So when the communist party came into power after the Bolshevik revolution, Wilson went to the League of Nations to negotiate a common embargo of the Soviet project, essentially sanctioning Russia the way we might sanction a nation for humanitarian wrongdoing.
This is to say Wilson was afraid of it actually working, which would jeopardize the industrial moguls who were already running the US.
This is also to say, the Soviet Union was doing a communism in hostile circumstances, much the way European monarchs pressured France to raise a new king after the revolution (leading to Napoleon’s rise to power, the Levée en masse (general conscription) and the War of the First Coalition (or as is modernly known, Napoleon Kicks European Butt For A While ).
Historians can’t really say, but the fact the red scare started with Wilson (and not after WWII) might have influenced events, including the corruption of the party and the rise of Stalin as an autocrat.
Also according to Prof. Larry Lessig, Boss Tweed in the 1850s worked to make sure the ownership class called all the shots in the United States, eventually driving us to Hoover and the Great Depression. FDR’s New Deal (very much resented by the industrialists) was a last chance for Capitalism, which then got a boost because WWII commanded high levels of production and distracted us with a foreign enemy. Then the cold war.
So communism was really unlucky and didn’t get a fair shake in the Soviet Union, and US free market capitalism got especially lucky in the 20th century, and we don’t really know if either one can be held together for more than a century or two. EU capitalism is wavering, thanks to pressure from the far right, and neoliberalism failing to serve the public.
In the meantime, check out what’s going on in Cuba, which isn’t perfect, but is interesting.
FYI, in the fifties the CIA wrote a memo where they stated that claims that Stalin was autocratic were largely exaggerated and the USSR largely had collective leadership.
CIA is a big institution, and gathered a lot of very useful data, which it shares in the World Factbook. (At least those things that can be attained by open research, which is a lot) CIA also engages in espionage not only to gain hidden and secret information but to serve state interests, typically how the state department (under the executive) defines interests of the state.
And as with most espionage organizations, CIA is not above engaging in cruel, sometimes violent shenanigans. During the cold war, CIA secured the Americas from influence of the Soviet Union (containment) but also arranged exploitation rights to US centered companies, and were often messy about it. To be fair KGB was also about trying to influence countries to sell to USSR, so there was incentive to act aggressively and escalate towards brutality.
( Incidentally, all those American interest companies are now multi-national corporations, which means they have no real allegiance to the US, and evade paying taxes anyway. )
Also during the cold war, CIA was big on SIGINT (intercepting communications and listening in) where KGB was big on HUMINT (infiltrating offices and coercing officials to report to KGB). This is not to say these are the only methods they respectively used (CIA liked finding officials in need and bribing them, often arranging for goods and services they’d otherwise not have access to), so when KGB captured (and brutally killed) a spy, it was usually the informant, not the CIA employed handler that turned them.
Also of note, the Most Brutal Spy Agency award (probably a dagger-shaped trophy) would go to… Deuxième Bureau of the French Republic, who liked exotic James-Bond-style cinematic deaths, like throwing people out of a helicopter over a body of water. KGB did feed Oleg Penkovsky into a blast furnace, but he was a mole in KGB feeding information to the US. Moles are embarrassing when uncovered and no one likes them.
Anyhow, CIA = incompetent is a mostly 21st century trope, when George W. Bush and his administration replaced all the top management with cronies at a time post-USSR Russia (and the entire Baltic region) was undergoing a lot of political upheaval. The US needed a robust intelligence sector managing foreign affairs at the time. But that was just not meant to be.
The whole Valerie Plame incident (in which the administration burned a CIA employee for political revenge – she escaped and made it home) demonstrated the meager level of respect Bush and crew had for the intelligence sector. After that, CIA, now a subdivision of DHS became reputed for torture and drone strike campaigns (which massacred fifty civilians for every killed POI), and worked with NSA to spy on Americans, under the color of looking for Terrorists.
Shit only gets worse from there. CIA would use the NSA mass surveillance program intel to create dossiers on Americans. Despite its conflicts with fourth-amendment protections, these files are used by secret courts – FISA – for secret trials, violating fifth- and sixth-amendment protections. These trials putting convicts on the Disposition Matrix (id est, Obama’s kill list ) for abduction and rendition or straight execution.
And all these resources were available for Trump when he came into office. Fortunately he got in a spat with the CIA directorate in 2017, so they weren’t as chummy with the White House early on as they were during the Obama administration. But now he has all those resources (though the upper echelons are MAGA loyalists and consequently double-plus-inept)
In the 1980s I wanted to be a spy… CIA researcher at Langley, actually, but I couldn’t handle the language requirements. Also being a field operative is really, really hard on the soul, and it’s no wonder James Bond drinks like Ian Flemming.
