They (American troops) generally had a very positive and friendly attitude to their Soviet Counterparts.
Our great, great grandparents fought fascism together, and despite what some feelings of “higher ups” had on communism or the USSR, the general consensus amongst American forces was these Soviets were pretty fuckin cool.
If I were the US president and he said that under my watch I would send Patton to the Soviet Union.
And make sure that he can only leave the USSR if he has had a conversation with Georgy Zhukov, Ivan Konev, or Soviet field marshal of the time
Unfortunately Harry Truman was a huge advocate for what he explained "let's just let the germans and russians kill each other."
The US oligarchs at the time were not unsympathetic to the nazis in the least. Without FDR the course of history could have looked much different (not a defense of FDR, just saying he was vehemently against the axis while others were not)
FDR was a bit of a glazer for Marxist-Leninist ideology, and was rather chummy with Stalin, with some glib dismissals of various Soviet atrocities. It was Roosevelt's directives that had U.S. propaganda paint such a rosy picture of the brave Soviet peoples taking common cause with America and Britain. Truman was not so enamored and considered Stalin a dangerous hoodlum with an enormous army.
" U.S. propaganda paint such a rosy picture of the brave Soviet peoples taking common cause with America and Britain"
So what, the soviets did not defeat the Nazis?
What are you even trying to say?
Also I wish FDR was more subscribed to Marxism. He was decidedly not.
You know for ya'll folk who love to try and rail against socialism and all it's forms....it is crystal clear that you have absolutely zero clue of actual history, have read mayb30 words total of theory and get all of your info from 30 second MSNBSC or FOX news highlights.
The Soviets defeated the Nazis... after being buds with them. They then decided to occupy Eastern Europe. FDR was definitely not subscribed to Marxism, he found it incompatible with democratic institutions, but that didn't stop him from spouting more admirable remarks than was really necessary to maintain the alliance with the USSR. Also, there was no railing against FDR or his progressive policies going on here, not even a critique of Marxism (though I could do that if you like); just a recognition of the difference in views between Roosevelt and Truman.
I mean even Americans are pretty self-aware about Patton.
Even Eisenhower had more respect and admiration for Zhukov.
I think Truman did Zhukov a favor to get him a clear kind of Coca-Cola so he could drink it without the risk of it being seized. I wish more people knew America didn’t have to define itself as Anti-Communist.
Good thing Stalin stripped him of his rank then.
Why is a good thing?
It isn’t.
McCarthyism and its metastasis into American foreign policy (read "synthesis with the doctrine of American primacy") is one of the greatest atrocities committed against the human race in our entire history as a species. The duped American proletarians that went to fight fascism alongside the Soviets, however late to the party they were, would turn in their graves if they knew how rabidly modern Americans desecrate the memory of thr Soviet Union. Imagine the world we could've had if America had been allowed to let Marxism-Leninism into their hearts.
This is what I'm always saying. Having a "developed" nation with international clout at the top of the global pyramid alongside the USSR as it was climbing, both working side by side, would have created a much better world then we currently live in, without poverty or government sanctioned greed or imperialism.
Also U.S.A is the biggest chunk of the imperialist core so them not being that, and therefore not sabotaging economic democracy via the CIA and military, would have allowed socialism to actually get its feet on the ground and with America enforcing anti-imperialist policies instead of its current anti-democracy anti-socialism imperialist policies would make the world very very different from what we live in today. Most likely much better with more developed nations and less global poverty.
America has installed dictators to fight against economic democracy.
You live in quite the fantasy world. The thing about Utopianism is you never can disprove the Utopia because it’s always just “give me more power and we can reach the Utopia”. If you never reach the Utopia, it’s not because the Utopia can never exist, it was just because you didn’t hand enough power to the Utopian dreamers
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1973_Chilean_coup_d%27%C3%A9tat
Socialism: Utopian and Scientific
Not exactly sure what you are trying to get at with the links
1) The CIA is known to install military dictatorships by coup d'etat in countries that become socialist. 2) You call Marxism "Utopian" when in fact it is based upon social science.
"based upon social science" you know experimentation and is the most crucial part of the scientific method? you don't say "uh but it's science" and become infallible, Marxism is barely at the hypothesis stage if it were following anything resembling a scientific method, Marxism only exists as a circlejerk of ideas on text
What do you call the Soviet Union, if not an experiment? There's a whole lot to be learned from both its failures and its successes - which often go unreported in western media.
Well it wasn't a lack of power that prevented the Soviet Union from getting to the utopia but a lack of resources and existing in relative isolation for most of its existence.
They started as a poor underdeveloped agarian nation, ie a nations who's main economic activity is farming and agriculture.
Start point determines end point, which is why have the U.S as an ally like what nearly happened in world war II, would have made all the difference.
