Fatwas, Communist Book Burnings, and Socialized Health Care
What do these three topics have in common? Nothing except that they all stem from warped and dangerous world views:
1) Foreign Policy has a list of the stupidest fatwas, including fatwas against Salman Rushdie, the polio vaccine (an imperialist plot!), Pokemon (a Zionist plot!), unclothed sex, and even one demanding that women breastfeed their male coworkers (no, I'm not kidding). Reason adds a fatwa forbidding publicizing the fact that Muhammed's followers would drink his urine, even though it's documented, because it's embarrassing in the modern era.
2) What do you get when you combine Communist- and Tsarist-style propaganda with Hitler Youth? Putin's newest effort at controlling the population: Nashi! Uniforms, brainwashing sessions, violent protesting of perceived enemies of the state, and even book burnings! This is frightening stuff indeed. Putin is even engaging in 1984-like revisionist history:
Just as the Nazis in 1930s rewrote Germany's history, the Putin Kremlin is rewriting Russia's. It has rehaabilitated Stalin, the greatest massmurderer of the 20th century. And it is demonising Boris Yeltsin, Russia's first democratically-elected president. That he destroyed totalitarianism is ignored. Instead, he is denounced for his "weak" pro-Western policies.
While distorting its own history, the Kremlin denounces other countries. Mr Putin was quick to blame Britain's "colonial mentality" for our government's request that Russia try to find a legal means of extraditing Andrei Lugovoi, the prime suspect in the murder of Alexander Litvinenko.
Yet the truth is that Britain, like most Western countries, flagellates itself for the crimes of the past. Indeed, British schoolchildren rarely learn anything positive about their country's empire. And, if Mr Putin has his way, Russian pupils will learn nothing bad about the Soviet empire, which was far bloodier, more brutal - and more recent.
A new guide for history teachers - explicitly endorsed by Mr Putin - brushes off Stalin's crimes. It describes him as "the most successful leader of the USSR". But it skates over the colossal human cost - 25m people were shot and starved in the cause of communism.
"Political repression was used to mobilise not only rank-and-file citizens but also the ruling elite," it says. In other words, Stalin wanted to make the country strong, so he may have been a bit harsh at times. At any time since the collapse of Soviet totalitarianism in the late 1980s, that would have seemed a nauseating whitewash. Now, it is treated as bald historical fact.
Yikes.
3) David Gratzer exposes the flaws in socialized medicine in his recent article in City Journal: The Ugly Truth About Canadian Health Care". After detailing some of the problems with the Canadian system (including rationing, dirty hospitals, long waiting lists, and substandard treatment) he notes that the problem is not uniquely Canadian and that the American system, while flawed, is vastly superior:
Nor were the problems I identified unique to Canada-they characterized all government-run health-care systems. Consider the recent British controversy over a cancer patient who tried to get an appointment with a specialist, only to have it canceled-48 times. More than 1 million Britons must wait for some type of care, with 200,000 in line for longer than six months. A while back, I toured a public hospital in Washington, D.C., with Tim Evans, a senior fellow at the Centre for the New Europe. The hospital was dark and dingy, but Evans observed that it was cleaner than anything in his native England. In France, the supply of doctors is so limited that during an August 2003 heat wave-when many doctors were on vacation and hospitals were stretched beyond capacity-15,000 elderly citizens died. Across Europe, state-of-the-art drugs aren’t available. And so on.
...
One often hears variations on Krugman’s argument-that America lags behind other countries in crude health outcomes. But such outcomes reflect a mosaic of factors, such as diet, lifestyle, drug use, and cultural values. It pains me as a doctor to say this, but health care is just one factor in health. Americans live 75.3 years on average, fewer than Canadians (77.3) or the French (76.6) or the citizens of any Western European nation save Portugal. Health care influences life expectancy, of course. But a life can end because of a murder, a fall, or a car accident. Such factors aren’t academic-homicide rates in the United States are much higher than in other countries (eight times higher than in France, for instance). In The Business of Health, Robert Ohsfeldt and John Schneider factor out intentional and unintentional injuries from life-expectancy statistics and find that Americans who don’t die in car crashes or homicides outlive people in any other Western country.
And if we measure a health-care system by how well it serves its sick citizens, American medicine excels. Five-year cancer survival rates bear this out. For leukemia, the American survival rate is almost 50 percent; the European rate is just 35 percent. Esophageal carcinoma: 12 percent in the United States, 6 percent in Europe. The survival rate for prostate cancer is 81.2 percent here, yet 61.7 percent in France and down to 44.3 percent in England-a striking variation.
