Cold War history is firmly on the side of the oppressed....

[RadioRaheem84]

One can disagree whether certain revolutionary left forces in the Cold War betrayed the cause of socialism and democracy or not, and they can argue if the USSR was a good counter balance to US imperialism or not, but the facts remain squarely on the side of the oppressed against US hegemony.

It just boggles my mind as to how people can even begin to side with the US in the Cold War. People act as if the US had a god given right to intervene in the affairs of the other nations and also act as if there was no motive to conduct policy on behalf of US business/political interests! That it was ALL in the name of democracy and fighting Communism.

Even counter arguments against the idea that the US was the villain in the Cold War point to historical manipulation by the CIA. For example:

No mention is made about the horrible economic war instigated against Allende during his days in office by the ITT corporation, the business community and the CIA. The media manipulation or the fake strikes and worker instigation in the ports. It all somehow begins at Allende's policies and how the inflation was all his fault for nationalizing businesses, taking no account of how the business community fired back with retribution. The respect for capitalist private property is so ingrained into their thinking that any point of economic denigration begins with political policy.

They even use manipulated media as their sources, citing the CIA infiltrated El Mercurio to analyze the political/economic situation of the time.

What hope is there for left wingers when they control so much of the history involved in the Cold War?

[chimx]

The same can be said for the soviet union.

[Kléber]

The sponsored researcher tends to be on the side of the oppressors, but the facts are on our side. Every revolution has been preceded by the most backward thinking (about history included), but there were always revolutionaries thinking "that can't be how it happened.." With modern information technology, the publication of a book or something, even if it's total reactionary crap, can change opinions overnight. Anyway, we should focus our rage about the distortion of history, into the motivation for writing new works that reclaim the history of workers' struggles, in that way counter the atrocious influence of right-wing think tanks on all aspects of intellectual life.

[RadioRaheem84]

The same can be said for the soviet union.

In some cases but the overall damage done to the third world was because of the imperialist powers.

[RadioRaheem84]

Anyway, we should focus our rage about the distortion of history, into the motivation for writing new works that reclaim the history of workers' struggles, in that way counter the atrocious influence of right-wing think tanks on all aspects of intellectual life.

The problem is that the Cold War was a very immoral time in terms of searching for a moral code that's upheld today. There is a high level of abuse attributed to nearly every major liberation struggle that fought imperialism, whether against imperialist collaborators or innocent civilians. The right uses these abuses to justify the need for either intervention or support for a junta in said state.

Liberals are no better in their assessment because they see both sides as an affront to democracy and therefore take no side or indirectly side with the right wingers. They act as if social democrats never fell to US imperialism.

The situation to reclaim history from the right and the liberals seems hopeless.

[Kléber]

Yep and the postmodernists do have a short historical memory. It's an enormous uphill battle to be sure, but we can win it. We need an army of historians, economists, social scientists, to counter all the bourgeois hacks. Marxism had such an army of thinkers in the 1970's but then they went on the "literary turn" and when the USSR went down they decided their lives had been wasted and abandoned communism and objective reality altogether. As the working class seizes hold of the political arena, popular culture will come running after us, and apply our ideas to all fields, and people will abandon the right-wing cold warriors.

I mean, think about how crappy it must have been when Marx started writing his theory of history, popular culture had way more reactionary viewpoints on history, and he had to go against Hegelian idealism too.

[Barry Lyndon]

