Did you get your idea of fallout from the movie "On The Beach," perchance?
US intervenes in Hungary in 1956
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Did you get your idea of fallout from the movie "On The Beach," perchance?
Funny, I don't recall Western efforts to undermine social-democratic states in Scandinavia, states in Western Europe that created National Health Services, etc.
No ? Not even one ? Not even the one with colonels and the Parthenon ?
Not even the one with the Tour Eiffel and the OAS ? Not even those little republics with bananas and criollos ? Actually not nearly as bad as you might think. The Soviets didn't really have the stockpile, or more importantly, the delivery systems, to hit North American. The total Soviet inventory was around 400 weapons in 1956 and they lacked a practical delivery system to get at North America. The Tu-95 was just beginning to reach squadron service and the Tu-16 was not really capable to making a strike against the U.S. except in full kamikaze mode, same thing went for the Tu-4, but worse. Figure, at most 8-10 weapons making it to North America. That is really bad if you are one of the poor bastards that happen to be where it falls, but it wouldn't knock the U.S. or Canada back to the 1700s.
Now Europe? Europe would be, well, pretty much screwed. Between the conventional war and the shorter range nukes the European plain would not be a Garden Spot.
Well, Italian communists in all their post WW2 history, French and Finnish communists in a sizeable part of their post WW2 history, the AKEL Party of Cyprus and the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia in 1946 (and, to be fair, the Czech Communist party still nowadays, quite surprisingly) do not second your proposition
I would count most of your examples to be those "unique circumstances" which I cleverly included.
After World War II, most European Communist parties reached their highest percentage ever because of the goodwill associated with the Red Army. Once Stalin showed his true colors, those decreased dramatically to their historic numbers. Czechoslovakia is even a unique case in this regard because the Czechs initially hoped the Soviets would be guarantors of their indepdence given geographical issues of depending on the West.
Finland's entire history after WWII is unique given the compromises it had to give to secure independence from a Soviet Union next door. Without the presence of the Soviets, I doubt very much the Communists would have gotten anywhere near those numbers.
I did err in excluding that French and Italian Communists consistently got above 15%. Mea culpa. France seemed to hover around 20% and Italians around 33%. Nevertheless, that was their plateau. In both cases because of the nature of their resistance to the formerly fascist regimes of Vichy and Mussolini, both parties had more of a patriotic shine to them than they deserved, but which served them well. Both also received substantial subsidies from Moscow which helped boost their numbers. I consider their higher electroal % to be explainable while retaining my essential point. I was wrong to not mention this, but I try not make every post of mine an essay. So I'm not really disagreeing with your point.
For the purposes of this, I consider any Social Democratic party - a party committed to democracy regardless of their economic stance - to be distinct from Communism, regardless of whatever semantics are used to include or exclude this or that from official Marxism. We can make a lot of distinctions without a difference, but I hope everyone can understand the difference between a party committed to democracy and freedoms and another that believes in a dictatorship by the vanguard.
I consider Eurocommunism a slightly better version of Communism where members became shamed enough to know they were wrong, but remained too proud to admit it.
wolf_brother
Banned
8-10 nukes striking North America is going to be very bad, especially with the fallout damage and the continued radioactive areas. Depending on where is hit the nation's crop harvest for that year, and the next, might have to be discarded, and major fresh water sources might be too radioactive to safely use.
As a couple people mentioned, you're vastly overestimating the amount of damage a fission bomb is capable of. Fallout is going to largely be localized; a fission bomb just doesn't have the power to throw the huge amounts of fallout up into the stratosphere like you'll get with more advanced Hydrogen bombs.
To give you a bit of scale, the Test Site in Nevada set off a bit over 1000 nuclear devices during its years of operation, including several that were far larger than anything the Soviets had in production in 1956.
You're assuming a primacy of parliament. Throughout November and December the Social Democrats and Smallholders and Peasants weren't party to negotiations. The Soviet military forces negotiated with one body. Guess which?
No true scotsman on "free" here eh? The Social Democrats, Peasants, Smallholders, students party and Gimes organised revolutionary communist party all supported the continuation of socialism under workers control. The rank and file of the Social Democrats were running the councils, supported, again, by Gimes-minded communists. The "inevitability" of bourgeois democracy is questionable. I'd refer you to Bill Lomax here.
Go look up the Hungarian social democrats' electoral results. The parliamentary composition expected by Lukacs and other key observers, and the councils did support a rump parliament, was looking to be dominated quite clearly by the Social Democrats (whose policies in 1956, and at previous moments, had been revolutionary) ruling in a grand coalition, but heavily reliant on the Students (yet another revolutionary socialist party, comprised of communists), with the "communist" vote likely to be split between a Gimesish tendency and a more Nagylike tendency.
