Lessons I draw from this history:
I draw a few more lessons from this (and from conversations with other survivors and escapees from horrific regimes):
6. Change is both gradual and terrifyingly fast - there is often months or years of buildup and warning, before weeks of crisis.
7. Terrifyingly fast is not instantaneous. It costs a lot, but one can get out if one actually believes the evidence in time.
Another detail: My grandmother planed to join the Communist Revolution together with two of her classmates, who made it farther than she did. One made it all the way to Communist controlled territory (Yan'an) and later became a high official in the new government. She ended up going to prison in one of the subsequent political movements. Another one almost made it before being stopped by Nationalist authorities, who forced her to write a confession and repentance before releasing her back to her family. That ended up being dug up during the Cultural Revolution and got her branded as a traitor to Communism.
So I can also testify from personal experience that if those in charge of schools and the media want to, and there's enough social pressure to not resist, it's not very hard to brainwash a child.
I grew up in communist Czechoslovakia, and I am pretty sure if the regime wouldn't end, I would probably be a Communist Party member now. (And if not, probably only because I would have failed at some political game.)
If you control all information one gets, it is not that hard to create a believable "Matrix".
In reality, the information control is never perfect... but then we also accept that in real life there is some noise, some things we don't know, etc. So if something in the official picture doesn't fit, there are many ways to explain it away. Even if you start to doubt, the doubt is likely of the kind "it is essentially correct, but slightly exaggerated" rather than "it is complete bullshit".
And of course, the regime is always ready to excuse its systemic failings as acts of foreign intervention, sabotage, someone's personal failing, etc. And because foreign countries do exist, and personal failings do exist, it sounds believable.
For younger people, there is the illusion of perfection. For older people, who have already seen the imperfections, there is the promise that they are the last generation to suffer, but their children will live in the true paradise they helped to build. (Of course, the following generations will get exactly the same fake promise.)
I was never a strong believer. There was never a moment where my "faith shattered", because I never had "faith" in the first place. It's just, given the filtered information, how the regime described the situation, that seemed to me like a plausible description of reality. I haven't heard any alternative description, and I didn't have a reason to invent one.
Also, I was a small kid, so my ability to think about politics was quite limited. For example, I heard the broadcast of Voice of America / Radio Free Europe (I am not sure which one, maybe both) a few times, and I was warned that this is something controversial that I am never supposed to mention to anyone outside my family, lest I want to get my family into big trouble... but frankly, I didn't understand what the broadcast was about. It was just some boring adult talk; I had no idea what was supposed to be exciting.
From my perspective, living in the regime was just an ordinary everyday experience. Like, you are told to go to school, so you go to school, because everyone does, duh. (Imagine a society that never invented the concept of homeschooling.) Then you are told to join the Pioneer movement, so you do, because everyone doe...
Most scholars of the field regard the Holodomor famine as unintentional on the part of the Soviet government.
When the government takes away food from the entire country, by searching the farms and confiscating every grain... it takes some chutzpah to call the resulting famine "unintentional".
There is evidence that members of the Soviet administration tried to reduce the impact of the famine.
Some people working in Soviet administration were not monsters. Of course. There were good people among the Nazis, too. Doesn't make the regimes less evil.
Purposeful deaths of Marxist regimes might be around 10 million.
If you agree to reframe this as "even the greatest apologists of Marxist regimes, after excluding all deniable deaths, couldn't reduce the number of victims below 10 millions", okay.
(But to me it feels like having a debate that Nazis only killed 3 million Jews, because according to some historians, people who died of X, Y, and Z don't really count. Yeah, maybe. So what?)
The dichotomy betwen "socialist" and "capitalist" countries makes about as much sense as a dichotomy between e.g. "Mormons" and "non-Mormons". That is, it probably sounds very important and profound to a Mormon, but it puts many different kinds of stuff in one basket.
Unless your point was that British colonialism was evil, in which case I agree. There is enough place for more than one evil regime in history.
But "capitalism" in the sense of "a country not governed by a Communist party" is a non-apple.
For the sake of thought experiment, suppose that there are three highly murderous religions, e.g. Mormons, Moonists, Mohists; and everyone else is relatively peaceful.
If you say, in such situation, that Mormons are highly murderous, it doesn't mean you want to take credit from the remaining two, unless you use words like "most murderous" or "the only murderous".
