LATIN AMERICA NEEDS A REVOLUTION
I take a lot of "right-wing" positions at home but abroad it's different: there are a lot of egregious and detrimental injustices out there, and sometimes lefties and Communists are the only ones willing to stand up against them. Here is a report on Guatemala, one of the most unequal societies in the world. The US has gotten on the wrong side of a lot of these affairs. Actually, that's the main difference between Iraq and Vietnam: in Vietnam, we were fighting against a revolution, in Iraq, we instigated one. Anyway, the danger is that in the process of globlization, we will integrate our own relatively just and legitimate property rights system with other, much more iniquitous ones, without even realizing it. We need a more critical attitude towards foreign regimes in institutions like the State Department. But it won't happen, of course.

The sad thing is that the Chinese aren't pushing this. They're supposed to be Communists, right? Back in Mao's time, when they had nothing to teach the world, they were proselytizing like crazy. Now, when they have much to teach the world, they make no effort to articulate what they're doing so well or to spread the good ideas. Depressing irony.

I was being partly facetious to suggest a "revolution." They're bloody. But change is needed, and I'm afraid that we inhabitants of the liberal democratic paradigm haven't yet succeeded in conceiving what that change is.