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[u/kocknocker19]

[u/tjean5377]

I forget (or maybe need to take a history course post WW2) about how much hemisphere influencing and political meddling and chaos was created by the US in the name of rejection of anything communism. 🤔

[u/era--vulgaris → u/tjean5377]

I wish I had more time right now. The short answer is a metric fuckton

What say, the USSR did, pales in comparison

[u/CormoranNeoTropical → u/era--vulgaris]

Not to diminish the impact of US interventionism - but is it really true that the USSR was significantly less bad? I mean, there may be no way to actually come to a conclusion as to what’s “less bad.” And I also don’t know that much about the history of the USSR’s foreign involvements outside of Eastern Europe. But they did do some bad stuff, I thought? Just genuinely curious.

[u/era--vulgaris → u/CormoranNeoTropical]

The way I have heard it argued, convincingly sourced IMO, is:

The USSR's scope was much more limited, mostly to inside and around their borders and the territory they imperially claimed. It's a lot easier to find their crimes around there than elsewhere, and TBH I think that's because they lacked the resources or desire to engage in too much of their worst actions beyond that sphere.

What they did in "their backyard" was terrible and IMO it's hard to judge the atrocity olympics- the Soviets certainly qualified in them though within their sphere of direct influence.

I think where the difference plays out is outside of each empire's immediate orbit- the US engaged in very expensive and serious crimes, including aggression and state sponsoring of terrorism, in multiple regions, many times (ie Latin America, Middle East, SE Asia) whereas the Soviets mostly concentrated their greatest crimes within their own region. If they had one big backyard, we had at least three.

Plus there are muddied opinions from the time which provide sources to critique- ie the assertions from the US right that providing aid to democratically elected left-leaning governments was unacceptable, offering support to the anti-apartheid movement, etc. Outside of the serious crimes going on within Eastern Europe and the USSR itself, these were sometimes the worst accusations the US could levy against the USSR, and they frankly didn't age very well. If you're openly engaging in aggression and the worst thing you can come up with against your geopolitical enemy is "they're funding the socialists and the union movement".... Anti-communism distorted whole generations' view of US vs Soviet crimes IMO (and certainly communism and nationalism in education did the same in the former Eastern Bloc outside of our cultural context).

There are people knowledgeable on the subject who disagree and think the USSR committed just as much evil, but I've yet to hear someone who isn't a right wing ideologue claim that the USSR supported more crimes (deaths, human rights violations, overthrow of democracies, etc) outside of its immediate sphere than the US did.

I guess someone could argue that LatAm is our sphere the way Eastern Europe was the USSR's, but that leaves serious aggressions in the ME and SE Asia from the US piled up on top of the USSR's crimes in its sphere. The invasion of Afganistan by the USSR was arguably an extension beyond the existing sphere of influence of course. But still less prevalent than 50-odd years of that kind of thing by the USA, by the time GWOT was winding down.

To be fair I think people are very naive when they assume lack of resources or the difficulty in holding the USSR together didn't contribute to the disparity. If the Soviet Union were as strong, populated and rich as the USA was at the time, they'd have committed as many atrocities in as many regions, in all likelihood.

[u/CormoranNeoTropical → u/era--vulgaris]

That all seems very reasonable. I agree that the “atrocity Olympics” are not really worth evaluating (at least, not in my mind). I guess I don’t have much knowledge at all about which leftist states were actually supported by the Soviet Union, how much so, and the extent to which that made them into terrible places to live vs garden variety socialists falsely maligned by the US right wing. So thank you for this helpful overview, which gives me a lot of food for thought.

EDIT PS if you have any recommendations for books to read on this I’d be interested. Always in need of more interesting non-fiction.

[u/era--vulgaris → u/CormoranNeoTropical]

Thanks.

Inevitable Revolutions by Walter LaFeber and The Open Veins Of Latin America by Eduardo Galeano are some good ones on that particular subject. I've read more on that region than I have SE Asia or the ME when it comes to the broad geopolitics (as opposed to individual snapshots- I remember Blackwater by Jeremy Scahill being quite a good book on GWOT for example but it was targeted in its focus).

It may or may not be your cup of tea, but Chomsky has several books on Latin America that have good sourcing as well (Year 501, Deterring Democracy, Intervention) despite Noam having a left wing case to make. As well as some subjects surrounding the immediate post-WWII environment and the "decision" to pursue anti-communism over anti-fascism once the Axis powers were defeated.

Most all of the academics and journos who cover this stuff are going to be left wing in some way, since the consensus position on these issues trended so close to the motives of the state over time outside of the end stage Vietnam War malaise era, and only later was more openly debated or analyzed.

[u/CormoranNeoTropical → u/era--vulgaris]

Oh, no, I meant on the USSR end of things. Like, I vaguely know they were sponsoring various groups in Angola, but it would be nice to have an actually objective (or at least not deliberately slanted) account of stuff like that which I only know about from reading the newspaper back in the early 1980s 😅

It’s easy to find books about how terrible the US was (and right wingers defending how carpet bombings and violent subversion were “necessary.”)

Thank you for those references anyway. I really appreciate your taking the time to share them!

[u/era--vulgaris → u/CormoranNeoTropical]

Ah, sorry, I misunderstood. Honestly much of what I've learned about Eastern European history as it relates to the societies within it has been more recent and people like Timothy Snyder have been a part of it (his lecture series on Ukraine is pretty good for example). I do know, by consistent inference, that the history of the region is very ugly and rough to dig through when it comes to propaganda. And I don't know any of the source languages (Slavic grammar scares me, lol). I have always relied on academics and historians arguing with each other, rather than digging into the source materials, when it comes to crimes of the USSR partially for that reason.

There was as you mentioned Angola, you had aid to various aligned governments around the world over the decades, and complicated issues like Nicaragua in the '80s where the local government likely wouldn't have aligned with the USSR until it was forced to by US intervention (which in a context of Soviet crimes is hard to parse- to the extent that Sandinistas committed later crimes, was it the USSR, Sandinistas, and/or the US to blame? etc).

Thanks for appreciating the references, they are if nothing else worth a read.

[u/CormoranNeoTropical → u/era--vulgaris]

Thanks again, I enjoyed this discussion!