… and your evident ability to make specious generalizations and meaningless distinctions. Costa Rica, who knows?
We do know the Marshall Plan was for the rebuilding of the European market for American industry at taxpayer expense. You’re welcome.
Please leave comments like this out of your posts in Great Debates.
You’re right, I was harsh. I interpreted the pervasive lack of germane response to the OP as folks nodding off. Let me rephrase it for them.
Wake up to what’s going on around you. Lenin knew.
Ah, but he didn’t take the 17/23 correlation into account, and that was his downfall.
America is generally one of the most warfaring nations on the planet.
It didn’t take over two countries, it just sent in the army and declared democracy. Or did I miss something?
Only that since 1898 (apologies to Hawaii) and right after SCOTUS granted corporations personhood, we have done the same in dozens of developing nations around the world, installing repressive dictatorships friendly to corporate investment as we go. It’s our US corporate foreign policy which is also quite well reflected in our domestic policies.
Yeeeess … please continue.
That was kind of my point. Silly of me to imagine it might be put to better use around here.
And I am not so surprised that the people you should have been explaining it to missed your point. By the way, ever get a chance to check out the cite yourself?
For those unaware, lalenin (talk about an ironically perfect user name) managed to escape Castro’s grasp when he was 12, IIRC.
I doubt I’ll be subscribing to the Ask The Man Who Survived Castro’s Chamber Of Horrors thread so perhaps you’d ask him how he thinks the bottom 70% of the Cuban population would be faring these days under another 50 years of corporate parasitism under Batista and the Mob.
I really don’t care what Lenin said on any subject. Go find someone who wasn’t mass murdering tyrannical scum to argue your position.
You recall wrong.
How enlightened you might be if you’d listen to yourself.
And while we’re at it, I’ve been on the SDMB going on a year. In a sense, you’ve been a mentor to me here but you’ve really lost your edge lately.
Early on in many posts you substantiated my view that Wealth = Corruption + War_On_The_Poor. I loved those early rants where you shouted well-cited shit like
GARBAGE! Rich men have raped poor women forever!
What’s happened to old red shirt? Lost in culture wars while The Class War wages, I wager.
PS IMHO, while I share your distaste for religion in general, there really is no reason to mock belief/unbelief in God. I do differ from Lenin in that, I think.
I would submit that anyone who’s the mass murdering dictator of a totalitarian country is on the wrong side of the class war. But that’s just me.
You seem to have utterly missed the point. Lenin wasn’t just “an asshole”; his criticism of capitalism, based squarely in Marxist theory, was fundamentally flawed, coming as it did from a reflexive rejection of conventional supply side economics in favor of an academic theory of extreme economic centralization and planned industry that has proven to be an utter disaster wherever it was implemented. The fact that communist dogma has also been used to justify the largest campaigns of mass murder, enslavement, and planned and incidental famine that the world has ever seen is just a side effect.
Stranger
Don’t have to - the Americans with Disabilities Act mandates the informational release publish promulgations.
I agree that the ends don’t always justify the means and Lenin is a prime example. Look what he left in his wake after decades of corporate sponsored nuclear insanity which justified their profitable wholesale spread of hi-tech conventional arms. Sell 'em arms, stir 'em up. $.
I think Lenin’s mistake was thinking he could take on the other great powers in international trade and remain socialist. The only way to remain competitive was to centralize which insured corruption which insured its ultimate collapse into the Corporate Kleptocracy… They lost the people to Western Glitter and our basic right to meaningless opinion.
Now, had Lenin recognized the cohesive strength of the Mother Russia meme and that the great communal free market infrastructure, which had evolved albeit heavily and brutally taxed under the Tsars, could easily have been morphed into into an invasion-proof socialist continent, lightly taxed by The State charged with facilitating roads ,rails and mail according to need along with arming local militias and wisely distributing its vast oil supplies, he could have done some good.
In the end, he was just another politician morsel for the Beast.
Nonetheless, he spit in its eye on his way into winner’s history.
But what about the Heinz corporation’s involvement and the mystical influence of the number 57?
Wait…what? I’ve just been sort of nodding along here, watching the crazy, but are you trying to say that you believe the Soviets produced and distributed arms around the world for profit?? Do you actually believe they MADE a profit?? Seriously?
-XT
Preach it, brother, whatever it is.
That’s some really good shit you’re into.
AFAIK, the post-wall Russian Capitalist Core, which shook down to the basest of the base Soviet crooks still standing after we spent Lenin’s miserable attempt at defiance into the ground are the folks we’re conspiring with and against, today.
Is that a ‘yes’ or ‘no’?
-XT