There are two things I have an issue with:
One-sided "whataboutism". Like, in every discussion about Mormons, someone inevitably mentions Moonists and Mohists... but in discussions about Moonists or Mohists, Mormons are typically not mentioned. That makes me suspect that the real reason of the objection is simply to move the discussion away from the Mormons.
(For example, if you wrote an article about the Great Famine in Ireland, it would be pretty inappropriate for me to try derailing it into a debate about communism.)
Creating an almost-all-encompassing basket of "non-Mormons" which includes the murderous Moonists and Mohists, along with the rest of humanity, me and you and Gandhi included; pointing out a few examples of Moonist and Mohist atrocities, and concluding "as you can see, the non-Mormons are just as evil".
(The basket is "capitalist country" which is pretty much a synonym of "a country not ruled by a communist party". Yes, a few of them are pretty evil. Are they representative of non-communists to the same degree Stalin + Mao + Pol Pot are representatives of communist regimes?)
Well, I am not qualified to judge historical research. As a personal heuristic, I assume things were more likely towards the worse end of the scale. Not only because of Soviet official propaganda, but also because many "experts" in the West publishing about Soviet Union were shamelessly bribed. Thus I believe that the consensus of experts will be biased towards denying atrocities.
To explain why I consider the Western "experts" unreliable, remember that Soviet Union was a totalitarian state, and only people approved by the regime were allowed to enter the country. So, as a first step of selection, only those Western journalists and historians who already demonstrated pro-communist sympathies were allowed to enter the country. As a second step, those who afterwards wrote anything negative, were not allowed to return. (So if you wanted to build a career as an "expert on Soviet Union", you had a strong incentive to only write what they wanted you to write. If you didn't, you lost access, and then your colleagues attacked you as "he writes as if he has reliable and up-to-date information about Soviet Union, but he didn't visit the country for the last X years, and all his research is on...
One thing I'm curious about - what did the process of the border closing off look like, and what was going on in the weeks leading up to it? While I have no near term plans to emigrate, I often wonder what the warning signs are that it's time to start seriously looking, and what the warning signs are that it's time to GTFO.
In general, I think people try to time markets much more than they have skill for. Suppose you think there's a stock bubble; the temptation is to buy, hold as it rises, and then sell at the top of the bubble before everything comes crashing down. But enough people are trying to do that that you need some special skill in order to be in the leading edge, able to sell when there's a buyer. It's much less risky to just sell the stocks as soon as you think there's a bubble, which foregoes any additional gains but means you avoid the crash entirely (by taking it on voluntarily, sort of).
A similar thing happened at the start of the pandemic, where my plan was basically "look, I don't think I'm going to be especially good at the risk assessment, I want to just lock down now instead of staying open to get the marginal few weeks of meetings or hangouts or whatever," and various other friends said "look, I believe in math, I think it's just paranoia to lock down immediately instead of doing so based on a cost-benefit analysis." None of us knew it at the time, but the official tests were faulty and delayed and other testing was being suppressed, and so the numbers being used for the cost-bene...
Noticeably, if there's a revolution in some country, it's much better for the new government to murder all of the people who would want to leave than let them leave.
At Yalta conference, Stalin requested that all captured Russian soldiers be returned to Soviet Union. Especially the ones who turned and fought against Soviet Union during WW2. After hearing about the deal, many of them committed suicide rather than return. Those who were returned (both those who turned and those who did not) were sent to death camps. According to Soviet policy, all prisoners of war were automatically considered traitors. They were supposed to fight harder, duh.
Then there was no one to contradict the Soviet propaganda, and many left-wing people in the West parroted it completely uncritically. So as a part of propaganda, Russian expatriates who left before the WW2 were asked to return and help rebuild their war-ruined country, because "it's completely different now". Those naive enough to believe the message and actually return were also sent to death camps.
By the way, speaking about Armenians, who remembers all those ethnic groups exterminated by communists? ("Which ethnic groups?" My point exactly.) Even in the recent debate about whether Crimea was historically inhabited by Russians or Ukrainians... susprisingly, the correct answer is: neither.
Suppose you think there's a stock bubble; the temptation is to buy, hold as it rises, and then sell at the top of the bubble before everything comes crashing down. But enough people are trying to do that that you need some special skill in order to be in the leading edge, able to sell when there's a buyer. It's much less risky to just sell the stocks as soon as you think there's a bubble, which foregoes any additional gains but means you avoid the crash entirely (by taking it on voluntarily, sort of).
