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[jonesey]

I do say that, if people felt as DvF does (that the Soviet Union wasn't a threat to anyone, ever)

Wow, are you ever a bad reader!  Wherever do I say anything even remotely resembling that? - DvF

Sorry, confused you and daurousseau (who are, I am fully aware, not the same person).  : )

[daurousseau]

I do say that, if people felt as DvF does (that the Soviet Union wasn't a threat to anyone, ever)

Wow, are you ever a bad reader!  Wherever do I say anything even remotely resembling that? - DvF

Sorry, confused you and daurousseau (who are, I am fully aware, not the same person).  : )

[daniel_von_flanagan]

FWIW, I don't think that daurousseau said that the USSR was never a threat to anyone, ever, either.

All great powers throughout history have been expansionist, and there is little question that the USSR sought to influence affairs in the Middle East and Asia...exactly as we did.  In response we had a geopolitical policy of containment...as did they.  As an American I am rather biased towards the US (and as a Jew towards Israel), but that doesn't stop me from wanting my leaders to stop acting like we are perpetually in the final struggle for civilization.  It is disgusting.

When an administration uses a bogeyman story to get us to agree to an action, they are implicitly telling us that we are too stupid to understand their actual reasons for the action.  Maybe they're right.  Even if the foreign policy they are supporting is a just one, they should argue it on its merits, and not on some fairy tale about dominos (just read McNamara to see that nobody in the Johnson administration actually believed the domino theory which they were peddling to the American people) or the Russians marching through Germany and France to invade England. (Thatcher actually used this in full-page newspaper ads when running against Kinnock in the late 80s - though the ads forgot to mention that Russia would actually have to pass through other countries before getting to Dover.)

The last president in my lifetime who was reasonably straight with us on foreign affairs was Eisenhower.  (He seems to have actually believed the domino theory.)  We have every right to be indignant about our decades of suffering from manipulation by our elected employees. - DvF

[daurousseau]

FWIW, I don't think that daurousseau said that the USSR was never a threat to anyone, ever, either.

Quite right. Trotsky, for example, interpreted an ice axe in his skull as a threat. And the Soviet citizenry as well as that of Eastern Europe found their rulers to be a threat--still do, under post-Soviet capitalism.

However, the U.S. did nothing whatsoever to help. By posing the false dichotomy: "our way or Stalin's way," they have disarmed the very people who could have and would have abandoned Stalinism for some form of economic and political democracy.

The "communist threat" and "capitalist imperialism" are brother bogeymen under the skin: neither has any use for democracy. (I call them boeymen here to underline what we were talking about previously--that they were never much of a threat to each other. Just to us.

[sad_goat]

The "communist threat" and "capitalist imperialism" are brother bogeymen under the skin: neither has any use for democracy. (I call them boeymen here to underline what we were talking about previously--that they were never much of a threat to each other. Just to us.

You are correct. Under the sickening yoke of capitalist imperialism, I have a chance to get the job of my choice. Under communism, the state pays for my funeral after they kill me for wanting the job of my choice.

You are like phosphorus, the more water thrown on you, the hotter you burn.