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By Undustrial (registered) - website | Posted December 09, 2010 at 11:06:17
Well folks...you wanted to see what a serious conversation without trolling looked like...get out yer yardsticks.
I never said that I supported the Soviet Union or that it wasn't dangerous. It clearly was. There were plusses and minuses, many of which depended on where you were. And they could vote - just not like we do. "Soviets" are worker councils, and focused largely on economic matters. I'll never advocate any form of state communism, and certainly not the USSR. My sympathies for that empire died when Trotsky put down the Krondstat Rebellion during the revolution.
However, to count only countries in Western Europe and North America as "our side" would be only telling a fraction of the story. Many communist countries were (comparatively) nice places to live - Tito's Yugoslavia, or Castro's Cuba. And if we consider only those examples, and not those like neglected central Asian states or North Korea. The prosperity which exists in rich western nations now would not be possible without massive imports of cheap resources and labour, along with financial factors like debt and undervalued currencies. The countries those resources come from - in Asia, Africa and Latin America, show a very different side of our system. This is now, as it always has been, at the core of US military strategy. What did Cuba and Guatemala have in common? The United Fruit Company. It owned, reportedly, a third of Cuba before the revolution, and large parts of Guatemala. When these were lost to land redistribution policies in these crushingly poor post-colonial states, both became the targets of Washington. Executives of United Fruit - Alan and John Foster Dulles, went on to lead the CIA and took both as favoured targets. The CIA backed a coup in Guatemala which lead to 140-250 000 dead and ended democracy there for decades. In Cuba, the CIA has now allegedly tried to kill Castro over 600 times, and the United Fruit Company supplied the boats for the Bay of Pigs invasion.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1954_Guatem...
These are not the actions of people trying to "protect the world". These are the actions of people desperately trying to keep it under control.
It's also worth noting that "Communism" isn't and never was a single force. While it's rarely reported by fear-mongering conservatives who would rather paint a bleak picture of a world against us, a war between Russia and China has been at least as likely at any given point as a war between both of them and us. The best example is probably Vietnam (a "Russian" communist state) and Pol Pot's Cambodia (which had been backed by the Chinese), and the conflict between them. As the Vietnamese became victorious (and put down the Khmer Rouge, thankfully), this only strengthened Chinese fears, much like those in America (who then began to fund Khmer Rouge rebels). If you've ever wondered about the long-standing alliance between the Americans and Chinese (since Nixon) - this is why.
"Today, the notion of progress in a single line without goal or limit seems perhaps the most parochial notion of a very parochial century." — Lewis Mumford
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