<https://tinyurl.com/yex679ty> globaltimes.cn

| The US is becoming USSR 2.0 ..
| | .. Neo-Eurasianism founder Aleksandr Dugin ..

That is promising.

| Symptom I: Interest groups
| | In the USSR, the self-proclaimed dignitaries of a large bureaucratic
| class were parasitic on all aspects of Soviet society. They took
| advantage of their privileges .. The number of commodities that
| ordinary people could consume were strictly limited, but the
| dignitaries had privileges to obtain all kinds ..
| | Today, the American ruling class have become new dignitaries ..

Such a narrative that "Soviet nomenclature" are living in extreme luxury
while the ordinary people are extremely poor was exaggerated by the
Western propaganda (mainly in order to undermine domestic left-wing
Soviet sympathisers), and, after the Sino-Soviet split, the Chinese
propagada also started to utilize similar narratives.

In general, in any [stable] governance, people closer to government are
either richer than average or (if it's not a 'monetary' system) somewhat
more privileged in consumption. In the USSR, too, life of the management
stratum was of course better than average. Since the very revolution in
the 1917, the Lenininst principle was that those who are useful for the
revolution should have better living conditions, food, healthcare and so
on, and it created [new] class of people privileged in consumption.

One can find certain functional similarities between the modern American
ruling class and the former Soviet "bureaucratic class", but the way the
writer likens them is nevertheless a falsity. Along with the system of
privileges, the inequality gap between the privileged and the ordinary
in the USSR was still much less against the gap between the rich and the
poor in the Western countries (as then as today <http://bit.ly/2Wb4rif>),
as well as against the present day 'communist' China and 'capitalist'
Russia. In China and Russia today, the inequality gap is even higher
against Europe, and it's only little less against the US.

In fact, the writer replicates the narratives of the anti-Soviet Maoist
1960s-70s propaganda (eg. <https://archive.is/qCPf4>). Those narratives
were false and highly delirious, and it would be better if the modern
Chinese ideologists refrained from resurrection of then mad stuff today.
Especially given that China itself turned 'other way' in the 1980s.

Piquancy is that the Mao's propaganda started to exaggerate the idea of
Soviet 'capitalist inequality' linking it with the Khrushchyov's rule as
a part of the broader 'revisionism' agenda. But the Mao's "revisionism"
accusations towards the USSR originally arose not because of the Soviet
domestic policies. Khrushchyov supported softening of the Soviet stance
against "capitalist world" and adopted the idea of peaceful coexistense
<https://bit.ly/2W2aRkg>, due to which Mao called him revisionist. I.e.
it was primarily about the Soviet foreign policy. But as soon as "Soviet
revisionism" concept was adopted by the CPC, the Mao's propaganda began
to far fetch into this concept also the Soviet domestic policies, as if
the post-Stalin Soviet Union had become socialist in name only.

In real fact, the practice of giving privileges of consumption and
maintaining (semi-)institutionalized inequality was more typical for the
Stalin's regime. Against that, the Khrushchyov's domestic policies were
intended to make the Soviet life more truly egalitarian and 'equal'
(read also <https://tinyurl.com/ydo58sh3>). But the post-split China's
propaganda unbridledly served the Mao's "revisionism" narrative out of
touch with reality and without sense of proportion.

| Symptom II: abusing military force
| | The Soviet Union's intervention in foreign countries was unrestrained.
| It not only sent troops to Hungary, but also to Czechoslovakia,
|, Afghanistan and others ..
| Since the 21st century, the US military has launched numerous wars
| such as the Iraq War and the Afghanistan War ..

Once there was a time when the Soviet interventionism helped develop and
promote the CPC, at its early stage (which drives the crazy Taiwanese
activists to claim the CPC today is a Kremlin's puppet).

The world was now living for about 75 years without large scale wars, so
it has become more accustomed to peace (and that's surely good). The WW2
as such was a huge abuse of force, and in the post-WW2 period,
'psychological' threshold for use of military force was naturally lowered.
One might take this consideration into account.

With regard to Afghanistan, the elderly Soviet leadership were initially
very reluctant to send troops there, but the progressive socialist Afghan
comrades who had taken power there, were very enthusiastic and insistent.

