I’m finishing the last episode of S5 now, and I’ll be fully caught up on this series. Between Afghanistan and Cambodia, China’s willingness to play ball with the US and its agenda is frustrating to learn.
It leaves me wanting to learn more about the Sino/Soviet split. The way this division manifested really aligned China with some dark forces, it would seem.
I also imagine the process of “normalization” with the US plays a huge role in the way this history unfolds as well.
It makes me wonder what they knew about The Khmer Rouge’s operations. I was left with the impression, based on how the history was laid out, that China was aware of just how aggressive and bloody the Khmer Rouge’s policies were.
Something about that stretch of time between 79 and 89 seems to have resulted in a bunch of weird geopolitical stuff.
Need to finish this episode, I guess.
These are important things for all socialists to consider among ourselves. Let’s not make the same mistakes in the future and do our best to build unity among the working class at a global scale.
I’m very uneducated, but I feel like the USSR would have had a much better chance at pulling through if they had close relations with the PRC. Socialism would be in much better shape in the modern day if that were the case, it’s truly a shame.
It’s hard to say, since China was far weaker than the USSR at the time, and did not want to be an unequal partner to the USSR, especially with revisionists at the helm. Who’s to say China would have managed to lose its pariah state status and become a superpower if it was subordinate to the Soviets? This of course is no excuse for the atrocious foreign policy decisions following the split, a gross overreaction brought about by a combination of Mao’s senility and some realpolitik with Nixon, but there’s no guarantee that had the split not happened that things would have played out better; you’d still have a revisionist USSR in ideological decay to contend with, and now China would be poorer, still cut off from most of the world, and more vulnerable to the predations of imperialist states.
No easy answers here
The USSR would’ve had a better chance at pulling through by simply keeping to themselves and developing production instead of engaging in adventurism abroad.
Sure, let’s just damn every person that’s been helped by the home of the revolution. Let every spark be smothered in the tinder pile.
Their adventurism ended up damning their own nation and discrediting socialism all around the world, i definitely do not want China to repeat this historical blunder.
Their “historical blunder” is why the People’s Republic of China actually exists and isn’t a hyper-exploited resource and labor colony of the west. The same for Cuba, the DPRK, Vietnam and every people that had received the aid of the Soviets whether they still exist or don’t.
The faithful execution of communist internationalism is not a blunder, it is an obligation.
Yeah I mean, the Soviets have their flaws, but a commitment to international socialism was not one of them.
In what way?
What basis does this claim have? You do realise that the demonisation of socialism and violent suppression of socialists predate the USSR, right?
What damned the USSR was the sheer scale of damage to the social fabric caused by WW2. The death of millions of the most committed communists let revisionists like Krushchev into the seats of power, and led to the separation of the party from the people. You got a stagnating economy (that is, stagnating compared to the earlier USSR, rather than, for instance, the US today) because Stalin was the last actual trained Marxist to hold power, and the leaders afterwards didn’t understand the machine they were at the controls of. They could no longer consciously manage the structures of society or the party, and so internal forces grew that combined with external forces to rip the Union apart. But it certainly wasn’t because they took a principled stance of helping socialists around the world. Even the intervention in Afghanistan, which supposedly finished the USSR off, was a disaster due to mismanagement and taking the wrong strategic approach, not because it was some kind of totally unwinnable scenario.