Going back to the first Red Scare of the 1920s, anti-Communists appear to have erred in accepting the Communists' own estimation of Communism -- that is, instead of dismissing it as flatly ridiculous, they assumed it was compellingly sensible enough to triumph politically unless fought against. Which seems a silly attitude now, when not even the most revolutionary movements bother, any more, to invoke the name of Marx, which appears to have lost its power to conjure. The Zapatista rebels in Mexico never called themselves Communists or Marxists -- they would have, if their rebellion had started 20 or even 10 years earlier. Hugo Chavez called his Venezuelan revolution "Bolivarian" for some reason (Simon Bolivar was certainly no socialist of any kind), but I never heard him call it "Marxist." In the 1960s Communism was assumed even by its enemies to be a "dynamic philosophy" with natural potential to expand. Well, we saw how that worked out.
More importantly, for decades Americans were told the Communists were trying to subvert our society -- that they were behind the labor unions, the black civil rights movement, rock n' roll music even in the '50s, water fluoridation, the hippie counterculture and the New Left -- but, nothing that has come out of the KGB archives since the USSR fell indicates there was ever anything at all to that fear. The Soviets funded the small and marginal Communist Party of the United States and might occasionally have gotten some intel from it, but that was about as deep as their fingers penetrated here, ever. The John Birch Society was always wrong, in all ways, about the Communist threat, and so were most of the more moderate anti-Communists.
And looking across the globe, I find myself wondering if the Russians are really any better off, for having exchanged an ideological totalitarian state for a more conventional form of strongman-ruled authoritarian state. Not all them regard that as a step forward. Russian joke: "Everything the Communists told us about Communism was a lie. Unfortunately, everything they told us about capitalism was true."
Would it not have been better, after WWII, to simply accept the USSR's existence, dismissing both the "rollback" and "containment" strategies? That would have saved us a lot of money that was wasted on the MIC, not to mention the blood shed in Korea and Vietnam. We now know the system couldn't last in the long run anyway -- and if it were still around now, would we be any worse off? Certainly Communist China poses no threat to the world today, at least, not in terms of spreading Communist revolution abroad -- they're not even interested in that, they won't even support "Maoist" movements in nearby countries.
More importantly, for decades Americans were told the Communists were trying to subvert our society -- that they were behind the labor unions, the black civil rights movement, rock n' roll music even in the '50s, water fluoridation, the hippie counterculture and the New Left -- but, nothing that has come out of the KGB archives since the USSR fell indicates there was ever anything at all to that fear. The Soviets funded the small and marginal Communist Party of the United States and might occasionally have gotten some intel from it, but that was about as deep as their fingers penetrated here, ever. The John Birch Society was always wrong, in all ways, about the Communist threat, and so were most of the more moderate anti-Communists.
And looking across the globe, I find myself wondering if the Russians are really any better off, for having exchanged an ideological totalitarian state for a more conventional form of strongman-ruled authoritarian state. Not all them regard that as a step forward. Russian joke: "Everything the Communists told us about Communism was a lie. Unfortunately, everything they told us about capitalism was true."
Would it not have been better, after WWII, to simply accept the USSR's existence, dismissing both the "rollback" and "containment" strategies? That would have saved us a lot of money that was wasted on the MIC, not to mention the blood shed in Korea and Vietnam. We now know the system couldn't last in the long run anyway -- and if it were still around now, would we be any worse off? Certainly Communist China poses no threat to the world today, at least, not in terms of spreading Communist revolution abroad -- they're not even interested in that, they won't even support "Maoist" movements in nearby countries.
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