Daoloth, you’re quoting the same sort of boiler-plate rhetoric that they used in the way that our politicians have talked about “making the world safe for Democracy.” Similarly, their actions are simply the actions of a superpower sparring with its foes for domination in its spheres of influence.
I am not claiming that the Soviet Union was not attempting to attain a position of unassailable strength. They were certainly carrying on the tradition of the Great Game that they inherited from the Czars (and that the U.S. took up from the Brits). I am pointing out that the notion of “world communism” was more firmly lodged in the mind of Robert Welch than it ever was in the minds of Stalin, Kruschev, Breshnev, or Andropov.
If world-wide communism was such a monolithic effort, then we should have never seen a Yugoslavia, an Albania, or a China. They should have all been working with single-minded devotion to the spread of genuine Marxism. Instead, we saw the standard geo-political games throughout the world. Marxism flourished in places such as Vietnam and struggled for ascendancy in places like Malaysia because the “democratic” powers continued to support colonial powers and the rebels could more easily find help from the Russians. However, the struggle was simply one of national power, cloaked in the language of philosophy; following the death of Lenin and exile of Trotsky, it was never a serious goal of the U.S.S.R. Similarly, in China, it was a method of overturning both the Empire and the colonial powers. Aside from North Korea, China has never seriously sought to export its ideology. It has sought to extend its empire and its power, but not its ideology. (Even Sendero Luminosa, while borrowing its concepts from Mao, never got a lot of support from China except to the extent that China thought that it would weaken the political power of the U.S. in South America.)
