Talk:Lesser of two evils principle

The plural of "coup d'etat"
The expression means "state coup". Therefore, "coups d'etat" sounds (at least to me) far more logical than "coup d'etats"... Jancikotuc 09:04, 21 November 2006 (UTC)

This article is too US-centered
I doubt anyone has ever measured where the "lesser of two evils" principle is more used for anyone to claim the U.S. is particularly fond of it.
 * No. The article at the moment is very very poor and you're right in highlighting this as being a major cause of it. I have removed some of the U.S. bias from the Modern Usage section 138.253.249.67 (talk) 13:30, 9 April 2008 (UTC)

Shaky?
Is there any justification for referring to the democratically elected government of Chile as "shaky?" If so, it should be cited.

Political?
The phrase "the lesser of two evils," despite its widespread use during the 2004 U.S. Presidential election, is much more than a political phrase. This phrase can be used in everyday situations, and treating it as a primarily political reference is a misrepresentation.
 * Agreed. The entire article is very, very poor and gives a completely false impression of what the term means and what it is used for. 138.253.249.67 (talk) 13:31, 9 April 2008 (UTC)
 * Nobody has the intention to cause climate change. Politicians taking the responsibilty for it just want to get the majority of votes. Voters just want to maximize their privileges at whoever has not enough power to resist ( ie next generations ). And suddenly, no one knows why and how: climate change is there. sigh — Preceding unsigned comment added by 2001:4DD7:C542:0:64A2:60E1:E0FD:5525 (talk) 11:38, 9 April 2022 (UTC)

Unsourced speculation
The section "origins" has a lot of unreferenced speculation. Like the supposed justification for the US not getting involved in Saddam Hussein's supression of the Shia revolt. That US politicians thought Saddam was preferable is very dubious, and is offered as pure speculation. The coalition wouldn't have agreed to go into Iraq, and the US would have had to go in unilaterally. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 18.87.1.114 (talk) 02:02, 1 November 2007 (UTC)

The U.S. has publicly admitted supporting saddam vs. '91 shia revolt
It's not pure speculation. Look it up. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 66.108.43.105 (talk) 08:05, 12 February 2008 (UTC)
 * Unfortunately Wikipedia doesn't work like that. It's not the job of the reader to "look it up" - it's the job of Wikipedia to be the place that people go to to look things up. If there isn't a citation or reference then it must be deleted. 138.253.249.67 (talk) 13:33, 9 April 2008 (UTC)
 * It is BS since you can't find any reference in this entry and yet nobody has deleted it.

--200.83.2.4 (talk) 14:21, 29 April 2009 (UTC)--200.83.2.4 (talk) 14:21, 29 April 2009 (UTC)

Major problems with this article
This article claims that "lesser of two evils is a political term but does not provide any evidence of this or any citations. As such, the Cold War information has been deleted. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 138.253.249.67 (talk) 13:48, 9 April 2008 (UTC)

Ambiguous intro
The introductory paragraph in this article doesn't clearly state that its a political principle, but implies it in the last sentence. Perhaps it can be reworked a bit to introduce it formally as a political principle. &mdash;Memotype:: T 15:18, 19 October 2008 (UTC)

Dictator -> government
In the paragraph: "Conflicts over dictatorships began to occur when the Soviet Union, Cuba, and the People's Republic of China began to support communist revolutions and populist guerrilla warfare against established dictatorial regimes in the 1960s and 1970s, particularly in Latin America. In many cases these movements succeeded (see Vietnam War) and replaced an American-allied dictator with a pro-Soviet dictator; to counter the trend, the United States would often use its intelligence services to help orchestrate bloody coups d'etat that would overthrow shaky Marxist regimes (see Chilean coup of 1973)."

