>> No, it wasn't an accident. Obviously if a country spends 20 years building
>> a national religion out of the idea that the world will end if the Commies
>> win somewhere, a grotesque pummeling someplace in the world is sort of
>> overdetermined.
>>
>
> What's the difference between such a creed and "Are you crazy? How will we
> defend the capitalist system if a small country is allowed to create a model
> of successful autonomous socialist development?"
>
To put it in Venn diagram terms, the difference is that Creed #2 is one of many possible *rationales* for believing Creed #1. But there are many other possible rationales. For example: _The world will end if the Commies win somewhere because_........
(A) "...it'll help that damn Walter Reuther make this country socialist"... (B) "...it will weaken the will to resist Communism in Europe and Japan and lead to a preponderance of global geopolitical power for the Communist alliance." (C)"...Christianity everywhere will be threatened by satanic atheism and free love." (D) "...it will encourage the native population to revolt against our benevolent tutelage and thereby diminish our world prestige." (E) "...these race-mixers and miscegenists will take over the world and interfere with our way of lahff."
......Etc.
> Incidentally, have there been any good materialist investigations of why
> there was such a thing as the Cold War, where economic models very roughly
> corresponded with geopolitical alliances? I mean, I can think of a few crude
> hypotheses, and the idealist answer is trivial, but.
>
No, I don't think so. The standard materialist approach (in this case, Marxism and para-Marxism) doesn't really put it that way. It puts it this way:
(1) Communist regimes emerged as the result of internal class contradictions; (2) this compelled the capitalist world to seek to smother them; (3) to defend themselves, and/or spread socialism (two inseparable tasks), the Communist regimes formed alliances
SA