[Loq]

   successful socialist country

Does such a thing exist?

What do you count as success? Just a few years earlier, and driven by the same socialist expansion strategy, another developing state turned socialist, Cambodia, with active help from Moscow. Is this what you have in mind as success?

Wasn't Sankara a charismatic leader, and military man who came to power by a coup d'état? Have you looked at the track record of military coup d'états in history ...?

[pjc50]

His wikipedia entry, which has no doubt had the usual battles over sources and bias, reports:

> His foreign policies were centred on anti-imperialism, with his government eschewing all foreign aid, pushing for odious debt reduction, nationalising all land and mineral wealth and averting the power and influence of the International Monetary Fund and World Bank. His domestic policies were focused on preventing famine with agrarian self-sufficiency and land reform, prioritising education with a nationwide literacy campaign and promoting public health by vaccinating 2.5 million children against meningitis, yellow fever and measles

> Other components of his national agenda included planting over 10 million trees to combat the growing desertification of the Sahel, redistributing land from feudal landlords to peasants, suspending rural poll taxes and domestic rents and establishing a road and railway construction programme. On the local level, Sankara called on every village to build a medical dispensary and had over 350 communities build schools with their own labour. Moreover, he outlawed female genital mutilation, forced marriages and polygamy. He appointed women to high governmental positions and encouraged them to work outside the home and stay in school, even if pregnant. Sankara encouraged the prosecution of officials accused of corruption, counter-revolutionaries and "lazy workers" in Popular Revolutionary Tribunals. As an admirer of the Cuban Revolution, Sankara set up Cuban-style Committees for the Defense of the Revolution. Such programs led to criticism by Amnesty International and other non-governmental organizations for violations of human rights, including extrajudicial executions and arbitrary detentions of political opponents.

So large improvements in material conditions for an extremely poor country - but at the expense of political freedom.

> Have you looked at the track record of military coup d'états in history

As so often in history, those who come to power by violence leave it by violence; he was assassinated.

[Loq]

Pol Pot, Mao, Stalin ... made similar promises. Did they deliver?

Political movements cannot meaningfully be evaluated by what they promise, for the all promise the world, but by

- Before they come to power: by what they are likely to deliver (which is predicted from what similar policies have lead to in the past).

- Post facto: what they did deliver.

This is obvious. Everybody in this discussion is aware of this.

There is an interesting social phenomenon at play here, that deserves intellectual curiosity and explanation: there is no identifiable political ideology in the history of humanity that failed to deliver so hard and so often with identical policies, as the Marxist position via Leninist cadre parties. Yet even today, we we see apologias like pjc50's despite Marxist / Leninist cadre parties. I've even pointed to the A/B testing that were the division of Germany and Korea.

Many times people have tried to answer this question. I'm broadly in agreement with Nietzsche on this one ...

[bobthepanda]

If we’re talking about governance failures, I’d argue that absolute monarchies also generally ended up failing at delivering results. There aren’t very many left for a reason.

[BurningFrog]

> So large improvements in material conditions for an extremely poor country - but at the expense of political freedom.

He had stated goals of improving material conditions for the poor. Every strongman promises that.

Without doing the research, I feel safe assuming none of those improvements actually happened.

But I'll be very happy to have any Burkinabes correct me!

[InitialLastName]

Not to engage the broader question of whether socialism has any success stories, but I think one could more sympathetically read GP's "successful socialist country" in this context as "a country successfully converted to idealogical alignment with the Soviet Union"

[Loq]

That would be misleading, since it would distract attention away from the core reasons of such conflicts.

Aside, during the cold war, many leaders in developing countries played the US and the Soviet union off against each other, in order to get weapons etc. Erdogan in Turkey has been masterfully doing some variation of this for a while.