Lol no. They woukd drug each other with lsd while on assignment through the whole later half of the cold war. Which, based, very cool, but not the best for winning cold wars.
most brutal
Do we include their proxies and ‘school of the americas’ grads as theirs? Because some of them also liked the helicopter trick. And worse things.
secured americans against
Sure thing sen. Mcarthy.
Really though. They said that’s what they were doing. But they’re kind of professional liars.
often messy about it
Fire is often thought of as warm
wanted to be a spy as a kid
Sure, before you learn what it really is. Try being a labor organizer; all the danger and intrigue, less language requirement and pay, plus it’s easy on the conscience.
They were always streaked with incompetent shit heads. There’s huge swathes of culture they just cant get people into, because they can’t hire anyone from those cultures, and to work there your ability to understand shit has to wear serious horse blinders.
I suggest we also collectively recall CIA can be both, given it’s a pretty big institution. It’s also been an evil fucker, presuming commercial interests based in the US count as US interests, even when those companies have become large multi-national corporations who actively avoid paying taxes.
I agree that it’s gauche that surveillance companies will pass sufficiently saucy private pictures to their colleagues for a gander (a tradition since WWII that is still carried on in NSA deep-packet scans of internet communications. (That includes sext exchanges between teenage lovers.) Playing around with LSD (on each other, as a practical joke) sounds like it falls more into this category, which, I’ll concede, is unprofessional especially for a department that has to sometimes engage in unethical action for sake of US national security, but that’s different than incompetent
If I was going to be critical of them, it would be their propensity for assassinations (botched ones on occasion) when there were alternatives, abandoning liberation forces they had sworn to support and supply and putting down developing democratic regimes in favor of US-allied dictators. Or even that they fueled their budget by supporting and participating in major drug trafficking syndicates, but these things are not incompetent, they’re immoral.
CIA’s strength (in the 20th century, at least, was SIGINT, including codebreaking, and analysis (that is, developing accurate dossiers based on limited or scattered data), and CIA did a whole lot more of that than they did killing VIPs and supporting revolutionary force.
As a young adult, I realized being a field operative was dangerous, and besides I was better at research and analysis, which I wasn’t imagining at all as a kid. Then by the time I understood the more gruesome parts of CIA history, George W. Bush was in office and they were torturing folks.
Putting aside it is a baseless speculation, how is a system that falls into authoritarianism under a little bit of pressure a good system? If it wasn’t capitalists, wouldn’t it be something else? Drought? Covid?
It’s not baseless speculation, and it’s not a little bit of pressure. I’m saying it was a lot of pressure. And I’m saying we don’t know what could have happened if the early Soviet Union was left alone to flourish or fail on its own merits.
I’m not sure if we can leave an experimental state to do its own thing, since it is really popular among commercial interests and aristocrats to meddle with establishment systems in order to procure more power, lather, rinse, repeat. All for freedom and for pleasure; nothing ever lasts forever
Regardless, it appears that we’re just too tempted when creating our state constitutions to lend favor, at least, to the petite bourgeoisie, who take advantage of that power to secure more power until the state collapses into an autocratic regime or factions into warlord states.
It really depends. China is winning the race on sustainable energy because it’s treating it the way the US treated the Space Race after Sputnik.
And we are seeing how market economies go, the the outcome is dire.
I don’t know what works, but obviously neither do you. Neither do our elected representatives who are captured by interests to return to monarchy (which can command the economy).
I agree, but very large corporations (like WalMart and Amazon with high levels of vertical integration and revenue greater than the GDP of many countries) are kind of like a command-economies and “work” (for the shareholders). So, I think command-economies can work, but the question is for whom.
So when the communist party came into power after the Bolshevik revolution, Wilson went to the League of Nations to negotiate a common embargo of the Soviet project, essentially sanctioning Russia the way we might sanction a nation for humanitarian wrongdoing.
This is to say Wilson was afraid of it actually working, which would jeopardize the industrial moguls who were already running the US.
This is also to say, the Soviet Union was doing a communism in hostile circumstances, much the way European monarchs pressured France to raise a new king after the revolution (leading to Napoleon’s rise to power, the Levée en masse (general conscription) and the War of the First Coalition (or as is modernly known, Napoleon Kicks European Butt For A While ).
Historians can’t really say, but the fact the red scare started with Wilson (and not after WWII) might have influenced events, including the corruption of the party and the rise of Stalin as an autocrat.
Also according to Prof. Larry Lessig, Boss Tweed in the 1850s worked to make sure the ownership class called all the shots in the United States, eventually driving us to Hoover and the Great Depression. FDR’s New Deal (very much resented by the industrialists) was a last chance for Capitalism, which then got a boost because WWII commanded high levels of production and distracted us with a foreign enemy. Then the cold war.