I replaced 'pro-Soviet dictator' with 'pro-Soviet government' and 'shaky Marxist regimes' with 'regimes not allied to the United States'. The implication that Allende was a dictator and Chile under him a dictatorship is, quite frankly, absurd. In addition, not all victims of US intervention were "shaky Marxist regimes": the fact that some may well have been shaky and/or Marxist does not by any stretch mean that all of them were. Jacobo Arbenz, for instance, quite openly declared his intentions to build capitalism in Guatemala, and Iran under Mossadegh was moderately reformist. --superioridad (discusión) 06:26, 25 October 2008 (UTC)

Criticism
This article could use a detailed criticism section where we discuss arguments against the principle and responses to those criticisms. 75.143.172.45 (talk) 17:45, 29 June 2012 (UTC)

Video
Is there a reason for the video linked to at the end? I see that there already was a removal and re-adding in the history, but as far as I can tell, no justification was given for either one. Further, the video seems to add nothing to the article. Finally, the video is a bad example of heavily biased and misleading (if not outright lying) claims; this makes it unlikely that the speech that 'won "first place at the Rocky Mountain Classic qualifier and the Gold Standard Regional Invitational"', especially since neither one seems to exist. 68.255.109.91 (talk) 08:41, 31 January 2013 (UTC)
 * The video is an example of how the "lesser of two evils" concept is spoken of and used as a rhetorical device in political speech. This link is consistent with WP:YOUTUBE. Claims made in the speech are cited here in written format. Nevertheless, claims made in the video shouldn't be the primary focus. Rather, it should be viewed as an example of how the lesser of two evils philosophy is analyzed. First place awards are confirmed at the Rocky Mountain Classic, at the Gold Standard Regional invitational, and at the 2009 National Championship finals. There appears to be no copyright claim on the video, so I see no compelling reason for removal. User:joyfulrook 19:37, 31 January 2013 (EST)
 * From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:External_links: "Any site that misleads the reader by use of factually inaccurate material or unverifiable research, except to a limited extent in articles about the viewpoints that the site is presenting." So yes, the claims are important to focus on. Also, your citations for the existence of these awards require registration at "homeschooldebate.com", which is an additional point towards these being at most very little known awards, which tends to mean that the awards are not meaningful, assuming that the citations are accurate (not trying to say you're being dishonest, just again pointing out that I can't check them). Finally, the video clearly presents a non-neutral point of view on the subject, while neutral points of view can easily be found. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Neutral_point_of_view "Wikipedia aims to present competing views in proportion to their representation in reliable sources on the subject. This applies not only to article text, but to images, wikilinks, external links, categories, and all other material as well." So there are plenty of reasons to delete it even without copyright claims (which I agree are not there, since the material is freely available elsewhere, as you pointed out). 69.209.51.125 (talk) 12:32, 1 February 2013 (UTC)


 * Given that it's been 3 days without a response, I think it's reasonable to assume that you won't be responding to this; further, I feel that I have made the case that it should be removed. To add further to the case: the citations for the claims in the speech are very weak. The first citation (that "His support of extremist pro-abortion groups, his pledge to sign the Freedom of Choice Act, and even his support of infanticide were no secret.") clearly and deliberately removes the context of the original quote ('But Obama's record on abortion is extreme. He opposed the ban on partial-birth abortion -- a practice a fellow Democrat, the late Daniel Patrick Moynihan, once called "too close to infanticide."'); the original quote itself is clearly biased as part of an op-ed that is slanted against abortion. In other words, the speech has to take out of context a quote that has already been slanted against Obama. To give an example that goes straight to the lesser of two evils principle: 'A conservative in NAZI Germany during the 1930’s applying the “lesser of two evils” standard could say, “The Marxists are ahead of every other political party in the polls, so even though the NAZIs want to kill the Jews, I think the Marxists may end up killing more people than the NAZIs. Therefore, I will vote for Hitler.” History would eventually prove that assessment correct, since the NAZIs only murdered six million while the communists in Russia alone murdered more than twenty million. ("That abyss has no bottom." TheologyOnline. 19 Oct. 2008.)' The citation is to a post on a forum, which doesn't support either sentence in the quote. There is nothing to support that that is what Germans were thinking - no citation to German politics or anything of the sort. Further, the numbers are inaccurate; the Nazis killed 11 million people (of whom 6 million were Jewish), and there were fewer than 20 million Russians killed (there is a difference between Russia and the Soviet Union, and 20 million refers to the Soviet Union). Finally, there is still nothing to indicate that the award is in any way a meaningful award. In short, the speech is extremely biased (breaking NPOV), either poorly researched or misleadingly presented (breaking the external links policy), and misleadingly presented on the Wikipedia page; that should be more than enough of a case to have it removed. Edited to add: A good link for an analysis is here: http://www.hss.caltech.edu/~snowberg/papers/Padro%20i%20Miquel%20Snowberg%20lesser.pdf 69.209.52.140 (talk) 17:14, 4 February 2013 (UTC)

