Member-only story
The Story of Right and Left
How you can eat others, or eat yourself
For those too young and too indolent to know about history, after World War II there followed decades of what was called The Cold War. During this period of time, two monolithic blocs competed for global dominance. One was the USA plus a handful of small European nations; the other was the Soviet Union plus the enforced vassal states comprising the Warsaw Pact.
Each side attempted to use propaganda to convince its own people, and to a lesser degree people in the developing world, that it was The Good Guy and the other side was The Bad Guy. But there were no Good Guys. Both were corrupt systems that didn’t hesitate to use power to enforce their authority over those who couldn’t fight back.
There was, however, one fundamental difference between the USA and the USSR: the former imposed most of its horrors on other people; the latter stupidly imposed most of its horrors on its own people.
The USA was (and continues to be) endemically racist. During the Cold War, black people were routinely and unjustly abused, imprisoned, shot, and suppressed. The USSR, on the other hand, embraced all those within its domain because it relied on all nationalities to keep the system going. The USA only relied on white people, plus poorly-paid Hispanics working in slave-like conditions who could be…
