It becomes again wild when you remember that the Cold War was only "necessary" because of US antagonism post-war. This isn't passing judgment on Soviet policies, only a recognition that conflict might not have been so heated if we'd learned our lesson from how the disintegration of US-Japanese relations had drawn us into the previous war.
Essentially, the US seems to have a habit of being "forced" to ally with undesirable elements after some lapse in geopolitical awareness or effort leads to hostilities (sound familiar?).
>It becomes again wild when you remember that the Cold War was only "necessary" because of US antagonism post-war.
Only if you ignore communist antagonism in Europe, Asia, Africa, and Latin America. Up to and including their own allies when they gave their citizens a little too much freedom. I have several books in Czech on my shelf with a copyright date of 1968, a year in which far more books were published than years prior, I wonder why they share that year?
Are you implying that all communist antagonism was in response to American policy? I believe there was plenty of aggression by all parties in the Cold War, but there are several instances where the communists were very clearly the aggressors. Just a couple of highlights:
1) The Soviet blockade of West Berlin. The Soviets did this in response to the horrifically aggressive acts of the US, Britain, and France to... manage their occupation zones in Germany differently than the Soviets wanted them to, and economic and currency reform in West Germany.
2) The Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968. As far as I can tell, western involvement in Dubcek's reforms and the Prague Spring were about as non-existent as possible. This didn't stop the Soviets and other Warsaw Pact nations invading their own ally, and in explicit violation of the Warsaw Pact itself.
3) The Vietnamese invasion of Cambodia, and the Chinese invasion of Vietnam. The west's bizarre support of the Khmer Rouge after the successful Vietnamese invasion notwithstanding (for complex geopolitical reasons), prior to the invasion it treated both Cambodia and Vietnam as enemies and the war between the two nations was do to their own politics, not any US influence.
And there are plenty more. And I'm sure there are instances you can bring up where the combloc countries were reacting to clear aggression by the west, but here's the thing: I'm not claiming that such aggression never happened. Meanwhile you seem to be arguing that the combloc countries would have been perfectly peaceful if they didn't need to react to aggressions by those damn western capitalists.
Would you care to explain to us how (just picking one of the events listed at random) literally blockading an entire city -- cutting off all access to food and humanitarian supplies -- can in any way be a logical, "non-antagonistic" response to a paper declaration such as the Truman Doctrine?
Or even to the Soviets' stated rationale for taking action -- the introduction of the Deutsche Mark in West Berlin?
I'd really like to see your careful, considered response to this question.
Well, it's not non-antagonistic, of course. It was an antagonistic response to previous antagonism, both in word (the aforementioned doctrine) and deed (unnecessarily obliterating an entire city with a single bomb, in part as an intimidation strategy). It's simply not irrational to perceive some given action as a way to f*ck with you (even if we give America et al. the benefit of the doubt it assuming that it was ultimately meant benignly) if the people carrying out the action had previously declared, "We are going to f*ck with you," and it does, in fact, end up f*cking with you.
>But this we do know: per previous replies, if we can't agree on appropriate language to discuss the color of the sky on a given day -- that is, if I can't get a straight answer from you in response to an extremely straightforward question about a single event in 1948 -- then we're not going to be able to communicate with each other in regard to the bigger-picture stuff.
>Which was?
>No need for fancy optic effects here - just say what you mean.
I see that you're angry that I did not take the bait of trying to contradict your premise. Sorry; much as you may hate it, we agree that the siege was antagonistic. My straight answer, I'll repeat: antagonism in response to previous antagonism is, at the very least, understandable. In this case, "Who started it?" is significant.
I'm trying to falsify my own stance by finding an instance where the USSR did something aggressive and uncalled for that wasn't a response to Western rhetoric or behavior. One might say the various invasions in the run-up to WWII, but those come after Truman's famous, "Let 'em kill each other," line; Western enmity was preexisting, at that point. And I reject the notion that it comes down to their human rights record, considering our own (even at that time). It seems to come down to a bitterness over the West's inability to turn its totalitarian machine towards at least the facade of our desires and ends (a la China for much of the 90s and 2000s). It's just one of many examples where the West has interpreted a failure to kowtow to our ambitions as an existential threat. This is the dumbshit recklessness that I'm referring to when I say that we started the Cold War.
Also, this is the last time I'm assuming good faith on your part. I would say, "Don't fuck it up," but part of me thinks that you'll take that as a challenge.
