> tfast wrote:
>
>> Nice theory of history Doug! This is called the historical fallacy.
>
>
> No, I think it's an example of what happens to small countries that
> resist the U.S. empire: they end up isolated and desperately poor.
> Vietnam is another example. Cuba escaped this fate for a long while
> because the USSR subsidized them. But with no USSR, there's no good
> way for the weak to live off the grid, unless you embrace the
> Unabomber model and hang out in a shack without electricity. It's
> going to take collective action on a large scale to change the global
> hierarchy of wealth and power, not isolated acts of resistance.
>
> Doug
Fine, but that is an entirely different argument than the "line" you originally articulated which relied on the assumption that one can delete big events from history (i.e., the Korean War) and hold -constant- on the rest (i.e., suggesting that Korea would look like the North does today). You just cannot make such an argument: it is called the historical fallacy. You know this, and you know it is the basis of the "slight of hand" contained within this administrations "line" on history and freedom.
If you want to have a discussion on what may be termed the autarkic fallacy lets have one. I take your -new- point: socialism in one country is lilkely to be about as successful as capitalism in one country hence the stakes of the cold war. But we can surely talk of different strategies for economic development within the context of a nested international heirarchy of states. And in this regard, there has been some degree of variation in successful strategies that have had as part of their "models" more or less protected domestic sectors. What I find most interesting is that the big capitalist success stories (NICS) had many things going for them that were a function of the conjuncture in geopolitics. For example, preferential access to US markets and Capital and a steady supply of technological innovations. So what I am arguing is that autarky is really to miss the point. Guatemela is relatively open compared to Cuba but is much worse-off by whatever measure you wish to choose.
So yah, we need broad scale collective action but this only suggests that the dreams and fantasies of autarkists and globalists are mirror images.
Travis