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Maximo Roboto posted:Is there a leftist consensus on LBJ. Obviously imperialist war makes him a great satan. But what do they think of the Great Society and his attitude towards civil rights, do they denounce him as a succ reformist or as a Bismarckian who was just doing it for political machinations. Do they reconcile the two by saying the American reactionary attitude towards socialism forced him to overcompensate for his progressive domestic policy by being a rampaging Cold Warrior abroad He's tough to categorize. On the one hand he was the only president since FDR who legitimately wanted to restructure US society to help Americans rather than solely to enrich the wealthy, and he used his immense political skill and connections to bully people into supporting civil rights. On the other hand he was also caught in the same trap all Cold War presidents were caught in, which is that he had to appear tough on communism and was terrified that if he failed with containment anywhere it would mean his domestic agenda would get defeated because it would make him look weak. He didn't just fight the Vietnam War, he also invaded the Dominican Republic and supported fascist dictators across Latin America and Africa because he had to look tough on communism. It's the age-old dilemma of US presidents where even if they were good on domestic policy, and LBJ was probably one of the best on domestic policy, how do you balance that against a foreign policy that harmed far more people than the good domestic policies helped? In conclusion, LBJ was a land of contrasts. If your utilitarian calculation starts and ends at the borders of the United States he might have been one of the best presidents ever, but if your utilitarian calculation includes the sum total of human suffering worldwide he may have been one of the worst.
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Oct 18, 2020 19:02
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shovelbum posted:Communist Vietnam did more to fight the worst excesses of communism than any Western state lol fun fact, the Khmer Rouge remained the UN-recognized legitimate government of Cambodia until the 1990s because the US and China propped up Pol Pot to spite the Vietnamese
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Oct 18, 2020 19:22
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joepinetree posted:When the cables and recordings related to the coup in Brazil in 1964 came out, it was very clear that none of the higher ups in the LBJ administration had any idea of what was going on in Brazil, but that they were being hit hard on containing communism by the republicans so they were just going all out in supporting anything that looked like fighting communism. Indonesia is a particularly grotesque example, let's also not forget the Congo where Johnson hired a bunch of white South African mercenaries to come rape and murder their way through the country until all the anti-American rebels were dead.
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Oct 18, 2020 19:59
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Farmer Crack-rear end posted:The way I heard it was something along the lines of, FDR didn't push the New Deal to institute socialism, he pushed it to prevent a revolution. yeah basically, he did it to save capitalism by mitigating capitalism's inherent contradictions, not by getting rid of them
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Oct 24, 2020 18:26
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Fleetwood posted:I wonder how many times in his life LBJ sat down and accidentally crushed his nuts literally every single time
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May 12, 2021 20:43
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