Misleading title
The article has no discussion of the origin of the phrase (which seems to come from Plato, although I'm basing this on BrainyQuote), and limits the phrase to politics, with a focus on one country.

The article should therefore be re-titled to something that better represents its content, e.g.:
 * "Lesser of two evils (U.S. politics)" — Preceding unsigned comment added by 203.6.146.5 (talk) 03:52, 14 January 2014 (UTC)

Uncited material in need of citations
I am moving the following uncited text here until inline citations of reliable, secondary sources can be added to it, per the site's policies and guidelines of WP:V, WP:NOR, CS, WP:IRS, WP:PSTS, et al. Although we do not have to wait until the entire text is supported, portions can be moved back to the article when citations are found for those portions. However, portions/passages not supported by those citations should remain here. Nightscream (talk) 21:35, 21 June 2017 (UTC)

In politics
The lesser of two evils principle is one of the central tenets of realpolitik. During the Cold War era, a "lesser evil" pragmatic foreign policy strategy was used by the United States and, to a lesser extent, several other countries. It underlies the support given by the United States to dictators of Third World nations if they were regarded as anti-Communist, and it was closely related to the Kirkpatrick Doctrine of Jeane Kirkpatrick.

The lesser of two evils principle is often discussed as a rationale for tactical voting, especially under voting systems such as first-past-the-post which favor a two-party system. Voters well to the left or right of the mainstream parties may choose to vote for one of them anyway, instead of a fringe party, on the lesser evil principle.

In warfare and conflict
An early example of the lesser of two evils principle in politics was the slogan "Better the turban than the mitre", used by Orthodox Christians in the Balkans during the rise of the Ottoman Empire. Conquest by Western Roman Catholic powers (the mitre) would likely mean forcible conversion to the Catholic faith, while conquest by the Muslim Ottoman Empire (the turban) would mean second-class citizenship but would at least allow Orthodox Christians to retain their current religion. In a similar manner, the Protestant Dutch resistance against Spanish rule in the 16th century used the slogan Liever Turks dan Paaps (better a Turk than a Papist).

The Government of the United States had long stated that democracy was one of the cornerstones of U.S. society, and therefore that support for democracy should also be reflected in U.S. foreign policy. But following the Second World War, dictatorships of various types continued to hold power over many of the world's most strategically and economically important regions. Many of these dictatorships were pro-capitalist, consistent with at least some U.S. ideological goals; thus the United States would form alliances with certain dictators, believing them to be the closest thing their respective nations had to a legitimate government&mdash;and in any case much better than the alternative of a communist revolution in those nations. This struggle posed a question: if the end result was, in any realistic case, destined to be a dictatorship, should the US not try to align itself with the dictator who will best serve American interests and oppose the Soviets? This is what became known as the "lesser of two evils" principle.

