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I'm from Romania, and IMO the comparisons with the US make no sense, as the actual comparison should be what happened to the countries in the Warsaw Pact before
by bad_user 2y ago
I'm from Romania, and IMO the comparisons with the US make no sense, as the actual comparison should be what happened to the countries in the Warsaw Pact before and after USSR's collapse.
Well, those that entered the EU are now far better off by all the metrics that count, and you can take your pick from GDP, income or life expectancy. This didn't happen for all the countries under USSR, depending on whether they stayed within Russia's influence. Obviously, when you have Russia invading a country or threatening to invade, that country won't do well. But even in countries left out of the EU, such as the Republic of Moldova, you can see progress and a strong opposition to regional Russian influence. And Russia does what Russia always did. But it's pretty telling that Eastern European countries like Poland or Romania now have a higher GDP per capita than Russia, lower poverty and higher quality of life included.
In defense of the US, I will say that the Marshall Plan has rebuilt Western Europe after WW2, while USSR's response, the Molotov Plan, was designed for extracting resources. And that Pax Americana did the West, at least, a lot of good is an understatement. ALAS, it appears that world is ending, helped in no small part by the changing views of western citizens, “informed” by the Internet, and guess what will happen next.
Anyway, it's baffling to me to see such a changing tide in opinions on HN, now that the US administration has changed. I mean, I've seen stupid opinions denying reality on HN before, but now it's on a whole new level. I get it, we had cancel culture and all that, but such opinions don't change overnight, so I'm amazed at how many uneducated cowards the world has, even on HN.
- mlinhares 2y agoI think the main difference is that if you were a US friend in Europe or Asia it would be an improvement, if you were so in Latin America or Africa it would be pretty bad.
- simion314 2y ago>I think the main difference is that if you were a US friend in Europe or Asia it would be an improvement, if you were so in Latin America or Africa it would be pretty bad. Romania was a neighbor of USSR and was part of the Europe that was under USSR domination, so countries that were not neighbors with USSR like India might cry about USSR death while all ex-USSR countries are still in danger from Ruzzia's imperialist dreams. OP is right, you can be very objective here because you can observe countries that look West and enter EU and NATO and countries that looked East, the former are better economically the later a poor, corrupt, and with territories occupied by Ruzzia. And if you really want to study this area of the world try to see the puzzeling Ruzzian mind, where they pretend USSR was the best democracy in history and they pretend that there is ZERO motives the exUSSR countries hate imperialist Ruzzia.
- mlinhares 2y agoYou completely missed the point here, there is 0 mention of the USSR in my comment.
- simion314 2y agoSo why not put the effort to make it clear what is your point? Because if you go back at the entire thread , you can see we are trying to explain to communists or soviets that in fact USSR collapse was great for Eastern Europe and not a tragedy.
- pqtyw 2y agoI'm not sure if most African countries that were friendly with the Soviets did that well either.
- mlinhares 2y agoThey didn’t. Aligning with any one of the powers was a terrible decision for countries in Africa and Latam, the best path would have been to be friends with everyone and not take sides.