Longines Chronoscope with Princess Alexandra Kropotkin sounds like the title of a steampunk novel, but it’s actually a 1951 television interview with the daughter of Peter Kropotkin, one of the most prominent left-anarchist figures of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. As Jesse Walker of Reason notes, sometimes the very fact that something exists is reason enough to watch it:
Henry Hazlitt, author of Economics in One Lesson, makes a brief appearance.
“America’s quarrel today is not with World Communism or with the dictators in the Kremlin, but with old fashioned Russian Nationalism.”
Yep, sounds like Acheson all right.
The observation that 80% of the Russians were not expansionists fits basic human nature except for the narcissist politicians. Most folks want to be left alone to live their life as they choose. You can see this almost anywhere in the world today. It’s not the people that are the problem…it’s the governments.
Wan Wei Lin, you speak a truth, but… The problem is that that 80% you speak of is also the 80% of humanity that just goes along to get along. Sure, they don’t want war, but they’re perfectly happy to support the leaders that do, and take full advantage of the benefits of conquest.
Take Nazi Germany or Imperial Japan; I’m sure that most people in those countries would have been perfectly decent people to have as neighbors–But, the problem is that they were participants in nation-state activities that were impossible for everyone else to tolerate. Which is why we bombed Dresden, Hiroshima, and Nagasaki.
At some level, you’re complicit and responsible in the activities of your nation-state. I’m not sure where the line is to be drawn, in terms of “Yeah, you deserve to die for Unit 731 or the Holocaust…”, but it is there. What’s unfortunate is that we can’t somehow distinguish things down to such a fine resolution that we’re only killing that guy on the block who’d voted for Hitler, or who asked their kid in Holland for some of that sweet, sweet black market provender that led to the Dutch suffering the Hunger Winter of ’44-’45.
“But, the problem is that they were participants in nation-state activities that were impossible for everyone else to tolerate. Which is why we bombed Dresden, Hiroshima, and Nagasaki.”
Neither of those countries were crushed for reasons of “nation-state activities”, especially not ones “impossible for everyone else to tolerate”. Unless, of course, by “nation-state activities” you mean economic eclipse, by “everyone else” you mean the Eternal Anglo-Jew, and by “impossible…to tolerate” you mean “not to preempt the existential threat to complete world domination”.