I'm going to play a bit of forum necromancy here, forgive me, but my inner-historian and inner-political scientist had to respond.
Not only that, but hitler hated communists with a passion.
This is completely false. Hitler hated people who didn't agree with him, as psychopaths are wont to do, and that's about it. Most people forget that in 1939, Poland was invaded from two fronts. Prior to the beginning of the war, the Soviets and Nazis had formalized the Molotov-Ribbentrop pack which spelled out each others "zones of influence" (the countries they were to eventually occupy), as well as trade relations and even fairly extensive cooperation between the Gestapo and NKVD. In fact, the Germans learned a lot about how to run concentration camps from the Soviets.
Some wiki links:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet-German_cooperationhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Molotov-Ribbentrop_Pacthttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gestapo%E2%80%93NKVD_Conferenceshttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German-Soviet_Commercial_Agreement_%281940%29We aren't talking about China or India here, we are talking about economic liberalism. China for instance is a nation that learns from its mistakes and history, and is influenced by communism, socialism and confucianism. Thusly China invests heavily in clean energy, unlike other "developed" nations like the US, which do NOT learn from their mistakes.
It's kind of ridiculous to say that "a nation learns from its mistakes". Nations do not learn, governments do not learn, only people learn. I don't feel like typing a whole economic history of modern China, but suffice to say, China's present economy very little resembles "communism, socialism" or Confucianism. The latter culturalist reference gets batted around so much, but let's remember: the "lowest" caste in a Confucian society is the merchant. Ha-Joon Chang tackles this issue quite well in his book "Bad Samaritans". The link to the relevant chapter is here:
http://www.sed.manchester.ac.uk/research/events/conferences/povertyandcapital/chang.pdfAs for the economy, the present Chinese system is heavily "publicized" in the sense that huge portions are still owned or heavily regulated by the government, but very few businesses borrow from Communist ideology in anyway. Most are structured exactly the same way as any western corporation is, with the exception that the state and other party cadres are sole shareholders. For example, a great number of businesses that emerged from the economic reform period were Township and Village enterprises that were "owned" by the collective communities, but in most cases the de factor (if not de jure) ownership resided among a few entrepreneurial individuals and the politically well-connected. Class distinctions are high, and by most accounts, growing. It could simplistically be described as a 'mafioso' economy, where as long as you grease the right palms, you can go far.
As for environmental policy, the case is mixed. I'd say China does better than some western countries (US and Canada, chiefly), but far worse than most European countries. Keep in mind that investments in green technology are not the same as use: China is still heavily reliant on coal and its use of oil (as witnessed by many African and even some Canadian oil investments) has been growing steadily. Many 'landmark' environmental programs, such as "eco-cities" have not only been full of marketing shlock, but have also failed to materialize. A professor of mine is a specialist in urban Chinese environmental policy, and I recall her telling me about the "green cities" program in China, which used a variety of indicators to rank cities by their environmental health. One of the indicators was something like "% green surface" (measured by satellite imagery, I guess). As a result, many cities began converting the farmland they had annexed, but not yet developed, into massive green lawns in order to gain in this ranking.
http://www.theage.com.au/news/world/chinas-first-ecovillage-proves-a-hard-sell/2006/08/25/1156012740582.htmlhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Township_and_Village_EnterprisesFinally, as for the test itself, a few people pointed out some of the implicit assumptions it makes about the relationships between the axis. The left-right dichotomy is meaningless to me, a believer both in open trade, and lassiez-faire policy (in the original sense of the term, meaning that the government doesn't provide 'favours' for certain industries at the expense of others), as well as a decent regulatory framework and a strong social 'safety net'. In other words, the left-right axis hides a more nuanced distinction between government intervention in the economy, public regulation of business, and public services.
I think LCS is a pretty good satire of modern political discourse and its LIBERAL v. CONSERVATIVE construction, but we should remember that politics is about policy, and policy is not simply dichotomous, but polychotomous.
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Topic: ARE YOU TRULY LIBERAL? (Read 10422 times)