At 14:25 26-5-01 -0400, Gautam Mukunda wrote:
>Acquiring an empire is not the same thing as protecting yourself. You
>have no right to defend an empire - the only right involved is the
>right of your subject nations to be free.
There once was something called "The British Empire". Although the British
probably did some things back then they shouldn't be proud of, they weren't
as brutal as the Soviet Union. You claim that because something was called
an empire, it didn't have the right to defend itself. By that definition,
the British Empire didn't have a right to defend itself either.
I only used the word "empire" because it was the first word that came to
mind when I wrote that post. If I had written "The Soviet Union's sphere of
influence" instead, would you have said "you have no right to defend your
sphere of influence"? By saying something like that, you'd be saying that
no country has the right to defend itself.
>Also - having the military capacity to
>defend yourself against invasion does not give you the capacity to
>launch an invasion of your own. I don't know who told you that, but
>it's not true. You need significant superiority of forces to launch
>an invasion - it's far easier to defend than attack. That's why
>American forces in Western Europe were never a threat to the Soviet
>Union - because there were always far fewer of them in theatre.
OTOH, NATO equipment was technologically far superior to Warsaw Pact
equipment. If you want to win, your fist has to bigger than your enemy's,
but that doesn't necessarily mean you have to physically outnumber your enemy.
The Warsaw Pact had more tanks, airplanes etcetera, but they were
technologically inferior. The WP's reasoning behind all this was that many
would be destroyed in battle, so it would be cheaper to build a large
numbers of them, and not make them technologically on par with NATO equipment.
>So let's see.
>1. You agree that the US was a democracy and the Soviet Union was not.
>2. You agree that the US's allies in Western Europe were democracies,
>and that they were true allies, not conquered subjects, and that they
>freely chose to have American troops protecting them.
>3. You agree, I think, that states of Eastern Europe were subject
>provinces of the USSR that did not want Soviet troops there. You even
>call the nations of Eastern Europe part of an "Empire."
As pointed out above, I only called it an "empire" because it was the first
word that came to mind. I could also have said that the nations of Eastern
Europe were "within the Soviet Union's sphere of influence". I do not,
however, consider those countries "subject provinces". Although the
Soviet's will was law there, officially they were seperate countries, not
provinces.
>4. _But_ you seem to think that putting troops in Eastern Europe to
>protect that "Empire" was morally no different than helping the free
>nations of Western Europe defend themselves.
>Do I understand you correctly? I'm serious here - I'm trying to give
>a fair reading of your position as I understand it.
Yes, you understand me correctly. I do believe that the Soviet Union had
just as much right to defend it's sphere of influence (Eastern Europe) as
the West (US and Europe) had to defend *their* sphere of influence.
Jeroen
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