So communism was really unlucky and didn’t get a fair shake in the Soviet Union, and US free market capitalism got especially lucky in the 20th century, and we don’t really know if either one can be held together for more than a century or two. EU capitalism is wavering, thanks to pressure from the far right, and neoliberalism failing to serve the public.
In the meantime, check out what’s going on in Cuba, which isn’t perfect, but is interesting.
FYI, in the fifties the CIA wrote a memo where they stated that claims that Stalin was autocratic were largely exaggerated and the USSR largely had collective leadership.
https://www.cia.gov/readingroom/docs/CIA-RDP80-00810A006000360009-0.pdf
On one hand, i don’t trust the cia on anything. I dont even trust them to know what those words mean.
On the other; this us hilarious.
This was an internal memo not meant for the public eye, so it probably contains accurate information.
My trust is not greatly increased, and they could be manipulating released documents to form a narrative.
If, again, they know what any of those words mean.
< nerd-moment rant >
CIA is a big institution, and gathered a lot of very useful data, which it shares in the World Factbook. (At least those things that can be attained by open research, which is a lot) CIA also engages in espionage not only to gain hidden and secret information but to serve state interests, typically how the state department (under the executive) defines interests of the state.
And as with most espionage organizations, CIA is not above engaging in cruel, sometimes violent shenanigans. During the cold war, CIA secured the Americas from influence of the Soviet Union (containment) but also arranged exploitation rights to US centered companies, and were often messy about it. To be fair KGB was also about trying to influence countries to sell to USSR, so there was incentive to act aggressively and escalate towards brutality.
( Incidentally, all those American interest companies are now multi-national corporations, which means they have no real allegiance to the US, and evade paying taxes anyway. )
Also during the cold war, CIA was big on SIGINT (intercepting communications and listening in) where KGB was big on HUMINT (infiltrating offices and coercing officials to report to KGB). This is not to say these are the only methods they respectively used (CIA liked finding officials in need and bribing them, often arranging for goods and services they’d otherwise not have access to), so when KGB captured (and brutally killed) a spy, it was usually the informant, not the CIA employed handler that turned them.
Also of note, the Most Brutal Spy Agency award (probably a dagger-shaped trophy) would go to… Deuxième Bureau of the French Republic, who liked exotic James-Bond-style cinematic deaths, like throwing people out of a helicopter over a body of water. KGB did feed Oleg Penkovsky into a blast furnace, but he was a mole in KGB feeding information to the US. Moles are embarrassing when uncovered and no one likes them.
Anyhow, CIA = incompetent is a mostly 21st century trope, when George W. Bush and his administration replaced all the top management with cronies at a time post-USSR Russia (and the entire Baltic region) was undergoing a lot of political upheaval. The US needed a robust intelligence sector managing foreign affairs at the time. But that was just not meant to be.
The whole Valerie Plame incident (in which the administration burned a CIA employee for political revenge – she escaped and made it home) demonstrated the meager level of respect Bush and crew had for the intelligence sector. After that, CIA, now a subdivision of DHS became reputed for torture and drone strike campaigns (which massacred fifty civilians for every killed POI), and worked with NSA to spy on Americans, under the color of looking for Terrorists.
Shit only gets worse from there. CIA would use the NSA mass surveillance program intel to create dossiers on Americans. Despite its conflicts with fourth-amendment protections, these files are used by secret courts – FISA – for secret trials, violating fifth- and sixth-amendment protections. These trials putting convicts on the Disposition Matrix (id est, Obama’s kill list ) for abduction and rendition or straight execution.
And all these resources were available for Trump when he came into office. Fortunately he got in a spat with the CIA directorate in 2017, so they weren’t as chummy with the White House early on as they were during the Obama administration. But now he has all those resources (though the upper echelons are MAGA loyalists and consequently double-plus-inept)
In the 1980s I wanted to be a spy… CIA researcher at Langley, actually, but I couldn’t handle the language requirements. Also being a field operative is really, really hard on the soul, and it’s no wonder James Bond drinks like Ian Flemming.
< /nmr >
Lol no. They woukd drug each other with lsd while on assignment through the whole later half of the cold war. Which, based, very cool, but not the best for winning cold wars.
Do we include their proxies and ‘school of the americas’ grads as theirs? Because some of them also liked the helicopter trick. And worse things.
Sure thing sen. Mcarthy.
Really though. They said that’s what they were doing. But they’re kind of professional liars.
Fire is often thought of as warm
Sure, before you learn what it really is. Try being a labor organizer; all the danger and intrigue, less language requirement and pay, plus it’s easy on the conscience.