I even have a serious problem with the term 'Cold War'. Sure, it was 'cold' in the sense that Americans and Russians did not die in atomic hellfire like everyone feared would happen. But for millions of Greeks, Koreans, Vietnamese, Cambodians, Laotians, Angolans, Mozambiquans, Guatemalans, Salvadorans, Nicaraguans, Chileans, and Argentinians the war was very much a 'hot' one, killing millions and leaving their entire countries in ruins. Claiming that the war was 'cold' appears to be a way of saying that no one 'important' died.
It also seems hard for so many liberals and even socialists to admit that the Soviet Union played a largely positive role in being a support base for progressive and/or revolutionary national liberation movements. It was Soviet support for independence movements, such as the FLN in Algeria, the MPLA in Angola, and many others that helped put an end to the terminal savageries of the European imperial powers after World War II. Without the Soviet Union the Cuban revolution would have likely not survived, nor would the Vietnamese resistance have won. Granted the Soviet Union was doing it for its own geo-political reasons and interests, but that is the way politics works.
I also see the Soviet Union, in terms of its foreign policy anyway, as the lesser evil. Contrary to McCarthyist propaganda, the USSR was not so much trying to dominate the world as it was attempting to maintain its own sphere of influence, creating buffers of friendly countries/satellites around itself so that there would never be a repeat of being attacked again like it was by the Nazis in World War II, in which it lost 15% of its entire population, 27 million people. Was it right how Eastern Europe was treated in the process? No, it isn't, but it is hardly surprising.
Even some of the Soviet's more agressive activities, like the invasion of Afghanistan, were in retrospect rather progressive. Consider the condition of women under the communist regime that the Soviet army was supporting compared to what happened to them once that government collapsed and the CIA-backed mujuhideen took over.

[Red Commissar]

Cold War was a war by proxy. The Soviets and the USA were fighting for influence and their spheres of influence. All the while a lot of innocent people got caught up in the hellfire.

The historical awareness in your 'patriotic' types claiming the US saved the world from communism is fairly low. Most accredited historians acknowledge the dealings and meddling in other countries the US had done in the name of anti-communism.

[RadioRaheem84]

It wasn't even done in the name of anti-communism. The majority of the regimes it tackled were nationalists, right wing, Peronist, social democratic, populist or theocratic. From Sukarno, Nasser, Mossedegh, Arbenz, Juan Peron, Juan Bosch, Saddam Hussein, Khomeini, Noriega, etc. Some of these regimes were helped by the US until they decided to map their own course, some never aligned themselves with the USSR, and others were simple social democrats like their European counterparts. Other regimes were pulled into the Soviet sphere because the US rejected their national liberation.

The US simply opposed ANY regime that it regarded as a threat to their business and political interests, simple as that. It didn't matter if they were nationalist, democratic, or communist one bit. The fight was never about anti-Communism, it's just that Communists represented the biggest and most obvious threat to US imperialism.

[Barry Lyndon]

The atrocities Washington committed during the Cold War were committed in the NAME of anti-communism, but like you said, it all came down to protecting and expanding US business interests in the Third World. The most compelling evidence for this is that US foreign policy did not really change after the Soviet Union collapsed, but rather in some ways accelerated, as US capitalist imperialism extended its tentacles into areas of the world that were formerly off-limits, such as the former Yugoslavia. The Communists were the most demonized because they tended to be the most uncompromising opponents of US imperialism, however, that is not always the case- I mean look at how nicey nice Washington is with China as soon as they embraced the wonders of the free-market. Cuba, however, remains naughty and has not 'reformed', so their still under blockade.

This understanding is what separates the liberal from the Marxist critique of US foreign policy. The liberals, unable or unwilling to recognize the base class interests that were driving forward Washington's international war against the wretched of the earth, instead endlessly moaned about how 'misguided' and 'bumbling' US policy was, and piously opined that carpet bombing peasants and arming fascist dictators was 'counterproductive' and would drive the world's poor 'into the arms of the communists'.

This idiocy persists to this day. I had an explosive argument with a liberal friend of mine on this very issue, who insisted that American hegemony could be reformed if only US economic and military was geared towards 'helping' the Third World and providing social welfare, and using its military to prevent political oppression/genocide. I asked him to name a single instance in the last 60+ years of US foreign policy in which the US government had intervened on the side of a revolutionary or even reformist movement in the Third World, not against it, when Washington did something that WASN'T motivated by dollars and cents. Empires cannot be reformed into benevolence, it is a sociopathic state. To much of the world, it is like they are trapped in a small room with Hannibal Lectur. Empire cannot be 'reformed', it must collapse.

