General Politics Thread

@Diana 1969 I agree, I was not even trying to disapprove that. In hindsight, should have only made the post as a response to m-95, not you since they are the one who conflated fleeing with defecting.

Edited by Risa123 on Feb 1st 2024 at 8:03:51 PM

Ultimately, what it boils down to is that the US and USSR were both pretty awful (especially to countries they viewed as "theirs") internally and internationally and a whole lot of stuff on both sides is just them being manipulative as hell.

Like the US creating tons of Soviet spies by refusing to admit that maybe just leaving gay people alone was smarter than massive witch hunts or pre-emptively trying to take out leftist movements and creating brutal dictatorships in the process.

Or the Soviets getting really aggressive at any countries within their sphere that didn't want to fully commit or being willing to sacrifice tons of their own citizens to make projects happen.

Both sides created openings for the other and both sides were terrible to almost everyone, just in slightly different ways.

The heroes of the Cold War are like, France (which being the only independent nuclear power that wasn't beholden to either side despite being nominally allied with the US meant that it was protecting most of western Europe and it made the idea of nuclear war way less palatable. It didn't matter if one side wiped out the other, France's missiles would knock out anything that was left), that one Soviet guy who double-checked the missile alert and realized it was a false alarm, and the people who put in huge amounts of work to minimize the damage from the fighting between the two. Neither the US nor the USSR were really fighting for freedom and the good of all mankind, both just wanted to be the top dog.

I’d hardly call France a hero of the Cold War considering they’re the ones originally responsible for the Vietnam war, the entire mess with Algeria and the way that they and the British made such a mess with the Suez Crisis that the US and USSR teamed up to tell them to cut the crap.

Also the British nuclear deterrent has been kept similarly independent from the US. It was explicitly bought into being because the British government didn’t want the USA to be able to dictate to the U.K., with the foreign secretary saying to a commitee in 1946 “We've got to have this thing over here whatever it costs.... We've got to have the bloody Union Jack flying on top of it”.

Edited by Silasw on Feb 1st 2024 at 7:22:20 PM

Okay, fair enough. I mean more them blocking several nuclear threats from going anywhere by basically phoning up both sides and going "If you don't cut this out right now and stop preparing to fire, we'll nuke you both".

Please research Francafrique before saying ridiculous things like this. France was to parts of Africa was the U.S. was to Latin America.

I think it's far easier to find villains and victims than it is to find any country that could get close to heroic during the Cold War.

Okay, I have just one general question.

According to the other Wiki:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emigration_from_the_Eastern_Bloc

So was there an equal number of Westerners desperately risking their lives in order to cross to the East? If no, and the conditions were equally bad in both countries, then how come the U.S.S.R felt the need to prevent immigration and restrict travel, even enacting the wall of Berlin for that?

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If the argument is that both the West and East were awful in their External Policy and their treatment of Third World countries, then I vehemently agree, and I support that POV with extreme prejudice

And the U.S. today is no better in that regard, and most of the world conflicts, can be traced to something the West was involved in during the Cold War.

But the living conditions were not equal in both the West and East, as the numbers of people who risked their lives to immigrate, defect, or escape from one side to the other testify.

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Not sure if "far-left" is the correct word, but -always with the other wiki- I found this three American theories (Though the third one was popular among France leftists), take it as you want:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conspiracy_theories_in_United_States_politics

Edited by jawal on Feb 1st 2024 at 9:14:04 PM

The big difference is that Western Europe was a thing. It's very hard to argue that the US was good for people of colour or queer people. McCarthyism was racist, homophobic and sexist to insane degrees and it got into everything. The height of the civil rights movement was during the Cold War, and Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr. were both being stalked and harassed by the FBI and CIA with the justification of being "potential soviet agents". White people in the US being left alone if they didn't do or say anything that could even possibly imply leftist sympathies or anything hinting that they might be queer doesn't make the US better for everyone else.

Like, this is the era where the War on Drugs was specifically engineered to go after left-wing people and people of colour. That's literally why Nixon started it, by the way, it's in the tapes. The US was effectively at war internally against anyone who wasn't a straight white Christian who put in a lot of work to seem as vanilla and boring as possible.

