Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Reparations and capitalistprogress.

[Jim Devine <jdevine@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

At 11:38 AM 2/14/00 -0800, you wrote:
> > The USSR had to keep pace with the militarist U.S. to protect itself from
> > another holocaust as committed by  "NATO" 1919 and the capitalist Nazi
> > army in the 1940's.

NATO in 1919?

Brad writes:
> Ummm...
> How quickly they forget.
>
> The world "socialist camp" was on the *offensive* between 1945 and... call
> it 1980 or so.
>
> The overthrow of the capitalist regime in Czechoslovakia and the Maoist
> conquests of China were singular offensive victories by the socialist
> camp, followed by the defeat of the French at Dien Ben Phu and the
> successful defense of North Korea against MacArthur's unprovoked
> aggression between 1950 and 1953.

this is a mixed bag: the overthrow of the Czech capitalist regime (in 1948)
was part of a process that was mirrored in Western Europe by the US. Just
as the USSR set up a region of buffer states to protect itself from the US,
the US prevented popular victories in places like Greece and Italy that
would have favored the communists. It's a matter of dividing up the spoils,
moving into the vacuum of power that often occurs after a war. That's not
quite an offensive.

On the other hand, the Chinese and Vietnamese communists were home-grown
nationalist victories -- not part of some sort of unified "world socialist
camp." This was revealed when they started fighting each other and China
fought the USSR. The N. Korean victory against MacArthur may have been
aided by its big brothers, but it was powered by communist nationalism.
These are not parts of some sort of unified "offensive." The idea that they
were unified was US Cold War propaganda (a  kind of propaganda that seems
to have been believed by much of the elite itself, such as the CIA's James
Jesus Angleton, who saw the Sino-Soviet split as merely a ruse).

> The aggressive response of the Red Army to counterrevolution in East
> Germany, Hungary and Czechoslovakia laid down the law that not an inch of
> socialist territory would be yielded to imperialists.

this is not part of an "offensive." It was more a matter of despots
protecting their "property."

> Things reached a crescendo in the 1960s, with the glorious socialist
> revolution in Algeria, the successful establishment of a
> western-hemisphere beachhead in Cuba and the conquest of the south and the
> reunification of Vietnam.

Algeria wasn't (and isn't) socialist, though they did establish a kind of
"state capitalism" (along with some worker-controlled enterprises). Cuba
was not a "beachhead" of some sort of world socialist "offensive" (or do
you mean to say "conspiracy," Brad?) Again, as with Vietnam, it was a
home-grown progressive nationalist rebellion. Cuba leaned toward communism
only as the US tried to stomp on its neck.

> Neither Stalin, Khrushchev, Brezhnev, or Mao *ever* perceived themselves
> as being on the politico-military defensive. It's a little late to start
> (falsely) claiming that they did.

The USSR was always "encircled" and mostly was trying to develop their own
economic powers. While they did meddle in the other superpower's sphere of
influence, they did not attack it. (I don't think that this was due to the
soviet leaders' benevolence as much as their need to deal with domestic
problems and the nuclear balance of terror. The leaders listed above were
bad people in many ways, but they were also very conservative, maintaining
rather than extending their power.)

Jim Devine jdevine@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx &  http://liberalarts.lmu.edu/~jdevine