The correct move in this situation isn't to get out early, but to leverage down. By keeping a balanced fraction in cash, you both accumulate the gains as the bubble inflates, and survive the inevitable crash—and it's likely you can come out ahead on net. The appropriate ratio depends on the amount of volatility you're expecting.
I'm not sure how to generalize this insight, but maybe there's a similar move available? A winter home in Costa Rica, perhaps? Even if that means a smaller summer home here.
Interesting how it mirrors the experience of my great grandparents after the Russian revolution through the 1920s and 1930s. It always starts with good intentions, but eventually deteriorates into the usual squabble for power and control, ideology superseded by envy and greed. I was also not told much about it until I was out of the situation where knowing too much would be dangerous. People never learn, of course. Wonder when and where will this pattern repeat (or has repeated).
When COVID started, I made a checklist for what to look for to predict a global catastrophic pandemic based on the mechanisms of transmission and harm and historical outcomes in various outbreaks.
It would be interesting to make a checklist for what to look for when expecting the rise of a totalitarian state from a democratic one, vetted for sensitivity and specificity against historical regimes.
Do we have any examples of such an event in the last century?
Totalitarianism is not a very useful political category. Authoritarianism is a preferred concept. In general democracies tend to have larger and more effective bureaucracies. China and the Soviet Union are outliers in this regard, inaccurately suggesting that authoritarian states are necessarily large and interventionist. They are usually much less competent.
Authoritarian states can emerge from democracies. The following risk factors are observed
There's coupcast model. It's not very good https://oefresearch.org/activities/coup-cast
Because the US is a presidential model with many veto points and FPTP, it is more likely to have a coup. This makes it unusual among long established democracies. Japan is also a younger democracy (first regime change in 1994).
Assigning a base rate here is difficult. We know presidential systems have more coups, and there are very few multi-century presidential systems. If your base rate is based on only those factors its low because of New Zealand and Sweden and the UK, which almost never have divided legislatures or divided judiciaries. This is a real problem - all the democracies that last as long as us look different. The democracies that are most like us had coups long ago.
If you ignore that problem, the base rate is like .3%. If your reference class is presidential democracies, then your base rate is more like 3%.
Chile had lots of other risk factors:
Of Chile's three neighbours, two experienced 7 or more coup attempts in 1950-89. The other, Peru, experienced 5. Executive and parliament not just divided, the legislature in coalition against the executive President elected with just 36% of the vote Riots and protests were common. Escalating political violence Inflation 140%/year Judiciary publically criticizing the executive Failed coup just one month prior Economic contraction
All of those combined I say make coups quite likely. Over the 5 year period from 71 to 76, maybe 25%.
Do the data speak about the relationship between coups and federal systems? In the US, there is more than one level of fundamental government in play, even though they use similar models. I wonder if this helps to explain our weird longevity.
I just did a very quick search. The literature focuses really heavily on the relationship between federalism and interethnic violence at the national level (if we give tribe B their own province, are they more or less likely to launch a coup/civil war). Your question is addressed much less often, but if I had the time to dig I could find something. One note - among non-democratic states I doubt a relationship. Soviet Union was federal and high-coup.
In the US case, I strongly agree with your explanation. There are two plausible mechanisms.
The states would resist any coup in distant Washington. GW and TJ could not name themselves kings because the states had much larger armies. Similarly like Macron and Merkel cannot take over Europe by couping the EU. Biggest reason.
Any faction has a reduced incentive to launch a coup. This is more subtle, but it explains the large divergence in regime length in the Christian and Muslim world from 1,000 AD on (because Christian feudalism is "federal"). Each faction controls the wealth of a state/province/barony and has rich opportunities for rent seeking there. They can increase their rent-seeking by couping the capital, but the increase is ac
This is misleading. Firstly, it selects on the depenent variable. Secondly it implies that the USA is responsible for the the majority of backsliding instances, which is not correct. Thirdly, it overstates the role of the US in several backsliding instances and understates local dynamics.
It's worth noting that the 1966-1976 Cultural Revolution was official government policy of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) under Chairman Mao Zedong and (for our purposes here) represented neither a transfer of power nor a bottom-up social movement. The transfer of power which put Mao and the CCP in charge was the 1927-1949 Chinese Civil War. But the concept of a "1927-1949 Chinese Civil War" is an anachronism. China: A History by John Keay describes China as more-or-less in a state of civil war from the fall of the Qing Dynasty (well before 1927) until its domination by the CCP.
