Whose Dictators in Asia?
SCOTT, JOHN
The choice in underdeveloped lands may lie between ours and the Communists' WHOSE DICTATORS IN ASIA? By John Scott After two long trips through Asia, from the Suez Canal right round to Korea, I...
...In Calcutta and Bombay, reliable Indian and foreign observers told me that in the 1962 general election Bengal, Andra and Madras may well go Communist...
...Essentially the choice in underdeveloped countries is a choice among dictatorships...
...Like Kemal Ataturk, who, though a vigorous dictator for a decade, later relaxed and allowed free elections, men like Diem and Abdul Rahmah intend to work toward democracy...
...Then after the cataclysm of war, an operative democracy gradually evolved...
...Thus a wide margin was available for investment, and it was from these resources that Japan built its industries and its schools-without concentration camps, without confiscatory seizures and almost without outside loans, grants or investments...
...But the main point, I think, is this: We do a disfavor to our Asian friends and to ourselves if we urge on them the adoption of democracy before their people are ready to use it effectively...
...It is my conviction that we must recognize that in underdeveloped areas dictatorship is a form of organization more effectual than democracy...
...I had a long talk with President Diem, and he admits frankly that when his opposition becomes serious its leaders go to jail...
...50 10 IS India...
...India might he an exception, were Nehru and its other ageing saints to leave the Government to younger, more vigorous men, and were the Congress party to split into a liberal and a conservative party...
...In most of non-Communist Asia, the other party is the Communist party...
...This does not mean that Asian nations and their friends should not try to select dictators with careful discrimination...
...Of course, this axiom applies to Communist as much as to non-Communist Asia...
...75 8 50 South Korea...
...So, if one wants to vote the inefficient rascals out, for whom should he vote...
...Then the voter could choose between candidates both pledged to uphold democracy...
...In Kerala, a state of 14 million strong on India's Malabar Coast, the Communist party won a plurality last year and now governs the state...
...Asia's masses are poor...
...If they do, it will bring Communist strength in India perilously close to that 38 per cent which Czechoslovak Communists controlled on the eve of their seizure of power in 1947, an analogy whose significance is not lost on concerned Indians...
...Men like President Diem are determined to allow free elections as soon as they can be sure that, no matter who wins, there will still be free elections...
...It is being most careful not to frighten the rest of India by sudden extra-legal actions...
...He has become a squatter, scratching a few vegetables from what is still legally Dutch concession land...
...Per Capita Investment Income Rate Literacy Country ($ per year) (% of GNP) Rate Burma...
...The master demagogue Sukarno-Asia's Huey Long-tells him Dutch colonialism and Wall Street imperialism are responsible for his plight...
...What is the difference...
...efficient men, rather than bunglers...
...I think he is right...
...So he votes Communist...
...2,000 17 97 Communist parties need win only one election for it to be the last...
...350 high 35 Singapore...
...The key to Japan's achievements in this area, of course, was hard work and relative austerity...
...I would like to cite two historic examples of dictatorships evolving into democracies in Asia...
...Is there any reason to believe that the Javanese peasant is any better prepared to vote in a free election than was the Navajo a generation ago...
...Indeed, some scholars believe that the rapid rate of capital formation in that country during its Industrial Revolution would have been impossible had universal sufferage been in effect...
...This would not be because the Javanese peasants have become Marxist-Leninists...
...900 18 85 U.S...
...And many Indians in Arizona and New Mexico could not vote until last year...
...But, as things are, India faces an immense danger of voting itself Communist in free elections...
...Many non-Communist dictators, on the contrary, are dedicated to eventual government by the will of the governed...
...Still worse, they are aware of this situation...
...He is afraid of being evicted and dispossessed...
...In Kerala, as in the rest of India, most of those who vote Communist have never heard of Marx, of Lenin, or of the Dictatorship of the Proletariat...
...Foreign dictatorship is evolving into independence and democratic self-government...
...A glance at the accompanying table indicates that the following countries do not fall into the category of "underdeveloped": Japan, the Philippines, Hong Kong, Singapore, Israel, Turkey...
