[kziemio]

The idea that a communist movement could have existed without KGB interference is equally absurd.

Communists in the USSR (and backed by the USSR) stole property on a vast scale and murdered or enslaved people by the millions. The CIA did many bad things but it is very hard to out-do the USSR on evil acts.

West vs East Germany was as good an experiment as anyone is likely to ever see. It was capitalism vs communism head-to-head. The communists had to build a wall to keep their enslaved population from escaping from a secret police controlled hellscape to what was (in comparison) a capitalist utopia.

The US is a fundamentally mercantile country that found out the hard way (through two world wars) that non-interference doesn't work. It very reluctantly adopted the role of world police.

In many ways it resembles the problems all policing forces face, which is that people tend to focus on the mistakes rather than the successes.

The people that spend time railing against US policing failures spend no time trumpeting its great many successes.

It's always easy to point the finger. It's much harder to explain how one would have done a better job solving such complex problems.

[rgblambda]

>West vs East Germany was as good an experiment as anyone is likely to ever see.

Both the U.S and U.S.S.R pumped huge amounts of money and resources into "their" Germany. Both sides needed to show that their economic model was the correct one. This rather pollutes the results of any experiment.

Additionally, West Germany was heavily industrialised and had much more in the way of natural resources. East Germany in contrast was mostly agricultural. In the immediate aftermath of WW2 the western allies agreed to dismantle factories in West Germany and send the equipment and materials to the east.

A better example would be one where a country divides into communist & capitalist states and has no interference from the outside world. I don't know if such an example exists.

[kls]

North and South Korea. While the US has a lot of influence on South Korea, North Korea has virtually no intelligence presence due to their guarded nature. Couple this with the fact that China outed all of the US resources in Asia and you get a country that has had little in the way of internal meddling by western intelligence services. The fact remains every communist utopia turned into a dictatorship, walled off and and has an horrible human rights record. This was not due to external influences but by the very nature of what happens when you consolidate power roles into a centrally planned government. Funny enough in contrast the Soviet Union was absolutely refined compared to Pol Pot, Castro, Ho Chi Minh, et. al. Its sad that the Republic was conceived in a revolution in 509 BC and to date the only counter we have to it are the poorly conceived communism, fascism and socialism and while those tend to conflate economic models with their rule of government, due to central planning being a core tenant of each, they always lead to tyrannical rule, due to consolidation of power roles. Consolidating power in politicians never ends well.

[notahacker]

Since Marxist-Leninism claims international solidarity and free market capitalists claim international trade as key values, I'm not sure completely isolated states would be a fairer test of their economic models.

We've had plenty of tests of communist states becoming capitalist ones though, for reasons it would be difficult to attribute entirely to capitalist interference

[rgblambda]

I should clarify that by interference I mean in the sense that neither state faces sanctions or blockades due to their national ideology. Or that one state receives massive amounts of capital and preferred trading status due to their ideology.

[kziemio]

This "better example" would not exist on earth, so there's nothing useful to learn from it.

The US and USSR were equally powerful, playing the same game, with the same population. Ideology vs ideology. Capitalism won by a mile.

Because fundamentally the US isn't driven by an all-encompassing ideology. Capitalism doesn't dictate how every citizen live their life. It only describes how the economic system will work. Anyone inside the system is free to create their own enclave. If you want to move to Oregon to live on a commune, no capitalist commissar is there to stop you. Starting a capitalist enclave in a communist country would have had to sent to the gulag.

[rgblambda]

I'm not disagreeing that capitalism is the better economic model. Merely that calling the contrast between east and west germany the best possible experiment when it was likely the worst.

Maybe a comparison should be drawn between post war Yugoslavia and Austria as they had comparatively less interference from the major power blocs.

Also the U.S had much greater economic power than the U.S.S.R throughout the cold war. After WW2, Stalin even considered accepting American economic aid from the Marshall Plan.

[dilap]

> If you want to move to Oregon to live on a commune, no capitalist commissar is there to stop you.

I don't know, didn't work out so well for the Rajneeshees. Or Clive Bundy.

[kziemio]

Neither of those are counter examples. Both had issues that have nothing to do with trying to live in a commune within the US, something that many groups have done successfully.

[dilap]

Also Waco.

I was being a little bit tongue in cheek, and you're right that you can fly under the radar, but it's also possible to draw the interest of the feds, and then they will fuck you up.

I spent a fair amount of my summers as a kid in a buddhist community hidden away in the woods. I think they're all above-board now, but at the time they were always fighting w/ the govt, trying to hide illegal busses & cabins out of site in the trees and stuff like that.

[bediger4000]

> Capitalism doesn't dictate how every citizen live their life.

That's not really true. Reports of living "off-grid" make it out to be extremely diffiicult to not be part of the consumer economy. Similarly, the un-banked have a lot of trouble. Heck, even adamant Linux users report a huge amount of trouble when trying not to be part of the "Windows Ecosystem".

[Nasrudith]

> The idea that a communist movement could have existed without KGB interference is equally absurd.

The communist movement ended up giving birth to the KGB. For that to be true there would have to be time travel involved.

The KGB certainly did their share of support and outreach to both peaceful movements and outright funding of many Red Army Faction terrorist groups which faded away after the fall of the USSR cut off funding and crushed hopes, but claiming they are responsible for their very existence would be an oversimplification.

[dandersh]

"The idea that a communist movement could have existed without KGB interference is equally absurd."

This was the case throughout Latin America. Castro, Bosch, Allende, etc. Furthermore there are no examples of the KGB interfering on the scale of the US (specifically the CIA) in places like Cuba, Chile, etc.

"Communists in the USSR (and backed by the USSR) stole property on a vast scale and murdered or enslaved people by the millions. The CIA did many bad things but it is very hard to out-do the USSR on evil acts."

All of which pales in comparison to the settling of the new world, America's settling of the west, etc.

If we want to focus on the 20th century there is nothing comparable to the use of nuclear weapons or America's actions during/after the Vietnam war where they engaged in the largest bombing campaign in history and use of Agent Orange.

"The US is a fundamentally mercantile country that found out the hard way (through two world wars) that non-interference doesn't work. It very reluctantly adopted the role of world police."

This is a lie. After the US expanded throughout the continent to their heart's content (by killing/removing the existing inhabitants) they began expanding beyond their shores as evidenced by their involvement in the Philippines and Cuba as well as their deployment of the marines in other areas of Latin America from 1898 on.

Cuba, in particular, was initially ruled as a colony until it was deemed too expensive. Then Cuba was granted its "independence" alongside the Platt Amendment, which gave the US de facto control over Cuba's domestic, foreign, and economic policy and resulted in them interfering regularly in elections, deploying marines to protect American property, etc.