Is it really hard to fathom why many people despise the US?

[vtsnowedin]

And the Vietnam War is still not over. Since the Americans went home 100000 Vietnamese have been killed by American ordnance that didn't explode when it was meant to. And as for the legacy through generations still being afflicted upon the new-born by Agent Orange... How folk manage to fall for US propaganda just beggars belief.

So you think that in 1960 the leaders of the USSR and Red China were not out to win world domination. We could have all just stayed home and tended the garden and go to ball games and everything would have worked out just fine? You seem to forget that the USA was not the only 800 pound gorilla in the room during most of the time you are complaining about.

[biffvernon]

So you think that in 1960 the leaders of the USSR and Red China were not out to win world domination.

Correct.

[UndercoverElephant]

And the Vietnam War is still not over. Since the Americans went home 100000 Vietnamese have been killed by American ordnance that didn't explode when it was meant to. And as for the legacy through generations still being afflicted upon the new-born by Agent Orange... How folk manage to fall for US propaganda just beggars belief.

So you think that in 1960 the leaders of the USSR and Red China were not out to win world domination.

That is also what I think. I believe the US was, and still is, bent on world domination. I believe Islam is bent on world domination. I do not believe that either the USSR or China were out to win world domination in 1960, and I also strongly suspect that almost nobody outside the US believes that either.

Yep, your nation is that deluded.

We could have all just stayed home and tended the garden and go to ball games and everything would have worked out just fine?

Worked out just fine? Depends what you mean. I don't believe for one moment that the world would have fallen under the control of totalitarian communism.

You seem to forget that the USA was not the only 800 pound gorilla in the room during most of the time you are complaining about.

It was the only 800 pound gorilla bent on total world domination.

You really don't get it, do you? Americans see themselves as the saviours of "the rest of the free world". Everybody else sees you as a bunch of psychopaths.

[boisdevie]

I have a BA in History and studied the Vietnam war in depth. After WW2 the Americans were paraoid about the communist threat. Ho Chi Minh was a nationalist, an independence fighter and he cosied up to China as the only way of gaining independence for the Vietnam that he loved. Remember the phrase, the enemy of my enemy is my friend.

[biffvernon]

And on that note the French have to take some responsibility for setting up the American catastrophe.

(It was one of the bits of the world that was coloured green rather than pink in the old atlases.)

[vtsnowedin]

So you think that in 1960 the leaders of the USSR and Red China were not out to win world domination.

Correct.

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

[biffvernon]

Exactly so - not a hint that Russia was going to invade the world!

The actual verbal context was: "Whether you like it or not, history is on our side. We will dig you in" ("Нравится вам или нет, но история на нашей стороне. Мы вас закопаем"). In his subsequent public speech Khrushchev declared: "[...] We must take a shovel and dig a deep grave, and bury colonialism as deep as we can".[4] Later, on August 24, 1963, Khrushchev remarked in his speech in Yugoslavia, "I once said, 'We will bury you,' and I got into trouble with it. Of course we will not bury you with a shovel. Your own working class will bury you,"[5] a reference to the Marxist saying, "The proletariat is the undertaker of capitalism", based on the concluding statement in Chapter 1 of the Communist Manifesto: "What the bourgeoisie therefore produces, above all, are its own grave-diggers. Its fall and the victory of the proletariat are equally inevitable." Khrushchev repeated this Marxist thesis at a meeting with journalists in the US in September 1959. However, many Americans interpreted the quote as a nuclear threat.[6]
Mikhail Gorbachev suggested in his book Perestroika and New Thinking for our Country and the World that the image used by Khrushchev was inspired by the acute discussions among Soviet agrarian scientists in the 1930s, nicknamed "who will dig whom in", the bitterness of which must be understood in the political context of the times.

Of course history has not (yet) panned out in the way Khrushchev expected.

[vtsnowedin]

Exactly so - not a hint that Russia was going to invade the world!

The actual verbal context was: "Whether you like it or not, history is on our side. We will dig you in" ("Нравится вам или нет, но история на нашей стороне. Мы вас закопаем"). In his subsequent public speech Khrushchev declared: "[...] We must take a shovel and dig a deep grave, and bury colonialism as deep as we can".[4] Later, on August 24, 1963, Khrushchev remarked in his speech in Yugoslavia, "I once said, 'We will bury you,' and I got into trouble with it. Of course we will not bury you with a shovel. Your own working class will bury you,"[5] a reference to the Marxist saying, "The proletariat is the undertaker of capitalism", based on the concluding statement in Chapter 1 of the Communist Manifesto: "What the bourgeoisie therefore produces, above all, are its own grave-diggers. Its fall and the victory of the proletariat are equally inevitable." Khrushchev repeated this Marxist thesis at a meeting with journalists in the US in September 1959. However, many Americans interpreted the quote as a nuclear threat.[6]
Mikhail Gorbachev suggested in his book Perestroika and New Thinking for our Country and the World that the image used by Khrushchev was inspired by the acute discussions among Soviet agrarian scientists in the 1930s, nicknamed "who will dig whom in", the bitterness of which must be understood in the political context of the times.

Of course history has not (yet) panned out in the way Khrushchev expected.

