Comment by SCB@lemmy.world on "All you had to do was stick to oppressing your own people, and we would've kept looking the other way..."

far too many people hurt by the cold war

And all of those people hurt are a result of the Soviet Union being a hell state.

The USSR was not the hellscape you think it was for many people and the decline of the second wealthiest nation brought about real struggles for people in the aftermath.

“The USSR was a good thing, actually” is maybe the worst possible argument you could have made here lol

The unpleasant reality is, Russians, like the Chinese, have never, in all their long history, existed without authoritarian rule. Their people are culturally inured to it. They actively seek it. They’re broken, as a society, and only dissolving their society will cure them.

Balkanize Russia and China. It’s the only way.

I did not say it was good I said it was not a hellscape. Just like China is authoritarian and yet hundreds of millions seem to be happy with it so were millions of Soviet citizens.

You cannot overlook that there was a huge decline in the average quality of life for many/most immediately following the demise of the USSR. That harmed many many people.

Their people like it because their culture clamors for strongman, authoritarian leadership. They’re ill, culturally.

Everything about the USSR was objectively bad, just like being hooked on heroin is objectively bad. That some addicts fucking love heroin is immaterial.

Detoxing is painful, and rather than detox, the Russian people relapsed.

You have North Korea level indoctrination my friend. Stop seeing the world so black and white, you sound like a teenager.

No I just understand history.

Trump got elected in the US and a large chunk of the country still supports him. I guess that means the US has an ill culture that clamors for strongman, authoritarian leadership, or does that not count because of American exceptionalism?

No, the reality is that bad actors can take advantage of instability to gain power and people will go along for a number of reasons (apathy, distracted by just trying to survive, hopes of stability, etc). The US made Putin possible by capitalizing on the collapse of the USSR through shock therapy of forced “free market” principles, creating the oligarchy that exists in Russia to this day.

American culture is susceptible to Trump because American culture is fundamentally distrustful of government. Without reason or rationality, Americans culturally believe their representatives do not represent them, even when faces with evidence to the contrary. This is, historically, because the US was settled and then massively expanded via immigration, by political dissidents, politically/religiously persecuted people, and radicals bent on “making their own way.”

While this leaves us susceptible to “strongmen,” it also leaves us susceptible to populism of all kinds, and is a constant pressure that rational people must struggle against in order to build effective governments.

Before Trump and Sanders, there was the Tea Party. Before the Tea Party, Ross Perot had a fighting chance. Centuries ago, the Know-Nothings were essentially Trumpism without Trump.

Every culture has weaknesses and externalities. The offset in the US is a federal government that usually keeps these people in check. In China/Russia, their federal government is the problem because of their cultural inheritance.

Balkanization is divide and conquer bullshit. Why do you think the US commits to keeping the states together even though red and blue states are supposedly so much different from each other?

The US is a very different case, in that the state/federal divide and disagreement is almost entirely illusory, and those arguing for more state control are just using slanted language to hide their desire to persecute others.

There has never been an instance of Americans fighting for dissolution of federal power where they have not also wanted to use that power to persecute others.

The opposite is true is Russia.

None of that has anything to do with breaking apart a country to make it weaker, which is entirely the point of the balkanization argument.

No one wants to conquer Russia. No one has wanted to since Napoleon. Even Hitler’s dumb ass only invaded out of paranoia.

Personally I want Russia balkanized because the only thing holding that mess of a state together is authoritarianism. I’d much rather see a whole lot more liberal democracies in place of a single Russian country.

Same with China.

Im not on hexbear and you should try talking to some people who lived through it. Not everyone hated it all the time even my former boss who did time in a gulag has mixed opinions on it.

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"All you had to do was stick to oppressing your own people, and we would've kept looking the other way..."(lemmy.dbzer0.com)

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