They were always streaked with incompetent shit heads. There’s huge swathes of culture they just cant get people into, because they can’t hire anyone from those cultures, and to work there your ability to understand shit has to wear serious horse blinders.
I suggest we also collectively recall CIA can be both, given it’s a pretty big institution. It’s also been an evil fucker, presuming commercial interests based in the US count as US interests, even when those companies have become large multi-national corporations who actively avoid paying taxes.
I agree that it’s gauche that surveillance companies will pass sufficiently saucy private pictures to their colleagues for a gander (a tradition since WWII that is still carried on in NSA deep-packet scans of internet communications. (That includes sext exchanges between teenage lovers.) Playing around with LSD (on each other, as a practical joke) sounds like it falls more into this category, which, I’ll concede, is unprofessional especially for a department that has to sometimes engage in unethical action for sake of US national security, but that’s different than incompetent
If I was going to be critical of them, it would be their propensity for assassinations (botched ones on occasion) when there were alternatives, abandoning liberation forces they had sworn to support and supply and putting down developing democratic regimes in favor of US-allied dictators. Or even that they fueled their budget by supporting and participating in major drug trafficking syndicates, but these things are not incompetent, they’re immoral.
CIA’s strength (in the 20th century, at least, was SIGINT, including codebreaking, and analysis (that is, developing accurate dossiers based on limited or scattered data), and CIA did a whole lot more of that than they did killing VIPs and supporting revolutionary force.
As a young adult, I realized being a field operative was dangerous, and besides I was better at research and analysis, which I wasn’t imagining at all as a kid. Then by the time I understood the more gruesome parts of CIA history, George W. Bush was in office and they were torturing folks.
I guarantee, unless you’re a mavhinery operator, your job is not effected as much by lsd as a professional liar/abuser.
Do you mean bush2? Because, like… What do you call what they did to gary webb?
Hey, you know who doesnt have to do any torture? Labor organizers!
You lost me at “the Soviet Union was doing a communism”. Hard to see a dictatorship as the workers owning the means of production.
“The Western idea of a dictator within the Communist setup is exaggerated.”
— The CIA
(https://www.cia.gov/readingroom/docs/CIA-RDP80-00810A006000360009-0.pdf)
And you think that describes the Soviets and isnt just a statement about the red scare?
The document linked specifically is talking about the Soviet system and Stalin.
Yeah, after the death of Stalin.
“Even in Stalin’s time there was collective leadership.”
It’s like the first sentence of the document dude.
Congrats you made the argument that it was an Oligarchy.
Putting aside it is a baseless speculation, how is a system that falls into authoritarianism under a little bit of pressure a good system? If it wasn’t capitalists, wouldn’t it be something else? Drought? Covid?
I’m currently watching capitalism in America bow to authoritarianism. I fail to see what you’re trying to say
America has always been authoritarian. You and I obey the authority of capital — who controls the state. US democracy has always been an illusion.
That no system is perfect but one of them lasted centuries in multiple countries and one always failed within years, if not immediately.
Also, US failing so hard is mostly the result of the two party system. That shit never really worked properly.
Throw in gerrymandering, a first past the post primary system and the electoral college and you get we’re we are today.
Sprinkle in a dose of Citizens United and the oligarchs get all the power the need/want.
exactly
It’s not baseless speculation, and it’s not a little bit of pressure. I’m saying it was a lot of pressure. And I’m saying we don’t know what could have happened if the early Soviet Union was left alone to flourish or fail on its own merits.
I’m not sure if we can leave an experimental state to do its own thing, since it is really popular among commercial interests and aristocrats to meddle with establishment systems in order to procure more power, lather, rinse, repeat. All for freedom and for pleasure; nothing ever lasts forever
Regardless, it appears that we’re just too tempted when creating our state constitutions to lend favor, at least, to the petite bourgeoisie, who take advantage of that power to secure more power until the state collapses into an autocratic regime or factions into warlord states.
Command-economy communism is an absolute joke and a terrible idea.
It really depends. China is winning the race on sustainable energy because it’s treating it the way the US treated the Space Race after Sputnik.
And we are seeing how market economies go, the the outcome is dire.
I don’t know what works, but obviously neither do you. Neither do our elected representatives who are captured by interests to return to monarchy (which can command the economy).
So that’s, just, like, your opinion, man.
China has also been leading in increased demand for coal and petrol, and recently reversed their stance on population limiting policy.
I agree, but very large corporations (like WalMart and Amazon with high levels of vertical integration and revenue greater than the GDP of many countries) are kind of like a command-economies and “work” (for the shareholders). So, I think command-economies can work, but the question is for whom.