would it have been better if Warsaw Pact had won cold war?

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Many argue that the Soviet Union lost the cold war because its internal economic system was inherently faulty.

However I am not convinced that the NATO victory in the cold war has necessarilly meant the maximum standard of living for as many people as possible. Its important to bear in mind that the USSR was militarilly and economically outflanked because of geopolitical factors that in no way indicted the workability of centralisation on a grander, global scale. Or for that matter whether it would or wouldn't have been a superior system to what we have now, if we are talking about maximising average standard of life.

Neither should we forget that the soviets were working with what they inherited from the tsarists. What they had in the Soviet Union turned a feudalistic, resource starved, backward oligarchy into a industrial powerhouse and the world's second greatest superpower in a space of forty years.

Imagine what it could have done for the world, given fertile geo-politics, time, land and the wealth of the west.

Are you proposing the world would have been better off if the Warsaw Pact's economic system won, or if the Pact itself won? There is a difference in my mind.

A victory for the Warsaw Pact would be bad for the world regardless of the economic system. Any system dominated by Russia would be doomed to dysfunction. After observing Russia and studying its history, I have concluded that they are maybe one of two or three societies that are actually dangerous to their neighbors and to their international well-being. This is not to suggest that the Russian people are some sort of "other" that should be thought as lesser humans, nor do I mean to discredit the many contributions that Russian culture has given. Rather, Russian society has expansionist and authoritarian tendancies that manifest continuously, up to this present day.

Why might this be? A big part is geography. If you look at Russia on a physical map, you see the entire country is a very large plain with no natural barriers, save the Arctic and the Caucasus on its southwestern flank. Aside the icebound Arctic, Russia has very few sea links, and all are some distance from their European heartland. They have been invaded on all sides. Many nations with this predicament have simply disappeared. The Russians fought back, and then acquired as much land between themselves and any potential enemies. They were insecure because they needed to be, and this is the broad arc of their foreign policy.

Modern Russia has shown this same paranoia projected into some very nonconstructive ways. Their intervention in the Ukraine is to keep both a political ally (Viktor Yanukovic) in power while maintaining critical energy links to their European customers. Their actions in the Middle East have helped no one. I suspect they may conflict with China one day soon.

Internally, a society with such ingrained paranoia is bound to be unstable. Vladimir Putin may be unsavory, but I think he is doing what anyone in his position would do. If Putin was out of power, someone equally or just as ruthless would rise up. These dictatorships can give me short term gain, but they can turn mighty repressive once they are threatened.

Again, this isn't meant to be an attack on the Russian people, who are, after all, people. They are probably quite proud of their country as well. Rather, I'm just saying there are tendancies in the Russian culture that make the Russian nation dangerous to its neighbors. It would be unconscionable to live in a world run from the Kremlin.

Name one Warsaw Pact country you wished to live in and why it would be better then the privileged existence you in your Western one

Everybody I like would have been executed, or would be rotting in the Gulag. Doesn't sound like an improvement to me.

Did you read my post content or did you kneejerkingly react to the poll question and post this?

What i said was-

1) You need to take into context what it had inherited from their predecessors and in spite of that, created powerful nations.

2) They were beseiged, and in a state of war.

Under peacetime circumstances i do not necessarilly believe the living standards in places like the Soviet Union would have been extrapolated to the west because of centralised management of far greater resources under fruitious political conditioning.

Last edited by thomas81 on 29 Jan 2014, 11:53 am, edited 1 time in total.

Again, read what i typed.

No.

Any country that has to put up walls with armed guards to keep its citizens (or the citizens of countries under its control) from leaving is not somewhere that I would want to live.

I know that this is overly simplistic, but for me it comes back to this:

We build walls to keep people out. They had to build walls to keep their people in.

I'm also not a big fan of sending people who nonviolently oppose the current leadership to prison camps in the far north. In my opinion, the ideals that the USSR was founded upon were fundamentally flawed. Call me a literalist with a microscope, but I can't look at the overarching picture when the foundation had so many flaws.

Its actually a lie that people in the Eastern bloc werent allowed to leave. They were, but they had to pay the state to reimburse for the education, accomodation and healthcare that they had recieved during their lives. The policy of building walls was to ensure that that people trying to leave did not take away the investment that the state had made in them. The same holds true today incidentally, for North Korea.

The point that i am making, had the socialist model become truly global in the way that Marx and later Lenin and Trotsky had advocated, there would have been no need to build walls because the worlds resources would be managed in a uniform way. Warsaw pact citizens had free movement between Warsaw pact countries. It was national borders seperating the Stalinist from the capitalist world that necessitated walls, not socialism itself.

After WW I, Europe remained economically devastated for some time.

The Cold War gave the USA an incentive to start the Marshall Plan, and the USA footing the bill for Western Europe's defense meant that the countries of Western Europe could focus on social development. Hence, we had the absurdity of the USA not being able to afford a national health insurance scheme, while all of the countries of Western Europe did.

If not for the Cold War, then Europe would still be economically devastated.

Russia was also heavily damaged during the war, and was poor to begin with, so Russia didn't have the ability to subsidize Eastern Europe to such a great extent.

Anyway, the Western European socialist model is probably the best.

A movie that I highly recommend

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0301357/

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AZzQuRgaG24[/youtube]

If you give people an insurmountable fee that they have to pay in order to leave, then you are disallowing them from leaving. It's like the indentured servants who were charged more for room and board than they made as their salary-- it kept them trapped and never allowed them to leave. It's a passive way of imprisoning your citizens.

North Korea is not a country that you want to bring into comparisons when you are waxing nostalgic for communism.

Marxism-Leninism is communism, not socialism. They are not interchangeable terms. What you are talking about is utopian communism. It does not exist in the real world. There is no reality where all countries tear down their walls, lay down all of their weapons, get rid of currency, and share all of their resources. That's a wonderful dream, but you'll have to smoke a few bowls for it to seem even vaguely attainable.

Technically, they DID win the Cold War.

Economically, we broke them.

Ideologically, they took over pretty much all of Europe and even are well-entrenched in the USA (look at the policies of the Democratic party and compare them with the planks of socialism).

Even Gorbachev commented that the wall didn't come down because of the west "winning" but rather that it was no longer necessary. They had enough partners spreading socialism throughout the west that they knew they had won the ideological war.

At least the socialist nations ensured that everyone was literate, fed and had a roof over their heads.

As for co-ercive economics, thats really not a tactic you want to apply to defend capitalism. Through using precisely the same logic, one could argue that capitalism enslaves people to homelessness, poverty and sub standard living through the extortionate pricing of housing, education and healthcare that serves to curtail the access of all three to the very poorest.

What do you think of this man's arguments?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/János_Kornai

Yup, pretty much.

The USSR winning the cold war would be like Hitler winning the second world war.