[Red Commissar]

It wasn't even done in the name of anti-communism. The majority of the regimes it tackled were nationalists, right wing, Peronist, social democratic, populist or theocratic. From Sukarno, Nasser, Mossedegh, Arbenz, Juan Peron, Juan Bosch, Saddam Hussein, Khomeini, Noriega, etc. Some of these regimes were helped by the US until they decided to map their own course, some never aligned themselves with the USSR, and others were simple social democrats like their European counterparts. Other regimes were pulled into the Soviet sphere because the US rejected their national liberation.

The US simply opposed ANY regime that it regarded as a threat to their business and political interests, simple as that. It didn't matter if they were nationalist, democratic, or communist one bit. The fight was never about anti-Communism, it's just that Communists represented the biggest and most obvious threat to US imperialism.

Like Barry said before, I said "in the name of" for a reason. There were obvious reasons for the US attempting to spread its own economic strength and hegemony, but most of the time they claimed to be intervening to stop communism.

For instance, Jacobo Arbenz was by no means a Marxist, but it's hard to justify to the world and to the people that Arbenz was removed so United Fruit could continue operating. They need an ideological one to make their actions seem more justified in doing so, so you get "anti-communism" going.

How many people feel proud of that label "Anti-communist"? It makes them feel that their struggle is even more paramount. It works wonders with keeping people in line with an all-together cruel and self-serving foreign policy.

[RadioRaheem84]

But what's funny is that most of the information has been released concerning the Cold War and it points to the US solely being interested in business and political interests, not anti-communism. That canard just doesn't old water anymore.

[Red Commissar]

But what's funny is that most of the information has been released concerning the Cold War and it points to the US solely being interested in business and political interests, not anti-communism. That canard just doesn't old water anymore.

I know that, I said that in my other post. I'm just saying when the US was doing them at the time, it would always use anti-communism as their justification, and people bought it thinking there was a titanic struggle between the forces of "freedom" and the evil forces of "godless communism".

It's obvious the historical establishment knows these things now, My point is why they didn't, or more accurately, couldn't say this in the past.

There is a reason that generally most high school history courses avoid an intensive look at the cold war beyond Vietnam. It would reveal a very ugly side about the American foreign policy.

[Jacobinist]

Whats the difference? Both were empires. Both were Kapitalist. Both were police states. Both were undemocratic. Both were fascist. Both committed genocide and murder. Both use the color red in their flags.

Whats the difference?;)

[Reuben]

That is a historically illiterate use of the term fascist.

[kiwigunner]

I think you are also over looking the fact that the Union of Soviet Socialist republics and their warsaw pact also supported a lot of small wars during the cold war, and in terms of numbers actually more then the united states.

Just look at africa, all the little bloody wars were fought with AK-47s and RPGś, not saying they were wrong or right, just saying both sides during he cold war went hot.

[Kléber]

Just look at africa, all the little bloody wars were fought with AK-47s and RPGś, not saying they were wrong or right, just saying both sides during he cold war went hot.
Also, the US aggressively purchased Chinese-made weapons of Russian origin, primarily the AK model, to provide to its client armies such as those in Afghanistan. In addition, China independently supplied such weapons to pro-Chinese states and rebels, whose interests often fused with those of the pro-US bloc from the early 1970's to the early 1990's. So many, if not most, of these AK's in Africa are there because of the US imperialists and Mao's sectarian anti-Soviet alliance with Nixon, not because of the USSR.

[Jacobinist]

" think you are also over looking the fact that the Union of Soviet Socialist republics and their warsaw pact also supported a lot of small wars during the cold war, and in terms of numbers actually more then the united states." - KIWI

wow, they supported selling their weapons aborad (kapitalism), like the yanks and their m16's in israel. Thx, for proving my point that the USSR was both kapitalistic and fascist.

*On edit, wow Keliber, thx didnt know that.

[kiwigunner]

The soviets didnt sell thier weapons they gave them away, or used thier allys to equip and train arms, much like angola, the cubans fught the south africans yet none of the cuban equiptment came from cuba it all came from the ussr.

Yes america did just as much if not more, but im going to use the example of the Rhodesian Bush War. The zanu-pf (mugabe) was supported by the chinese, and ZAPA-PF (nokimono) was support by russia.
The chinese/soviet realtions were strained due to the fact they were both sending weapons to groups fighting each other.

I guess if you look at histroy that happens alot.