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If USSR escaped unscathed from WW2 and America had instead been nearly destroyed we'd probably be hearing the exact opposite.

• tekla 4y ago
  Oh yes, since Post Civil War and Pre WW2 Soviet Union was an amazingly productive economy without multiple famines and definitely didn't shoot over a million of their own citizens without a good reason.
  • pydry 4y ago
    The growth was pretty staggering, yeah. They progressed from agrarian to first man in space in 40 years.
    • allarm 4y ago
      The cost of that though. My grandmother and her sister were two survivors out of five children. The rest of the kids died of hunger and sickness during random migrations between villages in 1930s. Her father lost everything he had because soviets decided it’s theirs now, so the whole family had to move someplace else to find a new home. Not everyone had made it.
    • tekla 4y ago
      The growth was staggering because they stole grain and farmland from their citizens, exported it to buy machinery because the USSR couldn't manufacture themselves, which was also wasted since they didn't have the ability to keep the machines maintained properly. So yeah, turns out you can do things if you starve your people to death. (See North Korea)
      • pydry 4y ago
        They industrialized fast enough to defeat the Nazis who otherwise would probably have exterminated them. The urgency and the threat they faced if they didnt industrialize quickly enough was real and existential. And yes, in order to do so they caused millions of Ukrainians to starve by exporting all of the food they grew. Exactly like Britain did to my ancestors in Ireland for profit.
• mindslight 4y ago
  It probably doesn't make sense to attribute it to communism, because Russia is doing the same damn throw human life into a meat grinder approach in the modern day despite no longer being nominally communist. But that poor outcome is definitely attributable to something in the neighborhood of communism, namely the more general totalitarianism, which communism was most certainly a gateway to. Having said that, I'm not terribly keen on the nominally capitalist nominally democratic "inverted" totalitarianism that's on the rise. But given that more potent forms of totalitarianism are resurgent and eager to fill any power vacuums, I guess it's the best path we've got for now. I can just hope that the newer generations have developed enough memetic resistance to make the whole Facebook (nee Fox News) hysterical-nonsensical mob thing a passing fad.
  • pydry 4y ago
    >It probably doesn't make sense to attribute it to communism, because Russia is doing the same damn throw human life into a meat grinder approach in the modern day despite no longer being nominally communist. Yeah, this is 100% about Russian borders, which are long, exposed, expensive to defend and present an existential threat on a (historically) fairly regular basis. America's geography is pretty much the polar opposite, so it's hard to empathize.
    • hcurtiss 4y ago
      Yet, contrast USA with Mexico (not communist). Geography is no match for governance. The USSR failed because their system of government, like every other communist state, produced abject poverty.
      • sudosysgen 4y ago
        You're not completely incorrect, but the US has a far far better geography than Mexico, and it's not even close.
    • mindslight 4y ago
      I would think that since the borders are expensive to defend, that would lead to trying to be more efficient with human life and other limited resources, rather than less. Furthermore, talking about the defense of Russian borders is kind of ridiculous in the context of the current attack on Ukraine, where Russia is trying to expand its borders which would otherwise remain stationary. It only makes sense if you interpret "borders" as referring to some larger area outside the actual country but which they nevertheless feel entitled to.