[aaaaaaaaaaab]

>The CIA has an uncanny talent for arming and training future and former enemies of the US and most of the world.

The CIA? More like the USA…

They saved the Soviets from collapse via Lend-Lease. They made communist China a global superpower with decades of outsourced manufacturing.

[nine_k]

Preserving Soviet Union was unfortunate, but leaving the whole of Europe and most of Asia to Hitler was even worse. That would put the US homeland in direct danger of a major war.

Policies of Deng Xiaoping in 1980s and 1990s looked much softer and promising than the current regime under Xi Jinping. The Tiananmen Square massacre should have been a warning, though. The Chinese played their growing economy card expertly, even more powerfully than the Japanese in 1960-70s.

[adultSwim]

> Preserving Soviet Union was unfortunate

I wonder how things might have turned out differently had we not immediately betrayed them after WWII.

Without constant threat of annihilation, they could have diverted funds away from military spending and towards productive uses, possibly also loosening their grip on power. It didn't help that non-authoritarian left governments, sometimes as mild as Bernie Sanders, were easily overthrown by the CIA.

[nine_k]

You seem to misunderstand who controlled USSR then.

Stalin coopertaed with Hitler a lot. Stalin bought a lot of military technology and outright weapons from Germany (such as cannons). Stalin and Hitler collectively destroyed Poland in 1939, divided the territory, and had a parade where Wermacht and Red Army troops marched together.

At the same time Hitler planned to attack USSR, while USSR secretly planned to attack Hitler.

Before that, Stalin robbed Soviet peasants of the wheat they produced, and sold it all for gold, to buy weapons factories, mostly from the US. In 1933, this resulted in famine in Ukraine and some other parts of USSR (google Holodomor).

No way one could expect Stalin's regime to soften down and become nicer.

Certainly, Soviet soldiers who fought against Hitler, along with other Allied soldiers, fought for good, or at least for a better world. But these same soldiers, who liberated countries like Poland, or Hungary, or half of Germany from Hitler put these lands under control of USSR, not direct, but pretty stifling. They suppresses attempts to get out of Soviet control in Hungary and Checho-Slovakia with tanks soon after.

[adultSwim]

I was thinking about a longer time horizon, after Stalin. Eventually reformers start piping up, as they did in USSR and China. I compare and contrast the effect of the US relationship had on China and the Soviet Union.

I hear you on Stalin's crimes. However, we took a very different approach to our colonial power allies. Like Stalin, Churchill too oversaw mass famine in the colonies.

[aaaaaaaaaaab]

>had we not immediately betrayed them after WWII

Lol. That's an "interesting" take on history.

[avgcorrection]

When official history is written by the victors, all other histories become “interesting”.

[aaaaaaaaaaab]

I see! So the Soviets were actually the good guys? Or at least well-intentioned...

I assume the same logic could be applied to the history of the Third Reich too, right?

[avgcorrection]

Thanks for illustrating my point by assuming that there must necessarily be a Good Guy (who is of course the victor).

And for that matter yes: The Soviets were just as much of a Good Guy as the other Allies. As for the Cold War? They were the lesser evil of the two super powers. But not a Good Guy.

[adultSwim]

> So the Soviets were actually the good guys?

Yes. Soviets sacrificed dearly to save the world from Nazis and end the Holocaust. That was good.

The US and European powers weren't exactly angels. The Soviets certainly weren't. The Nazis were much worse. Defeating them was good.

[Jibbedeyeah]

It has never made sense to me why Anglos allied with the Communists. It seems to me the Communists wanted Global Communism, while Hitler wanted a larger Germany.

America shouldn’t have allied with either of them. We are complicit to Soviet crimes as a nation.

[kranke155]

A bigger Germany over something like 50 million dead Slavs, Jews and Gypsies - and this is even if they won?

Wtf

[the_only_law]

> while Hitler wanted a larger Germany.

I’ll take ridiculous oversimplifications for $200

[sangnoir]

I always thought Lebensraum and Generalplan Ost where mild euphemisms for industrial genocide...but "bigger Germany" makes them sound downright malicious in comparison. All Hitler wanted was a "bigger Germany", nbd. Save for the work of making room through ethnic cleansing.