Biden says he does not regret Afghanistan withdrawal as Taliban take over more towns
- Thread starter Dwarvenhobble
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Being invited, and then doing a massive host of repressive, imperialist garbage entirely outside of the remit of that invitation, doesn't make it all fine and dandy. As you well know.
Nah, no one cared about that in the socialist countries. US internal politics is not really that relevant to others.
No. Murder is bad, but it's not imperialism.
Invasion followed by a decade of occupation and looting of the native population for the enrichment of the occupying force is both bad and imperialist.
The invasion you must be talking about was followed by two decades of occupation.
Internationalism has its benefits. But whatever way, I'd prefer a more live and let live view of the world. The co-operation between Communist and capitalist countries was greater than we might immediately think: during the Cold War, my father-in-law worked for a British firm that helped construct a chemicals plant in Poland: hardly the stuff of total incompatibility. Detente and better co-existence was possible. The Soviets are every bit as much to blame for this not occurring. You might not like that conclusion, but it is true.
I think the people get the government they deserve. The British lack the will to defend their interests from being sold out from under them. The voices are out there for them to listen otherwise (my own small opinion included), and they choose not to. So be it.
Yes. And to be fair, the USA is unusually bad on that score. But it is what it is. Again, if people would rather repeatedly vote in those who sell off their rights to the highest bidder because they are offended someone dark skinned moved into their street, they get what they deserve. And eventually it will probably circle back round to a new socialistic flowering as the strains become too much to bear.
Again, take a look at the deaths in custody in the USSR and China during the Cold War, their execution rates, the mass deaths, the disappeared : even with its flaws the USA still looks superb by example. And lets face it, although the US prison population exploded thanks to the Reagan era, before then it was far lower than the USSR. Even Republicans have started realising that their punitive experiment with mass incarceration is a failure.
In America, maybe, but that doesn't explain Europe.
Not sure about that. A lot of people aren't aware of the creeping privatisation because it's constantly being obfuscated and denied, and it doesn't get reported.
It's not wilful laziness. It's a state of ignorance intentionally fostered by a tremendously wealthy governing party and its media allies.
It is fundamentally a public that is too apathetic or fixated on tangential issues that facilitates the press selling them triviality and bullshit.
Again, we can remember that public trust in politicians and media organisations is for the most part very low. But there is no real reaction to this. They carry on voting carelessly and they carry on reading their shitty newspapers, because somewhere along the line they don't even have the will to do anything about it.
???
People are a product of their environment. That a large number of people are obsessed with trivial bullshit by the design of the manipulators of public opinion should not be allowed to hold back the rest of us.
Is Europe's culture not influenced to a large extent by America's ruling class (to some degree because a good share of America's ruling class resides in Europe?)
In any case, it's not all that clear what precisely needs explaining; you've stated that some number of communists decided to stop liking the Soviet Union. OK.
Well, that's nice, but we're about to roast ourselves in the (too often literal) fires of climate change.
At the time that was going on our black population lived in terror of lynchings by KKK and police and our intelligence agencies were fomenting fascist coups d'etat elsewhere.
American culture is so infectious that large parts of Europe just echo US talking points. Ireland is becoming indistinguishable from the US politically. We mimic the exact same anti socialist sentiment despite the fact that the vast majority of the people who fought for our freedom were socialists and explicitly fought for a socialist country. Our country went from a third world country because of things like public housing, free education and free healthcare for low income families to one where all of the people who were able to make it out of poverty entirely thanks to these systems now want them gotten rid of because they have drank the American rugged individualism kool aid.
They were invited by the Communist Amin administration, which they immediately proceeded to betray. The first act in the Soviet-Afghan war was the storming of the presidential palace by Soviet forces who smothered Amin with pillows. They did this because they did not trust Amin to remain loyal to the Soviet Union and the Brezhnev's foreign policy encouraged the use of violent intervention to prevent states from trying to leave the USSR's sphere of influence. I'm not all that bothered that the Soviets overthrew Amin, he was an arsehole, and the guy Amin overthrew to get power was also an arsehole, and the guy the Soviets installed as a puppet ruler in his place was also an arsehole. The Cold War was not a conflict between empires in the traditional sense of the word, but it was a conflict over the geopolitical hegemony of two state entities, the United States of America and the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic. (Because ultimately the other constituent republics of the USSR were also imperialised states under a Russian hegemony and you don't have to look very hard to find the evidence of that. See also: Scotland, Wales, and Ireland in the British Empire, non-Han people in the PRC) Three western empires have launched military adventures into Afghanistan hoping to consolidate their position in a broader geopolitical conflict; Britain against Russia, the USSR against America, and America against Islamic fundamentalism. The People's Republic of China are the other great imperial power of the modern era and I will not be surprised to see them have a go in my lifetime and get much the same result as the last three that tried.