It was a lack of technological development, the time period, bad weather during the first 5 years plan causing a famine, and their previous economy which was quite weak compared to other modern economies of its time period.
And yet... The sons and daughters of illeterate peasants still beat us in every goal post in the space race besides man on the moon.
Also it's was all about putting the working class i.e the 99%, in complete power.
Which is... Democracy. The idea was to make the government and the economy democratically controlled and give the regular non-rich workers who do all the labor that makes the world go around complete control of both their government and economy via democracy.
Vietnam for instance, based it's constitution and declaration of Independence on the U.S constitution due to fighting for these Democratic ideals against a monarchy that was backed by france.
They though the U.S. would help based on our shared values of democracy and anti-monarchy/colonialism.
Instead we showed up to the Revolution on the side of the "red coats".
Pretty sure it was the rampant corruption that doomed the Soviet Union, and the Great Purge of 1937 that stalled the advancement of the Union.
Just like rampant corruption is destroying the U.S now. 😅
Yes, unfortunately.
What stopped them from reaching the communist Utopia is the fact it doesn’t exist and can’t exist. Communism cannot and will not ever work in a world where humans exist. It at best leads to human stagnation. The reason communism fails again and again no matter where it’s tried is because it just doesn’t work. It’s not for a lack of will.
I think this all stems from a misunderstanding of the interaction between “workers” and “employers”. Workers are not slaves to employers. Workers, normal human beings, are selling a product. The product is your labor. You can make that product worth more by learning new skills and leveraging deals. The employee pays you for that product. Then they use the product they just bought to build new products, that they then sell to other people who may or may not use that product to make their own products or improve their lives.
It’s a symbiotic relationship where you are bartering your time and labor for money so that you can spend that money on other products that YOU want.
I never said a lack of will. I said a lack of resources. Will they had, what they didn't have is a super-abundance.
Those, even Marx argued, mainly occur in the rich capitalist-imperialist core.
Which Is why I said having a developed country with a fully developed economy would be the game changer.
To state the things you are staying as fact would require for America to have not have toppled and sabotaged countries working to establish economic democracy.
Also, the innovation argument is kinda outdated. Even Capitalist economist point out that there's only so many niches to create improve upon in any economy and once we get to a certain point, i.e the chance for working class people to move from working class to owner class will finish as time goes on and large corporations fill every niche in our economy.
Meanwhile, inflation is a constant in capitalism but there is a vested interest in driving wages low for the entirety of the owner class. Prices rise, wages don't rise to meet them consistently.
We always look at where we're at right now, never will we will be, economically speaking, in a generation or two.
A worker could afford a home in his late 20s in the U.S in its prime. But inflation is a constant.
And now workers are buying homes well into their 30s and 40s if at all but most are looking at a life of renting.
Also, what about wage theft? I mean, it a worker assembles 1000 iPhones an hour, he makes the company $100,000 in an hour. Yet receives $75-$150 dollars for his day's work.
100% of the actual human labor was done by one person. All but only .05% of the money he makes in... Just an hour.
We’ve done that one too. Also, the Soviet Union was an advanced nation and it still collapsed. Venezuela was one of the richest countries in South America, went socialist and now is one of the poorest. Canada went socialist and now the average Canadian has the same buying power as the average Mississippian, which is the poorest US state.
Then you have China, who was poor and then abandoned communist economics and went to mercantilism and became far richer. Mercantilism still will fail in due time but the point is that they abandoned the Communist economics and flourished because of it.
canada went socialist.
lmfao
Canada isn't socialist. Not even close.
Canada isn't socialist. They are a liberal democracy that is capitalist in economic model.
They just have voted for slightly different policies. People who tend to be critical to socialism tend to not understand what is and isn't Socialism.
Canada is at most Welfare Capitalism.
Also see:
The difference between Social Democracy & Socialism
And also between those and Welfare Capitalism.
As far as China goes, they haven't completely abandoned Socialist developments like building widespread worker housing including 1000 bed homeless shelters that allow people to freely move from city to city to find better work allowing people to move however economically fits them arguably these only need exist because of the degree of their capitalist developments though, these haven't all be positive the way people tend to make them out to be.
Seas of solar panels being developed in rural parts of China like mountain complexes and deserts. They are re-greenifying the country at an astounding rate 10%increase in China's land mass is now covered by forest. China is huge. A new 10% is huge. It's even affecting the water table in new ways by changing how water moves through the water cycle through the country.
The seas of solar panels have actually been shown to be benefiting the ecosystem by allowing more shelter for animals and not interfering as much as you would think with plant life.
Huge hydroelectric development moving away from coal.
Collectivized agriculture.
They also tax their businesses by 40% tax on profits which is how they get all the money and resources for their unique hybrid model of economy.
