were cnd in the 1980s the equivalent of the appeasers in the 30s
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tim
EXPLODED TIM! (Help me!!!)
Remember the Contras, remember the American support for fascist murderers in El Salvador and Hoduras remember their support of Pinochet Britain appeased Appeasing the Reagan regime all the way.
JHE
.
There are times when the obvious needs pointing out, because some people don't seem to have noticed it.
1. There was a smallish portion of the anti-nuke movement that was definitely pro-Soviet. In fact, during the long lull in CND activity, from the mid-60s to the early 80s, the Communist Party, in strange alliance with the Quakers, kept CND going.
(In the early days of the movement for unilateral British nuclear disarmament, the CP was opposed, because the Soviet line was for multilateral disarmament, but that line was changed and the CP was allowed to take part in CND.)
2. Most people in CND etc were of course not admirers of the Soviet system.
3. Nevertheless, there was a strong tendency for CNDers to criticise British, US and NATO policies, arms and sabre-rattling, but not those of the Soviet Union and Warsaw Pact. I think the main reason for this was simply that they thought it was their job to oppose our side or rather our governments, rather than the countries and governments regarded by our rulers as enemies.
4. The old men in the Kremlin might have liked some aspects of CND etc, but they really didn't care very much about CND's central policy, unilateral British nuclear disarmament. They cared about the big picture and as we all know most nukes belonged to the SU and the US. If we had succeeded in getting Britain to get rid of nuclear weapons, that might have seemed a great success domestically, but unless the Yanks and the Russkies had been enormously inspired (highly unlikely), it would not have made a big difference to the risk of nuclear war.
(Back in the early days of CND, its leaders, like Peggy Duff and Canon Collins, had a rather patriotic notion that, though Great Britain could no longer rule a great chunk of the world through the Empire, it could lead the world through moral example. We'd show the foreigners how it's done by disarming. The reality of power was different. At most, the Russkies would have got rid of a couple of nukes to show willing. The bulk of their nukes would have remained and the Soviet regime would have reiterated that it wanted multilateral disarmament and that its main interlocutor had to be the US.)
1. There was a smallish portion of the anti-nuke movement that was definitely pro-Soviet. In fact, during the long lull in CND activity, from the mid-60s to the early 80s, the Communist Party, in strange alliance with the Quakers, kept CND going.
(In the early days of the movement for unilateral British nuclear disarmament, the CP was opposed, because the Soviet line was for multilateral disarmament, but that line was changed and the CP was allowed to take part in CND.)
2. Most people in CND etc were of course not admirers of the Soviet system.
3. Nevertheless, there was a strong tendency for CNDers to criticise British, US and NATO policies, arms and sabre-rattling, but not those of the Soviet Union and Warsaw Pact. I think the main reason for this was simply that they thought it was their job to oppose our side or rather our governments, rather than the countries and governments regarded by our rulers as enemies.
4. The old men in the Kremlin might have liked some aspects of CND etc, but they really didn't care very much about CND's central policy, unilateral British nuclear disarmament. They cared about the big picture and as we all know most nukes belonged to the SU and the US. If we had succeeded in getting Britain to get rid of nuclear weapons, that might have seemed a great success domestically, but unless the Yanks and the Russkies had been enormously inspired (highly unlikely), it would not have made a big difference to the risk of nuclear war.
(Back in the early days of CND, its leaders, like Peggy Duff and Canon Collins, had a rather patriotic notion that, though Great Britain could no longer rule a great chunk of the world through the Empire, it could lead the world through moral example. We'd show the foreigners how it's done by disarming. The reality of power was different. At most, the Russkies would have got rid of a couple of nukes to show willing. The bulk of their nukes would have remained and the Soviet regime would have reiterated that it wanted multilateral disarmament and that its main interlocutor had to be the US.)
tim
EXPLODED TIM! (Help me!!!)
