this post was submitted on 22 Jul 2023
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Someone else already linked 'Killing Hope' by William Blum. I recommend perusing it.
That doesn't answer the question. At most, it just shows that KGB were more incompetent or not endowed with literary talent.
What?
I asked for examples of international sanctions which USSR & their allies couldn't match. That book is about CIA and US crappy foreign policy. If you say that CIA actions where themselves sanctions against USSR, then surely KGB should have solved the issue.
The book is very clearly focused on US intervention directly against the USSR and other socialist regimes. Did you even glance through the table of contents?
Are you suggesting that we ignore this significant, direct interference from an abnormally advantaged superpower as a contributing factor to the USSR's downfall? That's simply illiterate.
No, I've already dismissed the narrative that poor little USSR had a disadvantage against the big bad US when I pointed out that they abusively occupied half of Europe at the end of WW2 and had influence over a lot more of it. If you're bringing up secret services and you're saying that the US one was better at its job, then you're simply pointing out that the USSR one was incompetent.
In one corner, an uninterrupted economy bolstered on the global scale by not being a smoldering pile of ashes. In the other, the ruins of post-war Europe, juggling reconstruction and revolution.
Your analysis is either deliberately disingenuous, or feeble-mindedly impotent. I'm not interested in either. Read a book.
Oh spare me of that song played on the world's smallest violin. That's the stupidest take an the whole situation that I've ever seen. "Read a book"... yeah, the poor little witch being burned alive by Hansel and Gretel... Is that how you view that story too?
I don't debate children.
But the poor witch was so hungry... What could she do?
Exploit the global poor and extrajudicially unseat duly elected leaders around the world to subvert the democratic will of foreign citizens and maintain capitalist hegemony? Who did your daddy tell you the hungry witch was?
You're telling me it was the USSR. Poor thing, alone in the woods with nothing to eat... Those kids were so unfair to her
That was you, but your reading comprehension is not surprising. Maybe try some sources besides right wing propaganda. Good luck in life, you'll need it.
You too. Have fun making excuses for poor witches
I hope you figure out you're not doing anything different.
You're obviously taking pleasure in debating an idea. Obviously so do I. However, you need more training. You have to add more support to your arguments and contradict the opposing arguments with facts that hold up. You have to concede points and counterpoint when possible. And most importantly, you have to bring datapoints to your claims.
At the moment you're only putting out ideas with very little data. When I asked for examples of sanctions and international pressure, I was expecting something like this which is concrete. The "Killing Hope" is a really bad data point because it doesn't support your claim directly and it is "fictional" 3rd party data from a biased source.
With the examples of actual sanctions, I would have pointed that USSR and their allies which included China and strong economic ties with India had its own access to resources and economic development and could impose sanctions of their own. In fact, I can point out that USSR controlled by itself a land area comparable to the entire NATO alliance today and that between them and China, they occupy considerably more landmass and have considerably more population.
In fact, those sanctions were not going to make any dent in the actual USSR economy. That wasn't the goal (since it was impossible to achieve). They were meant to weaken the relationship with the communist buffer states such as Romania, Poland, Hungary and they did to a certain extent.
But, of course, USSR was doing the same thing in what has been the US back yard: South America. Countries like Argentina, Uruguay, Brasil were being aided by the USSR with loans, technology and technical leadership in order to remove them from the US influence sphere. And USSR was more successful than USA at doing this. In fact, Romania, Poland, Hungary only became US allies after the collapse of the USSR while the south american countries were closer to USSR since the 70s.
The discussion from here either goes backwards in history to how Russia had a late start or goes into economic details for a while, but ultimately it always ends in the same place: one model collapsed, one didn't.
I grew up in eastern europe. I'm intimately acquainted with the philosophy, propaganda and history of the area. More than just 3rd party information. I'm also familiar with the Russian culture and arts. This was the only foreign culture allowed to be imported into my country for obvious reasons before the 90s.
I've had similar discussions through my life and I'm frankly disappointed in this one. But keep practicing, you'll get better at it. A hint: learn from the facts presented by others even if you don't agree with the interpretation. It helps in the long run