I see it as a combination: no-one likes to be a colonised people, but the thugs and priests also wanted the independence to maintain the core crappy political-economic culture they thrived under. “Offers” of alternate political-economic cultures were either met with rejections or attempts to alter and corrupt them to resemble the core crappy political-economic culture.
$10 BILLION (plus or minus) would have fixed the election no? School books, infrastructure jobs, food, healthcare, on and on… but no.
$10 BILLION people. Think about that.
There’s a great book called Marx at the Margins which fairly convincingly argues that Marx’s later work abandons unilinear and teleological notions of social development that were present in the Communist Manifesto. Instead, the book argues, Marx’s research into non western societies led him to develop a more complex outline of how societies develop. That the specific historical circumstances of a given society should be emphasized over any model of universal stages, and how the existence of capitalist modernity somewhere means that the world market will start transforming pre capitalist societies however it finds them. Of course much of this remained unpublished for more than a century so the “stagist” idea stuck around too long.
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We were never at war with Eurasia. We are at war with Eastasia.
Before the Soviets invaded in 1979, Afghanistan had a fairly westernized culture, women wore nice clothes, men wore suits, there were cities that were more than mud hovels. The US didn’t destroy Afghanistan; the Russians and the Mullahs did that.
After World War II, we executed most of the senior Nazis. We left the mullahs in place. THAT’S why, after 2001, there was no success in rebuilding Afghanistan. The Germans wanted to restore what they had in 1939. The mullahs wanted to restore what they had in 750. if we had rounded up all of the mullahs and executed THEM, then the Afghan people could have rebuilt for themselves, with a little help. Just as the non-Nazi West Germans did in 1946-1949.
Obama spent a TRILLION DOLLARS A YEAR, ABOVE the $3T coming in as taxes each year. $10 billion isn’t even a rounding error compared to what Obama was wasting.
Another important detail is that we didn’t start rebuilding until we’d finished winning the war. There wasn’t a Nazi guerrilla network in control of 40% of Europe running around blowing things up.
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Sure, the only problem is that we didn’t kill enough people. Gotcha.
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I doubt some of these statements.
First, systematic destruction of critical industrial infrastructure and transport facilities was very severe in the western part of the German Third Reich. In the Ruhr and Rhine area, whole cities were flattened by air raids. The Hamburg firestorm is widely known even today. Cities in the eastern part have not consistently been “more destroyed” to the best of my knowledge. However, the answer to the destructions have been very different, even if driven by the same needs.
I visited Leipzig. Berlin, Dresden, Freiberg and some other cities of the GDR before the fall of the wall and thus had an impression of the kind of development of these as compared to cities i visited in the FRG like Essen, Cologne, Dortmund, Aachen, Frankfurt, Duisburg, among others.
Communist, and explicitly Stalinist ideology did have a strong impact on cities in the east. The Berlin Stalinallee is perhaps the most impressive example, but especially Dresden and Leipzig have their more than fair share of Stalinist architecture.
Reconstruction of historical buildings wasn’t exactly en vouge in the Soviet sector and the GDR, by the way.
However, ideology alone is not the only factor, as stated above: the means to put certain ideas into realised architecture are a major factor.
From the 1950s to the1970s, Western Germany had a most extraordinary phase in which first many already destroyed or heavily damaged historical buildings were either reconstructed to restore the historical core of the cities at least as a facade (think Frankfurt and Cologne, e.g.), or eradicated. After the first phase, mainly in the 1950s, also other historical parts of the cities architecture were often replaced, either for benefit of the construction of motorways and large streets, or for mostly utilitarian, somehow moderately modernist and later sometimes post-modernist, more rarely also brutalist buildings. They not only had ideas of a “moderner Städtebau”, they also had the material and economical ability to put them on the ground. And a political will to do so: many cities in the FRG changed much during these two periods of modernisation, mostly for the benefit of car traffic, which was rapidly becoming both a driver of the economy and a real problem for cities.