I'd have rather face absurd travel restrictions and spend 10 years on the waiting list for a trabant in Eastern Europe than starvation torture, rape and slaughter in South east Asia or South America.
Azrael
circling Airstrip One
Heh heh. Giggle. Got a better term?
I have no problem believing this. I think CND would, inadvertently, have aided that system if it had succeeded. The intent of its members would make little difference, except to their conscience.
Absurd travel restrictions, in perfection.
tim
EXPLODED TIM! (Help me!!!)
Heh heh. Giggle. Got a better term?
Absurd travel restrictions, in perfection.
Iadmit it'snot much of a wall compared with what your American loving Zionist chums can build
Yes, dominate. The people of eastern Europe were not slaves. They went to their jobs, came home and had a private life and summer holidays, just like in the West. They were, whatever the many faults of the Communist-ruled system, generally well-educated and provided with the basic necessities of life for next to no cost.
Azrael
circling Airstrip One
They were probably reasonably educated in a technical sense. Problem is, once they'd learned their letters & numbers, they had little to peruse but the collected work of Messrs Marx and Lenin, and its derivatives. If they wanted to learn something un-Soviet, tough.
And yes, they had their jobs, and holidays. Unless the state decided to take those things away, in which case, they had no recourse. So they didn't have them at all, really. As for private life, I assume someone will be appending one almighty lol at the suggestion that privacy existed in the sphere of the Stasi, the Securitate and the KGB.
And yes, the Soviet bloc provided some of the necessities of life for a time. Then it didn't, and the command economy was happy to command its citizens to join the nearest queue.
So we've got people who must learn what they're told to learn, say what they're told to say, and travel where they're told to travel, by a government they had no say in. Disobey, and risk a trip to a cell, or a bullet, depending on the whim of the state. No, enslaved is such a wrong term.
They were probably reasonably educated in a technical sense. Problem is, once they'd learned their letters & numbers, they had little to peruse but the collected work of Messrs Marx and Lenin, and its derivatives. If they wanted to learn something un-Soviet, tough.
And yes, they had their jobs, and holidays. Unless the state decided to take those things away, in which case, they had no recourse. So they didn't have them at all, really. As for private life, I assume someone will be appending one almighty lol at the suggestion that privacy existed in the sphere of the Stasi, the Securitate and the KGB.
And yes, the Soviet bloc provided some of the necessities of life for a time. Then it didn't, and the command economy was happy to command its citizens to join the nearest queue.
So we've got people who must learn what they're told to learn, say what they're told to say, and travel where they're told to travel, by a government they had no say in. Disobey, and risk a trip to a cell, or a bullet, depending on the whim of the state. No, enslaved is such a wrong term.
Speaking as somebody who lived for a time in the USSR, at the tail-end, and with much experience of travelling in eastern Europe, I know for a fact that you are talking nonsense. I'd say the average east European is better educated in almost every sense than the average citizen of this country. Nobody I ever met had read anything of Marx and Lenin other than in the 'diamat' classes they were obliged to attend-but this was a minor subject, taken increasingly less seriously as time wore on even by those charged with teaching it. Nearly all the classics of world literature were available and many of them taught in schools. Cinema and theatre, opera and ballet etc were easily affordable to everybody and, especially in the latter, a wide variety of classics were performed, not just works of Soviet propaganda.
The state probably did have the power to take away people's holidays, but I think you'd find it difficult to find anybody that this actually happened to. Why would it? There was no organised mass opposition to the system (didn't Solzhenitsyn disappoint his Western sponsors by revealing that the number of genuine dissidents in the USSR could be counted in the mere hundreds?), apart from in Poland from 1980 (and most people were not deprived of their holidays even under martial law.) What would be the point? Like most governments, the authorities in those countries wanted a contented and passive population. They didn't go round arbitrarily punishing people and depriving them of things simply for the sake of it, especially when nobody was actually challenging the system.
