Land of Opportunism

[stewstewstewdio]

Insurgency, we understand perhaps a little bit more because of the Taliban. And that is that they went about systematically understanding how to disrupt and change a person’s entire processes. - Republican Congressman Peter Sessions

There has arisen a movement to disassemble the United States government one piece at a time. It appears to be a

Comments

[mrbogey]

The problem with the communist comparison is that many of them actually advocated for the USSR as a model of efficiancy and gov't equality.

[mrbogey]

You're phrasing it as looking back at the situation and not the defenders. The USSR had defenders praising it as an imperfect form of communism but superior to the West. Only after the collapse did they change their tune.

With those advocating free markets, they're critical today and back then of the steps the gov't is taking and predicting dire consequences if steps aret taken. Now they're getting their nose rubbed in something they never praises but cautioned against.

[underlankers]

Actually there were plenty of critics of the Soviet Union. Most of the Western Communist critics were Trotskyists who tried to make Leon Trotsky into a benevolent, kind, fuzzy-wuzzy huggie bear of Communism. In doing this they ignored that Ioseb Jugashvili was a *really* old-school Bolsevik and Lev Bronstein an opportunistic Menshevik whose ideas for the USSR weren't really that much different from Jugashvili's.

Nowadays Trotskyists and a few hardcore Stalinists are pretty much the only Commies around in the West. The Maoists took over Tibet a few years ago, but it seems that kind of Terrorism is not the kind we're waging a Global War Against.

[underlankers]

Less so than you'd think at the time. A lot of those revisionists were Trotskyites who overlooked that Lev Bronstein's ideas for the USSR differed in a few ways in degree, not at all in kind, from those of Ioseb Jugashvili.

[rasilio]

There are 2 important differences that you are missing

[underlankers]

1) Yes, we can extrapolate from victorious factions of civil wars that dictatorships built out of the ashes of civil wars tend to be ugly, unpleasant, poor societies. Congratulations.

2) Sure, and we have examples in the Oneida Commune and other long-lived socialist experiments that socialism works on the small scale, too. Working on the small scale does not mean it can work on the big one.