What exactly has China done militarily over the past 45 years that leads you to compare it to the US? China is predominantly a peaceful world power which hasn’t invaded any country over the past half a century.
I think any government/state/group with power wants to hold and expand it
Then you’d be wrong. Famously, after the Russian Revolution in 1917, the Russian Socialist Federation of Soviet Republics, under the leadership of the Bolsheviks, created the first constitution in history that granted the unilateral right of self-determination and secession to all peoples of the former Russian Empire. This is how Poland gained its independence in 1918, as well as Finland and many other countries formerly part of the Russian Empire. Interesting episode of history.
for decades
Centuries*.
China and Russia don’t have those restraints
I understand why you’d say that about modern Russia, but how on Earth are you comparing China to the USA? In what war has China been in the past 40 years? What countries has it been exploiting?
protecting us in europe
Protecting Europe from what exactly? What military threat did the US fight against in Europe? There hasn’t been an attack to western Europe since WW2 until the US bombing of Yugoslavia.
After WWII, they realised: “You know what, we’re tired and worn out and everyone wants us out anyway
This is a very naive understanding of the history of decolonisation. Decolonisation wasn’t a western initiative, it was done because the colonies were literally rebelling against their European oppressors, great part of that through Soviet funding and arming.
Someone else can step in if they want.
…unless they oppose western control of the region like Patrice Lumumba, Fidel Castro or Mosaddeq.
The US didn’t step in with the Marshall plan to stabilize Europe against war, the US did so in order to prevent socialist uprisings all over Western Europe, and to create ties between European capital and US capital so that Western Europe would support the US in its imperialism.
US imperialism didn’t happen until the 1950s, well after the war.
Absolute whitewashing of the USian crimes against humanity all over the first half of the 20th century. Examples: big stick ideology
The US also constantly did shit like this in the Americas all over the 19th century, see United Fruit Company or Military Government of Cuba.
The last time Finland invaded a nation, they did it together with the Nazis. I don’t think you want Finland to rule the world.
Please, everyone who supported the “ReArm Europe” initiative with the 800bn€ yearly to military: THIS IS WHAT SUCH WEAPONS WILL BE USED FOR. They tell you they’re to “fight the evil dictators”, but they’re used to bomb the people standing against Israel and Europe. Europe is a genocide-supporting empire and we should all take a pacifist stance to prevent further stuff like this. Today it’s Trump, tomorrow it’s Meloni/LePen/Orban.
The US didn’t occupy Iraq territory after 2003 and they still murdered hundreds of thousands in cold blood and destroyed an entire country, leaving it without infrastructure or future prospects, to be ravaged by radicalism and poverty.
They want to do this to Iran too. Please stop jumping to defend the western genocidal empire
I’m not gonna argue with you because you’re a lost loser, but for the rest of users reading this person’s comments: this is a genocide denier asking questions such as “why do you consider the Israel-Hamas conflict a genocide?”. This is what the defence of capitalism leads to.
If you’re sad about the “intimidation tactics”, it’s very easy: stop siding with the Nazis!
My fella here wasting their time and energy defending the system that’s currently destroying earth and supporting the genocide of Palestinians
Sure, you have a point, just wanted to remind people that western European countries enacted many genocides to similar scale than Nazi Germany (or greater)
Was he, though? How many millions did he murder in the manmade Bengal famine?
You go on ignoring my comment and the historical evidence. I’m not doing “no u”, I’m asking for detailed critique of my analysis, which you refuse to do
I already responded to you in a detailed historical account and you refused to read it because history is against your point of view
Already answered your pro-Nazi revisionism, go read a book not written by the CIA if you’re an actual leftist and not a nazi-adjacent pro-western imperialism propagandist.
Your entire worldview is based on CIA propaganda and is entirely compatible with western Imperialism, which killed billions and is actuslly comparable to Nazism, unlike socialism which freed billions from capitalist exploitation and imperialism through industrialisation and social welfare. You haven’t read a single critical book on the topic and your entire analysis is reddit vibes-based CIA propaganda.
