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Edited on Sat Oct-25-08 05:01 AM by The Magistrate
Why you feel the devastation of Russia after the Civil War, commencing shortly after the October Revolution and persisting till 1921 or 1922, depending on standards employed, differs greatly from that after the Great Patriotic War, escapes me. Both killed millions; the breakdown in civil and economic order was probably greater in the earlier instance than the latter. England, France, the U.S., and Imperial Japan all took a hand in the Civil War, backing various White factions in different regions, contributing not only arms and money but combat formations, even a body of Czech troops played a significant role in the fighting in Siberia. Relations between the Soviets and the Capitalist powers of the West were hardly better during the decades of the twenties and the thirties of the last century than they were from the late forties on. The Soviets sought aggressively to foment revolution; the Capitalist West sought aggressively to promote counter-revolution; both systems existed in a state of mutual hostility, tempered only by occasional recognitions of the reality of the other's existence and power. The principal aim of French diplomacy in Europe at that time, when France was universally acknowledged as the leading Army power in the world, was to cordon off the Soviet Union from the rest of Europe by an alliance of Central European states, known as 'the little entente', backed by French promises of military assistance in the event of Soviet attack. The rise of Fascist powers, and even of the Nazis, was welcomed by many elements in Western European democracies as a bulwark against the Bolsheviks, and a potential spearhead against the Soviet Union.
The timing of U.S. entry to the war in Europe has no bearing whatever on this question. It certainly was not artificially delayed. The U.S. simply was not ready for war when attacked by Imperial Japan, and commitment of forces to the Atlantic theater rather than the Pacific certainly took the highest priority, as any account of events in the latter theater will confirm. U.S. forces were committed on land into North Africa as soon as they could remotely be regarded as ready for combat, probably a little too soon, in fact, and moved on to continental Europe in Italy at fair speed. Invasion of France was carried out as soon as was practicable. There was no untoward delay, the thing was not easily achieved, and the stakes too high to blunder into hurriedly: an army flung back on a hostile shore is utterly ruint, and for a long time after the disaster. It is true indeed that the Red Army, and the Soviet people, deserve the greatest proportion of the credit, and gratitude, for defeating Nazi Germany, and that they had met and turned back the crest of Nazi invasion at Stalingrad and Kursk, the high water-mark of land battle in world history. It is also true that Lend-Lease assistance from the West played a large role in that success, not in armaments, an element greatly exaggerated in many histories, but in essential support items like motor transport and communications gear, and food.
It is all very well to proclaim someone opposing you in debate does not understand the reality of how events transpire in history, but when you do, you take on the burden of demonstrating a superior grasp of these realities, otherwise the charge has a tinny ring indeed, and certainly does not suffice as a rebuttal. What you do not seem to grasp is the concept of a breaking strain. If you are capable of bench-pressing two hundred pounds, have a hundred ninety pounds on the barbell, and an additional twenty pounds is suddenly added to the shaft, the entire weight is going to come down on your chest, even though the twenty pounds itself, considered separately, is a trifling weight. But in that situation, it would break you. All political and social systems labor under a certain weight, to which they are more or less equal, and this accustomed weight does not break them; they break when put to some additional burden suddenly, that is unexpected and unusual, that they are not prepared for. Defeat in Afghanistan was such a strain for the Soviet Union, and you have not produced a single argument against this statement, or against my stated reasons for arriving at this conclusion.
It is my view that defeating the Soviet Union was a proper end. It was a totalitarian power, antithetical to any permutation of liberal and progressive ideas of human freedom, particularly freedom of conscience and expression. Soviet Communism, as it actually developed, was neither the standard bearer, nor the embodiment, of leftist aspirations, and in fact did considerable harm to the cause and prospects of leftist success. State ownership of the means of production, when the state is in the hands of a vanguard party ruling by totalitarian means, is simply a radical form of monopoly capitalism, in which the gun serves as the means of concentrating ownership. Soviet rule moved the people of the Russian Empire out of the twilight feudalism of the latter Czars, it destroyed a corrupt aristocracy, it churned a number of people from the ranks of laborers and peasantry into positions of leadership and power, but it certainly did not bring Socialism, and it ensured that the left would labor henceforth under the charge that what leftists seek is totalitarian, illiberal governance.
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