Hi all.
Well, is it a big surprise that it was me who made the comment about the
USA and the USSR being "same sh*t, different flag"? *grin* Now, I must
clarify that when I made that flippant remark, I was essentially joking.
But when Dan took me semi-seriously, I thought it through, and asked myself
why I said that, and why I have that perception. So I'll try to clarify
what I said, and my perspective on it, and so on. I will not claim absolute
authority, or that my perceptions illustrate the absolute truth. Nobody's
perceptions do, really. They can be more, or less, informed. Mine are less
informed in some ways about the details of each "empire", which may
contribute to a distortion in my perception. But being subject to the
nationalistic materials that circulate in either state, I would imagine
that a Soviet or American perception of one's own, and of the other, nation
would also be significantly distorted.
>>Dan Minette wrote:
>> >and the USSR. The differences are much more important than the
>> >simulatirites.
>> >
>>For the (US)american people and the soviet people, yes. But in
>>the periphery of their empires, the cold war hit us equally bad.
Alberto's point is an important one. My perspective is on the periphery of
the two Empire, though very clearly linked to one . . . and of course,
because of that (and likely other reasons) I feel more allegience to the
US's system in favour of the USSR's. But I can honestly say that I am an
outsider to both, and am critical of both.
>Well, on the periphery, relatively little can be done by either party. They
>can send a few soldiers, train locals, make deals with local goverments or
>anti-government forces. The price of direct intervention there is rather
>high.
Right, but in one sense, the question is that both states were deeply
concerned with extending power over the globe. Basically, where the last
major imperial thrust for world domination was European, and ended up with
Britain on top (for a while), this was more of a long-term duke-it-0ut
between two major powers whose notions of politics and economics were:
(a) founded on ideology, and thus not fully tested and experimental in
nature (and still I say the US's system is...)
(b) inherently utopianist in its sense of the future and thus inherently
bent on spreading throughout the world, and altering the face of all
cultures and societies in the world by their presence and impact on them --
or, rather, making all peoples of the world a part of their
industrial-political system.
(c) convinced that action (b) was sustainable despite the scale of the
attempt, despite the specifics of all other cultures, and that is was
desired by all peoples whether they "knew" it or not.
The specifics of an American's comparison between the USA and the USSR
running different countries and the beneficence or malevolence thereby is a
difficult thing to evaluate. I know that Russian intelligentsia tend to
speak disparagingly of Russia and tend to have moved to the West. But then
again, I have heard Eastern Europeans speak very disparagingly of North
American culture [generally the lack of any] and hypocrisy as well. I'd
like to see a comparison from several different points of view, and one
thing I am really curious about is how people not in G20 countries see the
differences between the two nations. How would a Turkish or Ghanian see the
two nations? I will have to ask around I guess.
>Again, this is not saying that the US was correct in supporting
>dictatorships. It is arguing against the equivalence of the US and the
>USSR.
Yes, but my very point in the original discussion, Dan, was not that they
really WERE equivalent, it was that the similarities were more than people
of either nation would be comfortable admitting. My argument is that the
USA WAS correct in supporting dictatorships to the degree that the status
quo in the USA and worldwide was thereby preserved -- at least, from a US
perspective!!! I am saying that absolute morality goes out the window, and
all moral terminology becomes subservient to nationalist ideology to begin
with in both nations. This is the similarity that could allow some
Communists to justify Stalin's mass killings, AND allows the USA to justify
its own admittedly (by USAns here) nasty actions abroad -- and not just
military ones, at that.
It's funny, because the massive amount of reaction, and the strength of
that reaction, is shocking to me. I actually was imagining that we are in
the West moving into other ways of conceptualizing our identity as a
"group" or set of "groups". I was thinking in terms of politics, in terms
of demographics and economics, essentially in post-nationalistic terms --
and this is how I conceive myself, honestly. But perhaps that is partly
because I am not a resident of THE mother country of the growing world
empire right now, and thus not subject to the slings and arrows of the
dissatisfied natives and other competitors. *grin*
Another major point of my comparison sits upon the following: by extensive
evangelism, both the USA and the USSR sought to retool the aesthetics of
the rest of the world. Each offers a different utopia, its own brand as it
were. But both make their appeal to the aesthetics of people in other
nations via the same means they make their appeal to the people within
their state: the USSR offers a utopia for the worker, promising that
distribution will be fair and equal among all. The USA on the other hand
offers the American dream, which is the dream in which, rather than the
money being mobilized downward, the good worker can [ahem, will] be mobile
upward, into a kind of leisure class who are the subject of a great deal of
North American fantasizing.
Aside from the inversion of what is mobile -- the money, or the people --
it's a striking similarity. Since in the USSR model, it is the money that
is made mobile, it is the people who need to be controlled -- by military
means and military extensions outward. With the USA, it is the people who
are conceived of as mobile, and therefore a lot of the control and
extensions outward have to do with money (or market).
This kind of massive retooling of human aesthetics -- the building of the
dreams of humanity for the current paradigm -- is a significant thing, and
I think especially so simce they are essentially a variation on one
another. And the crucial point is that whole economic and social systems
are based on these aesthetics, these fantasias of possibility. And both end
up betraying the mass majority of their "adherents", because let's face it,
even marginal improvements in the lives of most people are also accompanied
by the necessity to work for survival, yet the work's profits do mainly
exist for the benefit of the elite. This economic model is already
extending around the world, and in the light of this, Dan's comment about
the Cold War:
>No excuse is a pretty strong statement. Many people in the US saw the Cold
>War a war the US could lose. If it did, it would be destroyed or remade in
>the image of the USSR. I do feel that this was overstated, but not entirely
>false. I think the US�s treatment of Germany and Japan after WWII gives a
>good indication of what it would do with complete control. One cannot cite
>racism in the treatment of these countries, because Japan is Asian.
is problematic. In building up a network of potentially powerful and likely
allied nations -- nations that share the same economic and political
interests, and thus would eventually become allied with the USA in the
world that emerged after WWII, split as it was between Communism and
Capitalist-Democracy, I see some good but I see the good as a side-effect
of a deeper underlying drive for the safeguarding of the USA and its, shall
we say, meme-set? Otherwise, why hasn't the USA been rebuilding all sorts
of other poor countries around the world? It's not pure humanism at work
here, obviously.
Were the Stalinist purges horrific? Yes. I know I am hearing the rustling
of voices whispering about the Cultural Revolution in China, about Pol Pot
. . . yes, all of this is very overtly horrific. I agree. I personally
would tend not to equate murder with, say, enslavement or theft, if we were
to put these onto an individual metaphor level. What I am saying is that
the set of psychological and discursive techniques used to justify ALL of
these crimes are pretty damn similar, and that THIS is striking. To bring
it back to the national scale, some people would argue that long-term
economic subservience of and poverty for masses of people in many countries
around the world who help, ahem, participate in the "global economy" for
the benefit of, well, us as in the West including and led by the USA, is a
comparable evil to mass murder. Never having been quite so poor as that, I
cannot say for myself, and I know that the situation cannot be fully blamed
on the USA or even the West in general . . . but I still think there is a
responsibility and involvement in the affairs of other countries that is
romanticized and dangerous in a way strikingly similar to, perhaps because
often an inversion of the model used by the USSR.
Gord