I’m sure the Polish people are so glad the soviets “saved them from Nazism”
Polish nationalists are immensely russophobic and reactionary, making that claim is like asking Spaniards (I’m one myself) about the literal golden age of Islam in Al-Andalus: you’ll get a distorted, nationalist, racist and islamophobic account based on vibes instead of the material reality. Polish people can think whatever they want after 35 years of nationalist right-wing propaganda (look at the results of their latest elections): the Soviets saved their fucking guts from genocide and Nazism, and yes I’m saying the Soviets, not just Russians: Ukrainians, Belarusians, Kazakh, Georgian… All of the people from the Soviet Union did the most immense sacrifice to rid Europe from Nazism. And liberal Nazi apologists like you will never forgive them from doing so.
I’m sure the Ukrainians appreciate the Russians brutally suppressing their independence
This is especially funny. Ukraine literally obtained autoctonous political representation and the state of a republic for the first time in history during the Bolshevik revolution. There are literal letters between Rosa Luxembourg (whom you probably love because she didn’t actually defeat Nazis) and Lenin in which Lenin defends the right of Ukrainian self-determination and the creation of a Ukrainian republic, institutions and a sense of nationality, in opposition to Rosa claiming Ukrainian nationalism shouldn’t exist (interesting read if you truly care about the origins of Ukrainian nationalism and the people of Ukraine and you’re not just concern trolling). Ukraine industrialised thoroughly during Soviet times and had very comparable living standards to the rest of the Union, which can’t be said after the perpetual crisis that took place once the Soviet Union was illegally dissolved against the desire of the majority of Ukrainians (71% of them voted for the Soviet Union to remain in the 1991 referendum). Your analysis is vibes-based taking western propaganda as a source and not actual historical events.
forcing them to die en mass against the Nazis, often times not even being armed and sent to the front lines
Why this fucking focus on Ukrainians? Belarus lost literally 1 in 4 people in the war against Nazism, how come you don’t make the same claims about Belarusians? The answer is because your analysis is ahistorical and not based on actual events, but on anticommunist nazi-adjacent nationalist russophobic propaganda. You’re using literal Nazi propaganda of “the unarmed human wave tactics” that featured in Nazi posters during the war after the defeat in Stalingrad, YOU ARE SIDING WITH THE NAZIS.
you refuse to even acknowledge my points about Holodomor
What part did I not acknowledge? There was a hunger episode in the early 30s in areas of the Soviet Union as a consequence of land collectivisation policy, is that not enough for you? Or do you need to fabricate genocidal intent because of your obsessive victimization of Ukrainians, completely disregarding the millions of Russian and Central Asian deaths in the hunger because they don’t suit your political nazi-adjacent agenda?
Wasters Germany still feels the effects of soviet oppression to this day
Eastern Germany is less developed economically than Western Germany due to two reasons: the first is that Eastern German industry was thoroughly dismantled after the reunification in favour of Western German companies. The second is that Western Germany developed in much more favourable conditions due to the access of cheap resources and labour extraction from the Global South that western capitalist countries have no problem performing and that for some reason you don’t care about, which is frankly immensely racist. Who cares if West Germany developed, like the rest of western Europe or North America, on the backs of literal BILLIONS of exploited people in Central and South America, Africa, Middle East and Southeast Asia, right? Who cares about the west performing unequal exchange? After all it’s black people, Muslims and Asians who are being exploited, and those aren’t worthy of your attention unlike white Ukrainians or Poles who enjoyed immensely better conditions BY LITERALLY ANY METRIC thanks to socialism.
I fucking hate tankies so much.
That’s because half of your ideology and worldview is indistinguishable from that of Nazis
Do you think the soviet oppression of eastern Europe is fundamentally different than the European oppression of Africa
If you don’t think they’re fundamentally different it means you’re not what you’re talking about. To this day, university students in Morocco and Algeria study in French, ask a Polish graduate from the 70s what language they used in university.
