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Viliam_Bur comments on Calibrating your probability estimates of world events: Russia vs Ukraine, 6 months later. - Less Wrong Discussion
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The Cold War ended with economical victory of the West, and memetic victory of the Soviets. The economical defeat led to collapse of the Soviet empire. The memetic defeat results in the lack of will we see today.
It was a huge strategic mistake after the fall of communism not to use the opportunity to expose the crimes of the regime, and to remove the important people from power, just like it was done with Nazis. For example in Slovakia, the communists still have the power; they have to compete for it in democratic election and sometimes they lose, but they still have the advantage of decades of unopposed brainwashing on their side, and the skills and contacts of the former secret service. These days, Slovakia is technically a member of EU, but our government is communist, the prime minister is openly pro-Russian, the majority catholic church focuses on fighting homosexuality and liberalism, and some of my "friends" on facebook still insist that Ukrainians are attacking themselves, Russians are only trying to protect the innocent victims, and the evil Americans are spreading propaganda to start the war because that's all those evil mercenaries ever do, unlike us, peaceful Slavic brothers. So... this is one EU country, which happens to share a border with Ukraine. We will not be helpful, because we are already conquered memetically.
You can't just go in an remove important people from power. That would have needed a military invasion at a time where it wasn't clear who controls which nuclear weapons.
I think you overstate that case. A lot of former Soviet countries like Poland aren't pro-Russian. Poland has 38 million citizens while Slovakia has 5.5.
Given Russian/Polish history, if communist propaganda were strong enough to make Poland pro-Russia, the communists would have taken over the world.
Poland was Eastern-bloc, yes. It was not a part of the Soviet Union since WW2 wound down.
The same is true of Slovakia. It was part of Czechoslovakia.
I use Soviet country to mean, a country which political structure is build on Soviets as opposed to a representative democracy.
I'm aware of Slovakia's origin, having visited Czechoslovakia. I'm not sure where I implied anything different.
Sorry for being pedantic.
(why the downvote, whoever? Was it belief I was lying about visiting Czechoslovakia? Believe it or not, the country did exist under that name during my lifetime. Was it suspicion of my being sarcastic in my apology? I was not.)
Which memetic victory? Marxism/communism/Soviet ideology pretty much imploded after the fall of the USSR. Look at what China did. I think it was a total memetic loss for the Soviets.
First, whose mistake and who would have been doing the removing?
Second, it depends on the country. I think that in Russia the old Soviet "important people" were effectively removed. The new political elite is not the old political elite.
In my country, our mistake, of course. People were too idealistic during the "Velvet Revolution". We thought that just publicly ending the evil regime is enough, that we can just forgive everyone and have a fresh start. And that the bad guys will be happy for being forgiven (instead of e.g. executed for their crimes) and they will live peacefully.
Yeah... they just waited for a year or two to make sure there is no will to punish them... and then they returned to the power. Since most of the judges or policemen or people in any position of influence except for parliament (because all our attention was focused there) were former communists, it wasn't even difficult. They just had to wait for hedonic adaptation, and blame all the problems on lack of socialism, and then win one election. Then they removed all their opponents from the public media and used the media for propaganda. And used the loyal secret service against political opponents.
I don't know about situation in Russia. Just saying that it's not enough to remove the visible people in parliament. It is also important to remove communists from the justice and secret service. Otherwise, you get new faces, connected to the old less visible people.
And yet the current head of the EU is a not-quite-repentant former Soviet apologist.
I would disagree, many of the former soviet republics are full of old communists or those who were ascending the party ranks right at the end.
First, I explicitly said "Russia", not USSR.
Second, of course there are a lot of old communists. In the Soviet era if you wanted to make any kind of a career you had to be one. LOTS of people were communists. What do you think happened to the rank and file of the CPSU? Answer: nothing, they're still around and still ambitious.
What happened to the rank and file members of the Nazi party after WWII?
Nothing much, I think. Of course, a lot were killed during the war, but those who survived went through denazificaton and remained normal members of the German society.
Thank you for proving my point.
Samuel Huntington would be cheering if he were alive because he predicted that this is what would happen. We would have a multi-polar world and that a great deal of that polarity would be based on ethnicity and he used the Slavic countries as a prime example. The downside is he predicted a lot of small scale conflict under this system which we are seeing.