.] We must take a shovel and dig a deep grave, and bury colonialism as deep as we can"
No that is not a hint. It is a direct statement of intent.

[biffvernon]

Colonialism was a very bad thing, as in, for example, the French Colonialism in Vietnam that led to the American's greatest atrocity when they tried to defend it. And of course the British were past masters at the art.

For Khrushchev to say "We must take a shovel and dig a deep grave, and bury colonialism as deep as we can" sounds a pretty noble sentiment. It shows he was NOT in favour of nations invading other nations and doing what the British/French/Belgians/Dutch/Germans/Italians/Portuguese/Spanish had done so much of and what the Americans have been attempting to do, albeit in a more covert way, ever since the Europeans gave colonialism up.

(Isn't it remarkable how two people can look at the same historical event and draw diametrically opposite views.)

[RenewableCandy]

That Russian verb is in the present tense, not the future or some mode implying intent. Prob more accurately means "We are burying you", as in, it's inevitable. This ties in better with the bit about a country's own poor people doing the job, rather than the USSR having to step in.

Meanwhile, how about Iraq (because it's recent and still fresh in my memory)? There was, before the invasion, a perfectly good conspiracy to assassinate Saddam Hussein. It was mainly local people with only a bit of help from overseas, and by all accounts would have been successful had the overseas part not suddenly pulled the plug, leaving the locally involved individuals high and dry. Not a lot of people like to talk about it because it doesn't show us (UK and USA, aIui) in a good light. But it would have been a better alternative to what actually happened. There's be a lot less DU about for a start.

[ceti331]

but didn't the russians basically occupy half of europe, would they have stopped?

I suppose you could say thats just kind of a tit-for-tat outcome from ww2. Wasn't ww3 a potentially 3 way affair, prior to it east and west viewed eachother with hostility already

[boisdevie]

but didn't the russians basically occupy half of europe, would they have stopped?

I suppose you could say thats just kind of a tit-for-tat outcome from ww2. Wasn't ww3 a potentially 3 way affair, prior to it east and west viewed eachother with hostility already

But didn't the Americans basically occupy half of europe? The US military still has bases all over Europe.

You've got to understand your history. The Russians lost around 40 million people in WW2 - that's more than ever other country put together. Imagine, you've lost 40m people, you've won a war and then you're going to want to dominate as much of the place as possible so you won't ever have the danger of being innahilated ever again. The US lost sod all in comparison and was never invaded. Kind of makes a difference.
And I'm not some apologist - Stalin was a first class murderer and the postwar Soviet regime did some truly awful things.

[RenewableCandy]

As a new graduate, among my many job applications was one to something called Radio Free Europe. It sounded pleasingly Continental and anarchic, and I thought they might appreciate my French. I was rather shocked when they told me I couldn't work there because of not being a USA citizen.

[raspberry-blower]

As a new graduate, among my many job applications was one to something called Radio Free Europe.

Cue R.E.M.

[featherstick]

That Russian verb is in the present tense, not the future or some mode implying intent. Prob more accurately means "We are burying you", as in, it's inevitable. This ties in better with the bit about a country's own poor people doing the job, rather than the USSR having to step in.

Sorry, Candy. Закопать - future tense. Закaпывать = present tense. And contextually, the phrase can only be understood as "we will bury you".

It's pretty clear from the Soviet side though that although the rhetoric and bluster was expansionist, there was little real appetite for domination until the American paranoia was noted. In 1939 (I think) Stalin had already refocussed the USSR's ambition on to building communism in one country, not worldwide. By the 1950s, the Soviet Union was LEADING the US on a whole range of public health and wellbeing indicators, as well as science results, a fact which has been given as the reason the US ramped up the aggressive rhetoric. Let us not forget that many of the global elite feared communism as it seemed to be a successful example of a planned economy, it was a viable alternative system to capitalism, and in Europe, some communist experiments had gone well. Europe in particular made more concessions to its working classes to prevent wholesale democratic transition to communism.


So the US ramped up the aggression in the 1950s to frighten the Soviet Union into spending more on guns and less on butter, and the Soviet Union responded. The Cold War served the interests of a tiny military-industrial elite on both sides, giving them plenty of reasons to claim the other side were out to kill them and they needed more resources. Suvorov writes very amusingly of attempts to develop a radiation-proof paint for the Soviet long-range bombers which went on for ten years only to end when it was pointed out that it would be useless as the shock-wave would knock the planes out of the sky. Plenty of people got dachas and privileges from the paint experiment, just as plenty of people got rich from Boeing and Lockheed.

The problem for the modern world is that the US military-industrial complex has got hooked on the heroin of public money and its own global policeman rhetoric and since 1989 needs a new foe. Islamic fascism has fitted the bill nicely and once again we see a relatively small number of people on both sides benefitting from the contrived paranoia, aggression and cynicism deployed to justify massive spending, massive control and power grabs. The utter inability of most Americans I have met to discuss some of the issues rationally, or indeed in a normal tone of voice, also contributes to the perception the the US is a country of psychos.

As Winston Churchill once said "Americans can always be counted on to do the right thing once they have exhausted all other possible options". We live in hope.