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Comment by colechristensen | Hacker News Reader

>Does anyone have examples of a world power funding a revolutionary force and it ending in peace and prosperity?

Western Europe in and post WWII would seem to apply.

Israel is pretty prosperous if you're Israeli.

The problem is that basically wherever you go in the world, you can find lack of peace and prosperity, and you can usually find some reason or another to attribute some blame to one power or another involved in the last major change. Any location you name will welcome a "what about X!?"

The whole world though, the whole of human civilization is now and has been for a long time on a significant upward trend in peace and prosperity. If you smooth out the bumps there is a very significant increase in every metric you could think was positive. Consistently. For centuries. Is that a result of world power using force? Probably to a significant extent.

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> Israel is pretty prosperous if you're Israeli.

What is called in Israel the War of Independence and outside the 1948 Arab–Israeli War, wasn't a revolution. The Jews in Palestine had their own territory and governance distinct from the Arabs for decades. So I think it was more a case of expanding and consolidating what they already had.

The point I was making further in my post was this kind of retort is impossible to avoid for nearly any situation. There’s always going to be an argument that what happened was this kind of thing not that kind of thing, and because change in governance is so messy, everybody usually has a valid point to some degree, regardless of what it is. It’s impossible to have clean cut examples, especially of “success” because someone innocent always loses something.

  Israel is pretty prosperous if you're Israeli.

he said peace and prosperity. so, no.

> Is that a result of world power using force? Probably to a significant extent.

Perhaps it’s because 1) what ideologies are widespread in a society is the key factor in determining that society’s prosperity and 2) historically (and to a large extent now) the only way to change ideologies on a large scale in a relatively short time span is refine change (and the often accompanying death, subjugation, and/or displacement of large populations).

There are, of course, many ideas of ways to organize a society such that new ideologies can be proposed, criticized, and implemented (and old ideologies disposed of) without such regime change. Some have even been implemented and are believed by many to be very promising.

“ >Does anyone have examples of a world power funding a revolutionary force and it ending in peace and prosperity?”

Solidarity in Poland, supported with plausible deniability at arms length by the CIA.

Solidarity was a Polish labour union that grew massively in size from its foundation in 1980 to evolve into a civil resistance social movement using non-violent means to achieve change.

In 9 years Solidarity went from inception to leading Poland’s post-totalitarian communist pivot towards democracy.

In a program called QRHELPFUL, CIA provided cash as well as communicatio/distribution equipment via 3rd party cutouts to prevent the Soviet KGB and Polish UB/SB from portraying Solidarity as a western puppet.

It was incredibly successful, but it would best be described as providing a bit of tailwind to existing organic momentum.

CIA didn’t create Solidarity, they simply backed the right player in a non-kinetic way that has had lasting impact.

Poland’s post-communism pivot initially led by a Solidarity coalition government would be considered a considerable success for the people of Poland in terms of economic value creation and political freedom.

> Western Europe in and post WWII would seem to apply.

What world powers funded revolutionary forces in Western Europe in and post WWII?

The United States and the Soviet Union facilitated the overthrow of Hitler, Mussolini, and associated puppet governments in Europe during WWII and reconstructed the affected countries or their successor states after the war. Those which remained in the US sphere of influence seemed to do fairly well.

With the exception of Yugoslavia, that was achieved primarily through invasion.

How is any of this funding "revolutionary forces"? Retaking Western Europe from the Nazis wasn't a revolution. It was just restoring those countries to the governments that had been kicked out when the Nazis conquered them.

How did the Nazis conquer Germany in your opinion? The point applies at least there.

> How did the Nazis conquer Germany in your opinion?

By winning the popular vote in an election. No revolution at all.

> The point applies at least there.

Even leaving aside the above, the point would only apply if you are claiming that Nazi Germany promoted "peace and prosperity" in Western Europe.

There’s an argument to be made that the nazi Party never won an actual free election.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/hitler-was-not-voted... is a good example of the reasoning.

Sure, just stipulate that any election with results you don't like isn't "an actual free election". No True Scotsman is indeed alive and well.

Uhm. That’s a nice straw man to support the “no true Scotsman” fallacy. Well done. :-)

I did a bit of digging on Wikipedia. And based on the description in https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/March_1933_German_federal_el... I think the claim that the ‘33 election wasn’t a free election isn’t baseless.

Having your fascist enforcers “monitor” the election, helping elderly people to the voting booths and “helping” them to vote correctly all seem to be indicators that the election is fishy.

And even then, the fascist party didn’t even get a majority…

"If you smooth out the bumps there is a very significant increase in every metric you could think was positive"

The problem here is solid data, but I believe we are at an all time high with the need and use of antidepressants and co.

"has been for a long time on a significant upward trend in peace and prosperity"

Prosperity paid for with a coming climate collaps and deforestation and constant fear of nuclear holocaust.

I am really not an back-to-the-trees kind of guy, but knowing rough and wild nature life and knowing and seeing the systematic suffering in our modern meatfactories (whether for humans or pigs) I remain very sceptical that everything is so much better now, than how it used to be.

> I believe we are at an all time high with the need and use of antidepressants and co.

And I am glad people are getting help they need. I wish more were.

>I am really not an back-to-the-trees kind of guy, but knowing rough and wild nature life and knowing and seeing the systematic suffering in our modern meatfactories (whether for humans or pigs) I remain very sceptical that everything is so much better now, than how it used to be.

Yes, unequivocally, and by every real measure life is better now than it has ever been for more people than ever before. You claim to "know rough and wild nature life" but how do you propose forcing it upon 8 billion human beings with your self indulgent logic? Nothing stops you from living this supposed rough life consistently, yet here you are regularly commenting on HN, participating in tech industries and contributing to the use of a wast, worldwide high technology infrastructure that extracts resources from the Earth to sustain itself. It's not just meat farms that contribute to massive natural resource use.

The aside about antidepressant use as an argument against the previous claim about improved living standards is just bizarre, because for one thing it does the opposite of negate a claim of improved conditions for people and secondly, it's such a minor thing relative to billions of people living longer, better, more calorically and medically stable lives than has ever been the case in any previous century.

"Yes, unequivocally, and by every real measure life is better now than it has ever been for more people than ever before"

No doubt the number of humans is at an all time high, but whether the amount of happiness on this planet is at an all time high, is quite dubious. Or is "happiness" not a real meassure?

"it's such a minor thing relative to billions of people living longer, better, more calorically and medically stable lives than has ever been the case in any previous century"

Modern people might be well fed, but overall they live a stressful, anxious and lonely life. They might still be better off, than a medival starving and exploited peasant, but human history is more diverse than that.

My main point was btw. that we have no real data, of how happy the average human was 10000 years ago, 1000 years ago, .. till now. Since we do not have that data, all the nice self reasuring meassurements are mainly a placebo.

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