...Many Americans assume that because democracy works effectively in the U. S., it must work effectively everywhere and at all times...
...From this example many Asian nations today might well learn useful lessons...
...Over several generations the British had been increasingly benign dictators in Singapore, and during this time they gave the city's million inhabitants the highest per capita income in Asia ($400 a year), a fine school system, an able and honest civil service...
...The restraints of family and faith, which in generations gone by kept them in sleepy acquiescence of their lot, have been shaken up by the social changes of the past 20 years...
...Nationalist leaders have roused them to a high pitch...
...They should try to find honest men like Diem, rather than dishonest dictators like Juan Peron...
...It is vital for shepherding a nation through the period of rapid capital formation and education necessary to bring it up over the point of 50 per cent literacy and $200 a year per capita income...
...Thanks to a paternalistic and patriarchal totalitarian sociology at all levels from state to family, life remained frugal, and consumption increase was held down to about double...
...It would be because the Javanese peasant is miserably poor...
...205 9 56 Turkey...
...144 0 25 Philippines...
...569 22 98 For comparison: Latin America (average) . . . 250 15 50 USSR...
...True, power is habit-forming...
...I spent a fruitful morning last August in the Legislative Assembly of Singapore, watching an elected body of 32 members, nearly all ethnic Asians, govern the city of Singapore with all the quaint procedures of British parliamentarianism-the white wigs, the "Honorable Gentlemen...
...250 high 60 Japan...
...With convulsive energy they have thrown off the yoke of colonial domination, confident that their newly won freedom would by some miraculous and painless alchemy make them as rich as their former European masters...
...During the two generations before World War I, Japan's agricultural productivity quadrupled as a result of intensive and intelligent efforts on the part of the country's farmers...
...400 10 60 Israel...
...The same thing was true in 18th-century England...
...The rubber plantations which used to furnish him a meager living are now in many cases abandoned...
...60 12 20 Indonesia...
...They are simple, peaceful people for whom both the U. S. and the USSR are distant, semi-legendary lands...
...Who controls some 80 per cent of all Government operations...
...Asia will be governed or misgoverned by Asians...
...But I prefer to be more blunt and use the word dictatorship, in spite of its associations...
...Yet, in lands like India and Burma today the Asians themselves look back to the days of British mastery with some nostalgia, and a residual rancor laced with respect and gratitude...
...Nor would it be the result essentially of Communist infiltration from China through Indonesia's nearly three million ethnic Chinese, though some infiltration has certainly taken place...
...In this process the U. S. can perhaps be useful to its Asian friends...
...Further, it seems clear that attempts to apply such democratic procedures as free elections in these areas result in Communist victories...
...The reason is simple, and not at all ideological...
...211 15 60 Hong Kong...
...81 12 73 Viet Nam...
...This thought can be expressed in language less crass, and with fewer unpleasant historic associations...
...they were a generation ago...
...Now the British are leaving...
...When they fail to get these things they blame whatever government they have...
...But their appetites have been whetted by new hopes and expectations...
...If it fails, the voters can return Party A to office, or vote in Party C, in the kind of political process that has gone on in the West for many decades...
...49 23 40 Laos...
...Who is to blame...
...the Crown Colony is becoming the State of Singapore...
...But when one of the competing parties is the Communist party, the whole process breaks down...
...The difference is great indeed...
...Java has two-thirds of the population of Indonesia...
...Some 6,000 of them are behind bars today (as opposed to some 30,000 in North Vietnam...
...And there is a chance that current Asian dictators like Diem will forget both the lessons of history and their own democratic intentions...
...They all have indices above those I have mentioned, and in all of them democracy is currently working-not perfectly, certainly-surprisingly well...
...They have been told by modern electronic communications and aroused by the population movements caused by war and urbanization in the past generation...
...This risk must be taken, however, for the alternative is a Communist dictatorship in which the future cannot be doubted...
...But they are unhappy, and for good reason...
...It is not simply that Communist dictatorships are by definition allied with and subservient to a power bloc hostile to the U. S., while the non-Communist dictators, in most cases, like to maintain a maximum degree of independence and sometimes find themselves willing and loyal allies of the U. S. Communist dictators by definition do not believe in eventual democracy...
