Yes, that’s the substitute boogeyman for the commies after the cold war.
The commies weren’t a boogeyman. They were a legit threat to the American Empire. The socialist face of statism, fighting the fascist state of statism.
Yes, a threat to the American empire, which libertarians don’t support. But it was a boogeyman to the extent that it was blown out of proportion - there simply was no meaningful commie threat to the lives of average Americans. It became an absurd witch-hunt on Americans and alarmist propaganda used to support the military-industrial-complex. The commies were already well on their way to crumbling all on their own - this view was generally taken by Rothbard after he broke bonds with the right.
Hmmm…you do have a point.
“Commies”? You`ll have to be more specific.
And they were not a threat to the American Empire as such, only an obstacle to its world wide hegemony.
your missing the point BP. for one thing if we assume that soviets (at least some of them) were honest revolutionaries then the treat was real. the soviets efforts were thwarted by germans(after WWI), british and americans. so the reds did want to take over the world, at least on paper.
after all wanting and being realisticly able to is different things. the maoists in asia and peru are still very much in their fighting spirits.
was the cold war a jingiost drum-up? yes
did and do marxists want to take over the world? yes
are they a real threat? no
Actually the Bolshevik advance westwards was made impossible primarily by the Polish winning the Polish-Bolshevik war.
In that case Soviet Union stopped being Marxist when Trotsky fell out of grace.
Sure there was. You’re being naive.
The communist threat was that third world countries would stop serving the west with endless natural resources, commercial goods and infinite credit. Communism is a liberation philosophy at it’s core. It’s radical, pro-labour, proletariat revolution.
That’s definitely not in the interest of the American hegemon and certainly not in the interest of the Thursday night poker playing, beer swilling, Sunday afternoon football watching, factory labourer with an endless pension at the expense of future generations.
Oh, btw, the Communist have won. They have completely undermined American culture, infiltrating it’s colleges with their professors, movie stars and musicians, all sorts of pop culture icons are left or radically left. They have succeeded in helping drive America to bankruptcy, and hijacked it’s foreign policy for a Trotskyite obsession with Democracy.
Congrats. You just repeated what I said.
so, your aknowledging that they did want to take over europe. and that the polish were part of the imperialist/capitalist camp.
and yes, the soviets did give up on worldwide revolution after trotsky, but they still had their hopes high with angola and nicaragua
Do people get used to your brand of humour after a while?
I`ll be damned if I can decypher this.
brand of humor? LS is cristal clear here. the west was and is using the superprofits from the third world so garbage collectors have plasma TVs.
if you want it from the horse’s mouth, here you go.
According to MIM, imperialism’s extraction of super-profits from the Third World allows oppressor nations to buy off a large portion of their labouring population, which MIM does not view as a ‘working class’ in the strict sense. MIM argues that these ‘workers’ bought off by imperialism form a new petty-bourgeoisie called the labor aristocracy. These classes are not the principal vehicles to advance Maoism within those countries because their standards of living depend on imperialism. At this time, according to MIM, imperialist super-profits create this situation in Canada, Quebec, the United States, England, France, Belgium, Germany, Japan, Italy, Switzerland, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Israel, Sweden and Denmark
They hoped that with a swift victory they could hook up with communists in Germany and Hungary. The Polish were in a camp of their own. They couldnt care less for the Russians ideology. They were fighting for their borders.
No they didnt. They couldnt have cared less for these places.
Half the time (Nicaragua, Afganistan…) revolutions were headaches, because the revolutionaries if successful always ended up wanting some sort of aid and support from the Soviet Union and she was forced to oblige being the official Defender of the Marxist-Leninist Creed, but actually they hated doing it as it was costly.
Other half the time (Angola, Ethiopia…) it was just KGB employees passing time, playing proxy war with the Americans, sending Cubans against the South Africans, stunts like that. Just something that was in the job description.
The only place USSR really cared about was Warsaw Pact and the plains of Northern Germany.
And anyways. Trotsky wasn`t about world revolution. That is just a phrase. He was about Soviet Union exporting revolution to every last corner of the earth on the ends of Red Army bayonets.
Cold War era Soviet Union on the other hand never exported communism (read its sphere of inflence) via its military. Its military was only directly used in its narrowly defined sphere of influence, so by statist rules it was playing fairly. Its most belligerent action was intervention in Afganistan, but even in this case Afganistan had turned communist on its own, before they moved in and had been in their broadly defined sphere of influence since the midd 1970s.
i see your point, but how were they gonna fight the west if they viewed every new african country like benin, angola and guinea-bassau as a fiscal headache.
They weren`t “going to” fight the West. They were concerned NATO would attack them.
i meant morally
Oh I dont know. I think it may be a situation where no matter how sarcastic you are being somebody will think youre being serious. Or is it the situation where no matter how serious you are being, somebody will think you are being sarcastic??
Should I know this MIM guy?
+1, especially on the Trotskyite point. As melodramatic as a referrence this is, Cradle Will Rock didn’t get it half-wrong, as The Great Depression certaintly holds a high place in statist-left folklore (as does the Cold War in statist-right folklore as well, methinks).
On an aside, I’ve read elsewhere (it could’ve been from infowars, this forum, or even counterpunch, I’m not quite sure as my bookmarks are a constant mess) that Obama more or less represented a type of candidate for a Trotskyite re-take of the American Empire (whereas McCain represented more or less what Bush II represented, AFAIK).
If I can find the source I’m referring to, I’ll post it up here later, but I remember it being an interesting reading.
You should probably know about various political movements if you are going to strengthen your arguments, I’d imagine, yes.
Well I dont see that I should have known about what seems to be an obscure and miniscule organisation based in the US. Particularly seeing how Im not American. Somehow in my parts first association to Maosim is not “MIM”.
Thanks for the link anyway.