This largely depends on whether the economy is still a value system with wage labour. Your analytical toolset isn't particularly useful here, as both rent and profit have their origin in the same extraction from living labour, and depend on state power to enforce this. On occasions where things somewhat resembling revolutionary workers councils have existed in capitalism, yes they have had a tendency to seek lower rate of return profits than private enterprise as they explicitly value social externalities. Yugoslavia's unique institutional arrangements come to mind, as does the Western cooperative movement. However, these bear as little resemblance to workers councils that have state power as the petits bourgeois of 1300 do to the interlocking stock holding trusts of today. Hungary in 1956 was a situation where the capacity for state power of the workers councils were increasing faster than that of the geographic councils (in the early Soviet Union, the geographic councils rapidly achieved political ascendency), and the power adhering to the workers councils vastly outpaced the power held by the Nagy government or the Anna Kethley lead parliamentary social democratic party.
yours,
Sam R.
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Based on what?
The U.S. was routinely testing above ground in Nevada at the time. In 1956 it tested 18 devices, in 1957 25, in 1958 it was 57. In 1956 the Soviets tested 9 devices above ground, in 1957 , in 1958 36. People in Vegas used to go outside to watch the damned things.
To get the radiation damage you are describing would take several hundred salted weapons, the Soviets DID NOT HAVE several hundred weapons deliverable to North America.
No ? Not even one ? Not even the one with colonels and the Parthenon ?
I was thinking more about Sweden and its ilk.
And when exactly did the CIA encourage a military coup to overthrow the British government to stop it from nationalizing much of its economy and establishing an NHS?
And the banana republics were in the Western Hemisphere. I'm talking about European social-democracies.
If fission bombs were that powerful, the two Japanese bombs would have wiped out the entire country in 1945.
They didn't.
wolf_brother
Banned
I will defer to others, hopefully more educated, opinion on the matter, though I will part by saying that the cavalier attitude apparent among many posters in this thread towards the use of nuclear weapons on civilian targets is frightening, to say the least.
The uprising was a multi-sided clusterfuck with goverments springing up in several parts of the country and armed gangs led by strongmen roaming the streets. If anything with the Red Army quelling the uprising Hungary would face civil war.
Also if the US sents troops or eqipment the Soviets will simply increase their efforts to crush the rebels even if they have to nuke Budapest. Honestly I dont see how anyone can seriously hold the idea that the Soviet leadership were a bunch of wimps who'll piss themselves at the sight of US troops.
These were hard men most of whom were combat veterans and had survived for decades in one of the most deadly political environments in the world. They would not scare easily nor tolarate any NATO Troops coming anywhere close to the U.S.S.R's western border.
Nobody is saying mass killings of civilians is good--that's a moral question.
We're saying the belief that 8-10 fission bombs would destroy the entire United States is improbable--that is not a matter of morality at all.
Well, we in Italy have a long tradition of US and Atlantic meddling in our internal affairs, including nationalizations and so on, however it's frankly un-important what the US didn't DO to European socialdemocracies in advanced countries: what they DID to european and world social democracies in other countries matters a bit more. Plan Condor, Allende, Guatemala, Greece, Turkey ... pick what you prefer !
Seconded; there's a huge difference between objectively analyzing the destructive power of early generation nuclear weapons and advocating the use of nuclear weapons, especially against civilian targets.
I think you may be overreaching. In most of these countries, it was not the US interfering. Instead, the US simply stood by or said, "We won't object," when groups native to the countries acted. For example, I don't know of any US involvement in the Colonels' Coup in Greece. It was just that afterwards we didn't do anything about it. While one can complain about that, it's not quite the same as complaning about intervention. It is complaining that the US is not intervening.
One also has to point out that US involvement in European affairs was generally in response to Communist involvement. All European Communist parties at the time were clandestinely funded and controlled by Moscow. Once Communist parties got control of the government, destruction of democracy is practically a known fact given history. At the very least, US involvement seems to be justified if you believe in continuation of democracy. I think MerryPrankster is correct when he says the US was not getting rid of social democrats in Europe.
The US does have greater involvement in interfering in Latin American affairs with less justification. The Arbenz coup was clearly a mistake driven by greed of the United Fruit Company. Given Allende's violations of Chile's constitution and law, his creation of a separate armed forces, his involvement with Soviet and Cubans, the strange nature of the election in the first place, and the call by Chile's own congress for the military to intervene, that his overthrow was probably entirely justified (again with US approval, but not direct involvement). Pinochet staying on power afterwards was not, but at least he eventually voluntarily stepped down on his own. Operation Condor was primarily run by the countries themselves with limited US involvement.
The US certainly did not have clean hands, but it is a far cry from acknowledging that to the claim that the US would subvert a Hungary now free from Soviet control simply because its politics were to the left.
Funny, I don't recall those Scandinavian states being anything but capitalist states.
By contrast, a successful Hungarian Revolution doesn't mean privatization and capitalism. It means a publicly owned economy that is managed by a mix of central planning and autogestion, a paradigm that is totally incompatible with the west. All the worse if they have free speech and free elections. The capitalists states can no longer maintain moral supremacy if there are democratic socialist states floating about
Britain nationalized a lot of its own economy in the aftermath of the war and I don't recall the U.S. complaining at all.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_democracy
Based on the list, one could argue Britain was a social democracy between Chuchill and Thatcher.