B0ycey wrote:
Sure, Stalin was against the Nazis given they tried to take Stalingrad.
Okay, so 'anti-imperialism' / 'anti-fascism' in the sense of *national self-determination*. The same principle extended throughout the entire subsequent 'Cold War' period.
B0ycey wrote:
But if the criteria for anti imperialism was defeating the Nazis, I wonder what you make of the all the allies?
Sure -- the Warsaw Pact was for defensive national and regional self-determination against the imperialist predations of the Allies, internationally, through NATO.
B0ycey wrote:
Also, the Eastern European land grab must have been a blip.
I'll go by Harman's treatment on this one:
[T]he most sterile form of Stalinist ideology was imposed in Eastern Europe, with prisons and labour camps for anyone who objected.
The two blocs were quickly organised into rival military alliances, NATO and the Warsaw Pact, and to a large extent cut off from one other economically. The US banned a massive range of ‘strategic’ exports to the Eastern bloc, while within it Russia insisted on ‘the unreserved subordination of politics, economics and ideological activity to the needs of the bloc as a whole’.268
Military expenditure on both sides leapt to heights unprecedented in peacetime, reaching about 20 percent of US national output and up to 40 percent of Russia’s smaller output. Russia built secret cities to develop an atom bomb to rival the US, while the US developed the H-bomb—100 times more destructive than the atom bomb—and maintained a fleet of armed nuclear bombers permanently in flight. It was not long before the combined arsenals of the two superpowers were enough to destroy the world many times over. Yet generals on both sides played war games which assumed the use of these weapons.
Harman, _People's History of the World_, p. 546
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B0ycey wrote:
*Grin*
Nonetheless I never mentioned Imperialism but Fascism. Explain why two leaders that were nationalists, authoritarian, oppressive dictators that are similar in many ways should be separated by a label such as left and right wing when they both match the definition of Fascists in all but name?
Because of respective *ideology* -- meaning political *intention* -- in the context of actual nation-state *power*.
Western imperialism is what *prevented* the October / Russian Revolution from prevailing after the overthrow of the tsar, and it's Western imperialism that prevented Russia from industrializing on-par with the already-industrialized *Western* countries.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allied_in ... _Civil_WarExplain why Russia and China were prevented from their own respective *self-determination* (by Western / Japanese imperialism) after each had overthrown their own monarchies, as England, the U.S., and France had done earlier, in past centuries.
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late wrote:
Politics is the art of give and take, of making deals. First thing a dictator does is kill or imprison his political enemies. That ends politics...
You're confusing means and ends -- politics is about 'ends', or 'interests', while killing or imprisoning, is the *means*, which may or may not be *justified*, depending on the *ends*.
Means and Ends CHART
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late wrote:
If you look at the history, Stalin nationalised industry, Hitler made arrangements with the industries he needed. They were different.
But you have a good point, once they became dictators, they were not doing politics.
Again, I'll uphold the line that Stalin was being *defensive*, geopolitically, versus the Allies' imperialism (in the Russian Revolution), then against Nazi imperialism (World War II), and then against Western / NATO imperialism (Cold War).