Current Events — HabitableZone

Current Events » in reply to re: history ain't changed

The Right seems to justify supporting any awful dictatorship
z — (archived)

...as long as they're anti-communist.

I think one of the main lessons of the cold war is that there were wise, an unwise, ways to stand up to Soviet and other communist aggressions, and they weren't the same everywhere. The world is more complicated than that. Putting troops and bases among democratic allies in Western Europe, and in South Korea, made sense in retrospect, but the enormous investment of lives and fortune in Vietnam was counterproductive, as was supporting brutal and repressive military dictatorships in Latin America. It gets back to American cultural ignorance about many far-flung parts of the planet, I believe. In our misguided attempts to fight communists, we pissed off the people in what could have been friendly pro-American nations, and we paid a price for that, and still do.

Communism was destined to fail in the Soviet Union mainly because it's based on assumptions that run contrary to human nature, not due to the expenditures and military campaigns of the US and its allies. That's not to say of course that there was no place for carefully chosen and planned strategies involving the latter. But certainly not everywhere, in all situations.

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