In other words, the first domino was "civil war", not "Maoism". The CCP didn't even come into existence until years after the fall of the Qing Dynasty
If you want to use modern Chinese history as a model for predicting political catastrophe then the place to look is for indicators of the breakdown of the Qing Dynasty. The obvious place to begin an examination for that would be the Opium Wars and the Taiping Rebellion, both of which are out-of-scope of "the last century".
If our goal is to specifically look for "a transfer of power from democracy to non-democracy in China" then that happened when Yuan Shikai...
This ended up being my highest-karma post, which I wasn't expecting, especially as it hasn't been promoted out of "personal blog" and therefore isn't as visible as many of my other posts. (To be fair "The Nature of Offense" would probably have a higher karma if it was posted today, as each vote only had one point back then.) Curious what people liked about it, or upvoted it for.
This is a personal anecdote, so I'm not sure how to assess it as an intellectual contribution. That said, global developments like the Covid pandemic sure have made me more cynical towards our individual as well as societal ability to notice and react to warning signs. In that respect, this story is a useful complement to posts like There's No Fire Alarm for Artificial General Intelligence, Seeing the Smoke, and the 2021 Taliban offensive in Afghanistan (which even Metaculus was pretty blindsided by).
And separately, the post resulted in some great discussi...
In your experience (and others who directly experienced similar repression and violence), how did age demographics play into it? I get the sense that in China and early Nazi Germany, a lot of it was driven by (in one author's words) "roving gangs of teens and young adults, murdering with impunity". Some revolutions seem to include very young children as soldiers and enforcers.
I wonder if that's one of the stronger signals of the shift from "worrisome trend" to "get out now" - when we see significant (an order of magnitude worse than the summer protests) non-state, non-regulated youth violence.
Judging from the upvotes, it seems like people are quite interested in my grandparents' failure to emigrate from Communist China before it was too late, so I thought I'd elaborate here with more details and for greater visibility. They were all actually supporters of the Communist Party at the beginning, and saw it as potential saviors/liberators of the Chinese people and nation. They were also treated well at the beginning - one of them (being one of few people in China with a higher education) was given a high official post, and another retained a manager position at the factory that he used to own and operate.
The latter side of the family considered moving away from China prior to the Communist victory since they would be classified as "capitalists" under the new regime, but were reassured by high level party members that they would be treated well if they stayed and helped to build the "new China". They actually did relatively ok, aside from most of their property being confiscated/nationalized early on and their living standards deteriorating steadily until they were forced to share the house that they used to own with something like 4 other families, and them being left with a single room in which to live.
The other side were more straightforward "true believers" who supported Communism at an early stage, as they were part of the educated class who generally saw it as the right side of history, something that would help China leapfrog the West in terms of both social and economic progress. My grandmother on that side even tried to run away from her family to join the revolution after graduating from the equivalent of high school. Just before the Communists took power, my grandmother changed her mind, and wanted to move away from China and even got the required visas. (I asked my father why, and he said "women's intuition" which I'm not sure is really accurate but he couldn't provide further details.) But my grandfather still believed in the cause so they stayed. After the Communist victory, there was still about a year before the borders were fully shut, but it seemed like things were moving in a good direction and disproved my grandmother's worries. My grandfather was given an important post and went around making important speeches and so on.
Unfortunately he was not very good at playing politics, as his background was in physics (although plenty of natural politicians also fared quite badly during the various "movements"). His position started attracting envy from those who thought he didn't contribute enough to the revolution to earn it. He was demoted and moved from city to city as the Party assigned him to various jobs. Finally, some kind of political dispute near the start of the Cultural Revolution led to his opponents digging up an incident in his distant past, which was then used as an excuse to persecute him in various ways, including confining him in a makeshift prison for ten years. He died shortly after the Cultural Revolution ended and he was released, just before I was born. According to my father, it was from over-eating due to finally being released from the extreme deprivation of his confinement.
BTW, I wasn't told any of this when I was still a kid living in China. My parents had of course grown quite disillusioned with Communism and the Communist Party by then, but probably didn't think it would be to my advantage to show any signs of resistance to the indoctrination and propaganda that I was being fed in school and in the mass media. So I can also testify from personal experience that if those in charge of schools and the media want to, and there's enough social pressure to not resist, it's not very hard to brainwash a child.