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Looking at pictures of Afghanistan in the 60's is very disheartening. It was a quite cosmopolitan country. But the strange thing is, this happened communism.
So I'm thinking, perhaps communism does have a place not as the ideal end aim of a society, but as a sort of "rights of passage" for tribal societies to evolve. Compared with Taliban rule, it seems more desirable as it removes tribal alliances and will empower woman. If in place long enough, these tribal ties may be severed forever. During these times, there was an Afghan cosmonaut and many educated in the universities of the former USSR. Communism had a lot of bad, but not all of it was. Nothing is all bad or all good. Communists would not tolerate the fundamental extremists.
I recall working in India and witnessing the appalling lives some have because of the caste system. I recall thinking at the time that India could do with a good dose of communism for awhile to rid themselves of that disgusting caste system ie make all equal for once.

No, I don't support communism. Nor do I support unrestricted capitalism. What I am saying is that in certain situations, as a chapter in a societies evolution, perhaps there are times when communism has a place.
The world is not black and white, lots of grey.

powder 8 Aug 19
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1

Marx dreamed of a world where the workers in western capitalist economies, would start a revolution and turn to communism, but that never happened.

Nearly all of the revolutions which issued and ended in communism, started in feudal or near feudal societies, mostly based on rural peasant economics, such as Tsarist Russia and Eastern Asia. And the step is clearly only a small one, changing the hierarchical structure of feudalism, for the hierarchical structure of a one party state and a command economy, not too big a leap for a society in one go.

If you turn to socialism in a reasonably democratic way, from an even half way successful economy, you usually turn to a moderate, tolerant, and culturally diverse form of democratic socialism. Hard one track communism only results from hard won, bitter and violent revolution, and to start that sort of revolution, you require, that people should be nearly starving. People will only face the fire power of the state, in violent uprising, if the choice is a truly stark one, between death for you by bullet, and death for both you and your children by starvation.

The western semi-democratic capitalist states long ago, realized that the trick to managing social injustice and maintaining the divide, between the rich exploiters and the useful poor, was to give the poor just enough to keep them just above actual starvation. So that working harder for the rich and powerful to win a slightly larger share of the hand outs, would aways seem a better way to escape poverty, than charging into the throats of machine guns. And thus a fairly large degree of social injustice, in which those who work to produce the wealth, receive far less than their earned share of it, can be maintained forever, because the cost of change in the short term is too great whatever the long term benefits.

The only way to change that, is to raise aspirations by the slow drip, drip, drip, of education and the constant democratic pressure which results, pushing society ever towards more social justice by democratic means. Which is why there is such a strong anti-education movement, pressed forward on behalf of the right wing rich elite, by those who are fooled into thinking that education is main feature of the rich exploiters, and that therefore rejecting education is equal to rejecting the rich exploiters. This is a very good trick to fool people, if you can get away with it, and it certainly does seem to work.

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Communism suppressed religious tribalism and forced loyalty to the state. I think, if the USSR had gained control of Afghanistan, when it fell, like other countries under their control, that religious tribalism would have resurfaced.

And, in modern Russia what we now see is that they have realized that using their traditional Russian Orthodox religion to help control people works better than suppressing it.

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I agree. The longer I live the more I see that others do interact with us but that does not mean they see things as we do or that they believe as we do. Believing otherwise is the big mistake of human kind.

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One reason why Yemen is such a mess now. Like Afghanistan in the 70's, South Yemen was a more modern society connected to the USSR. Later they united with the promise of a more modern country but the North, a puppet of the Saud family, pushed for more of an Islamic state. Now, as we see on the news, Yemen is in a civil war.
So, yes, a modern, less religious Afghanistan was a better place under Communism. And the United States, using the CIA, supplied the Taliban with money and arms and training.

@powder It's one that has foreseeable consequences to actions. Every group, that becomes empowered, wants to take power. This is why the public must be educated and informed enough to debate which actions should therefore be made. 90% of d$A demanded this war and they were the best educated and informed generations in history so our system really failed. Possibly because we don't consider the humanistic aspect of monetary actions so well?

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