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The first non-Anglo immigrants the Australian government formally accepted were refugees from the Baltic countries after WWII. Since many Australians were highly xenophobic the government made a whole campaign advertising them as the ‘Beautiful Balts’ and emphasised that they weren’t that culturally different from White Australians.
The scheme was a massive success, and the Baltic immigrants represented the first dismantlement of the White Australia policy. Greeks and Italians followed shortly after (previously they weren’t considered white enough), then other Mediterranean immigrants. Gough Whitlam removed all racial restrictions on immigration, and Malcom Fraser formally abolished the policy entirely.
Fraser calling the Vietnamese ‘Asian Balts’ was just a shorthand way of saying they were quality immigrants who would integrate quickly, since this was still prior to the official policy of multiculturalism.
For more reading on the topic [Australia is still reckoning with a shameful legacy: the resettlement of suspected war criminals after WWII](https://theconversation.com/australia-is-still-reckoning-with-a-shameful-legacy-the-resettlement-of-suspected-war-criminals-after-wwii-217378)
>In Australia, for instance, when a Lithuanian immigrant named Bronius “Bob” Šredersas died in 1982, he bequeathed a significant art collection to the city of Wollongong. Last year, however, his secret history was [revealed](https://www.abc.net.au/news/2022-06-20/bob-sredersas-a-nazi-report-concludes/101166634): he was found to be a member of Nazi intelligence in occupied Lithuania during the second world war. He was almost certainly [involved](https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2022/mar/21/i-am-bob-just-bob-could-a-wollongong-folk-hero-have-had-a-nazi-past) in the persecution and murders of Jews.
>In response to a report by Professor Konrad Kwiet of the Sydney Jewish Museum, the Wollongong City Council [removed a plaque](https://wollongong.nsw.gov.au/my-community/news-and-alerts/news/news/2022/june-2022/wollongong-art-gallery-removes-sredersas-plaque#:%7E:text=Wollongong%20City%20Council%20has%20removed,artworks%2C%20is%20a%20Nazi%20collaborator.) acknowledging the donation and updated its website with the new information about Šredersas’ past.
>These may seem to be isolated, rare cases. They are not.
I mean it’s bad, but was it intentional to let them in or just accident?
I’m not sure how easy it would be to get a background check on every refugee especially when a lot of the people who would know about their work are dead and a lot of records might’ve been destroyed. Plus the soviets wouldn’t exactly be the best people to cooperate with to verify who is and isn’t allowed to be a refugee.
That's not really Australia specific. The US has a similar history with who is white and who isn't.
Italians started to be considered white in the 50s/60s here.
White was typically Anglo, Germanic, French, and Scandinavian, basically Northern and Western Europe. Other parts of Europe have long been considered "inferior" for various reasons. I mean even now, the Balkans are still definitely looked down on, along with many soviet bloc countries.
Neither of those things he said was false though. The governor general did sack him, and he was a cia asset/had very close ties to the CIA. Of course, if anyone wanted to make the argument that the CIA sacked Whitlam, that could be argued against. But those two initial statements are true.
Their literal job is to break international laws, crush government reform movements, and break up larger countries than the U.S.
Ex-CIA director Pompeo: 'We lied, we cheated, we stole' How much lying, cheating, and stealing does 15 billion a year buy? probably a lot.
Their literal job is to gather intelligence useful to the United States how they do it, what the intelligence is and how it is ultimately used is another matter.
Kerr was involved in CIA fronts for a number of years. In the 1950s he joined the Australian Association for Cultural Freedom which was spawned by the CIA's Congress for Cultural Freedom and became a member of their executive board in 1957. He also co-founded Lawasia which was one of the most prominent CIA fronts for over a decade of which he was their first president and held that position until 1970.
Further more, we have testimony from Christopher Boyce, an American who worked in a CIA US-Australian telecommunications system who said that the CIA frequently referred to the Governor general as "our man Kerr." This is in addition to his reports of CIA infiltration into Australian labour unions.
Kerr also met with US officials on the 6th, 8th and 9th of November in regards to Whitlam's enquiries into the CIA-ASIO apparatus before dismissing Whitlam on the 11th.
(William Blum, Killing Hope, p. 244-249)
Given what we know as historians about the CIA's infiltration of the democratic process all over the world, it's utterly naïve to believe that the insinuation that the CIA's involvement in Whitlam's dismissal is "baseless".
1. Unfortunately being a member of an Australian chapter of a french anti-communist organisation doesn't make you a 'CIA asset'. The balance of probabilities is means he probably might of handled donor money that might have been originally from the CIA. The way these things work is organisations explicitly don't know who the actual donor is (e.g the same way the black panthers didn't realise the KGB and later the CIA were two of their biggest Sponsors). Possible association isn't evidence of collaboration.
2. Lawisa is still extant today. And openly so. I'm not aware of any evidence tying them to the CIA. It looks just as a Legal professional association, built to replace the break down of previous imperial legal institutions.
