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Here is my "analys," most of those leaders came to power due to serious economic deficits of the governments that preceded them. Putin came to power easily after the complete disaster of Yeltsin years. Erdogan came to power after economic crisis of the late 1990s and the 1997 "post-modern coup." Chavez's rise to fame (and his coup attempt) occurred after the bloody caracazo riots. Orban slide into position after a very unpopular MSZP government. The mistake the article and most analysis in NYC and DC make is they think is providing access to information, commercial goods or "rock'n roll" that is the key to undermining these regimes when they ultimately have strong popular backing because the public general prefers it (Venezuela is the exception here). In addition, economic decline may not be either because it isn't just economics but a combination of national aspirations largely based on past "national humiliations." Liberal democracy fell apart in these countries for a reason, and in some of them it wasn't even there in the first place (Turkey, Russia).
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May 26, 2015 20:32
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MaxxBot posted:I would disagree with both the nationalist viewpoint and the viewpoint put forward by the OP. I would certainly agree about "the vast hypocrisy and violence of US foreign policy and the demonstrable emptiness of its claims of supporting freedom and democracy at home and abroad" as would most of D&D, that's not a super controversial opinion here. My issue with the nationalists is that they look at a lovely country or one that does something against their own interests and conclude by default that we must work for regime change if not outright military invasion. The answer is everyone knows that these criticisms often lead to broader "policy" that goes for all those things and that most likely the narrative building that goes on isn't necessarily in the name of human rights but push a path in a broader geopolitical struggle. Russians specifically, including everyday people, immediately assume it is a dishonest tactic and is part of a chess game. Ultimately they have a giant blind spot of the faults of their government because of this but often they are right at the same time. The "left" has got three options: support the Western narrative even knowing it will most likely be part of some type of cynical policy, support the Russian narrative that ignores the abuses that are going on or simply try to remain neutral and/or attack them both.
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May 28, 2015 01:35
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I have seen articles from the US press heavily criticizing Russian arms sales to Egypt, without mentioning that we have continued to sell them all types of poo poo at the same time. A big order of everything from Abrams tanks to Harpoon missiles recently went through. Hell, even the New York Times seems to have taken a pretty cold war shift lately. http://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/22/magazine/out-of-my-mouth-comes-unimpeachable-manly-truth.html?_r=0 Russian TV News is ridiculous but at the same time a Russian could write some story about watching Fox News in a hotel room in Moscow and it being insane and brain-numbing. That is the ultimately the issue: if you are going to call upon moral authority to take dramatic actions against the population of a country, it helps to actually have something to back it up with. The US still has the power that pretty much no other country has on earth, and its actions simply carry far more weight because of it. If the US wants to know out a government on the other side of the world, it is pretty much alone in maybe being able to get it done. That type of power requires more responsibility and greater accountability not less. Ardennes fucked around with this message at 10:12 on May 28, 2015 |
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May 28, 2015 10:03
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DeusExMachinima posted:I agree that's why any communist superpower had to go. 100 million killed = do not pass go, do not collect $200. Too bad the US hitched itself to the PRC then, also the Black Book of Communism is nonsense. Like seriously it is a an embarrassment in the field. Ardennes fucked around with this message at 17:39 on May 28, 2015 |
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May 28, 2015 17:35
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DeusExMachinima posted:Lowest estimate I've heard from Black Book critics is 65 mil, so eh, no biggie I guess. I'm sure you can find me similar numbers in the great post-WW2 first world famine and intellectual purges. You probably should look at famines and death under European colonialism then if you want to play the statistic game. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Late_Victorian_Holocausts http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_major_famines_in_India_during_British_rule http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Congo_Free_State Also, the PRC is still around and if anything is a far powerful state due to trade with the US. Ardennes fucked around with this message at 18:00 on May 28, 2015 |
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May 28, 2015 17:52
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Josef bugman posted:Yes, but over how much time is the latter? 3 to 2 hundred years? Or are we meaning in the immediate bits where colonialism was being critiqued? Then it is probably a bit less. You can easily say within 100 years there was plenty of death in the British Empire depending on how you want to frame it, ultimately though the British Empire is remembered in a very different manner than Stalinism. Of course that is the point right, but ultimately how do you respond to a criticism like "Communism killed 100 million"? Do you just accept it as it is even if most historians agree it is very problematic? Do you refuse to mention the context? One side has to give up so the other can win? I mean it is obvious there was going to be no consensus and the battle lines were already set. It doesn't really matter, the Soviet Union was already going heavily in a market direction before it collapsed as well. White washing the PRC compared to the Soviet Union is nonsensical especially since the US opened relations not long after most of