Here's what Afghanistan under the Soviet-friendly government looked like.
<http://tinyurl.com/y3hc7r7o>
<http://tinyurl.com/y6zf3tce>
Here's what it looked like after 'liberation' by those freedom fighters.
<http://tinyurl.com/y56368y4>

| Symptom III: Totalitarianism
| | The Soviet Union once practiced chauvinism and advocated for limited
| sovereignty, which eventually led to the disintegration of the
| socialist camp.
| Today, the United States believes in neoliberalism, the survival of
| the fittest, and winner takes all. America turned into a liberal
| totalitarian state ..

Totalitarianism, chauvinism and neoliberalism have not only different
meanings but also different scopes, and mixing them so looks unsightly.
The idea the writer seems to express is that the Soviet leadership were
tend to impose their vision on other nation's leadership within the
"socialist camp", and it's similar to how America tends to threat its
'allies'. For expression of this claim, there is no necessity to abuse
poorly relevant terms simply because they all are negatively charged.

| Symptom I: Political correctness
| | The Soviet Union once vigorously suppressed "dissidents."
| Neoliberalism in the US has now also become extreme and absolute ..
| Any speech that does not conform to liberal ideology is presumed
| guilty ..

Some topics and narratives are known to be unwelcome or cenzored in the
present day mainland China's public discourse, so the US today and the
USSR in the past are not the only.

| Symptom V: Intensified surveillance
| | The Biden administration strengthened private speech and text message
| monitoring, and the FBI encouraged citizens to report any "violent
| extremism" from relatives and friends, just like the Soviet authorities
| did. This is a new era of the American government seeking full control
| of American society.

It's not uncommon when a government encourages concerned citizens to
report criminal and anti-social activities. With regard to the USSR, the
topic of such reports is often 'peculiarly' associated with the 1937-38
Big Terror period. In the 1930s, Soviet propaganda began to indoctrinate
people so that 'hidden', disguised, conspiratorial enemies are hiding
everywhere, waiting to use every opportunity to commit some sabotage and
wrecking. Of course, it encouraged ordinary people, including those who
had an unstable psyche and morbid imagination, to send reports against
those whom they saw suspicious. Some indecent people also might use this
way against their personal foes or competitors. This situation was much
specific to the second half of 1930s, but it wasn't specific to the USSR
in general, including its late period. And also all this isn't directly
related to the "surveillance" topic.

Surveillance basically means state monitoring of people's activities and
communications through various technical means and administrative
regulations. In this primary sense, most would point to China as a
modern world leader in such practices. Within the Western world, Britain
is a recognized leader in surveillance.

* * *

Most of the Russians today are somehow critical towards the Soviet past
and most don't want it back, but they would also dislike if someone
makes factually wrong and/or silly claims about the Soviet Union. After
the Sino-Soviet split, China's propaganda produced a lot of exaggerated
or wrong claims against the USSR. It would be saner if the present day
Chinese ideologists reviewed this contentious historical legacy in more
balanced and restrained way.

The Sino-Soviet split began when the Soviet leadership had decided to
"de-cultivize" Stalin. The Soviets minded it as a Soviet internal matter
and underestimated foreign consequences. At the time, Mao modeled his
own cult of personality following the Stalin sample, so such a turn
naturally made him feel unhappy. He was not the only: North Korea's Kim
Il-sung and Albania's Enver Hoxha also felt unhappy by this reason. In
the Mao's view, image of Stalin was important for the entire Communist
Movement, and he perceived the fact the Soviets had not consulted with
him and others as a sign of disrespect and 'imperialist' arrogance.

Moreover, after the death of Stalin, Mao started seeing himself as more
Elder against those 'juvenile' post-Stalin generation folks in Moscow,
and this perception aggravated his ambition and anger. Here was a subtle
moment, since in the 1st half of the 1950s there really was a *sincere*
spirit of "international socialist brotherhood" (many Russia's elderly
and 70+ mainland Chinese remember the time). It contributed to the Mao's
view that, as an older in age, he could take over the Stalin's role.

Some myth-makers exaggerately depict Mao in the 1950s as "the most
authoritative communist theorist in the world" <https://bit.ly/3kuvOMC>,
misrepresenting him as a highly influential figure within the "socialist
camp", so that Khrushchyov even had to beg for Mao's approval due to the
internal struggle within the Soviet leadership. It's a falsity. It might
be what Mao wanted to be (and so may be a wishful thinking of some Mao's
fans in China), but what he in fact was not.