...70 1 30 Cambodia...
...Until 1924, most American Indians living on reservations did not have the franchise...
...Local Communist organizers tell him patiently that if they are elected they will repudiate the concessions, and give him land...
...The Government...
...If there were a free election tomorrow in South Vietnam, I fear the people there would vote out of power the anti-Communist Government in Hanoi, and for identical reasons...
...But current facts and recent history do not support such a supposition...
...nothing could be further from the truth...
...And in these countries Communists are winning elections as legitimately as the Republicans won Texas in 1956...
...266 15 85 Malaya...
...In Korea, Formosa, Malaya and Thailand, too, the Communist party is outlawed and the electorate is given no opportunity to vote the Communist party into power...
...Worse, in many cases, their numbers increase faster than their production of food and commodities...
...Many of us forget that in the early days of this country, because of highly discriminatory regulations on residence, property ownership, registration and sex, only one adult in seven had the vote...
...The first is Japan...
...In Java's regional elections in the summer of 1957, the Communist party took more votes than any of its competitors...
...This is arbitrary, but it is better to give a figure than just to say "poor countries...
...The second example is British rule in Singapore...
...70 low 45 Thailand...
...For this country went through a process of capital formation during the Meiji Period which is unique and remarkable...
...These citizens had been living in a relatively stable community for several generations, and had never been exposed to the temptations of totalitarianism...
...But I will rest my case, which can be summarized in one simple arithmetic formula: In underdeveloped countries, democracy equals Communism...
...The key is there today for other Asian nations to use...
...In a country with a per capita income of some $144 a year, with an adult literacy of less than 30 per cent, a country where but two years ago there was fighting every night in the suburbs of Saigon between Communist irregulars, the armies of the religious sects and Government forces, a country harboring a million refugees from its Communist-governed northern half which is bent on its subversion, in such a country, Diem feels that free elections are a luxury he can ill afford...
...As a result, they are poorer now than JOHN SCOTT, special assistant to the publisher of Time, and author of Beyond the Urals and other books, spent most of last year touring Asia...
...Of course, the British have not always left so gracefully and in such good time, and what the British did effectively at their best in the 19th and early 20th centuries, no Westerners can do today in Asia, It is the wrong century...
...They have tried to do something about India's severe unemployment problem, and they work hard...
...Were no Communist parties active in Asia, this process might be a salutary one...
...First, let me define underdeveloped areas as those with per capita incomes below $200 a year, and adult literacy rates below 50 per cent...
...By John Scott After two long trips through Asia, from the Suez Canal right round to Korea, I find myself driven to the conclusion that democracy will not work in underdeveloped lands...
...The masses want things and they want them now-schools, shoes, tools, and even wrist watches and canned food...
...When they are given political freedoms - free speech, a free press, the right to organize political parties and campaign in elections - they tend to use these to upset whatever governments they have and to replace them with "the other party...
...The Congress party...
...We might say that Hamiltonian rather than Jeffersonian democratic principles are better adopted to realities in underdeveloped countries...
...Party A becomes corrupt and inefficient and is voted out of office by the electorate in favor of Party B, which then has an opportunity to do better...
...Similar points could be made with reference to Burma, Ceylon, Laos and Cambodia...
...if the nationwide election scheduled for 1960 is held, the Communists may well win a plurality...
...The Communist party...
...On the contrary, there is every reason to believe that he is not...
...60 low 20 Mainland China...
...The Communist ministers began by cutting their own salaries, and since have given the state a relatively honest government...
...But free, or relatively free, elections are currently being held -in India, Ceylon, Laos, Cambodia, Burma and Indonesia...
...Yet it was legally recognized that they were not yet ready for the responsibility of the franchise...
...But in the rest of Asia-which means nearly the entire mainland and some islands such as Ceylon and Indonesia-I am convinced that democracy does not work...
...If non-Communist dictatorships do not take over, Communist dictators will...
...That is where Diem feels they belong...
Vol. 41 • November 1958 • No. 40