those deaths from famine occurred. Maybe Nixon's handshake was the healing touch? Fojar38 posted:The difference being that non-Fox News perspectives are actively represented in the US press. Having a free press means a very broad range of diverse opinions are represented, so I don't understand why you would cherry-pick articles saying one thing when I would bet money that you could find an article somewhere expressing the exact opposite opinion that's just as freely available. When I google search for news about China or Russia I have to sift through a small army of apologist websites before I find anything that I would personally consider reliable, but those apologist websites are there, saying what they want, and nobody is threatening to shut them down. The issue is scale, leftist sites are relatively minuscule compared to heavy hitters like the News Corp. That plurality of opinion exists but it is about the weight it is given. Obviously, the US has far more press freedom than Russia but at the same time, the media most Americans are going to exposed is going to be from a large newspaper/tv channel still even if that is changing. Let's be honest here in D&D, you can't post a article from a socialist website but the NYT is no issue. But let's be clear here, the narrative in the NYT article was that the Russian population was being brainwashed by their media into zombies, a narrative not even the NYT would say about Fox News or CNN. That half truth is at the core of what they are going. You can believe a country has far worse press freedoms, but at the same time, there is a point when you go too far in assuming your own moral superiority on the issue to the point of going on a crusading mission for it. However, now if you're a journalist in Russia that is something different, and if anything is extremely dangerous and worth criticizing Putin's regime for but at the same time, it is question of what you are hoping to achieve. (Btw the Russian internet is pretty free compared to somewhere like China, there isn't a firewall.)
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May 28, 2015 21:14
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Josef bugman posted:True enough, but then again what else was being done at the time alongside that. The British Empire is, and remains, one of the worst things ever inflicted on a reluctant globe by a series of hideously moustachioed crazy people. Well, in that sense, the amount of people killed in China was numerically much higher if you rely on famine numbers, and China's political repression easily matched Stalinism. Russia is seen as a hell of a lot worse, because the Soviet Union was far more of a threat especially after Nixon went to China. If anything under Gorbachev, the Soviets were softening quicker than China was. Obviously, you can say it was a "different time" but the counter-argument would be simply those crimes can't be erased etc. Ultimately, the narratives around "Black Book of Communism" is usually used are pretty much attack all forms of leftism. Even if people don't know of the book itself, there know the narratives it builds from and the is a reason why Obama was called a "socialist" if not a "communist" in the first place was to attach him to Stalin and Mao. You can't ignore the deaths and tragedy that happened but there has to be context and accuracy. In context, the 19th and 20th century was full of brutality from multiple empires and much of deaths that happened under them are still being argued about. For example, purposeful deaths under the Nazis are assumed to be far closer to 20 million from 1939-1945 addition to the tens of millions who died fighting against them during the war.
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May 28, 2015 22:46
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Josef bugman posted:Could it be that, more so than otherwise, the people in charge at the top did these things on purpose? In the case of Empire there was clear division between how things were supposed to work and how they did because it was farmed out to a great deal of different private and public entities which lead to a small number, though not majority, of the situations in the imperialised nations. In the case of Mao and Stalin the top down directives were being ordered by one person and then executed (sometimes literally) down a chain of command with no changes in between, according to the narrative. Perhaps that is what makes it easier to blame "Communism" as some all encompassing boogey man because it is associated with one man and a terrible moustache doing horrific things, where as in the case of Empire the blame for all of the things associated with it is more diffuse and wide ranging? Both had broad bureaucracies that carried out orders though and in essence they were also fairly centralized systems (at least under the Raj). Maybe British officials aren't as iconic as Stalin or Mao? In all three cases though, there was usually a combination of mass negligence and intent. Ardennes fucked around with this message at 23:37 on May 28, 2015 |
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May 28, 2015 23:19
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Josef bugman posted:Fairly centralised, but with a shared overview that was orchestrated from further away. You have the fact that the rhetoric of London was frequently different to the ones on the ground (as always) but that the actual orders sent down the chain were often less applicable. And I would say that, at least with Stalin, it is not necessarily negligence. Mao and the Raj (to lesser extents and for different reasons) sure, but with Stalin I think he seemed to be fairly keen to know who was getting purged next week. Ultimately though both Soviet and British responses were fairly similar, both showed a lack of concern for local populations and shipped grain from deprived areas to ones they desired. Both of them had their own biases and motives for ignoring the plight of the population. You may want to say Stalin "wanted" this more than the British who simply didn't care one way or another who died, but the sources don't really reveal much in that sense. It may have been a biased response but at the same time is unclear if it was really ethnic-focused in nature (compared to other poor responses to Russian and Kazakh populations during famine). I think in the end there is a complete lack of concern in both cases and the intend was for the needs of the state not the population.