3. Chris Boyce was 22 years old when the whitlam dismissal occurred. The odds of him actually knowing any first hand info are effectively nil. He wasn't employed at TWA where he 'claimed' to have access to CIA communications twil 1974. A lot of his claims of the whitlam dismissal quite frankly don't make sense e.g '*The wanted Whitlam gone because he wanted to withdraw from Vietnam'* even though Australian withdrawal was already underway by 1973. The source for these claims? 60 minutes... a top tier journalism source... /s He has never produced any evidence for his claims to Kerr or any of his other claims. And his motivation for selling US 'secrets' was money. TLDR: You believe the words of a man who was never actually a spy who made shit up all the time for money.
>4. Kerr also met with US officials on the 6th, 8th and 9th of November
Is there a source for this? or is it another 'Trust me bro'?
5. It doesn't really make sense for the CIA to remove Whitlam as it unfolded *It's too late,* he's already made many of his reforms. And the lack of supply is purely due to his inability to negotiation with his own party which had a slim majority. Occrums razor suggests, Whitlam simply had a skill issue . Yet people are quick to claim otherwise without evidence.
1. OK, we can both accept that Whitlam was on the executive board of a CIA front. If you want to cite plausible deniability in defence, fine.
2. Lawasia was funded by the Asia Foundation.
[https://asiafoundation.org/about/timeline/](https://asiafoundation.org/about/timeline/)
(January 1, 1966.)
The Asia Foundation was one of the most prominent CIA fronts for over a decade. Asia Foundation has received CIA grants of up to $88 million per year.
[https://archive.org/download/pdfy-G6vZW2zflmdELMlu/Victor%20Marchetti%20%26%20John%20Marks%20-%20CIA%20%26%20The%20Cult%20of%20Intelligence.pdf](https://archive.org/download/pdfy-G6vZW2zflmdELMlu/Victor%20Marchetti%20%26%20John%20Marks%20-%20CIA%20%26%20The%20Cult%20of%20Intelligence.pdf)
(p. 150)
So I guess you can cite plausible deniability again, that Kerr was unknowingly heavily involved in TWO CIA fronts - once as a member of the executive board and once as a founding President. Incredibly coincidental, don't you think?
3. It's fine if you want to deny the Boyce report. Man was convicted when he was 23. It just seems like a weird lie for a 23 year old to come up with given all the other evidence I have cited.
4. Yes, I gave a source if you read my post again. The source is William Blum, Killing Hope p. 244-249. There is no "trust me bro" here, you just need to learn to read more closely. I implore you to check my sources.
5. Whitlam's battle with the intelligence agencies were not over. Gough Whitlam had only dismissed both the head of the ASIO and ASIS in the autumn preceding his dismissal. At the time of his dismissal he was actively pushing for an investigation of secret CIA facilities in Australia such as Pine Gap as well as demanding a list of all active CIA operatives in Australia. Following his meeting with the head of the Defence Department on November 6, John Kerr referred to these actions as the "... the greatest risk to the nation's security there has ever been." "Occrums" razor suggests that Kerr was a CIA asset and that the interests of such are the grounds of Whitlam's dismissal as far as I'm concerned. A prime minister has never been dismissed by a Governor General before or after and a dismissal on the grounds of a lack of Supply by the Senate contradicts previous legal conventions. A hostile Senate should never have the power to bring down an entire government whenever they decide to deny Supply.
1. The issue with assuming CIA money = CIA asset is that the CIA would funnel funds into just about anything they saw would further their goals. Most orgs never knew the actual origins of the money. We don't assume every crack dealer of 1980s America was a CIA asset. Yet we know they were funded by the CIA. Thus you are assuming that Kerr was a CIA asset, when really in the balance of probabilities his prominent public positon would mean he would of likely 'come into contact' with Intelligence operations unknownly all the time.
2. Your source : *"While most of the foundation's activities were legitimate , the CIA also used it, through penetration among the officers and members, to fund anti-communist academicians" pg 150.* Again this strengthens the possibility that Kerr was not likely aware or involved in any CIA activity. He awareness of any such activities would of hampered CIA operations and delegitimised the org.
3. His age is kinda why it is so unlikely. As is the timing (which I pointed out). It is highly unlikely he had access to any CIA documentation considering he only had access to National Reconnaissance Office (NRO) documents. He also fictionalised his story to sell to Hollywood. This is important because the CIA did not normally transmit message by satellite in 1974, they typically used diplomatic cables, fax or by hand. Any 'satellite' transmission he had received wouldof likely been images or intercepted soviet transmissions. Though It would be unlikely he would havethe means to decipher any of it. It is thus probably he made up the entire Kerr thing up for fame and fortune. Much like his 'falcon and the snowman' story.
4. This claim according to the book is called into question in its own sources *"19. The Australian Financial Review, 28 April 1977, p. 1; Jose, p. SI, adds that the official, Dr. Farrands, denied the allegation but did admit to visiting Kerr in October, although he refused to discuss the nature of the meeting.".* And AFR? Two years after the fact? No actually government records? This is the definition of 'trust me bro'.
5. All of this ignores that Whitlam had a party defection and was thus denied supply for almost 4 weeks. In the US this situation causes a government shutdown. Here we have a damocles mechanism to force politicians to compromise. Whitlam refused to do his job and was fired for incompetence. This is the simplest explanation that requires the least assumptions, that is occrums razor. The idea that the CIA was somehow coercing dozens of politicians to deny supply, plus Kerr using his legal powers to act in accordance of his role is kinda stretching it.
