Dizzy takes an objection to a letter in the Guardian:
In the Guardian’s Letters page this morning we had this cracker from the International Institute for the Study of Cuba at London Metropolitan University, all about, unsurprisingly, Cuba and that old chestnut healthcare. The letter closes by saying,
“Whatever the deficiencies and criticisms of the Cuban political system may be, we can no longer avoid acknowledging their impressive record in achieving so much [in healthcare] with so little – and possibly learning something in the process.”
He illustrates his annoyance by way of a comparison with Nazi Germany:
Imagine if you will the sort of outrage if someone wrote a letter about the dreadful state of British trains and closed by saying,
“Whatever the deficiencies and criticisms of the Nazi’s political system may be, we can no longer avoid acknowledging their impressive record in achieving so much with their economy and railways – and possibly learning something in the process.”
There’s two objections to this.
Firstly, it’s factually questionable. The Nazi record on railways wasn’t particularly wonderful — the Reichsbahn was starved of investment in the early Nazi years and during the war they had to institute a crash program to build locomotives. Nor did Hitler “make the trains run on time”; that was Mussolini (the trains have always run on time in Germany!). The record of the German wartime economy was not particularly wonderful either — it produced some very good equipment, but was less capable of producing it in the numbers required, and there were in many categories of armaments too many competing programmes when rationalisation would have produced better results.
Secondly, it’s stupid and immoral. The Germans got a lot right in WW2 (they made a lot of mistakes too; they did, after all, lose), so naturally the victorious countries copied lots of things from them — for example in army tactics, jet aircraft, rocketry, nerve gas, assault rifles, and guided weapons. Imagine if a rather po-faced and stupid British leadership had instead said, “the Nazis were evil, so everything about them must be bad, so we won’t try to learn from them”. Then the British armed forces and British industry would have been weaker, and Britain would have gained no corresponding advantage.
All nations will, if they have any sense, look at what other nations are doing and learn from them where they are successful. So one might admire the Finns on their education system; the South Koreans on the speed of their broadband infrastructure; the Chinese for the impressive growth of their economy over the last quarter-century; the Americans for their innovations in computing and the Internet; the South Africans for the peace process that prevented a Yugoslavia-style civil war in their country; the Israelis for their capable and cost-effective armed forces; the Afghans for their dogged determination in kicking out foreign armies; and, yes, the Cubans for their health care system.
