Comments by "James the Other One" (@jamestheotherone742) on "What if Russia had been Capitalist in WW2? TIK Q&A" video.

  1. Yes. The US and all of Western civilization is racing to embrace authoritarianism and socialism faster than the former socialists are running from it....
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  2. There would just be different titles the asshats wore. The Human Condition is a tragedy.
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  3. Hitler didn't have any qualms about invading democratic capitalistic Poland, France, etc. etc. Hitler was elected because he promised to make "the trains run on time" ie fix all the economic problems and provide security. The Boslhiviks were just one of a whole host of threats to that (including competing nationalist socialist parties). All sides in the civil war (and into the post-war reconstruction) pillaged the countryside for food. It took many years to recover from that. Overlaying centrally planned soviets was a lot easier fit on top of the old feudal system, than suddenly emancipating the peasants and giving them ownership of the land and expecting them to become expert independent farmers overnight. The Reds were able to force (at literal gun point) collectivization and industrialization on a far quicker pace than if the (surviving) industrialists and entrepreneurs could pick up the pieces and resume a healthy economy. OTOH- Western capital would have flowed into a capitalist Russia and it would have had a strong stimulative effect to (re)build the economy, that then the government could tap to build up the defense industry the same as in Western countries. Yeah, socialism promotes totalitarianism, so a democratic Lenin, Stalin, etc. would have been much more constrained by the electorate. Even if Stalin had the authoriatrian power of Hitler in the 30s, there is no way his political career would have survived the fiasco of the Winter War, and its very unlikely he could have gotten away with the intentional famines in the South and the purges.
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  4.  @Usammityduzntafraidofanythin  Context. Poland was founded parliamentary democracy and one of the first European country to grant women's suffrage. When power was seized it was because of internal and external crisis. It was intended to revert to elected government, but the Germans put an end to that.
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