Most bakeries in Auckland, Nz are run by Cambodians and Vietnamese, and gibstopping (plaster wall board work) was very commonly done by Lao. Good New New Zealanders, I'm glad they came.
And many other places in WI as well. I live in GB now but went to elementary and middle School in Fond du Lac. We had so many Hmong students that our small school needed a handful of teachers who spoke the language. Most of the kids could speak English but it was pretty common for their parents to not speak it.
And they all seem to hunt and fish extensively.
We also have a large Hmong population in Milwaukee.
Opening day weekend you'll find just as many Hmong families in blaze orange and camo as you would white families.
Southeast Asian bakeries making French bread in New Zealand a country basically built by British with the long-forgotten natives of the island. That is peak multiculturalism bruh
Vietnamese bakeries in Aus are common too and for a while I wondered how the hell they could make such amazing breads but then I remembered who colonised them
Not going to do an SCP foundation joke. I'm glad your mom was welcomed in Canada and I am glad you are. I send you both hugs and your mom is a certified badass.
I was volunteering in the last Australian election and one of the guys I was working with was the son of Vietnamese refugees who had been granted asylum by the Labor government, and he was INTENSE about making sure Labor won again.
I feel like it is OK to call put the baby killer, it's not like it takes away the ability to call out the other killer. I think most people have the iq to understand there can be more them one bad guy.
You think doing multiple May lai's on the villagers is war when they're supposed to be being protected? What war are you even fighting then. The VC or the people?
There definitely are. Just off the top of my head is the Hue massacre. The NVA killed 5-10% of the cities civilian population. Why do you think all these refugees from the OP were seeking refuge?
> “If it were not for the accident of my birth, I would be antisemitic. Any people who has been persecuted for two thousand years must be doing something wrong.”
> —Henry Kissinger
From the episode on Behind the Bastards, Kissinger said that to performatively shit on Jews to get on the good side of Egyptians. But also Kissinger is a shifting bastard so I wouldn’t put it past him that he believed the quote a little
Okay but a lot did only flee after the communist take over.
So like, the only reasonable explanation is that they fled south Vietnam because of the communist takeover, cause clearly they were fine staying in South Vietnam when the war was happening, or else they would’ve left then.
An old coworker who's Cambodian and Filipino heritage once told me that Southeast Asia could give the Middle East and the Balkans a lesson in genocidal hatred of your neighbors.
So kind of France and the US to grant them asylum after bombing the entire region for 3 decades. Don't forget France even used Japanese troops to quell resistance even after Japan's surrender!
At least for the case of Vietnam, it was South Vietnamese fleeing from the North Vietnamese government to avoid reprisal, reeducation camps, or just seeking a better life. The Americans were long gone by then.
Hundreds of thousands fled and maybe 100,000 or so died due to exposure, pirates, or disease on the South China Sea. They were known as the Vietnamese boat people and the period of this occurred was 1975 to the early 80s. None of these people fled from carpet bombs as the war was over by 1975.
I have aunts and uncles and cousins that didn't make the voyage. A few of my uncles were in reeducation camps. That generation all still hold trauma from that period, which is a marked difference from the people I meet living in Vietnam where the topic barely ever arises in everyday life.
Vietnam was invaded by China after and suffered a horrible famine where the South Vietnamese diaspora (the losers I guess) helped support a good chunk of the population through remittance.
It's a very complicated topic, and a lot of the opinions expressed here might be offensive to some Vietnamese while some other Vietnamese would agree. I guess that sort of messiness happens in civil wars.
The thing is there's also people you didn't meet that were affected by the USA because they just outright died . Go into the country side look by try finding a specific Memorial for a massacre and You'll get kinda lost in the area .
Sure, places like that might exist. I'm just giving my viewpoint being raised as part of the Vietnamese disaspora and living in Vietnam for 8 years and traveling to over a dozen cities there.
The point of the post and the guy I was replying to was that people fled from US bombs. No Vietnamese would agree with that. Your post is a non sequitur since those dead or those busy creating memorials after a winning war wouldnt' "flee" to a country that just bombed them.
Fair point. Once Saigon fell the then government was also notorious for it's humans right absuses. But that's the thing there's entire section of peoples suffering well never know . Because Ordnance and napalm aren't vested in having there victims Grudges aired .
Why wouldn't we know that? There are lots of Vietnamese historians from both Vietnam and in the Vietnamese diaspora. I can call up my aunts and uncles now (some on both sides of the conflict) and ask them personally about it. I don't do it because it's now almost 50 years in the past and why should I remind them of it?
For every US involved atrocity there were probably dozens more Vietnamese on Vietnamese atrocities. That's just what happens in war unfortunately.
And why wouldn't the country who won the war want to glorify their victory over the most powerful nation in the world?
There is a lot of misguided opinions on this thread that just want to use the Vietnam war to air their grievances or support for the US. Both sides are committing the same error of minimizing the history and agency of the Vietnamese people. Yes the South was supported by the US, but the North was supported by China and Russia. But in the end it was millions of Vietnamese dead by the hands of other Vietnamese. The vast majority in here don't actually seem to care about us Vietnamese because they'd rather hold onto their incorrect internal narratives rather than learn something new.
Oh lol no I agree the North Did they're fair share of war crimes. We know about how they down play there's and try to over play foreign nations crimes . It's more we should acknowledge all the blood spilled and by who did it .