Look at the material exports not just during the colonial era but today in countries like Burkina Faso, whose 70% of exports are precious metals and 80% of exports go to Switzerland, and compare that to the Soviet Union providing raw goods and fossil fuels at international market prices to countries in the COMECON and importing manufactured, high value-added goods therefore subjecting itself to the short end of the stick of unequal exchange and mercantilism, in an effort to subsidise the industrialisation of said countries.
Look at educational outcomes, life expectancy, working rights in Communist Estonia and compare them to the Belgian Congo genocide or to Spanish invasion of Morocco and the status of moroccan citizens in occupied zones.
The Soviet Union was forced to sacrifice 27 mullion human lives in the war against Nazism, and it successfully rid Eastern Europe of it, saving it from being a German colony subjected to genocide and extermination, slavery, de-industrialization and resource exploitation, and instead industrialised its entire area of influence, eliminated landlords and serfdom, instituted huge unions, and did this all without resorting to the exploitation of people in the Global South. Come on, find a 60 year-old person from the Baltics or from Eastern Europe and ask them about worker rights, healthcare, education, pensions or access to housing during communism. And now go to fucking Libya and ask the same to someone who endured Italian colonisation.
You literally have no idea what you’re comparing.
As for “Holodomor” (a word propagated in this century with the intention of creating a nationalist russophobic propaganda of genocide), it was a disastrous hunger episode that affected wide regions of Russia, Central Asia, Ukraine and Belarus, consequence of the first successful large-scale land collectivisation project in human history. It caused a lot of suffering and deaths due to unforeseen effects of collectivisation policy that didn’t take into account how much resistance the landowners would put to the process, coupled with unfortunate weather conditions and bad crops.
Ultimately though, it enabled the successful and unprecedentedly fast-paced industrialisation of the Soviet union that managed to repel the Nazi offensive 10 years later and saved tens if not hundreds of millions of lives from Nazi genocide under projects like the Generalplan Ost and the Hungerplan, which targeted among many others the hundreds of millions of slavic people considered “Untermenschen” by the Nazis.
Regarding the Chinese famine, it’s simply the disastrous and horrendous consequence of failed ecological policy in an era and place prior to scientific understanding of ecology. Neither of these famines was a deliberate, white supremacist, targeted hunger against a peripheral group of people considered undesirable, such as the Bengal famine perpetrated by the British on India (one of a long series of provoked policies that arguably murdered hundreds of millions in India alone).
Describing the conditions under which something happens isn’t an excuse or a denial, BTW. Both these famines happened and they were horrifying, there are just no arguments to compare them to purposefully inflicted hunger by the British Empire on the Irish or Indians, and ultimately both episodes, while harrowing, stem from projects that fundamentally saved hundreds of millions of lives.
Life expectancy in the Soviet Union was 28 years before the Bolshevik revolution, and by 1940 (before the Nazi attack, just half a decade after the hunger episode we mentioned) it was 35 years. During the Nazi invasion of the USSR it obviously dropped, but by the mid-1950s life expectancy was already above 55 years old: twice higher than before communism. The Bolsheviks saved hundreds of millions of lives through the improvements in healthcare, industrialisation, mechanisation of agriculture and colectivization of land that took place in the first 4 decades of the Soviet project.
The same can be said about China. Life expectancy grew by some 20-25 years under the leadership of Mao, which in a country with a population of around 700 million, resulted in the saving of hundreds of millions of lives. The communist project in China over the past 40 years has lifted 800 million people from extreme poverty, which would be the equivalent of eliminating poverty in the entirety of the continent of South America and then some.
Why didn’t these improvements happen simultaneously in countries at the time comparably developed? Indonesia, Argentina, Northern African countries, Thailand, Myanmar, India, Sri Lanka, all of those countries were left unindustrialised and still today suffer from much worse living conditions than China or post-soviet countries, just compare life expectancy. Why is it, if “the evil of the Soviets was comparable to Western Imperialism”, that people in Poland don’t live like people in India? Why don’t people in China live like people in Myanmar?
It most definitely did not start in the cold war. The US was happily invading and controlling the politics of as much of the continent of the Americas well before WW2, with stuff such as the United Fruit Company or the Big Stick Ideology. The 1898 invasion of Cuba and establishment of a military junta comes to mind.