I'm OCD and like everything in a neat little package so these unending ideological overlaps, inconsistencies, and contradictions frustrate me to no end.

But I suppose that's exactly why I've always simultaneously been so interested in continuing to dig deeper and learn more about them as the years have gone on, in an effort to try and make sense of them.


>>the US backed dictatorships and/or fascism over the course
>of the last >75 years or so - while framing our foreign
>policy, incessantly,
>>as "promoting democracy" or some similar refrain - through
>>red, white, and blue-tinted glasses.
>
>Yep. And particularly during the Cold War you have a bunch of
>very broad, sweeping narratives that collide with each other
>in really messy, interesting ways. Socialism vs. Capitalism is
>just a story of competing ideologies until you have specific
>nations who embody those ideologies trying to figure out what
>that means on the fly - and often through the lens of a much
>more discrete story of US vs. USSR. But that latter narrative
>sometimes consumes the first, say when Stalin and Tito - both
>dedicated to communist ideology - fell out with each other. Or
>when the USSR put down independent labor movements in Poland.
>
>
>Or when other countries, particularly outside the North
>American/European framework, started to see themselves as the
>embodiment of socialist values. China (mostly) giving the USSR
>the cold shoulder and the first world proletariat with some
>skepticism and tiny, insignificant Cuba sending thousands of
>soldiers abroad to help African revolutions with no clear,
>national benefit reframes the socialism vs. capitalism
>narrative as something independent of the traditional Cold War
>powers. But instead you get DIFFERENT overlapping narratives
>like Colonialism vs. Nationalism or De-Colonization vs.
>NeoColonialism.
>
>And that invites a whole separate band of messiness into the
>analysis.

LOL yep yep yep re: Colonialism et al. It took me a long time to understand how Colonialism was different from so many other historical philosophies and ideologies. And I'm still working it out.