re: #341 steve_davis

The shame is that Ho Chi Minh approached the U.S., seeking support from us in the late 1940’s, and we turned him down. It’s easy to forget that a lot of the folks who were communists in the ‘40’s and ‘50’s were on that side because there were only two games in town, and that was the other one.

To paraphrase my uncle, who was born in the Raj and became a Marxist-Leninist:

…and a lot of people in the developing world were colonized by a nation that practiced capitalism and had no issue with treading them into the ground to make a profit. Indeed, if you were in a British colony, you’d be told that it was all for your own good. Capitalism wasn’t incidental to the subjugation of those people, it was front-and-center. They were a captive labor force, a captive consumer audience, and were explicitly being told by their European rulers that this is the only way things can work.

And if they were fluent in international politics, they could even look at countries that were no longer colonies, but still had the massive wealth division, injustice, and cultural segregation…like most of South America…and want something different.

The appeal of socialism and communism on paper was that it refuted what the colonized were being told by their colonizers, root and branch. Given self-determination, not a lot of folks wanted to recapitulate the system they’d already experienced.