The basic necessities of life were available cheaply even in the last days of Communist rule (and, in many places continued afterwards.) In fact, it is likely that the maintenance of a cheap and efficient public transport system, basic foodstuffs and housing/hot water etc that staved off a total societal collapse and mass malnutrition after the fall of Communist rule in the USSR (google Dmitry Orlov for an example of this argument.) You seem to be confusing the absence of a Western-style consumer economy (the degree of which varied form country to country) with provision of basic necessities, just as many people seem to confuse Stalin's slaughterhouse with the, in world terms, relatively benign rule of Communists in Europe from Khruschev onwards. How many people do you think were shot in the Communist-ruled countries in the latter decades of their existence, for instance?
I think you ought to read some proper books rather than those by hysterical right-wing eccentrics and cold war stooges, and look up what the term slave means. Talking to some people who grew up in those countries can help, too (in my experience it's those who are most critical of the system who are the most measured in their assessment of the period.)
Nylock
I hate 'these days'...
The fact that a major tenet of the NATO alliance at the time was 'an attack on one is an attack on all' did more to hold the russians in check than a bunch of cruise missiles stationed in the uk. Due to this tenet, in order to successfully propagate a nuclear war in western europe, the russians would have been compelled to launch an all-out strike on every NATO member including the US. This would have meant a global nuclear war so the point is moot. If NATO was just the western european powers minus the US then threats of lobbing ss-20's would have maybe had some effect -as it stands though the russians knew they couldn't conscience such an act because NATO wasn't just western europe.
Part of the reason for the nuclear arms race in the first place was the americans having to stockpile 'excess capacity' in order to cover their commitments to their european allies and on the other side of the fence, the russians desperate to maintain some form of power balance. The deployment of short/medium range tactical nukes in europe at the time was as a response to a conventional threat (the widespread fear of an unstoppable tank rush through the fulda gap) as opposed to any esoteric worries about the russians possibly threatening a nuclear first strike on western europe.
Azrael
circling Airstrip One
*Azrael hefts his edition of Chambers off the shelf and flicks to "slave"*
Slave, n, a person kept as property, usu made to work as a servant; a person who is sumbissive under domination ...; a person whose will has lost power of resistance ...
The countries of Eastern Europe were dominated by a foreign power, which had a habit of deploying tanks if the people gave that self-determination lark a run. Proper and improper books tend to agree on this point. Citizens were not free to leave the Pact if they didn't like it. And they could be locked up at the whim of the state, especially if they were ratted out by one of the many informers on the paybooks of the secret police.
Slavery is the absence of freedom and self-determination. Temporary comfort doesn't change this. Historically, slaves were not universally brutalised. The Roman empire had slaves in positions of comfort and power. If you took a time-machine back, I'll bet many would say they had a better life than free peasants. Except that their comfort and power were the property of another, and could be snatched away in an instant.
I've talked to people who lived in eastern block countries. None of whom thought their rulers were "relatively benign", but perhaps they were biased, having been on the wrong side of them. Bet your average German or Italian would find Mussolini or Hitler "relatively benign" into the bargain. I think otherwise, but it must be the propaganda talking.
There's promises, and there's reality. If the Soviets had decided to atomize an uncooperative European country with a weapon that was technologically incapable of reaching America, I suspect the USA wouldn't be falling over themselves to commit national suicide and launch ICBMs.
Azrael
circling Airstrip One
Was 1984 on the list? How about Mill's On Liberty, Locke's Two Treatise, Orwell's Animal Farm, Foccault's Discipline and Punish?
Solzhenitsyn's Gulag Archipelago?
Was there a free press, with journalists at liberty to criticise their government without fear of reprisal?
Independent courts capable of delivering justice without fear or favour?
But at least the ballet was cheap.
Azrael;9970797} [b said:
It depends on who you talk to. Talk to people wheeled out to give the required viewpoint and you'll get the answers you want. For myself, I preferred to select my 'Soviets' and others at random (a clue: I spent much of my time there illegally.)