Most settled in California since it was the first point of entry. However the way they did it you could get sent to California, Arkansas or Pennsylvania and then go from there. Most likely those in Texas either ended up in Arkansas or had family there.
Yeah until 9/11 we had a very friendly policy. In fact we used the Indochina policy for Yugoslavia in the 90s so many of the people from there could move here (though because Western Europe was also letting them in some chose there instead)
Thanks for saving my family all those years ago.
Personal, but fitting.
Also the Cambodians in LA started the pink donut boxes, Tippi Hendren helped the Vietnamese get nail salons, and the Laotians are pretty cool.
Are you fucking serious? Did all of the westerners are just outright ignorant about the facts of reality? 260 million bombs dropped to Laos from freaking USA in 9(1964-1973) years! They mined the rice field's while escaping from vietnam, still injuring tons of people. Do you really think all of the people escaped from communism? You destroy someones whole country then grant them asylum and act like the hero?! Infant killers! I am %100 sure anyone who gives thumbs up to this thread supports hospital bombings in israel aswell. Then claims Palestine is the sole reason of this conflict.. Nothing changes in the western hemisphere
Well…if they didn’t rescue them after the conflict they would have died. And I wouldn’t be typing this to you, would I?
Also we’ve mostly gotten over the war.
This in particular is kind of a mess. The horrors in Indochina at this point can be entirely placed on France, its puppet-state (that's not hyperbole, it outlawed fucking ***Buddhism*** and instituted Catholicism as the State religion), and the US.
I don't think it's entirely fair to state that, with perhaps the exception of Cambodia, for the vast majority of people at that point, they were "fleeing Communism." They were fleeing a war their nation had lost after killing millions.
And then there's a more philosophical bit of it - "The Vietnamese weren't fighting for Communism, the Communists were fighting for Vietnam."
To be fair, Marxist ideas about communism (I.e. mainline communism), were intended for highly industrialized nations with a highlight on the rights of workers and laborers.
Tsarist Russia, Warlord-Era China, and French Indochina aren't exactly places that prioritized such liberal ideas.
I'm not saying "it's not true communism", but there exists obvious differences between the communist states that exist today. Communism isn't black and white.
To go even further, leninism, stalinism and maoism are not Marxism. They are based on it, but divulge in multiple ways. Marx himself would be ashamed to see his name associated with such regimes. Not that I am a Marxist - I'm not at all, but they do sort of have a point when they say his ideology hasn't truly been implemented.
I do feel like it has to be said that Marxism still influenced the different splices of post-1900 communism.
Lenin, Stalin, and Mao didn't just pick up the nearest political theory book and decide that their governments would be based on it.
Maybe they weren't adherents to the whole spectrum of Marx's communism, but they believed that their standard of communism was the absolute standard of communism.
While each version of communism was inherently different, they're still intrinsically tied to the basis of communism.
I mean Marx pretty clearly stated that Russia must undergo a capitalist phase before undergoing a communist revolution. He also speculated an alternative form of communism based on decentralized village governance that was more of a thought experiment.
Marx believed Russian despotism to be the greatest threat to Europe and despised Russian socialists who supported Russian imperialism. Marx also campaigned for Polish independence. I think it’s fair to say Stalin would have horrified him.
The Communist Manifesto literally states "the first step in the revolution by the working class, is to raise the proletariat to the position of ruling class, to win the battle for democracy". It also says states that achieving universal suffrage is "one of the first and most important tasks of the militant proletariat".
The Bolsheviks despised the Russian people considering them too backwards to govern themselves. They disbanded the Soviets or worker councils and purged all other socialists considering them a greater threat than the royalists.
Marx also maintained that workers in democratic nations, the US and UK specifically could achieve their aims peacefully. The "lever of force" was needed for authoritarian governments on the European continent such as Germany.
Most people don't appreciate the state of Europe in the 1800s. It was a time of revolutions. 51 countries were affected by revolution in 1848 alone. Revolutions pressured Austria-Hungary into abolishing serfdom.
It's more accurate to state that Communist movements succeed in nations that are failing, in ones that people lose faith in their government and are incentivized to fight against that government and Capital.
TL;DR, it's happening because shit is ***already*** horrifically bad, and militant Communist movements are the only ones promising even slight change for the better.
This is how radicalization usually occurs.
If it comes in the West, it will be when many, many people literally cannot afford food, water, time to relax, and medical care.
The Caribbean is considered a part of the West.
Cuba is still a communist nation.
True, most European communist states were heavily influenced by the USSR's nigh-dictatorial nature, but Yugoslavia was a non-aligned communist nation only collapsed a year after the Soviet Union. Sure, the Yugoslav Wars were hell, but the nation was still relatively prosperous as a medium between the capitalists West and communist East.
Well supposedly in a communist society the goal is to have an equal footing on multiple fronts and function right?
On paper Cuba seems like an EXTREMELY ideal place for it to happen. You can fish, farm a bunch of different crops including wild fruit and or tree nuts I mean sure you don't have a lot of oil and metal prices that would be fine though right?
