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.
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.