As for the definition of slave, it still doesn't stand up when applying it to eastern Europe, I'm afraid. That's because the people of those countries were no more 'kept as property' than the citizens of this country. They were not servants but independent employees, free in most cases to change jobs at will. Nobody denies that they were in many senses oppressed, but the culmination of those regimes, as well as the sporadic large scale refusals to co-operate in certain countries, proves that the 'will to resist' had not been lost. It was just that, for decades, most people found life bearable enough to get on with without taking the trouble to oppose the regime politically. Such a simplistic view also ignores the fact that latent opposition to aspects of the regimes if not the entire system, existed to differing degrees at different times within the ruling parties. You also ignore the millions who willingly served those regimes with differing degrees of enthusiasm.
Citizens were not free to leave the Warsaw Pact, no. But nor are we free (not least as citizens), in reality, to leave NATO (or the EU) as we'd find out if we tried. In the same way, we can choose a different goverment from a small range of programmes, but not the actual system (again, as we'd find out.)
I daresay many, if not most, east Europeans didn't consider their rulers benign. (They increasingly siaid what they thought about them, as time wore on, to relatively little consequence in most cases-often depending on the country.) That isn't what I said, however. I said that in world terms the rule of Communists in Europe from Khruschev onwards was relatively benign. You only have to compare them to various Latin American and African regimes of the period, for example, to appreciate this. There were no mass disappearances, mass imprisonments nor thousands upon thousands of slaughtered under the Communist regimes in Europe even if you take the whole period from 1945-8 to the end. Nobody was taken out in helicopters and thrown into the sea by masked soldiers. Death squads didn't descend on villages by night and kill everybody on sight. These events were more commonly found in countries allied to 'the West.' As I said, people tend to confuse the period with the deranged slaughterhouse that was Stalin's USSR.
It isn't a matter of 'proper and improper books,' but of seperating works of crude and subtle propaganda from the many books written from a wide variety of political viewpoints, including conservative, that take a more nuanced view of the period and the options open to those regimes.
Was 1984 on the list? How about Mill's On Liberty, Locke's Two Treatise, Orwell's Animal Farm, Foccault's Discipline and Punish?
Solzhenitsyn's Gulag Archipelago?
Was there a free press, with journalists at liberty to criticise their government without fear of reprisal?
Independent courts capable of delivering justice without fear or favour?
But at least the ballet was cheap.
No. I don't think they were freely available (not sure about Locke.) Again, though, that isn't what I said; I said that most classics of world literature were available. And not only that, people were encouraged to read them.
I never claimed anything about the legal system nor the press. You're arguing with an imagainary enthusiast for those regimes. All I'm saying is that you're over-simplifying.
Anyway, I'm off to bed.
Azrael
circling Airstrip One
This goes for plenty of slaves throughout history, as well. Slavery is not simplistic, either.
We're free to book a flight to another country tomorrow, if we have the funds. We're equally free to live in a country with "a different system", if it exists, and will have us. How the failure of communism to exist on the scale you'd like is comparable to your own government shooting anyone who tries to emigrate, I'm none to sure.
Man sits down in 1936 and writes, "In world terms, the rule of fascists in Europe from Mussolini onwards has been relatively benign. You only have to compare them to various colonial regimes of the period, for example, to appreciate this."
Perhaps because Stalin didn't exist in isolation. The "Stalin = bad" mantra ignores the fact that it was a certain system that allowed him to operate as he did. If he'd shown up in Britain, and tried what he tried in the USSR, he'd have been gaoled, hanged, or committed.
Just blasted by tanks in East Berlin, Prague and Budapest, tortured by the secret police, and gunned down in the death strip if they tried to leave. And this by you is better?
Spion
I hear ya
Gandhi?
Fisher_Gate
Active Member
Cathy Ashton the new EU 'High Representative' on foreign affairs was an active member of CND in the 1980s. She even worked for them in the 1970s.