The Soviet zone and GDR, on the other hand, had a short modernist phase, followed by the top-down approach of the Sechzehn Grundsätze des Städtebaus (the Sixteen Principles of Urban Design), explicitly breaking with Nazi architecture, but also explicitly to prevent “american”, “box-like” architecture. In the mid-fifties, the need for a more standardised, industrialised approach led to a new development. Ironically, with that, they returned to previously phrased principles of the modernists like Le Corbusier, which is why parts of the eastern German cities today much remind me of the the banlieus of Paris. This second post-war modernist turn in the GDR was only possible top-down, in fact. If the USSR had changed their own approach to build affordable housing in an industrialised way, the GDR couldn’t have started the Plattenbau new urban development in the 1960s.
Cost-effective housing with industrialised architecture, a.k.a. Plattenbau, however, also_was_ developed in the FRG, especially in since1970s and until the 1980s. Examples include Neuperlach, Frankfurt-Nordweststadt and Chorweiler. Before new urban development, larger parts of cities were re-build with housing closing gaps between less-damaged buildings. Housing cooperatives were an important element in the political toolbox of providing affordable housing in western Germany until the late 1980s, and an important factor why nearly completely destroyed cities like Cologne were rebuild and massively extended.
During the 1980s, renovation of inner city dwellings became a big thing, and at the same time many lower middle-class families left the cities to build or buy in small cities or larger villages, from where they could still reach their workplaces by motorway. New urban development was increasingly called a failure during that time, as in many places around Europe. The UK, come to think of it, even started pulling down block towers, their own Plattenbau developments.
Nowadays, compared to today’s St.Petersburg or Krakow, London and Paris don’t look special in the amount of historical or historicised buildings. So doesn’t Berlin, or Potsdam. However, it is worth noting again that the restoration of historical inner cities and representative buildings of the old empires (or kingdoms) in eastern European countries was somewhat limited. The stereotypical post-stalinist architecture we associate with many eastern cities, as I tried to outline above, has probably nothing to do with the destruction of cities, as you seem to imply. You are quite right that it has much to do with the need for cheap housing. But also much, very much indeed I think, with ideology, and also much with the economic means.
And there we are. If wanted to cut corners, I’d say it boils down to Marshall plan and social market economy vs. deindustrialisation and Real Socialism (real existierender Sozialismus) in the parts of the former Third Reich.
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Nope. Not even a fraction.
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You mean that’s not how the US can make people all over the world love us and welcome us as liberators? The hell you say? /s
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That’s ultimately the problem, yeah. I do think that if the US had had competent people in charge (instead of Bush & co.), and if there had been a genuine, serious effort at state-building in Afghanistan, instead of half-assing everything in the hurry to invade Iraq and pour more blood and money into the sand, things in Afghanistan could be a lot better.
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To be fair Europe started out in better shape
@Glaurung’s right, but I don’t think it’s even a feature of colonialism, actually. India was a colony and, yeah, it has problems but it is working. Botswana and Kenya were colonies and they are, by all accounts, perfectly okay places to live and downright wonderful compared to the African mean.
Not to defend colonialism, of course—it ranged all the way from very bad (India) to Holocaust (Congo Free State, Jesus Christ Congo Free State)—but countries do bounce back. What’s harder to bounce back is what America did back in the fifties and sixties. See, most of the developing world was doing some sort of socialism. Not the fire-and-thunder glory to the Proleteriat kind you’d get in the Soviet Union but the much, much softer sort that’s a natural fit for a closely-knit developing country. This would have made things develop nicely—consider the Bitter Lake documentary and what the Afghanistan it shows in the beginning was like.
Then America shows up and, well, better dead than red, don’tchaknow, and so they decided that the socialists had to go. To do this, first, they made a deal with Saudi Arabia (a deal they still hold to) where they were given protection which they use, again, to this day to spread a benighted, horrifying, twisted version of Islam that’d strike the Mu’tazila school as unforgivably backwards in the eight goddamn century. They also shot as many of the socialists as they could and gave guns and gear and money to the lunatic fringe.
Imagine, if you will, the worst possible group in America. I’m sure you all have a favorite one. Someone dangerous and crazy and foul. Now imagine that some sort of extraterrestrial force[1] shows up and starts giving them support and intel (you can see a lot from a starship it turns out), and these crazy alien weapons in unlimited numbers.
[1] Since it needs to be a vastly bigger power.
How long d’you think America would last?
The current chaos and despair in the Middle East is largely the result of that. It’s also why Russia’s so leery of America and anything to do with America. A significant amount of Russians think you’d like to do much the same to them and they really don’t like the notion.