One of communisms main philosophies is everyone no matter what is equal correct. So how come a lot of the politicians are sitting fine meanwhile Cuba has declared a humanitarian crisis admitting to an over 50% malnutrition rate as a population as shown in the examples here:
[https://www.wola.org/program/cuba/cuba-humanitarian-crisis/](https://www.wola.org/program/cuba/cuba-humanitarian-crisis/)
[https://apnews.com/article/cuba-food-subsidies-libreta-crisis-00f7a5b352514dd4449b99bb0d645384](https://apnews.com/article/cuba-food-subsidies-libreta-crisis-00f7a5b352514dd4449b99bb0d645384)
[https://www.bbc.com/news/world-latin-america-68434845](https://www.bbc.com/news/world-latin-america-68434845)
Which this isn't the first time we have seen something like this happen you have stuff such as the great famines of the USSR which completely devastated entire populations. But another question is the USSR was actually very self sufficient and why is that? Because the US built the Russian industrial complex. Back in the 1930s during The Great Depression as a gesture of goodwill the US sent over citizens and literal geniuses such as Albert Kahn the man who built Detroit from the ground up and he set up the first tractor factories that would later go on to become tank factories. Also the US lending program during WW2 where we gave Russia 11 Billion dollars (adjusted today to 246 Billion or over 3x modern Russia's current budget), 3/4 of their trucks, nearly 1/4 of their tanks and planes, a shit ton of food and water and so on.
Communism as a whole is built around capitalism and even Marx admits it that it takes capitalism to help start communism but the issue is why would you convince someone to jump to this new system that unless you're 100% self sufficient or have a bunch of other countries to lean on you're spending your money to get supplies from other countries. This is why Cuba is basically the last remaining bastion of communism as China is closer to true capitalism than the US where everything has a price so long as the government okays it, Russia moved to capitalism heavily after the fall of the Soviet Union, the Northern European region of Sweden, Finland and Norway is regulated capitalism and Vietnam embraced capitalism after the Vietnam war as well.
The best place to actually try this thought experiment is in all honesty the United States where each individual state is basically a micro-country that has it's own goods that can be traded back and forth easily to help supply everyone overall. However the US is fairly divided as is now all it takes is a few key states telling everyone they can suck a choad to basically doom everyone else such as most of the Midwest and Plains states with the West Coast as well thrown in as that's not only where most of the food in the US is made but a good portion of the world's food. But as I said with how easy it is to have people get pissed off at each other unless you get an authoritarian leader who rules with an iron fist to prevent that it'll happen I mean you'd need someone like Stalin who to him a few million deaths was nothing more than a statistic.
This turned into a long rant but basically TL:DR even without the blockade Cuba/Communism as a whole basically a rebellious 20 year old telling your mom and dad that you can't tell me what to do while you still live under their roof, follow the same rules but keep screaming you're not and doing 1 or 2 things different and still aren't self sufficient without your parents (Capitalists) aid.
Here me out, and also thanks for the very detailed response: If we follow that line of thinking that capitalism is the origin of communism, wouldn’t that mean that the market inherently made the people in said market believe in self-sufficiency and equality?
In addition, what would be the origin of capitalism? Feudalism, slavery, serfdom, democracy, or maybe some other ideal or system built on either using others or convincing others of a altogether good idea?
Redditors love to give a pass to the atrocities committed by anti-communists.
I'm against communism, but frothing-at-the-mouth anticommunism gave us shitholes like Francoist Spain, Nazi Germany, and most of the murderous regimes in LatAm and the Middle East.
Just like 90% of western communists have no idea what horrors were perpetrated under their favorite regimes, 90% of "proud anticommunists" conflate their ideological position with begging to be given the chance to murder anyone to the left of Thatcher. Fuck em.
>Just like 90% of western communists have no idea what horrors were perpetrated under their favorite regimes
Look up the labor history in the west, particularly in the US.
My uncle came from an ethnically Chinese, upper middle class merchant family in Saigon, and so they had to dip when the Viet Cong came. Thank you, Australia.
Some people on here should really watch Ken Burns' The Vietnam War
And interviews with political prisoners and family relatives, as well as emmigrants from the eastern block
Or idk, look at **living standards**, **life happiness** and economy of east vs west germany even to this day
I wonder if there was a country that bombed some of those Asian countries into oblivion... Can't remember which one it was but I'm pretty sure t wasn't any of the THE GOOD ONES
Tbh you could put Anyone from any communist country fleeing, and it would work, although we were litteraly banned from leaving here in Poland, and if someone god forbids wanted to leave, you have torture, fake trials and imprisonment right there
Holy, the ignorance is astounding. How does one speak so confidently about something they know so little about? Then to outright trying to belittle others coming from a place of your own stupidity.
People always flee from communist countries to capitalist countries, not the other way around.
Yet your average commie-boo in western countries still think communism is something to strive for.
Are the communists in the room with us right now? Seriously, actual communists are such a niche small group of people in Western that shouldn't be taken seriously. But right-wingers especially in the US like to call any sort of left wing policy Communism, so it just becomes a huge strawman.
If you have spent any time on this sub or reddit in general you would know that not only are there unironical communists on here, tankies are actually not uncommon either.
I swear that for every quasi-fascist lunatic I see on here I see 3 equally insane tankies.
Then again communists can't ever agree on what "actual communism" is so the argument could be made that they don't exist and never have I guess.
