An ideology is like an object set into motion in a vacuum. It picks up momentum independent of who created it. The communism practiced by China, by Cuba, is nothing like what Marx envisioned.
But if you’re so mindful of what Marx said, he also said that communism was a tool for the oppressed majority to throw off the yolk of their oppression. He said it was an ideology to eliminate class struggle and end bourgeoisie exploitation of the proletarians. It advocates a progressive tax, free education, and universal employment. Funny how you skipped over the good stuff and went right into the bad stuff.
But of course, you can retort by saying no communist country operates like that, that in reality, its another way for the haves to rule over the have-nots. And you’d be right, but then that means you’d have to admit that its simply bad leaders who exploit the ideology for their own means.
See, attacking “communism” itself is stupid. It doesn’t exist without people to implement it. If bad people are doing something bad, then it doesn’t matter what ideology they espouse. The US should rightly put up a bulwark against evil people, not an idea that’s as vulnerable to exploitation as democracy.
America is gradually becoming incapable of leading the world, even when and where it wants to. Part of that is a legitimacy problem (e.g. spending resources on causes that the rest of the world clearly sees as serving only American interests); part of that is a perception of incompetent leadership (e.g. a global financial crises felt worldwide but caused by American capitalism).
And then there are the combined effects of these first two factors: America has a much worse debt-GDP ratio now than it did before. American power grew after WWII not just strictly because we were one of the few remaining superpowers left on the planet; we also grew because other countries saw a partnership with the US as something that worked to their advantage. Since 2008, however, we have lost a lot of that trust. Other countries solved their own financial crises that we helped create. Other countries are now coming up with their own solutions to the refugee crises that we created because of our disastrous Middle Eastern foreign policy decisions in the early 2000s. Consequently, more countries are wary about commitments to the American geopolitical model. America was trusted to keep peace and to help grow global economies. That trust is lost, so while countries will still seek partnership with the United States, that faith is going to be paired with a lot more skepticism and there will be attempts to mitigate the risk to their interests, which probably means that treaties, trade deals, and the like will be less advantageous to the United States and not necessarily on our terms completely.
At the same time, other countries that America has empowered through foreign trade (China) have been able to use these new resources as leverage against the United States. American supremacy is going to be challenged in numerous ways over the next 25 years. And as China continues to build islands and push the American Navy out of nearby waters, other countries like Taiwan, Japan, and South Korea will start to ‘get it’, that American power is really more about the projection of power than raw power itself. Those countries will build up more of their own military strength and seek economic partnerships that are broader and involve less dependence on the US or any single partner for that matter. American is losing its ability to act unilaterally, which is probably not a bad thing. But it means we can’t necessarily dictate terms anymore.
Having said all of that, while there are probably many who believe that the decline of American power is something in which we can all rejoice, the historical picture suggests that a multi-polar political power model is one which invites competition. And competition frequently involves armed conflict.
Communism, as it was practiced, was a failed economic model, and we’d probably agree that it failed because of its political structure, which inevitably created the very thing that it purportedly wanted to avoid: an elite class of people, albeit a political one more than an economic one.
Kruschev’s speech was probably nothing more than political trash talk. Everyone talks about the Russian threat, but if we look at it objectively, it’s not that difficult to understand why the Russians felt threatened by the United States. Even before the war, the United States was already a well-established global colonial power – much more so than Russia was at that time. The Russians saw the United States involvement in Europe and in Asia and saw themselves being encircled by a rising global power that would inevitably pick up the pieces of the British and French empires and use it to their advantage. America was known to be hostile to communism. America was known to use embargoes, blockades, and other non-military means to exert political and economic pressure on less powerful states.
This might seem inconsequential to us, but if you really knew anything about Russian history in the preceding 50 years to 1945, you’d really understand the paranoia from the Russian side. Russia had been thrashed by the Japanese empire in 1905 when a territorial dispute turned into a military war, which Japan won, and with it, acquired land from Russia in the process. From the West, Russia had tried to negotiate a peace with Germany, only to be inexplicably invaded by Adolf Hitler. Russia wanted to expand for its own imperial interests, yes, but part of that was motivated by the fact that (like the Chinese) a Western power was a little too close to their doorstep for comfort. The Russians and the Chinese both had their experiences about trusting Western imperial / colonial powers. They didn’t want to repeat those experiences. Russia went further than China in that they played a lot more offense as a way to put pressure on the United States. They weren’t just satisfied with protecting their territory, they wanted the United States to be afraid of Russia. In Russian culture, you negotiate only through force and strength. That has nothing to do with the political and economic system of communism, though. In 1962, the Russians had grown perturbed by the continued presence of American missile stations in Turkey. They weren’t satisfied knowing that they had lots of land under its control; they wanted to get those damn missiles away from Russia, and they decided that they would have to negotiate by making the United States fear Russia, which they did pretty successfully in October of 1962.
Documentary The World Without US - Documentary Films
I have not watched the whole thing so I do not know their final conclusion. But I think the US has been for all practical purposes subsidizing the economies of Western European countries wih military assistance for decades. And that doesn't count what American military personel spends in those countries.
WHY?
We should have started scaling back around 1995. But how many world problems have been caused by the US trying to manipulate things.
This is just blatant propaganda. There’s no need to watch it any further.
Not a single critical note. All is just about how wonderful the US is as the world’s police and that everything would descend into horrible chaos without it.