Actually the Soviets invaded because they were invited, and they were invited because the local semi-skimmed socialist regime was terrified of the Taliban (rightly) and the Taliban were so terrified because they were engineered to bleed the Soviets. The whole country was a trap. The geopolitical engineers who dreamed that one up didn’t seem to give much of a damn what happened to the country afterwards.
I maintain that merely physical devastation is much easier to fix than damage to the social fabric, to the bonds of trust, and to the necessary educated classes. Vietnam was incredibly damaged in the war, but by all accounts they are managing fine. Not perfectly but way better than Afghanistan. About as well as Moldova, in fact, which never had to go and fight and defeat the United States of America.
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I don’t doubt that the destruction was severe, but that there is a persistent myth that continually overstates the destructive power of aerial bombardment in WW2. By way of brief comparison, Soviet artillery dropped more tons of high explosive on Berlin in 12 days than British and American bombers did during the entire war. And Berlin was a comparatively short urban battle by the standards of the Eastern Front. Taking into account ammunition logistics, aircraft simple cannot compete with destructive power of artillery. Urban warfare in the west was less common and when the Allies crossed the Rhine in March 1945, there were was very little combat in German cities, excepting Aachen which was pulverized by the US Army in the process of taking it.
I’ll concede I’m overstating the impact of the war on urban planning in the Soviet bloc, as you seem to be pretty knowledgeable on it, at least in the German case. Urban planning of actually existing socialism is something I really want to know more about. However, the thoroughness of destruction in the east, particularly once you cross the Oder is well historically documented, and this did impact the recovery overall.
I wouldn’t compare the two. Factoring in the range of bombers, different bombing techniques (e.g. blockbusters followed by firebombing) and different aims of air warfare and land warfare, the destructive power of air raids is devastating. Think of Tokyo on the 10th of March 1945 - not to speak of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Aachen indeed was special, also because to the best of my knowledge it wasn’t as heavily damaged as e.g. Cologne by the time of arrival of ground forces, and there was a significant strategic value to the city which made it important for US ground troops to control the city. The Battles in the nearby Eifel, by the way - far off from larger cities - were even more fierce, for the same reason. Afterwards, other cities on the way to Berlnin weren’t as completely destroyed by ground troups because their strategic value for the German army was significantly lower.
However, this is of little importance for your original claim that cities in the east were more severely destroyed, and your additional statement that the destructive power of aerial bombardment is a persistent myth. I want to explicitly underline that I am not trying to downplay the destruction caused by ground forces, especially during the Soviet offensive movement towards Berlin. But I am very doubtful that your claims would hold under scrutiny. Destruction of industrial centres was very severe, including the Rhein-Ruhr area, the Weser-Fulda-Werra area, and the lower Elbe area. And this included centres of habiation, not only industrial parts. Central Cologne was basically flattend with the exception of the cathedral. Bochum, Dortmund, Hagen, Essen, Duisburg and many others had lost 50 % of their buildings. The eastern part of Germany had its share of heavy destruction, but I don’t see where your idea of a “myth” comes from. The tonnage of explosives deployed to destroy the capital (NB!) of the Third Reich doesn’t really convince me.
Also, Berlin was a special case. If you compare the Battle of Berlin with the Battle of Vienna, this should become clear. Quite some damage in the latter was caused by German troups blowing up strategic buildings. You can find similar patterns in the destruction of Warsaw in 1944, in which artillery shelling played but a role among much stronger destruction as a measure of retaliation by the German troups. The case of Berlin is more related to, but even less devastating than, the situation during the Siege of Budapest. This, in fact, is a very strong and vivid example of the destructive power of artillery. Last, not least: if you are referring to number of people killed and maimed by land and especially urbarn warfare - then I probably see where your line of argument is coming from.
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I’ll have to check that book out! Thanks!
I think you’re giving far too much credit to whoever you believe the geopolitical engineers are! 
Yes, the Soviets were invited in because of fears over the Taliban, no doubt. We most certainly celebrated the Taliban right up until we invaded to seek out Bin Laden.
Vietnam got a postwar reprieve, with investment from the Soviets. Afghanistan is still in the middle of a shit storm, so kind of a big difference there.
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