Why did we hate the Evil Empire?

For some 40 years, our arch-enemy was the Soviet Union, which Reagan called "the Evil Empire." We hated and feared the USSR because, among other things:

--It was a huge country with nuclear weapons and a means of delivering them.
--It invaded, occupied and controlled smaller, weaker countries.
--It had an overpowering conventional military.
--It stated its intent to impose its philosophy of government and economics on the rest of the world.
--It had secret prisons where people were held indefinitely without lawyers or trials.
--It tortured people.
--It had only one political party that controlled everything.
--Ordinary citizens' wages were low and people had little hope of improving their lives.
--The government controlled the media.
--Its leaders were a small, pampered group of elite party operatives.

Fortunately, the USSR finally broke apart, and although its component countries are still a long way from turning into Jeffersonian democracies like the United States, at least we won't ever have to worry that another Evil Empire like the USSR will plague the world.

Right...?

They had an overpowering conventional military. And their leaders were a small pampered elite.

the press, TV, movies, literature, and pulpits told us to hate it.

If those tools are used in other countries to hate the U.S., the U.S. will be hated.

killed in the 1930s.

hitler killed 6 million, so stalin murdered 4 times as many, and the reason was they were a)jewish? b)gay? c)capitalists? d)just unfortunates who got in the way of establishing a classless society?
...the fact is, the historians have been fibbing about a whole buncha things, since time immemorial. maybe if working class writers/journos, working for working class publishers to inform working people, then such a glib stat such as the '25 million' you mention might be alot less....the problem is that, as foxnews has proven uncontestably, a lie is as good as truth if there's big money behind it, and in bushworld, in doesn't serve any purpose to guesstimate how many people stalin killed (after all, we don't even know if stalin himself was murdered) as if that justifies the crimes of men who, unlike stalin, never had their grandpa sold like a head of cattle...

remember the union of soviet (workers) republics is dead and gone, and never its like will we see again, so saying i love it really is like saying 'i like bananas' but hate chimps....the question is, how long has the 'west' aka 'we' been the real evil empire?

If there is one it hasn't come to me...

You should do some reading on what's left of the Florida Seminoles... inspiring stuff, tragic too. But STILL HERE, despite having the whole of the human world against them.

There was a lovely exibit in the Smithsonian Native American Museum. It detailed more of their near destruction and less of their culture.

I'll polish up on them if the chance arises...

They've managed to carve a smallish (though EXTREMELY important) place for themselves in the Everglades. The US gov't has spent literally over a hundred years and countless dollars trying to eliminate them... the florida panther is hanging in there too...

check out:
All Our Relations: Native Struggles for Land and Life by Winona LaDuke

Chapter 1 involves the struggles of the Akwesasne (did you know our gov't is based to a great degree on the Haudenosaunee Confederacy?)

Chapter 2 the Seminoles...

really great stuff, inspiring...

I hope you don't mind if I memorize it and whip out on freeper aquaintances and relatives.
:)

Their evil practices have not stopped, the only difference is the perpetrators of those evils.

Good job of putting it in perspective! Fortunately for us, we have the luxury of the internet. The dissidents in the ol' USSR had to use hand-copied honest-to-God paper samizdat.

MojoXN

We hated them because they got Lenin, Bolshevism, and Stalinism before the Republicans could. Fortunately, we defeated the Communists and all these things became property of the GOP.

Grover Norquist has a picture of Lenin hanging in his office.

You forgot the parts about Five Year Plans (aka 'temporary' tax cuts), a moon/Mars shot, show trials, socialized low quality health care (aka prescription drug benefit), nepotism and corruption of the ruling party, crudeness of public life, rampant bigotry against Muslim and dark-skinned citizens, persecution of artists and 'counterrevolutionaries', the sophistry/cottage industry of corrupt theology, and a Supreme Court that went along with their perversion and ignoring of their constitution.

*

GOP think tanks 'globalized'/'outsourced' in the Eighties, mining the whole world for all varieties of reactionary caste-political arguments and 'justifications' for totalitarianism and plutocracy. It's not a coincidence that they hired upper caste East Indians in the late Eighties and members of the 'superrich' (i.e. feudal/colonial overlord) class from Latin America and Cuba before that. They've always gotten their major propagandists from the overlord minion classes of the various bits of the British Empire (e.g. David Frum from Canada's plutocratic set). The Jewish neocons with their Straussian notions are a totalitarianism of the Austro-Hungarian world where Stalinism is that of the Russian sphere. Don't discount exploitation of Maoism/historical East Asian varieties of totalitarianism (i.e. Michele Malkin) either. Or Boer apartheid as a source for 'ideas' parallel to but superficially different from and more 'Christian' than those of the American slaveholders and Southern 'heritage' propagandists, where Republican 'thinking' ultimately still roots.

Nominated.

Thank God things are so great in this country.

This thread would have been deleted by a moderator within seconds.

Maybe I'm going out on a limb, but I think "lies" about the USSR would not be tolerated here 2 decades ago.

It could be the US is going down this road: where the truth of what is happening can't be told, but as long as we can speak freely and rally for change, it doesn't have to come to this.

And when we found out they were deceiving us, instead of coming clean, we decided to cover it up for 50 years.

Of course I know you are being facetious and so am I.

We've been lied to about everything.

What's your point?

may find that you have become them.


Kicked/Nominated.

a Russian magazine printed in English that I was able to get through a London distributor. It was about what life supposedly was like in Russia with a lot of glossy photos. It was like a travel magazine in many of its articles. It earned me a file at the FBI, but I digress. One of the things that struck me is that most of the political stories read like something out of Time or Newsweek. All you had to do was change a few references and the propaganda was no different than ours.

We were so similar in many ways that it was hard to figure out who really was the evil empire.

Kind of like the way official WH transcripts are now changed to say what the Busheviks think * should have said, instead of the stupid things he actually said.

This way future historians are prevented from seeing the full extent of his incompetence.

Our leadership didn't hate and fear the USSR, they admired and were jealous of them!

Just West of Pennsylvanistan.

than US media -- by a long shot. I check out Pravda every once in while. The occasional translation 'glitches' are kind of cute... :-)