Gord Sellar <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: >Right, but in one sense, the question is that both states were deeply >concerned with extending power over the globe. One has to recall that the US was rather unwilling to be an internationalist. It didn't join Wilson's League of Nations. Washington's fairwell adress about avoiding foreign entanglements was often quoted. But, WWII changed the US's mind and enforced the idea that it had a responsibility in the world. So, the US became internationalists. I think mostly it was the threat of the Soviet Union that caused this. Now that the threat is gone, some Republicans are returning to their isolationist roots. > >(a) founded on ideology, and thus not fully tested and experimental >in >nature (and still I say the US's system is...) But there has been years of experimental testing. The US's system has been tested for over 200 years, and the Soviet Union's for about 80. One can claim different starting points, etc, but the sucess of one vs. the failure of the other seems to be well verified experimentally. I think we can see this clearly where a country was divided in two, with have going in each camp. Viet Nam is hard to measure because of the length of the war and the North winning. The other two cases, Germany and Korea, are useable. Both offer sharp contrasts in the performance of the two systems. > >(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. If this is true for the US, then why did the US withdraw from the world after WWI? There is also one overwhelming difference between the two idealologies. The US is founded on the philosophy of the Enlightenment. The inherent rights of people are fundamental. The Soviet System is founded on the historical dialectic, which is a view of the natural law of social change. The first assumes that people determine their own lives, the latter assumes that they do not. > >(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 US has done that on occasion, but when it does it suffers from a cognative dissonences, because it violates one of its founding presuppositions. The SovUnion, on the other hand, has no such violation. >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've had a person from the Soviet Union live in my house for a couple of years and have talked with others from that region, as well as friends of mine who have visited. The picture they painted did not sound very appealing. >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!!! But you are ignoring tremendous asymetries in what they do. The US had a draft for its war in Viet Nam. An ally with a border, Canada, accepted almost all the Americans who wanted to evade that draft (I think they turned away criminals, but I'm not sure). The US complained a bit, but that's about it. Do you honestly think that the Soviet Union would have accepted its draftees fleeing to Poland in the same manner? Other measures of asymmetries abound. People have been free to leave the US; leaving the USSR has been near impossible. People cannot even move from town to town in the USSR without hard to obtain approval from the government. And, the US had the chance for honest to goodness military domination of the world. I need to get back at the B-52 thread, but my understanding was that the US had the ability to devastate the Soviet Union with much smaller casualties on its side. >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. But the morality of the US's actions was debated in public by the leadership. What comparable debate can you show for the Soviet Union? Morality did matter to the US because it is central to its belief system. The historical dialectic need not consider this. >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. The evangelism part isn't that big of a problem. One side preaching government ownership of the means of production and the other private ownership, and matching how well they work would be just fine, and I'd be ashamed of the US if it were paranoid about its chances in such a battle. But, the Soviet Union didn't just preach. When the people decided they didn't like the sermon, they locked the church doors and had the deacons shoot anyone trying to sneak out the windows. That is a very fundamental difference. >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. > Gord, you have talked to the intellegencia. Have you sat down and listened to what the lives were like in the Soviet Union? The nation didn't work at all. People were lucky to get a 4 room apartment for a large family...and those are small, not large rooms. The only purpose of the economy was the military. The military was eating up about 50% of the GDP of the Soviet Union by the end of the '70s and the early '80s. It was in a permanent recession. The life of a lower middle class worker in the US was better than my friend who was high enough in status to be invited to join the party. His short summary of the Soviet Union is "they treated us like pets." >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. What mobile money? Few did well in the Soviet Union. The US had much more upward mobility from the 20s to the 90s than the Soviet Union. Not enough, sure, but much more than the Soviet Union. >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 since 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. But that's not true. My dad was raised in an orphanage, my mom's family was dirt poor, and my dad worked with his hands for a living. Yet, we benefited tremendously from the US economic boom. The people of the Soviet Union did not benefit from their government's mismanagement of the economy. >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. Again there is a tremendous asymmetry that is not being addressed. There are times the ends justifies the means and there are times the means totally corrupts the ends. One looks at where the US withheld the use excessive force and looks for a similar restraint on the part of the Soviet Union. One looks at the ways that each country ensures that it has enough allies. One looks at the atrocities approved by each government, etc. The asymmetry 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. The main argument against that is the trifling fraction of the trade of the US with third world countries. Basically, it's just a few percent. And, one sees that the countries that have next to no trade with the US do not have better economies. >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 There is a responsibility to do what we can to help them. There is no doubt that unfair trade has contributed to poverty. But, the evidence also suggests that the losses due to gross mismanagement overwhelm the losses due to unfair trade. Dan'm Traeki Ring of Crystallized Knowledge. Known for calculating, but not known for shutting up _________________________________________________________________________ Get Your Private, Free E-mail from MSN Hotmail at http://www.hotmail.com. Share information about yourself, create your own public profile at http://profiles.msn.com.