I think this actually got proven? Not in a "we choose to not act" way, but in a "each of our intelligence agencies has about 10% of the picture and none of them are talking to each other so no one put it all together" kind of way. It's also basically proven at this point that the Bush administration kinda expected something to happen and were waiting to use it as an excuse to invade Iraq again. They just didn't expect it to be nearly as big...or that it had nothing to do with Iraq. Baroness Nicholson over in the UK actively aided this one by laundering fake information about WMDs and she's recently tried to simultaneously frame herself as being completely incompetent and unable to identify good intelligence despite it being her job and also that she knew exactly what she was doing and she got the info from dozens of sources who happen to all be so anonymous that it's not possible to identify any of them in any way at all to anyone else, not even the people on her team or even the people who got the information to her, somewhow.

And in terms of the AIDS thing...it is a real thing that black people were used to test diseases and things like radiation exposure in the guise of routine tests. It's...really easy to see where that would come from, especially with how fucking useless Reagan was at combating AIDS.

Like, I said, a lot of the leftist conspiracy theories tend to be based on like, an actual thing but taken in an odd direction. The right wing ones tend to be a lot more deranged in general.

Edited by Zendervai on Feb 1st 2024 at 3:03:42 PM

More or less. It's not exactly easy to root for anyone when the governments of Truman, Adenaur, and Atlee were trying to rehabilitate Nazis and Japanese fascists immediately after the war ended. Everyone brings up Operation: Paperclip, but that was a drop in the bucket compared to shit like Halder working with the U.S. Army or Nobusuke Kishi becoming Prime Minister. And these were the guys trying to defend "democracy"!

Edited by Diana1969 on Feb 1st 2024 at 1:58:12 PM

Also, yeah, I was wrong about France.

I still stand by that guy who noticed the false alarm and the organizations that put in huge amounts of work to minimize or undo the damage the US and USSR were doing though.

You know, sometimes I wonder if the West only championed democracy so much during the Cold War because it was a useful rhetorical bludgeon against the Eastern Bloc, now that the Eastern Bloc is gone, anti-democratic figures and parties felt safe coming out to play again.

I suppose that theory will be tested if Russia or China seriously ramp up the imperialist expansionism to the point that even the most pro-Putin/Xi nationalist will have to think about geopolitics again.

Russia's already doing that. They're, you know, in the process of trying to conquer another country. And a lot of people just seem...totally unable to understand that the Russian government is extreme right-wing at this point.

It was literally just repackaging the same rhetoric from WWII, just replacing Nazis with the USSR. And that led to deliberate attempts to conflate the two, which has done plenty of damage on its own.

I know that, but it can always ramp up even further, especially if he starts attacking other countries if and when he's finished with Ukraine. For the time being the general sentiment among said figures feels like 'well Ukraine is not really our problem' (with 'so Russia can have it' being the unspoken second part of that sentence).

Edited by PresidentStalkeyes on Feb 1st 2024 at 8:14:01 PM

If you haven’t read it I’d suggest reading the Butler Report (or at least the summary), it was a public inquiry into what the hell happened with claims about WM Ds in Iraq and it goes into a lot of detail, including which areas of British intelligence tried to push back on false intelligence claims but got boxed out. It can be found here[1] if you’re curious.

On that note, Kazakhstan has been trying to get closer to China as of late. Most likely because it wants to avoid being on Putin's list.

With the morality of The Cold War, I'd argue that on the one hand you shouldn't "bothsides" it. However, on the other hand, it's important not to engage in whataboutism either.

Just because the Soviets were worse does not intrinsically mean that the US was good (lesser evils exist). Even if (for the sake of argument) we consider the US to be good, that doesn't mean every individual action was good or that bad things couldn't be called out.

I'd say this is overly cynical for a few reasons:

The broad strokes of "Tankies are not nice people" is not a controversial opinion. It's common enough that it's not crazy someone can run on a "stop Tankies from being jerks" platform and sincerely believe in the cause. Even if they turn out to be jerk themselves later on.

I'm unsure if the US and the West's foreign policy is worse than it used to be. Actually I'd suspect it's better: you see, during the Cold War a major problem is "Us vs them" mentality...or rather "Not them vs. them". Now that the US doesn't have a specific enemy, it can be a bit choosier. IIRC this is part of what led to Taiwan becoming more liberal, as they realized that The West might not support just any old dictatorship that happens to oppose Communism.