1) Foreign Policy has a list of the stupidest fatwas, including fatwas against Salman Rushdie, the polio vaccine (an imperialist plot!), Pokemon (a Zionist plot!), unclothed sex, and even one demanding that women breastfeed their male coworkers (no, I'm not kidding). Reason adds a fatwa forbidding publicizing the fact that Muhammed's followers would drink his urine, even though it's documented, because it's embarrassing in the modern era.
2) What do you get when you combine Communist- and Tsarist-style propaganda with Hitler Youth? Putin's newest effort at controlling the population: Nashi! Uniforms, brainwashing sessions, violent protesting of perceived enemies of the state, and even book burnings! This is frightening stuff indeed. Putin is even engaging in 1984-like revisionist history:
Just as the Nazis in 1930s rewrote Germany's history, the Putin Kremlin is rewriting Russia's. It has rehaabilitated Stalin, the greatest massmurderer of the 20th century. And it is demonising Boris Yeltsin, Russia's first democratically-elected president. That he destroyed totalitarianism is ignored. Instead, he is denounced for his "weak" pro-Western policies.
While distorting its own history, the Kremlin denounces other countries. Mr Putin was quick to blame Britain's "colonial mentality" for our government's request that Russia try to find a legal means of extraditing Andrei Lugovoi, the prime suspect in the murder of Alexander Litvinenko.
Yet the truth is that Britain, like most Western countries, flagellates itself for the crimes of the past. Indeed, British schoolchildren rarely learn anything positive about their country's empire. And, if Mr Putin has his way, Russian pupils will learn nothing bad about the Soviet empire, which was far bloodier, more brutal - and more recent.
A new guide for history teachers - explicitly endorsed by Mr Putin - brushes off Stalin's crimes. It describes him as "the most successful leader of the USSR". But it skates over the colossal human cost - 25m people were shot and starved in the cause of communism.
"Political repression was used to mobilise not only rank-and-file citizens but also the ruling elite," it says. In other words, Stalin wanted to make the country strong, so he may have been a bit harsh at times. At any time since the collapse of Soviet totalitarianism in the late 1980s, that would have seemed a nauseating whitewash. Now, it is treated as bald historical fact.
Yikes.
3) David Gratzer exposes the flaws in socialized medicine in his recent article in City Journal: The Ugly Truth About Canadian Health Care". After detailing some of the problems with the Canadian system (including rationing, dirty hospitals, long waiting lists, and substandard treatment) he notes that the problem is not uniquely Canadian and that the American system, while flawed, is vastly superior:
Nor were the problems I identified unique to Canada-they characterized all government-run health-care systems. Consider the recent British controversy over a cancer patient who tried to get an appointment with a specialist, only to have it canceled-48 times. More than 1 million Britons must wait for some type of care, with 200,000 in line for longer than six months. A while back, I toured a public hospital in Washington, D.C., with Tim Evans, a senior fellow at the Centre for the New Europe. The hospital was dark and dingy, but Evans observed that it was cleaner than anything in his native England. In France, the supply of doctors is so limited that during an August 2003 heat wave-when many doctors were on vacation and hospitals were stretched beyond capacity-15,000 elderly citizens died. Across Europe, state-of-the-art drugs aren’t available. And so on.
...
One often hears variations on Krugman’s argument-that America lags behind other countries in crude health outcomes. But such outcomes reflect a mosaic of factors, such as diet, lifestyle, drug use, and cultural values. It pains me as a doctor to say this, but health care is just one factor in health. Americans live 75.3 years on average, fewer than Canadians (77.3) or the French (76.6) or the citizens of any Western European nation save Portugal. Health care influences life expectancy, of course. But a life can end because of a murder, a fall, or a car accident. Such factors aren’t academic-homicide rates in the United States are much higher than in other countries (eight times higher than in France, for instance). In The Business of Health, Robert Ohsfeldt and John Schneider factor out intentional and unintentional injuries from life-expectancy statistics and find that Americans who don’t die in car crashes or homicides outlive people in any other Western country.
And if we measure a health-care system by how well it serves its sick citizens, American medicine excels. Five-year cancer survival rates bear this out. For leukemia, the American survival rate is almost 50 percent; the European rate is just 35 percent. Esophageal carcinoma: 12 percent in the United States, 6 percent in Europe. The survival rate for prostate cancer is 81.2 percent here, yet 61.7 percent in France and down to 44.3 percent in England-a striking variation.