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THE ” PINOCHET OF THE EAST ” ON TRIAL FOR MASS-MURDER

General Wojciech Jaruzelski, the ex-Communist dictator of Poland who declared martial law to crush Solidarity at the behest of the Soviet Union is on trial for mass murder – specifically, his earlier actions as Defense Minister in 1970 when security troops shot and killed 44 striking workers and injured up to 1000 others.

The old East bloc has a very sketchy record for dealing with ex-Communist human-rights violators. On one extreme the Ceaucescus were shot by a firing squad when their neo-Stalinist regime was toppled by a coup during mass-protests and on the other you have aged despots like Erich Honecker being allowed to flee abroad to escape trial or original Stalinist monsters like Lazar Kaganovich dying peacefully at home. Or GRU chief Peter Ivashutin living to ripe old age in retirement. Jaruzelski was far from the worst of the lot but unlike some of the others he carried out his efforts at repression despite having once been a tortured zek in the hands of Beria’s NKVD ( he had been deported to Siberia as a Polish P.O.W. – Stalin did not honor the Geneva accords so the Poles were treated as counterrevolutionary political criminals and spies). If anything, Jaruzelski had greater moral responsibility to resist repressive policies; the trial is merited.

FORGIVE THE POSTING DELAY

Blogger was not allowing me to log on until today and now that I can get on, ” real world ” priorities have impinged on blogging until Saturday. I will return with some interesting links and pointed opinions.

In the meantime, the administration has finally begun moving toward putting some of the al Qaida war criminals before a military tribunal – a position I have advocated here and on H-Diplo. Wolfowitz is repotedly the one who will make the call ( watch the” neocon cabal ” theorists on the Left go bonkers on this one)

AL CAPONE WOULD HAVE MADE A GOOD RULER OF NORTH KOREA

This makes the money collected by U.S. politicians look like chump change

AL QAIDA IN AFRICA

Swimming like fish in the sea of Malawi

MY BRIEF COMMENT ON THE SUPREME COURT DECISION

My focus here at Zenpundit is primarily foreign policy but since affirmative action is so strident an issue I have the following observation on yesterday’s ruling. The High Court demonstrated longstanding continuity, starting with Bakke by issuing another ambiguous decision that whittles down the allowable parameters of using race in public policy decisions. My sense is that the Court is trying to say ” not yet ” in regards to definitively ruling on affirmative action’s inherent logical conflict with the text of the 14th Amendment. Constitutionally, affirmative action is pretty much doomed but politically the Court seems to be wary of the possibly explosive electoral effects of an across the board sweep like the Hopwood decision in Texas prior to an election year. Affirmative action will probably continue to muddle along in this fashion for another decade or two until it is undone by the demographic changes of the electorate.

In higher education at selective schools affirmative action has been used to redress the continuing lag between the mean standardized test scores between white and black applicants ( Harvard excepted where the gap is less significant statistically). As a remedy, setting aside moral and constitutional questions, this back-end solution has not been terribly effective in terms of minority graduation rates while having the added negative of being politically and racially polarizing. What affirmative action programs in elite universities have done well however, and this is the real issue seldom discussed, is act as a networking gateway to the American power structure for promising minority students. If you want pure intellectual stimulation you go to the University of Chicago; if you aim to probe the reaches of science you head for Caltech – but if you want to run the world you fight to get into the Ivy league.

When we want to get serious as a society about closing the educational gap for minority students we will put our money, effort and political capital into longitudinal, comprehensive, programs that work from the bottom up k-12, if not earlier. There are no shortcuts.