arkirk
Veteran Member
What she was exposed to was Leninism and Stalinism.
And this she labeled collectivism.
Well on at least some level Leninism and Stalinism are to collectivism what Objectivism and Libertarianism are to capitalism.
Leninism and Stalinism were what happened after a bloody revolution. I have always felt that the U.S. constantly engaged in economic warfare against the revolution...even the cold war was an economic battle. The Russians started with a deficit in terms of organization and much of what the U.S. did was to promote splinter groups. The U.S. has been doing this to regimes it disapproved of or that guarded their resources from foreign exploitation for longer than I have been alive.
We have had a defacto policy of opposition to any government that nationalizes its resources...Iraq, Iran, Libya, Venezuela,Cuba, etc. etc. The methods employed are dirty tricks. Our nation has never cared whether another nation is a dictatorship or not, so long as there was profit in that nation for our miners, drillers, and banana haulers. Modern Corporate American propaganda makes governing a country a difficult task. The climate of distrust made it difficult for legitimate people to do about anything in Russia, and paved the way for Lenin and Stalin. They pretended to be communists but really could get nothing together but a monolithic second rate national system of production...monopoly.
Putin acts very much the same way today. The actual conditions leveled at so called Communist or Socialist countries becomes a cause for nationalism due to outside pressures and men like Stalin or perhaps Donald Trump take over everything and handle it for "the people." Bullshit! They just make themselves into plain old dictators. They raise their army to defend against outsiders and use it on their own people if necessary to keep power.
This does not equate to communism as Marx would have had it or Socialism as George Bernard Shaw would have had it. I do not personally believe that there is any reason to assume that collectivism has a damned thing to do with either Stalin or Lenin, any more than Trump or perhaps the Koch brothers are examples of free market capitalism. They are all just a bunch of liars claiming to be what they are not.