I suppose "New Labour turncoat" is hardly news these days but I'm surprised the Daily Mail/Torygraph aren't ranting about it that much - they've picked up that she worked for them, but they seemed to have missed out that she was quite a significant national leader.
I suppose "New Labour turncoat" is hardly news these days but I'm surprised the Daily Mail/Torygraph aren't ranting about it that much - they've picked up that she worked for them, but they seemed to have missed out that she was quite a significant national leader.
It was perceived as such by the Soviets, just as the Western powers perceived the deployment of SS-20s as aggressive. That's what arms races look like to each side.
It's worth bearing in mind how much the post-war Soviet military outlook was coloured by the experience of Operation Barbarossa. You might think 'Of course the West wouldn't have launched a pre-emptive nuclear strike, we're not like that'. But that's not how the Soviets saw it, particularly during 1983.
You don't know that. Just because the USSR didn't do those things, doesn't mean cruise missiles had anything to do with it. After all, the Soviets had around 100 SS-20s in position by around 1980, three years before cruise missiles began to be deployed.
100 might not sound a lot, but British civil defence planners in the 1960s estimated that just 20 H-bombs landing on our country would have been enough to reach the 50% population threshold for social breakdown. That is, when half of the people have been killed, injured or are preoccupied with trying to help relatives, organised activity on a national scale becomes impossible.
There's probably some truth in that, although Western Europe wasn't exactly defenceless, particularly in regard to aircraft- and submarine-launched nuclear weapons.
Serious deterrents would have existed without cruise missiles. There was no need for the arms race of the late 1970s/early 1980s. To have an arms race as a precondition for subsequent reductions seems almost like the bulimic who gorges herself then vomits in a corner, only of course rather more dangerous.
likesfish
You can't park here sir
I remember everyone expected the first gulf war op granby to be a very even match was part of the battle repalcement and helped set up a mass mortuary and casuality handaling area. turned out to be more of a live firing exercise.
None of the west's high tech gear had been used in battle and everyone thought soviet gear was on par with it even given that iraq kit was mostly cheap export grade it was shockingly rubbish
the sort of tank you would get at the pound shop if pound shops sold main battle tanks. considering the iraqi's had fought a long bloody war with iran. everyone expected the fight to be a long bloody war.
None of the west's high tech gear had been used in battle and everyone thought soviet gear was on par with it even given that iraq kit was mostly cheap export grade it was shockingly rubbish
the sort of tank you would get at the pound shop if pound shops sold main battle tanks. considering the iraqi's had fought a long bloody war with iran. everyone expected the fight to be a long bloody war.
DotCommunist
So many particulars. So many questions.
I remember everyone expected the first gulf war op granby to be a very even match was part of the battle repalcement and helped set up a mass mortuary and casuality handaling area. turned out to be more of a live firing exercise.
None of the west's high tech gear had been used in battle and everyone thought soviet gear was on par with it even given that iraq kit was mostly cheap export grade it was shockingly rubbish
the sort of tank you would get at the pound shop if pound shops sold main battle tanks. considering the iraqi's had fought a long bloody war with iran. everyone expected the fight to be a long bloody war.
Kalashnikov. Ceap, ubiqutous and popular for ease of use and reliability. Russian made.
Azrael, other people have picked some of your points up to challenge them and LLETSA especially has done so very well IMO, and he's hardly any kind of Soviet stooge, he seems to have a much more balanced idea of history and politics than you do.
Yours posts come across (note emphasis) like the rantings of a ultra right (albeit articulate!) extremist. Aggressively challenge myself and others about the evils of the Soviet empire all you like, aggressively assume (subtextually
) that CNDers and ex CNDers were either Soviet apologists or naive idiots all you like, but as you appear to be near unhinged yourself on these subjects, so I'd rather not bother engaging. Not even to post my own criticisms of CND's strategy and tactics. Because as overbearing right wingers go with a slightly subtler, slightly less crude version of all that 'CND are Commies and idiots, the Soviets are EVIL!!!!!' malarky (as if no-one to the left of Reagan and Thatcher had any criticisms of their own of the SU), well it's an unhealthy, distorted one eyed take on politics and history, and I had more than enough of that shite back in the Eighties, thanks, and I can do without it now.