I would probably say the lack of a unifying enemy might have had a negative effect on the US by opening the door for stronger political tribalism.

As for the rise of authoritarianism generally, I think that was also simply inevitable. Saying that the end of the Cold War was the end of history was a bit like calling WWI the War to End All Wars.

It's really not good to play games of "lesser evil" with real world geopolitics.

If you lived in the Middle East, Africa, or Latin America, between 1945—1990,  then both the East and West are the same.

They saw Third World countries as pawns in their global chess game, and thought only about how to exploit them.

............

The West, in a way, was worse. The Soviet Union, tried to appeal to students, workers, and intellectuals, trying to win them over and spread their ideology among the populace, not just the ruling class.

Which is why even today, the Arab world still has some communist parties, that are completely ineffective, totally separated from the surrounding society, speaking in a 1960s language, and living in a red fantasy world.

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The U.S., on the other hand, was more elitist, it used what they called Bazzar's principle (I think it was Kessinger who used that term?) when entering a country, search for the top man, (no matter if he is royalty, a religious extremist, a gangster or a power-hungry general) and negotiate with him; if he accepts to renounce the evils of communism, then offer him aid and weapons.

If not, look for someone angry, help him stage a coup, and become the top man.

The people are not important; they follow the top man, so don't waste time on them.

..............

Now, if you are instead a citizen of the U..S, Western Europe, or the U.S.S.R., then the question is, where will you prefer to live?

Edited by jawal on Feb 1st 2024 at 11:40:53 AM

America was able to rebuild Germany, Japan and South Korea through a generations-long process of nation-building. It was able to do that because the consensus of the entire political class was that communism had to be contained (there were plenty of Americans who didn't agree, but they had no real electoral options) and thus America was able to consistently commit America's wealth and power to nation-building in postwar countries.

With Afghanistan or Iraq, for example, there's no such consensus to get in and spend generations turning them into first-world countries.

I'd call that...sort of a negative compared to the Cold War.

That was the point I was trying to make earlier.

Yes, despite all the evils the US conducted, Western Europe existed. Democracies existed, Freedom of Speech existed, Freedom to Travel existed.

You did not get shot when you tried to leave your country.

Is this saying it's a *bad* thing that there's less support for "nation building" exercises?

The U.S. *also* rehabilitated fascists to help run two of those three countries, and the ROK was led by a murderous butcher in Rhee, then a literal fascist collaborator in Park. Because, once again, the U.S., the so-called "good guys" fighting for freedom and democracy in the Cold War, were eager to work alongside fascists to fight the "Red Menace" the moment the war ended.

Okay two things.

One: Are we forgetting the decades of dictatorship in Spain and Portugal, that was openly supported by the United States as anti-communist bulwarks? Portugal was waging a vicious three-front war in Africa to regain control of its colonies, for crying out loud.

Two: Western Europe could largely *afford* to be liberal democracies, they didn't have the same immense structural problems fostered by decades of imperialist plunder and a decayed feudal economic foundation as Latin America had.

These are not points in the U.S.'s favor.

Fucks sake, these were countries that still had colonies and then, once they became independent (if they weren't going to war massacring the people there), supported dictators who continued to support their economic interests.

Edited by Diana1969 on Feb 1st 2024 at 5:28:34 AM

Hell, all the shit in South America was the legacy of the Monroe Doctrine, that basically boiled down to the US telling Europe "stay out of our backyard and we'll leave you alone" and Europe went "yeah, sounds fine, just leave the Caribbean islands some of us still own and that one bit in South America that's just literally part of France alone."

There's even a story that the US started looking at Haiti and the Dominican Republic and France basically just went "YOU DO NOT TOUCH THAT ISLAND" because France was (and still is) squeezing every single cent out of Haiti.

Edited by Zendervai on Feb 1st 2024 at 6:55:53 AM

@Protagonist: Those are things worth considering, yea. Though I'm curious why you think that a post-cold war rise in authoritarianism was 'inevitable'.

I'll also say that I get a little bit annoyed with simplifying it to "The West" when these countries are independent actors whose interests happened to align with one another for portions of the Cold War. And I do emphasize *portions*, because imperialists only ever work together if their interests aren't in conflict.