Khrushchyov, who took the post-Stalin lead, was not nearly as heavy and
bloodthirsty as Stalin, but he was personally rough, impulsive and
direct, unceremonious character. It was what might additionally offend
Mao, given the Chinese love ceremonialism and see straightforwardness as
a rude manner. So all this likely contributed.

By then time, the Soviet Union was "building socialism" already for 40
years. In the early 1920s, the Bolsheviks hoped that their revolutionary
impulse will be continued in 'industrial' Europe. However, it turned out
so that Mussolini invented socialism with Fascist characteristics and
Hitler invented socialism with 'Aryan' characteristics. And, after the
WW2, the US turned out the ultimate beneficiary. By the 1950s, the
Soviet ideologists had become more careful and realistic, and adopted
"peaceful coexistence" line. But, for the Chinese communists, revolution
occured just recently. They had more revolutionary ardor. And it led to
the fact that Mao eventually proclaimed himself a true Marxist-Leninist
revolutionary against the Soviet "revisionists".

Combination of such factors drove Mao to distance from the USSR and
start playing a separate tune. In essence, he attempted "to hijack" the
Soviet-built "socialist camp", but he was unable to offer a reasonabler
alternative to the Soviet course. As the China-Soviet relationship was
deteriorating, since the second half of the 1950s, Mao / CPC started to
compete against the USSR / CPSU within the World Communist Movement by
offering "more true" Marxism-Leninism-Maoism in opposition to "Soviet
revisionism". It was not much successful. In the 1960-70s, the Mao-led
CPC used to endorse various schismatic, marginal, freaky factions within
socialist-communist parties in the world, but in this way the CPC was
still unable to create an international formation somehow comparable to
the Soviet-dominant community <https://bit.ly/3sMfnPH>. Along with that,
since the mid-60s, China'a official anti-Soviet rhetoric became
increasingly unbridled and obscene, as the doctrinal criticism gradually
transformed into nationalist-like hatred against the USSR.

The Mao's domestic policies at the time - the Great Leap Forward and the
Cultural Revolution - also ended up not so well, as well as those China-
backed non-revisionist Red Khmers in Cambodia-Kampuchea.

In Russia's old history, there was tsar Ivan 4 the Aweful (known as Ivan
the Terrible, in an inaccurate translation), who made great achievements
at the beginning, but the last 20 years of his reign were marked by ugly
extremist policies. Mao looks somewhat similar in this respect. Nowadays
the CPC has officially recognized <http://bit.ly/3zn8ZAN> the Great Leap
and the Cultural Revolution as severe mistakes, but, actually, these two
can't be taken separately, in isolation from other Mao's policies at the
time. Some changes to the worse happened in Mao's temper and mindset, so
that the Great Leap, the Cultural Revolution and the confrontational
stance towards the USSR, were all manifestations of one underlying trend.
Maybe one day the CPC will recognize it so.

If the Khrushchyov's leadership was more attentive and delicate towards
Mao in the 1950s, then maybe the China-Soviet relationship would worsen
less dramatically. But a hardly solvable issue was that Mao demanded not
only a higher 'status' for himself but also more confrontational "true
revolutionary" combative approach towards "capitalist world". The latter
was hardly acceptable for the Soviet and east-European communists in the
post-WW2 situation.

It would be wrong to claim the Mao's "anti-revisionist" agenda destroyed
socialist camp, since the Soviet-led socialism seemed to be untenable on
its own, but Mao played as a spoiler, and his quirks surely accelerated
the end of the international communist movement. By the mid-1970s, the
USSR entered in the Brezhnev's Era of Stagnation, and some basic chronic
nature of the internal shortcomings within "socialist system" had become
increasingly obvious. The Gorbachyov's hapless effort to reform, filled
with incompetence and idealistic delusion, finally led the entire system
to self-dismantlement.

When nationalist pragmatist Deng Xiaoping came to power in the 1979, the
'true Marxist-Leninist' issues, that seemed sound in the 1960s, were
already irrelevant, and the generic image of Communism had been damaged.
Deng further contributed to its damage by waging the nationalistically
motivated war against socialist Vietnam. Along with that, he started to
sell the cheap Chinese labour to the American greedy capitalists, which
eventually led China to the present economic succcess.