No one is angry about anything. It's a meeting of minds here, now.
Antagonism in response to previous antagonism is, at the very least, understandable.
Next question then: was the response ... proportionate? You know, blockading a a whole city, so that nothing can get in, not even diapers or baby food? That's like, an act of war, right? In response to -- currency reform?
More specifically: would you say the Soviet response to that situation was -- "understandable"? Would you now?
Because that's an incredibly euphemistic read of what it stood for, akin to taking a police department press release at face value. Soviets reading between the lines - as American warhawks certainly intended it to be read - would have recognized it as a declaration of America's intent to isolate the USSR, cutting it off from potential global allies (i.e., threats to Western capitalist hegemony, e.g., any country that threatened to nationalize its resources in opposition to Western corporate interests). It turned what could have been a negotiation for power-sharing (through which soft power and widespread welfare might influence more robust observation of human rights) into a (second) confirmation that the two superpowers were entering a period of conflict (the nature of which actually encouraged means-to-an-end thinking that caused suffering in both the 1st and 2nd worlds).
Later developments would also prove the doctrine's stated intentions to be a farce, as much of its execution involved toppling democracies in favor of US-backed autocrats.
So the Soviets took a public statement to mean something not explicitly stated, and that made it justified to and not an act of aggression to (checks notes) cut off all food and humanitarian aid to a city? Your view of things here is seriously twisted man. I don't think the west were perfect little angels during the cold war period, why is it so hard for you to not consider the same for the combloc countries? Especially when the Soviets already had a history of unjustified aggression and expansionism in Poland, Finland, the Baltics, and Romania in the lead up to/during WW2?
>So the Soviets took a public statement to mean something not explicitly stated
Yes.
>and that made it justified
I didn't say that. Their reaction may not have been justified, but it, or some like reaction, was understandable, even predictable - and, most importantly, a reaction. Speaking from the perspective of the West, who could not control the USSR's behavior, but who could measure its own actions against what would provoke or placate them: did we do everything we could to avoid the Cold War? Did we AVOID doing anything that might have pushed both states towards it? Clearly not.
So, circling back: when we talk about the US spiriting Nazis away to America, setting them up with a happy American life, justified by the necessity of staying ahead of the Soviets in a military and technological arms race... Where does that necessity come from? Something unavoidable, or not? That's my only point here. It's wild that America created conditions where we felt the need to harbor mass murderers and/or their enablers, when we needn't have had to. I don't know why that idea makes you so angry.
No, because that's a straw man. The idea is that the Soviets were not looking to be in a half-century-long dick-measuring contest with the US, with the fate of the biosphere in the balance, and that the impetus for much of their expansionism and antagonism was the selfsame posturing that we claimed was our response to their antagonism. This is tantamount to the stance that Henry A. Wallace - the man who would have been president after FDR's death if not for the DNC pulling a Kamala at the 1944 convention - took (even if he walked that back amidst McCarthyism).
I'm not saying that the US and Soviets ever would have been strict allies like we became with Japan, but a calmer entry to the post-war period might have cooled nerves and prevented the worst excesses of the Cold War. Do they seek the bomb? Do they ruin Afghanistan? Do we have flashpoints in Korea, Vietnam, South America? Are we still dealing with the negative ramifications of these events, decades on? And, in this hypothetical alternate history, did we have to employ and grant amnesty to literal Nazis to counter Soviets threatened by the Truman Doctrine? We can't know, but surely it's believable. Unless you think that mid-century communists were evil and irrational (and I suppose that you could (not me)).
It becomes again wild when you remember that the Cold War was only "necessary" because of US antagonism post-war.
This is an extremely myopic point of view, and ignores a whole host of major events in Europe and Asia in the key years 1946-1950. I don't have time to lay them out for you, but if the topic is of interest to you, then you're welcome to do your own research.
That sounds like you don't really have an argument. Per previous replies, you're implicitly displaying your own myopia, considering that major events in 1945 and before were what set up major power behavior post-war.
But this we do know: per previous replies, if we can't agree on appropriate language to discuss the color of the sky on a given day -- that is, if I can't get a straight answer from you in response to an extremely straightforward question about a single event in 1948 -- then we're not going to be able to communicate with each other in regard to the bigger-picture stuff.
Essentially, the US seems to have a habit of being "forced" to ally with undesirable elements after some lapse in geopolitical awareness or effort leads to hostilities (sound familiar?).