderful segment of humanity**....[W]e ought to **strive to keep the windows open, and to help along the process which may someday carry Russia forward... to freer institutions**. I believe not only her people but her rulers want peace; and I believe that given peace they will slowly liquidate Russia's terrible backwardness and unholy past."

Wasted, as Stone points out, by McCarthy era rhetoric, the blather of people so self-absorbed in their own ridiculous nonsense that they lost an invaluable opportunity.

The current situation between the Burmese government and the rest of the world is very similar to the cold war era situation that I.F. Stone describes. In likewise fashion, there have been and will be in the future, opportunities to open Burma up, end its long isolation, and start improving life for its people in terms of work, business, health, and educational opportunities.