Though they used to have separation of business and state kinda like how we have separation of church and state but that was reversed in 2001.
It's somewhere in-between.
Oh and technically on paper it's all owned by the people, ie public property but it's operated privately as an investment in the "Chinese economy". This is actually important because it's actually a failsafe to allow the people's government to re-establish socialism and abolish private property, returning the economy in stages to public ownership at a later time.
When people say the Soviet Union was atheist, the answer is no, it just pursued MarxismLeninism as a religion.
It's truly remarkable that they had such faith in something for which there was zero empirical evidence.
On the one hand, it tells you how horrible things were under the Tsar that they were willing to believe in such stuff. On the other, it was literally faith that things like central planning could ever work.
And of course, in the end, it didn't work. The idea you can have a plan for years in advance across the whole economy, all the way down to things like the number of books at your local library, is silly. But it was taken very seriously.
The American middle and lower class weren't duped, they had the highest standard of living from '45 to about the 80's. They had no reason to accept socialism into their lives cause they were living in a time of unprecedented wealth. And from there they slowly let the modern US economy grow and even inflate without any care cause they were making money. You can say socialism would've done the US better, but multiple attempts in other countries and the modern attempts at socialist policies show that the American political system isn't built for it, we'd need to do a complete culture and country reset to get anywhere near what you think is best.
Except the intervention of the US and Hitler’s obsession with taking Stalingrad instead of just ceasing Moscow when he had the chance were the only reason the Soviets weren’t completely annihilated by the Germans.
If the Soviet Union didn’t exist and it was only the allies fighting Germany, the allies still would have won, just with more casualties. You also have to remember the US was fighting s two front war and still smashed both fronts.
90% of German Casualties were killed by Soviets.
At that time they weren't brainwashed by American government
i need that photo of american and soviet soldier kissing on my desk now
Mind you, that quote is misattributed to him. Is was allegedly said by one of his advisors and there's also no verifiable evidence for that either. And of course American and Soviet soldiers were friendly, they were fighting the same enemy and American equipment kept soviets alive throughout the entire war
helped* keep soviets alive
Compare us rates of survival in tank to tank combat and air to air to the Soviets. The US equipment undoubtedly kept many a Soviets alive. Not to mention donated medical supplies and transportation.
You can be a lamb and make that comparison yourself. And while you're at it, compare the quantities of german tanks/planes/bunkers etc. destroyed by equipment/machinery produced domestically in the USSR, vs those destroyed by equipment/machinery bought via the lend lease. Since that's the metric that actually matters. Tank A having a slightly better survival rate than tank B means absolutely nothing to you strategically when you have only 1,000 units of A and 50,000 units of B.
Oh and you mentioned supplies and transportation? If you're feeling extra zealous, compare also the respective quantities produced domestically in the USSR vs American made.
And I don't know why you say "donated" when the Soviets paid for every single piece of equipment provided via the lend lease.
The point being - lend lease was an important factor that contributed to the war effort, but it was very far from the 'holy grail' that some individuals make it out to be. Simple as that.
They didn't actually fully pay for lend lease, but they did pay for a lot of it.
Yes they did. You can find the relevant sources in this discussion
If you're talking lend-lease, that was a fraction of early war hardware and only about 1% of total Soviet food production. Not that huge, but helped the Soviets rapidly industrialize.
11,000 aircraft, 300,000 trucks, 6,000 tanks, 350 locomotives, over 1300 rail carts and about 500,000 tons for rail road equipment by June 1944. I'd say that's not then a fractional amount of support
Do you know how fractions work?
Compared to overall, yes it is. This is corroborated by almost all statistical analyses. Overall it's roughly 10-15% of the total for most items.
Helpful? Yes. The majority? Absolutely not, whether you're looking at tranes, planes, and tanks, or food, farm equipment, and seed.
Edit:
Very thorough discussion here (link to specific comment):
https://www.reddit.com/r/ussr/s/I6Q2CCyXUH
Some people think Operation Unthinkable would’ve went in the allies favour, but this proves it wouldn’t, telling the common soldier that your friend is now your enemy right after fighting the greatest evil together, it just wouldn’t work.
Isn't this quote fake and only used by Nazis?
Would have been far less then average, as many were in the Pacific.
I hate people who say stuff like this without posting at least an article about it.
Y’all pulling any bull crap out here.
This whole sub is like a fan fiction. To think Americans weren’t prejudice towards Slavic peoples in crazy work
It's a bit weird to talk about "fighting against fascim" when we all know what happened in Poland
If I may ask Ya'll a question, what do You think of the Polish armed forces in the west? Are they apart of the anti-nazi struggle, or are they traitors?
yeah soviet soldiers are cool when you are not under their boot as a subjugated eastern European