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May 28, 2015 23:52
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Dilkington posted:I'm being ironic. I don't endorse fascism or Eurasian empire. I'm playacting as a reminder that the struggle against western liberalism is not exclusively a leftist project, and to suggest that contemporary leftists be wary of these kinds of alliances à la the Tudeh Party. How much is a leftist still allowed to criticize the US without being a fascist or assisting fascists?
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Jun 15, 2015 16:26
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Dilkington posted:Hey! I know as well as you do that criticizing the US or western liberalism does not make one a fascist, nor does it mean one is colluding with fascists. Let's say they aren't actively working for them but it makes them a dupe of fascists? I assume any academic work that follows in the same line follows in the same vein. Ardennes fucked around with this message at 19:05 on Jun 15, 2015 |
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Jun 15, 2015 18:57
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Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan especially were unraveled from the breakup and if anything wanted the union to stay around because it was the pretty much the only development that had happened (environment consequences and all). It isn't that the Soviet Union should be brought back, but at the same time you have to honestly weight every part of what happened and not treat it like a geopolitical Superbowl. As going after "leftists" betraying the West by criticizing liberal capitalism/liberalism (it is a broad theme in D&D), in the ends up disciplinary and while you can say policing a narrative "happens all the time in Russia or China" that isn't an actual argument to the contrary of what they are saying. I mean in the end Putin and his regime was born out of the nightmare of the 1990s in Russia, so where does all of it end? Dilkington posted:I understand your defensiveness but you're arguing with the wrong person. I don't agree that by simply criticizing the west or liberalism in general, leftists make themselves the "dupe of fascists", unless you have a ridiculously broad definition of "dupe." If that's the case, on the list of people who've inadvertently aided the rise of the right, Chomsky, Ali, and Weisbrot are somewhere below my grandma and Kanye West (West). Then in that sense your point about Dugin is unclear. Irony aside what are you trying to get at? Ardennes fucked around with this message at 21:30 on Jun 15, 2015 |
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Jun 15, 2015 21:20
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McDowell posted:Somehow getting the three big UNSC members and the EU to sit down and work out master plans for free trade / security. Eurasian economic integration is a good thing. The Middle East should be Russia/China's problem. Either that or eventually everything boils over (Middle East, South China Sea, Arctic rights). So yeah it eventually boils over, but lets be honest here that economic integration (looking at Europe) has broken down for a reason and there isn't a past/future that Russia would be ever be allowed into a Western economic union in the first place. China is rather ify as well. In the end we are more or less of a set path from the end of the war (Nixon going to China being a major shakeup though). Ardennes fucked around with this message at 21:42 on Jun 15, 2015 |
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Jun 15, 2015 21:37
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Tezzor posted:It is plausible that anti-black discrimination was worse in the USSR, I'm not familiar with the specifics. Let's say it's true. It is also actually indisputably true Good Soviet Intellectuals criticized the US's treatment of black people despite their country apparently being worse, in much the same way Americans who have to use duct tape to avoid tripping over their boners on the way to the internet to post advocacy of every American military action also love denouncing Russian aggression. This is why calling "tu quoque" is always a matter of who decided to shout it first. That said, geopolitics is a cynical game and we got a bit too use to just having a single player on the board. Just because I am pedant about history I think civil rights/human rights in general as better example for what you are trying to say.
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Jun 15, 2015 22:12
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Dilkington posted:When I talk about the Tudeh Party of Iran, I mean it as an example of a leftist party which formed an alliance of convenience with reactionaries (contra other leftist groups), with the idea that when the time came, they would put their erstwhile allies against the wall. The opposite happened. I put that forward as a cautionary tale for people not familiar with the party or with Ehsan Tabari. In that sense, I agree, but at the same time even as a champion of a "non-aligned" position, I have to say it is fundamentally an unstable one. What is the dividing line of going too far and how do you defend yourself on both fronts? An alliance with Dugin or right-wing populists is allying yourself in the wrong direction, but let's also be honest here there is going to be a lot of pressure from the "Western" side as well. One thing I am surprised about is how many center-leftists/liberals become far more interventionist when you bring up bombing the right region under the right-circumstance, and you may find yourself rather lonely even among people on the "left." Of course, even in the West, there is still a "radical left" with hard positions of their own and they don't brook disagreement either. In many ways, it is easier to pick a team and just attempt to batter the other side into submission, certainly less stressful as well. That or become apolitical. Granted, it is unclear how much of what I said doesn't apply to the right as well either. Ardennes fucked around with this message at 01:28 on Jun 16, 2015 |
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Jun 16, 2015 01:26
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