At 19:59 24-5-01 -0400, Gautum Mukunda wrote:
>Liberals _always_ believe that conservatives are dumb, Kat. In this
>conservative's opinion, it saves those liberals from the effort of
>actually thinking about what we say - because if they did, they'd
>realize we were right :-)
In this socialist's opinion, the liberals *do* think about what
conservatives say -- which is exactly why liberals don't vote conservative. :)
>So I think the moral case for destroying the Communist
>governments in the world was basically beyond question to any person
>with eyes willing to see the true nature of those governments.
So, what is it? Is Communism evil, or was it the government that was evil?
IMHO, communism and socialism aren't all that bad. The problem in the
Eastern Block was that the leaders weren't capable of handling the
responsibilities that came with the job, and turned the country into a
totalitarian state, which was only communist/socialist in name, not in
practice.
>Revelations from the
>Russian archives are demonstrating, in fact, that Soviet influence
>around the world was far more pervasive than we earlier believed.
>They funded terrorist and subversive organizations all around the
>world in the attempt to topple democratic governments and replace them
>with Soviet satellites.
I don't doubt that this happened. But before you scold the Soviet Union for
that, please remember that the United States have done exactly the same
thing: supporting terrorist and subversive organizations in countries
around the world, in order to topple governments and replace them with
US-friendly ones (or, to use some Cold War rethoric: to turn them into US
satellites).
>Soviet forces in Eastern Europe were
>_supposed_ to establish democratic governments and withdraw after the
>Second World War. Let's just say that they took their time. They
>constantly outnumbered the combined forces of the NATO allies
It's not like they had a choice. The Soviets knew very well that the West
was technologically far more advanced, so all they could do was try to win
a potential armed conflict by sheer force of numbers.
The West argued that they had to have a lot of firepower in Europe because
of the large number of Warsaw Pact forces at the border between East and
West. But look at it from the Warsaw Pact's POV: they saw an awful lot of
NATO troops at *their* border, and found that threatening enough to put up
defenses on their own side of the border.
> - I
>think it is reasonable to think that their intentions were highly
>aggressive. So the second reason was self-protection. Which is a
>moral end - you have a moral right to defend yourself.
You're absolutely right about that; yet when I read your post, it seems to
me like you believe that the West had that moral right, but the East didn't
have that right. The East believed the West's intentions to be aggresive.
Did they have less of a moral right to defend themselves?
>Either of those reasons would, by itself, have justified our actions
>during the Cold War. After all we _never_, not _once_, attacked the
>Soviets or any allies of theirs.
Not officially, anyway. But I don't believe for a minute that the US didn't
have covert operations going on in the Eastern Block to destabilize those
countries.
Jeroen
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