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Comment by wes-exp | Hacker News Reader

> And this meant that the great danger to the peace and freedom of the world came not from Moscow or "international communism," but from the U.S. and its Empire stretching across and dominating the world.

Can anyone explain how this statement makes any sense for a supposed libertarian at that time? Any way you look at it, the Soviet Union 1) suppressed freedom and 2) espoused militarism. I'm puzzled why it seems to get a free pass here.

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USSR did suppress freedom. It was a state after all; that is the purpose. USSR had a military, but it never received more than a tiny fraction of the resources that USA military received. The CIA and other liars continually exaggerated the strength of USSR military in order to inspire paranoia in the political and media elite, and to keep the world divided in ways that were good for business.

Their military still might have been a match for USA military, because keeping armaments manufacturers wealthy was never their purpose in the way it was in USA. Fortunately that test never came, perhaps because USSR believed much of the same hype we believed in USA. The Soviets were constantly afraid of what USA might do, and nearly every action they made was a response to that fear. Thus it was the actions of USA that drove the cold war.

The phrase I'd like to examine is "free pass". What constitutes a "free pass"? Would we consider allowing people on the other side of the earth to live as they will to be a "free pass"? How about not attacking those who have never attacked us? Would not spending more than the rest of the world combined on our military deserve the classification of "free pass"? We anarchists are so stupid, please explain it to us.

The USSR, by definition, was a collection of countries conquered by Russia. They certainly were rather effective at conquering.

This map [0] seems to indicate that Russia's maximum extent predated USSR. They only lost territory after that. Of course, they did hold power over most of Eastern Europe for decades, but since that was a result of WWII it is also a fact that predates the period under discussion.

[0] http://www.nzhistory.net.nz/media/photo/map-russian-empire-1...

> The Soviets were constantly afraid of what USA might do, and nearly every action they made was a response to that fear. Thus it was the actions of USA that drove the cold war.

Every newspaper, every magazine in the USSR had the "Пролетарии всех стран, соеденяйтесь!" printed above the title. Which roughly means "Working men of the world, unite!" and refers this Marx's quote:

"The Communists disdain to conceal their views and aims. They openly declare that their ends can be attained only by the forcible overthrow of all existing social conditions. Let the ruling classes tremble at a Communistic revolution. The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to win. WORKING MEN OF ALL COUNTRIES, UNITE!"

I'm sure that the Soviets regularly found something in our newspapers that upset their sensibilities. Our grandparents should have demanded better justifications for the radical changes made to our nation.

Except Soviets could not possible do this just for the simple reason that they were not allowed to read your newspapers.

Anyways, the point of that quote was not to enrich the newspaper's contents. It was to remind the citizens that the USSR's raison d'être was to bring the world's Communistic revolution.

Not entirely. In fact, one of the main "insights" brought by Stalinism was the rejection of the necessity of the Marxist international revolution in favor of Socialism in One Country.

Not entirely. Socialism in one country was a temporary measure since the world revolution did not take on in the 1920s. The way that measure worked was to build up military and political power to force the revolution even if some countries were not progressive enough to do it on their own. Hence the slogan. Hence the USSR forcing "revolutions" all over the world.

Yes? I don't see the problem.

> Any way you look at it, the Soviet Union 1) suppressed freedom and 2) espoused militarism.

What human organization with a military arm doesn't do that? And for that matter how are you even defining freedom? The defense of freedom in the abstract is worse than meaningless.

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