Speaking of that as "the first thing they did" is vacuous; they had a presence there before that and it was doing things. What you're saying is as good as "the arbitrary point we decided to mark as the beginning of the war was the beginning of the war". But yes, they murdered a murderer. And the treaty which demanded their presence in Afghanistan was negotiated at a time when Amin was somewhat subordinate to Taraki (at least to the extent that people would speak of the leadership of "Taraki and Amin" rather than "Amin and Taraki") and so far as I can tell the Parcham faction hadn't yet been purged, or at least not as completely.
Amin had assassinated a rival to achieve his position, was purging other factions in the PDPA, was unpopular and regarded by the Afghan people as a murderer and apostate, and he'd let the insurgencies grow out of control; there were plenty of much better reasons to want to be rid of him; arguing that the Soviet Union only cared about his loyalty is silly.
Were Moscow and Leningrad getting rich from exploitation like London and New York? Or is "hegemony" just a matter of being large and populous?
Because there are lots of Han and not that many everyone else? Or what? Anti-Chinese propaganda likes to paint China as "Han supremacist" to try to muddy the waters for the United States with respect to white supremacism, but evidence, especially evidence of a kind that would be anywhere near comparable to white supremacism, seems scant.
Not really sure how to respond to this low-effort reply malarkey. The following words of the same post you quoted (which you edited out) provide an explanation. If you have an actual response, I'm all ears, but "the US invaded Afghanistan, maybe you were thinking of that instead, eh?" isn't an argument, it's a lazy deflection.
Literally every single description you've given of Amin here applies to the Soviet occupying force as well, interestingly.
Oh yeah they replaced Amin with Mohammad Najibullah who was a paranoid mass murdering drug addled nutcase. Tens of thousands of people were disappeared, tortured, and executed under his leadership.
A lot of Mujahedeen ended up with Soviet equipment because their Soviets sold their own equipment to locals in order to obtain basic supplies and also drugs because getting addicted to hash or smack was more fun than drinking aftershave, boot polish, or jet engine coolant, and approximately as safe.
Also the Soviet forces made extensive use of the PFM-1 landmine which they spread indiscriminately across the Afghan countryside which killed and maimed a lot of children because they kind of look like toys because they're made of plastic and the initial ones deployed were European green instead of khaki so they stood out. It's almost identical to the BLU-43 Dragontooth mine which the US deployed in Vietnam to similar effect. Afghanistan was very much the Soviet Vietnam in that they thought they could have a quick war to secure their interests, committed a lot of war crimes, got a lot of their own soldiers killed through utter incompetence, gave a nice comprehensive demonstration of how utterly dysfunctional their military was top to bottom, and then went home after a years long occupation having achieved basically nothing.
And then America did it again in their own Afghan invasion because nobody ever learns anything and time is a flat circle except this time got the rest of NATO to join in.
37 British soldiers died operating the Snatch Land Rover before the army and the government realised it offered no real protection against roadside bombs. This is reminiscent of Soviet troops choosing to ride on top of their APCs in Afghanistan because flaws in the armour made them more dangerous to ride inside and this hadn't been fixed by the time of the invasion of Georgia in 2008. https://www.reuters.com/article/reutersEdge/idUSLK23804020080820
If I have a broad point it's that adherence to capitalism or communism is overridden by a more universal truth that these very powerful state actors will act to protect their own interests above all regardless of the human cost, and are also generally run by absolute fucking idiots.
They don't. They suggest that there is an invasion that you're talking about that isn't the American one. Which was also conveyed by "No."
Answer is the same either way: ???
They put up with similar behavior from the Parcham faction because it would hardly do to kill the political leadership of Afghanistan *again*. And "we want revenge" is not entirely without merit as a motivation. If the Soviets had intervened and stopped the Parcham faction from doing all that stuff? According to you, that would have been more imperialist.
So a bit of levity to come from the unfolding tragedy
news.sky.com
Context in case anyone didn't know, the Kabul airport attackers were suicide bombers.
So guess Biden plans to invade heaven or more likely hell next?
Afghanistan: 'We will hunt you down and make you pay' - Joe Biden's warning to Kabul airport attackers
The US casualties in Kabul are the country's first deaths in action in Afghanistan in 18 months, despite a promise from Mr Biden that withdrawing was intended to save American lives.
news.sky.com
Context in case anyone didn't know, the Kabul airport attackers were suicide bombers.
So guess Biden plans to invade heaven or more likely hell next?