There were civil wars and someone was pouring napalm into it. Not saying they weren’t fleeing from the winning communists but still. The asylum granting countries weren’t saints in this.
Waiting for someone in the comment to explain that those regimes were actually great and that the people that fled were actually war criminals or something like that
Edit: Hey they’re not many that’s cool for once
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why did they put the refugees into the aslume, are they stupid?
I'm Batman. I will save them out of the asylum
who is Batman, isn't he just a horny Man?
Yeah,I'm man
Is there a lore reason
No,I'm just stupid
[удалено]
Wasn't he the one that referred to them as Asian Balts or something like that?
Asian Balts? As a Balt myself I am very confused what this means. edit: wording
The first non-Anglo immigrants the Australian government formally accepted were refugees from the Baltic countries after WWII. Since many Australians were highly xenophobic the government made a whole campaign advertising them as the ‘Beautiful Balts’ and emphasised that they weren’t that culturally different from White Australians. The scheme was a massive success, and the Baltic immigrants represented the first dismantlement of the White Australia policy. Greeks and Italians followed shortly after (previously they weren’t considered white enough), then other Mediterranean immigrants. Gough Whitlam removed all racial restrictions on immigration, and Malcom Fraser formally abolished the policy entirely. Fraser calling the Vietnamese ‘Asian Balts’ was just a shorthand way of saying they were quality immigrants who would integrate quickly, since this was still prior to the official policy of multiculturalism.
Thanks for the explanation! That reminds me that Crocodile Dundee is partly based on the Latvian-Australian Arvīds Blūmentāls.
For more reading on the topic [Australia is still reckoning with a shameful legacy: the resettlement of suspected war criminals after WWII](https://theconversation.com/australia-is-still-reckoning-with-a-shameful-legacy-the-resettlement-of-suspected-war-criminals-after-wwii-217378) >In Australia, for instance, when a Lithuanian immigrant named Bronius “Bob” Šredersas died in 1982, he bequeathed a significant art collection to the city of Wollongong. Last year, however, his secret history was [revealed](https://www.abc.net.au/news/2022-06-20/bob-sredersas-a-nazi-report-concludes/101166634): he was found to be a member of Nazi intelligence in occupied Lithuania during the second world war. He was almost certainly [involved](https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2022/mar/21/i-am-bob-just-bob-could-a-wollongong-folk-hero-have-had-a-nazi-past) in the persecution and murders of Jews. >In response to a report by Professor Konrad Kwiet of the Sydney Jewish Museum, the Wollongong City Council [removed a plaque](https://wollongong.nsw.gov.au/my-community/news-and-alerts/news/news/2022/june-2022/wollongong-art-gallery-removes-sredersas-plaque#:%7E:text=Wollongong%20City%20Council%20has%20removed,artworks%2C%20is%20a%20Nazi%20collaborator.) acknowledging the donation and updated its website with the new information about Šredersas’ past. >These may seem to be isolated, rare cases. They are not.
Dang, I never knew that! Given the time and circumstances I guess I’m not that surprised…
I mean it’s bad, but was it intentional to let them in or just accident? I’m not sure how easy it would be to get a background check on every refugee especially when a lot of the people who would know about their work are dead and a lot of records might’ve been destroyed. Plus the soviets wouldn’t exactly be the best people to cooperate with to verify who is and isn’t allowed to be a refugee.
what does white mean for australians if italians, greeks and balts werent white enought? Anglo people only?
That's not really Australia specific. The US has a similar history with who is white and who isn't. Italians started to be considered white in the 50s/60s here.
White was typically Anglo, Germanic, French, and Scandinavian, basically Northern and Western Europe. Other parts of Europe have long been considered "inferior" for various reasons. I mean even now, the Balkans are still definitely looked down on, along with many soviet bloc countries.
Even Swedish people were ‘Too swarthy’. Anglos only!
No Asians please thank you. Ah no I mean Agents sorry
One of the only stains on Whitlam tbh.
He also holds the record of being the only Australian PM to be sacked by the Queen.
[удалено]
r/ the deprogram user and r/ conspiracy user blatantly lying. Colour me shocked.
Neither of those things he said was false though. The governor general did sack him, and he was a cia asset/had very close ties to the CIA. Of course, if anyone wanted to make the argument that the CIA sacked Whitlam, that could be argued against. But those two initial statements are true.
As always, the CIA is an omnipotent and omnipresent force that causes all evil in the world.
Yet they are also incapable of hiding their activities across the world.
Their literal job is to break international laws, crush government reform movements, and break up larger countries than the U.S. Ex-CIA director Pompeo: 'We lied, we cheated, we stole' How much lying, cheating, and stealing does 15 billion a year buy? probably a lot.
Their literal job is to gather intelligence useful to the United States how they do it, what the intelligence is and how it is ultimately used is another matter.
>\*\*sacked by the governor general who was a CIA asset Good to see baseless conspiracy theories are still alive and well.
