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Sometimes I just think about the titanic sacrifice made by the people of Russia, millions and millions of bodies broken in an unfathomable effort both tragic and heroic to turn back the tide of fascism, only for the world we live in now to be born.
It fills me with a sensation beyond disgust.
Not just Russia though, the USSR was a multicultural and multiethnic state, and the contributions of millions of brave Belarusians, Ukrainians, nations of the Caucasus and Central Asia should also not be forgotten. Glory to the heroes who saved the world!
for me the sensation is dread. if that sacrifice wNt enough to win a lasting victory, what sacrifice could be enough?
Complacency of the late Soviet Union was the cause of the present state of things. It is important to always be vigilant.
Sacrifice is not a price paid to some cosmic trader with fungible deaths and fixed rates of return.
I had this question as a written discussion in sociology class and I really did the Putin 4000 year history rundown, was pretty funny how everyone else did exactly as you said and put it all on blue jeans and central planning.
I wish I could read it
Liberals are idealists who believe in a titanic moral struggle between good and evil, in their mind the USSR “losing the Cold War” was a divine punishment from the cosmos for their negative gommulist 1984 karma. Quite literally magical thinking
One of the hardest truths I had to learn in becoming a Marxist-Leninist was that not only can the bad guys win, they win a lot.
Even AES friendly leftists routinely ignore or seemingly never learned the specifics of the calamitous horror that was Operation Barbarossa and the subsequent Nazi occupation
Not only did Soviet Union have to rebuild and repopulate millions of square kms from scratch, but they also had to reconstruct civilization throughout Eastern Europe and beyond, all while dealing with a never-ending siege by the most powerful empire in history
This is why I've always described the Cold War as a struggle between literal post-apocalyptic societies attempting to rebuild civilization and apocalyptic empires desperate to manifest the end times
Remembering the time a guy told me in all seriousness that Barbarossa wasn't as bad as the Great Depression
Without examination I had called it a civilized society having to compete with one that was organized as a blood thirsty empire optimized for death and destruction being pit against each other in a competition of violence. If you asked me why I didn't consider the ripple effect of WW2 I would have and am currently telling you "oh yeah..."
It wasn't blue jeans and rock... It was pizza hut
The food rationing system in the UK from WW2 continued into the 1950s.
An entire generation didn't know that eggs weren't just some powdered food.
material conditions are invisible to liberals. they can only perceive things that don't matter
Let's start with the Americas being discovered to Westerners 12 years after the Russians ousted the Mongols from Eastern Europe (who had made it all the way to Austria), consider the vast difference in non-petroleum based natural resources, the huge difference in technological and disease resistance gap between American colonizers and their new neighbors and Eastern Europeans and their neighbors, the geographical defenses afforded to anglos and budding americans by big bodies of water, the utter devastation from the Nazis on Eastern Europe (jesus they can't get a break can they), and of course the difference in population between those two entities, one of which had been more than decimated by the Nazis while the other sat on ass and sent their poor, and go from there shall we?
Funnily enough I don't think that's the main answer either, you can go back even further to 1917 or 1929 to find the original reasons.
In 1929 (moment by which the USSR had recovered the Tsarist pre-WW1 economic levels), Germany, Britain and the USA were already industrial powers enjoying a century of industrial revolution behind their backs, based off the labor and resources of hundreds of millions of colonial slaves. The USSR was, at this time, an essentially feudal state in which 80% of the population were impoverished peasants without significant lands working to enrich local landlords. Life expectancy was about 28 years of age.
The invasion by USA, Britain, France and many other countries in the Civil War simply for the sinful act of being communists, made it clear to the USSR that they needed to industrialize extremely fast in self-defense, and this process would create a lot of tensions in Soviet society in the years and decades to come. The rapid collectivization kickstarted in 1929 to free labor from the fields and allow them to move into cities for the industrial sector, while being the first successful example of collectivization in human history, also left the scars of millions of deaths by hunger and some hundreds of thousands by repression, one of the main reasons for the repudiation of Stalin in the years following his death, which in my opinion is the ultimate reason for deviation from Marxism-Leninism and the eventual withering of the Soviet state.
Ultimately, as proven by Nazi invasion, the rapid collectivization and industrialization proved to be the correct policy, allowing for the defence from Nazi extermination, but the 100 years of lag with respect to the industrialized west are, in my opinion, the main reason for the cold war being lost. Had communism sprung up in the industrialized countries instead of in a backwards pre-capitalist state, there wouldn't have even been a cold war.
Libs outright blame the Soviet Union for WW2 nowadays