Criticism
The AFL-CIO's Tom Kahn criticized conceptual problems and strategic consequences in Kirkpatrick's analysis. In particular, Kahn suggested that policy should promote democracy even in the countries dominated by Soviet communism. Kahn argued that the Polish labor-union Solidarity deserved U.S. support and even in its first years demonstrated that civil society could expand and that free labor unions could be organized, despite communist regimes. Kirkpatrick's analysis of communism underestimated the democratic potential of the working class.
Ted Galen Carpenter of the Cato Institute noted that while Communists movements tend to dispose rival authoritarians, the traditional authoritarian regimes supported by the US came to power by overthrowing democracies. He thus concludes that while Communist regimes are more difficult to eradicate, traditional autocratic regimes "pose the more lethal threat to functioning democracies."
Read more about this topic: Dictatorships And Double Standards
Famous quotes containing the word criticism:
“It is from the womb of art that criticism was born.”
—Charles Baudelaire (1821–1867)
“The aim of all commentary on art now should be to make works of art—and, by analogy, our own experience—more, rather than less, real to us. The function of criticism should be to show how it is what it is, even that it is what it is, rather than to show what it means.”
—Susan Sontag (b. 1933)
“I consider criticism merely a preliminary excitement, a statement of things a writer has to clear up in his own head sometime or other, probably antecedent to writing; of no value unless it come to fruit in the created work later.”
—Ezra Pound (1885–1972)