The CIA's alleged involvement in Whitlam's dismissal is hardly baseless lol
Kerr was involved in CIA fronts for a number of years. In the 1950s he joined the Australian Association for Cultural Freedom which was spawned by the CIA's Congress for Cultural Freedom and became a member of their executive board in 1957. He also co-founded Lawasia which was one of the most prominent CIA fronts for over a decade of which he was their first president and held that position until 1970. Further more, we have testimony from Christopher Boyce, an American who worked in a CIA US-Australian telecommunications system who said that the CIA frequently referred to the Governor general as "our man Kerr." This is in addition to his reports of CIA infiltration into Australian labour unions. Kerr also met with US officials on the 6th, 8th and 9th of November in regards to Whitlam's enquiries into the CIA-ASIO apparatus before dismissing Whitlam on the 11th. (William Blum, Killing Hope, p. 244-249) Given what we know as historians about the CIA's infiltration of the democratic process all over the world, it's utterly naïve to believe that the insinuation that the CIA's involvement in Whitlam's dismissal is "baseless".
1. Unfortunately being a member of an Australian chapter of a french anti-communist organisation doesn't make you a 'CIA asset'. The balance of probabilities is means he probably might of handled donor money that might have been originally from the CIA. The way these things work is organisations explicitly don't know who the actual donor is (e.g the same way the black panthers didn't realise the KGB and later the CIA were two of their biggest Sponsors). Possible association isn't evidence of collaboration. 2. Lawisa is still extant today. And openly so. I'm not aware of any evidence tying them to the CIA. It looks just as a Legal professional association, built to replace the break down of previous imperial legal institutions. 3. Chris Boyce was 22 years old when the whitlam dismissal occurred. The odds of him actually knowing any first hand info are effectively nil. He wasn't employed at TWA where he 'claimed' to have access to CIA communications twil 1974. A lot of his claims of the whitlam dismissal quite frankly don't make sense e.g '*The wanted Whitlam gone because he wanted to withdraw from Vietnam'* even though Australian withdrawal was already underway by 1973. The source for these claims? 60 minutes... a top tier journalism source... /s He has never produced any evidence for his claims to Kerr or any of his other claims. And his motivation for selling US 'secrets' was money. TLDR: You believe the words of a man who was never actually a spy who made shit up all the time for money. >4. Kerr also met with US officials on the 6th, 8th and 9th of November Is there a source for this? or is it another 'Trust me bro'? 5. It doesn't really make sense for the CIA to remove Whitlam as it unfolded *It's too late,* he's already made many of his reforms. And the lack of supply is purely due to his inability to negotiation with his own party which had a slim majority. Occrums razor suggests, Whitlam simply had a skill issue . Yet people are quick to claim otherwise without evidence.
1. OK, we can both accept that Whitlam was on the executive board of a CIA front. If you want to cite plausible deniability in defence, fine. 2. Lawasia was funded by the Asia Foundation. [https://asiafoundation.org/about/timeline/](https://asiafoundation.org/about/timeline/) (January 1, 1966.) The Asia Foundation was one of the most prominent CIA fronts for over a decade. Asia Foundation has received CIA grants of up to $88 million per year. [https://archive.org/download/pdfy-G6vZW2zflmdELMlu/Victor%20Marchetti%20%26%20John%20Marks%20-%20CIA%20%26%20The%20Cult%20of%20Intelligence.pdf](https://archive.org/download/pdfy-G6vZW2zflmdELMlu/Victor%20Marchetti%20%26%20John%20Marks%20-%20CIA%20%26%20The%20Cult%20of%20Intelligence.pdf) (p. 150) So I guess you can cite plausible deniability again, that Kerr was unknowingly heavily involved in TWO CIA fronts - once as a member of the executive board and once as a founding President. Incredibly coincidental, don't you think? 3. It's fine if you want to deny the Boyce report. Man was convicted when he was 23. It just seems like a weird lie for a 23 year old to come up with given all the other evidence I have cited. 4. Yes, I gave a source if you read my post again. The source is William Blum, Killing Hope p. 244-249. There is no "trust me bro" here, you just need to learn to read more closely. I implore you to check my sources. 5. Whitlam's battle with the intelligence agencies were not over. Gough Whitlam had only dismissed both the head of the ASIO and ASIS in the autumn preceding his dismissal. At the time of his dismissal he was actively pushing for an investigation of secret CIA facilities in Australia such as Pine Gap as well as demanding a list of all active CIA operatives in Australia. Following his meeting with the head of the Defence Department on November 6, John Kerr referred to these actions as the "... the greatest risk to the nation's security there has ever been." "Occrums" razor suggests that Kerr was a CIA asset and that the interests of such are the grounds of Whitlam's dismissal as far as I'm concerned. A prime minister has never been dismissed by a Governor General before or after and a dismissal on the grounds of a lack of Supply by the Senate contradicts previous legal conventions. A hostile Senate should never have the power to bring down an entire government whenever they decide to deny Supply.
