What Moore does is activist filmmaking, rather than documentary. Bush and the rest of the neo-con criminals got what they deserved in Farenheit 911, but there wasn’t even a hint of objectivity. It’s fun to watch right wingers flip out over a lefty bogeyman other than Soros or Sharpton, though.
And that would be a good thing, wouldn’t it?
That is no dichotomy; the first is a subset of the second. Hearts and Minds was clearly an anti-Vietnam-War film, and clearly a documentary.
A totalitarian Russia/China/East Europe axis? That would not be good at all, actually.
A USSR that dropped its doctrinaire Marxist economics and significantly privatized/liberalized its economy, like the Czechs tried to do in '68 and the Chinese actually did starting in the 1980s? Wouldn’t that be a good thing? And better than what happened in our timeline (the USSR collapsing and its successor states plunging all at once into a capitalist system they had no idea how to run)?
No, because they are weak, with a chance to get stronger as they figure this stuff out, while evolving towards an ever freer system of government.
A broken up China struggling towards a democratic system would be better than a strong totalitarian China as well. We’d even get a free Tibet out of the deal.
A case can be made that we’re better off with China now than Russia now, since Russia is still adventurist and their weakness makes them paranoid and irrational. But assuming we don’t end up in a nuclear war with Russia, I think what happened to the Soviet Union is a better outcome 50-100 years down the road. China could very well still be totalitarian in 2050, and the most powerful country in the world to boot. And they are not immune to adventurism, they just recognize their relative weakness better than the Soviets did. Once they are strong enough to compete anywhere in the world militarily, all bets are off.
Plus Eastern Europe seems pretty happy to be free, which would not have happened in an alternate universe where the Soviets follow a more China-like path.
But, it is not totalitarian now. It used to be. Now it is authoritarian, which is not the same thing, and which is something that has usually not repelled the U.S. from having friendly relations and trade relations with a country.
It is actually still totalitarian, they’ve just lightened up on the economic controls. But the people still have no rights. It’s basically Pinochet’s system on steroids.
Pinochet’s system was authoritarian, not totalitarian; that was why Chicago-Schoolers and economic-libertarians liked it so much.
THey were ideologues who lost their minds because someone liked their theories. A monster is still a monster even if he believes in single payer or privatization.
Haha. Come on. You don’t give a shit about a free Tibet. It certainly doesn’t mean anything in a geopolitical sense to America.
We’re calling feudal theocracies “free”, now?
Could you please hop back to the 50s and tell the Russians that.
I also noticed that Moore and Obama are rarely in the same room together. Coincidence? I think not.
Neither does a free Taiwan.
Really? Nothing? Undersea oil reserves, naval routes, economic ties, China’s sphere of influence in SE Asia, the symbolic historical divide between a free capitalist society and a Communist one? None of those things have geopolitical importance to America?
C’mon, you know the Cold War was a war of choice – to West only; the Soviets only reacted to it. They had occupied and inevitably Communized Eastern Europe as a defensive tier, quite understandably considering their recent experience, but up to then they had only limited interest in expanding the Revolution worldwide – that’s Trotskyist thinking, and Trotskyism was heresy.
Then why did they fire the first shots of the proxy wars by aiding Greek Communist guerillas? The Truman Doctrine was in response to Soviet aggression.
We contested China in the Korean War, and to some extent in the Vietnam War as well. Why then is China like China today?