Your posts are overbearingly, hectoringly onesided and I'll leave them to more patient types to cope with.
Yours posts come across (note emphasis) like the rantings of a ultra right (albeit articulate!) extremist. Aggressively challenge myself and others about the evils of the Soviet empire all you like, aggressively assume (subtextually
) that CNDers and ex CNDers were either Soviet apologists or naive idiots all you like, but as you appear to be near unhinged yourself on these subjects, so I'd rather not bother engaging. Not even to post my own criticisms of CND's strategy and tactics. Because as overbearing right wingers go with a slightly subtler, slightly less crude version of all that 'CND are Commies and idiots, the Soviets are EVIL!!!!!' malarky (as if no-one to the left of Reagan and Thatcher had any criticisms of their own of the SU), well it's an unhealthy, distorted one eyed take on politics and history, and I had more than enough of that shite back in the Eighties, thanks, and I can do without it now.Your posts are overbearingly, hectoringly onesided and I'll leave them to more patient types to cope with.
likesfish
You can't park here sir
cheap and reliable is all vey well.
But if your lada built tank can see 500 metres at night
When your facing overly complicated expensive tanks that can see you at 6000 metres and shoot at you on the move.
then the old maxman quality has a quanity all of its own fails
But if your lada built tank can see 500 metres at night
When your facing overly complicated expensive tanks that can see you at 6000 metres and shoot at you on the move.
then the old maxman quality has a quanity all of its own fails
Spion
I hear ya
That might be what they told the grunts on the ground, but anyone with a wider, more well informed view - especially regarding the air factor - will have known different.
You don't think any grunt ever gets told, 'It'll be a walkover' do you?
Spion
I hear ya
And you think that wasn't known at the time?
These are just the usual cold war cliches though. Come up with all the definitions of slavery that you want. It does nothing to alter the fact that the vast majority in the Communist regimes had lives that resembled in most respects those of most people in the West, rather than those of slaves throughout history or in the vastly more populous Third World at the time.
Again, you ignore the fact that emigration wasn't an option, not least for financial reasons, for the vast majority of the world's population, no matter what kind of regime they lived under. That includes the Western parliamentary democracies. Whether you're technically free to move and live under a different system is to miss the point-the point is that we are, in reality, no more able to change the actual system we live under than the people who lived under Communist rule. In fact, you could say that they were, in the end, more easily able to do this, assisted as they were by the richest and most powerful countries in the world and their own erstwhile rulers. Meanwhile, hundreds of thousands of people did emigrate from the Communist regimes, and in Berlin aside, none of them were shot for trying, although their lives might have been made more difficult as a result-but again to what degree depended on the particular country and the individuals concerned. (Please try to remember that I'm not arguing that this was a good thing, just stating what used to happen.)
The rest of what you write above is incoherent, excitable, semi-comprehensible drivel which again tries to pin on me sentiments that I haven't even hinted at. (Here's a hint for you: it's possible to dispassionately look at the reality of a system of which you disapprove, especially when you've experienced it at first-hand, in order to let truth overcome mere propaganda and idiocy.)
By the way Azrael, here's what your fellow self-styled 'real conservative' Peter Hitchens has to say about the Soviet education system: 'Because the Soviet schools were wholehearted servants of the state and the Communist Party, they were disciplined, ordered places. Teachers had power, there were right and wrong answers, there was an accepted body of knowledge which had to be learned, and poor work earned bad grades. Young Russians are immensely better educated than their Western counterparts. It will be interesting to see if this survives the collapse of Soviet power.' (Russian friends tell me that it is surviving, but is becoming the preserve of those who can pay.)
kyser_soze
Hawking's Angry Eyebrow
You claiming objectivity here LLETSA?
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