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Comment by guard-of-terra | Hacker News Reader

It's now obvious that the spread of communism was a straw man. It didn't turn out viable after all.

Torturing or killing people in the name of straw man containment doesn't sound as a valid excuse anymore.

> legitimate-looking takeover that they had so successfully executed in Eastern Europe before everyone realized what was happening.

This is plain false. Takeover of Eastern Europe was a result of USSR winning the war that Germany lost. It was arranged so that USSR gets Eastern Europe that it has already took. Everybody realized what was happening.

Don't see how it could happen in Iran, much less how post-communist Iran would be worse these days than jihadist nuclear Iran you now have.

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You're mistaken about the nature of Stalin's takeover of Eastern Europe. He maintained plausible deniability until the very last minute. He made it look like a democratic process while his cronies were throwing opponents out of windows. Some people did see through it, people like Churchill and Patton. But Roosevelt and Truman were completely fooled by Stalin, and thought they could trust him. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eastern_Bloc#Concealed_transfo...

As for communism proving non-viable, how can you possibly judge actions in the 50s by what surprised everyone in the 80s? And we have every reason to believe that communism would have spread further and lasted longer if not for the extraordinary Western efforts to prevent and undermine them. They would certainly have taken all of Asia and South America, for instance.

> how can you possibly judge actions in the 50s by what surprised everyone in the 80s

The thing is, your ends don't justify your means. It was Stalin's dogma and boy was he wrong. You can't justify crimes with "or what would have happened". The fall of communism just makes that apparent.

That's a worthless platitude. Your values mean nothing if you lose. Our ideals of democracy and human rights wouldn't be worth the paper they're written on if the Nazis or Communists achieved world domination.

But they didn't and they couldn't.

However, what do your ideals of democracy worth when you overthrew democratic regimes?

One ties oneself in knots if one promotes "democracy" above all. What's valuable is freedom. Democracy is just one means of encouraging that, and it doesn't always work.

>But they didn't and they couldn't.

They most certainly could have.

I don't think so. With their half-life they'll never be able to overrun much of the world. And thing is, we'll never know now. It's your opinion vs my opinion.

World Communism was looking pretty damn viable in the 50s.

> Don't see how it could happen in Iran, much less how post-communist Iran would be worse these days than jihadist nuclear Iran you now have.

Not necessarily. The Soviet Union sponsored plenty "nationalist" movements which are only superficially different from religious.

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