Some modern Chinese thinkers seek to interpret the present situation as
sort of China's victory over the USSR, as if the 1960-70s rivalry was in
continuation today. This is a bogus interpretation, because the USSR was
not Russia and it ended poorly not because it didn't listen to the Mao's
'wise' criticism, but due to very other reasons. China has succeeded not
because it stood the Mao's "true Marxist-Leninist" "counter-revisionist"
line, but rather the opposite: it renounced the Mao's leftist radicalism
and ambition to lead the socialist camp, and pragmatically jumped into
bed with the US, in exchange for particular China's economic interest, -
which was much greater 'revisionism' in comparison to what Mao called so
in the 1960s.

The moral of the story allows a variety of interpretations, but at least
it's clear that the present day situation differs from what was 60 years
ago, when Mao came into a feud against the Soviets within "communist
brotherhood". Today, post-Soviet Russia and post-Mao China do not play
exactly on the same field, and there's no reason to resurrect and abuse
the outdated narratives. And the international communist movement, the
way it existed in the 20th century, is dead.

In modern China, 'communism' has now become to mean essentially the one
ruling party governance and certain social discipline. Chinese people
are inspired primarily by "national rejuvenation" sentiment, which may
be good as such, but it's nationalist rather than communist. It's very
far from the original socialist spirit in the early 20th century.

Analyzing the reasons why the Communist idea, - at least in its original
plan, - turned out to be untenable, one can point to many reasons, and
such an analysis has far from been completed, and one of the reasons was
that those people whom the revolutionary movement brought to leadership
positions turned out to be prone to destructive feuds among themselves -
and not only / much due to ideological disagreements, but also / largely
because of their personal ambitions and rivalry for power and 'status'.

On the one hand, the revolutionary movement promoted up into the ruling
class many such people who were originally poorly educated, had narrow
outlook and limited cultural baggage, - and so were their behavioral
patterns. On the other hand, there was a cause inherent in the communist
doctrine itself: the Marxism and most of other "left" revolutionary
socialist trends of thought that became popular since the mid-19th
century, were focused on contradictions between social groups or classes
but tended to completely ignore the very basic competitive nature of
humans. So the original ideologists idealistically saw the revolutionary
community or party as sort of brotherhood whose conscious-conscientious
members were supposed to somehow fraternally elaborate their decisions
on the basis of reason and common goal. Real life has shown it does not
work well this way.

"Oleg Smirnov" wrote in message news:sge65o$e6f$1@os.motzarella.org...
>
> Such a narrative that "Soviet nomenclature" are living in extreme luxury
> while the ordinary people are extremely poor was exaggerated by the
> Western propaganda

Like the Afghan presidential poison plot?:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GHw-vuHTMok

"Oleg Smirnov" wrote in message news:sge69m$es2$1@os.motzarella.org...
>
> By then time, the Soviet Union was "building socialism" already for 40
> years.

And had it not been for U.S. aid, you'd be speaking German, Oleg.

And you KNOW it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fcpUdhj-9A8

Keep that in mind the next time you see footage of Marshal Zhukov
being driven around in a U.S.-made Willys jeep:
https://share.america.gov/america-sent-equipment-to-soviet-union-in-world-war-ii/

Byker the Shithead, <news:SsidncZYCaLEPbf8nZ2dnUU7-bnNnZ2d@earthlink.com>
> "Oleg Smirnov" wrote in message news:sge69m$es2$1@os.motzarella.org...

> And had it not been for U.S. aid, you'd be speaking German, Oleg.
>
> And you KNOW it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fcpUdhj-9A8
>
> Keep that in mind the next time you see footage of Marshal Zhukov
> being driven around in a U.S.-made Willys jeep:
> https://share.america.gov/america-sent-equipment-to-soviet-union-in-world-war-ii/

Watch Byker <https://youtu.be/_KCRiK0ykC0?t=74>

"Oleg Smirnov" wrote in message news:sge7lb$qk2$1@os.motzarella.org...

Byker the Shithead, <news:SsidncZYCaLEPbf8nZ2dnUU7-bnNnZ2d@earthlink.com>
> "Oleg Smirnov" wrote in message news:sge69m$es2$1@os.motzarella.org...
>
>> And had it not been for U.S. aid, you'd be speaking German, Oleg.
>>
>> And you KNOW it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fcpUdhj-9A8
>>
>> Keep that in mind the next time you see footage of Marshal Zhukov
>> being driven around in a U.S.-made Willys jeep:
>> https://share.america.gov/america-sent-equipment-to-soviet-union-in-world-war-ii/
>
> Watch Byker <https://youtu.be/_KCRiK0ykC0?t=74>

Oleg Knievel (cont.): http://rlu.ru/2OLfh