Earlier, during World War II, the Western Allies justified their support for Joseph Stalin under a lesser of two evils principle. Justifying the act, Winston Churchill said, "If Hitler were to invade Hell, I would at least make a favourable reference to the Devil in the House of Commons." Meanwhile, self-declared socialist movements had their own versions of "lesser of two evils" policies such as justifying their Popular Front Against Fascism by arguing that allying with capitalist powers to overthrow fascism would be better than having the latter successfully occupy the world and permanently consolidate power. From the communist view, the primary scourge of the planet at that point was fascism, and that under the circumstances, fascism had to be defeated first and communist revolution could come after that.

The decision of the leadership of the People's Republic of China to seek rapprochement with the United States in the 1970s was an application of the "lesser of two evils doctrine", since the United States ended up being deemed a lesser threat by the Maoists than was the Soviet Union. Mao Zedong argued at that time that it would be impossible to continue to deal with the turmoil of the Chinese Cultural Revolution, the after-effects of the Sino-Soviet Split, and a hostile stance towards the United States and its "imperialist aggression" all at the same time. These measures of rapprochement later expanded into full-blown cooperation between the United States and China, and the introduction of Chinese economic reform and Socialism with Chinese characteristics that decisively introduced many elements of capitalism into the Chinese political system. But at its origin, the act was meant as an ostensibly temporary tactic by which Mao's China hoped to gain a strategic advantage over the Soviet Union, with the United States thus being viewed as the "lesser of two evils".

Conflicts over the nature of various dictatorial regimes began to intensify when the Soviet Union, Cuba, and the People's Republic of China began to support communist revolutions and populist guerrilla warfare against established regimes in the 1960s and 1970s, particularly in Latin America, Southeast Asia, and Africa. In many cases these movements succeeded (see Vietnam War for one of the major examples) and replaced an American-allied right-wing dictator with a leftist communist leader; to counter the trend, particularly in Latin and South America, the United States would often use its intelligence services to help orchestrate coups that would overthrow those regimes and reverse the leftist and/or communist trend (see Operation Condor and 1973 Chilean coup d'état).

In Iraq, the United States supervised Saddam Hussein's rise to power to counter the threatening growth and influence of the Iraqi Communist Party, which by the late 1950s was on the verge of taking state power. In 1963, the Kennedy administration backed a coup against Abdul-Karim Qassem who had deposed the Western-allied Iraqi monarchy, and then the Central Intelligence Agency both covertly and overtly helped the new Ba'ath Party government of Abdul Salam Arif in ridding the country of suspected leftists and communists. Though many in the US Government at that time recognized Saddam as a dictator or a potential dictator, they viewed him as the "lesser evil" when compared with the damage the Iraqi Communist Party might do with its planned nationalization measures and other reform programs that would probably have run counter to U.S. interests. Similarly, in 1991, when Shi'a across Iraq revolted against Hussein's regime (partially in response to the televised rallying call to do so by U.S. President George H. W. Bush), the U.S. justification for ultimately staying out of the revolt and allowing Hussein's security forces to suppress the rebels was that the U.S. had strategically decided Hussein's rule was better than the risk of a mujahideen- or Iranian Revolution-style takeover.

Probably the best example of this principle in action, however, was the political struggle behind the Vietnam War. Ngo Dinh Diem was the ruler of South Vietnam during the initial stages of the war, and though his regime was brutal and he was dictatorial, he was also an anti-communist who was determined to fight the expansion of the North—something that the United States government found sufficiently attractive and ultimately supported him. Ho Chi Minh ruled North Vietnam, was backed by the Soviets, and was a Marxist who wanted to see a united, Communist Vietnam. The United States thus supported Diem's regime, as well as his successor's, during the war and believed that he was the "lesser of two evils". Diem was later assassinated, and the United States oversaw a new South Vietnamese administration that was relatively less repressive.

It is widely speculated that because of this principle being placed in Afghanistan after the Soviet Union invaded it in 1979, the jihadists the U.S. had supported were able to stay in power using American weapons, and, eventually, carry out the September 11 attacks.

Game theory
In game theory this scenario is commonly known as the no-win situation, and as such refers to the necessarily unavoidable decision between one outcome or the other; as well as the losses of whatsoever value therein.