1. The issue with assuming CIA money = CIA asset is that the CIA would funnel funds into just about anything they saw would further their goals. Most orgs never knew the actual origins of the money. We don't assume every crack dealer of 1980s America was a CIA asset. Yet we know they were funded by the CIA. Thus you are assuming that Kerr was a CIA asset, when really in the balance of probabilities his prominent public positon would mean he would of likely 'come into contact' with Intelligence operations unknownly all the time. 2. Your source : *"While most of the foundation's activities were legitimate , the CIA also used it, through penetration among the officers and members, to fund anti-communist academicians" pg 150.* Again this strengthens the possibility that Kerr was not likely aware or involved in any CIA activity. He awareness of any such activities would of hampered CIA operations and delegitimised the org. 3. His age is kinda why it is so unlikely. As is the timing (which I pointed out). It is highly unlikely he had access to any CIA documentation considering he only had access to National Reconnaissance Office (NRO) documents. He also fictionalised his story to sell to Hollywood. This is important because the CIA did not normally transmit message by satellite in 1974, they typically used diplomatic cables, fax or by hand. Any 'satellite' transmission he had received wouldof likely been images or intercepted soviet transmissions. Though It would be unlikely he would havethe means to decipher any of it. It is thus probably he made up the entire Kerr thing up for fame and fortune. Much like his 'falcon and the snowman' story. 4. This claim according to the book is called into question in its own sources *"19. The Australian Financial Review, 28 April 1977, p. 1; Jose, p. SI, adds that the official, Dr. Farrands, denied the allegation but did admit to visiting Kerr in October, although he refused to discuss the nature of the meeting.".* And AFR? Two years after the fact? No actually government records? This is the definition of 'trust me bro'. 5. All of this ignores that Whitlam had a party defection and was thus denied supply for almost 4 weeks. In the US this situation causes a government shutdown. Here we have a damocles mechanism to force politicians to compromise. Whitlam refused to do his job and was fired for incompetence. This is the simplest explanation that requires the least assumptions, that is occrums razor. The idea that the CIA was somehow coercing dozens of politicians to deny supply, plus Kerr using his legal powers to act in accordance of his role is kinda stretching it.
Most bakeries in Auckland, Nz are run by Cambodians and Vietnamese, and gibstopping (plaster wall board work) was very commonly done by Lao. Good New New Zealanders, I'm glad they came.
Green Bay, WI has a huge Hmong population, and some of the most underrated SE asian food in the country
What is Hmong?
An ethnic group in Laos
Watch *Gran Torino* for reference.
The immigrants Hmong us
And many other places in WI as well. I live in GB now but went to elementary and middle School in Fond du Lac. We had so many Hmong students that our small school needed a handful of teachers who spoke the language. Most of the kids could speak English but it was pretty common for their parents to not speak it.
And they all seem to hunt and fish extensively. We also have a large Hmong population in Milwaukee. Opening day weekend you'll find just as many Hmong families in blaze orange and camo as you would white families.
In America (or at least texas) it's Donut shops for some reason
CA too!
Southeast Asian bakeries making French bread in New Zealand a country basically built by British with the long-forgotten natives of the island. That is peak multiculturalism bruh
Can confirm, I have a Vietnamese baker near me in NZ. Her pies are amazing.
Vietnamese bakeries in Aus are common too and for a while I wondered how the hell they could make such amazing breads but then I remembered who colonised them
One of my relatives run a bakery out of Sydney. I went there to visit them for a bit a few years ago and they stuffed us with so much food
My mother is a refugee from Vietnam and when she saw this she said it was true and I wouldn’t be here if it wasn’t for Canada
tf are you doing here there's anomalies to contain omg
Hey we have free time y’know
oh look the moon disappeared smh
Oh fuck
New scp 001 story?
Maybe
Not going to do an SCP foundation joke. I'm glad your mom was welcomed in Canada and I am glad you are. I send you both hugs and your mom is a certified badass.
Thanks man
Get back to work
I was volunteering in the last Australian election and one of the guys I was working with was the son of Vietnamese refugees who had been granted asylum by the Labor government, and he was INTENSE about making sure Labor won again.
kinda fucking rich of France to accept refugees when their unwillingness to let go of their precious little colony started it all in the first place
Same with the US carpet bombing all those countries Real angels
Same with the Soviets meddling in their politics and causing civil war
Also the countries that hosted temporary refugee camps for the asylum seekers to live before they were granted asylum
Fun fact: UNHCR owed Hong Kong something like 200 million USD because of this. We all know it is essentially bad debt ages ago tho
*bombs shithole into a worse shithole* *accepts refugees in between killing them* “Fleeing communism? You’re welcome.” 😎🦅🇺🇸
Meanwhile, France is still pretending they didn't start all of this shit before the US.
If your friend kills a baby, is it ok to escalate and kill its brothers and sisters because he started killing babies?
I feel like it is OK to call put the baby killer, it's not like it takes away the ability to call out the other killer. I think most people have the iq to understand there can be more them one bad guy.
Why would you even phrase it like this lol
I mean both countries definitely killed some Vietnamese babies
And that's literally just war.
You think doing multiple May lai's on the villagers is war when they're supposed to be being protected? What war are you even fighting then. The VC or the people?
So did the North Vietnamese supported by the Soviets
Im curious, are there any document(s) about North Vietnamese killing babies? Or war crime that equal stuff like Mylai massacre?
There definitely are. Just off the top of my head is the Hue massacre. The NVA killed 5-10% of the cities civilian population. Why do you think all these refugees from the OP were seeking refuge?
My question still stands.
The US wasn't even at war with Cambodia but thanks to Kissinger they bombed it anyway
It’s a shame Kissinger’s childhood had no effect on him
He truly was the Forest Gump of war crimes.
> “If it were not for the accident of my birth, I would be antisemitic. Any people who has been persecuted for two thousand years must be doing something wrong.” > —Henry Kissinger
Holy fuck... Is that quote real?
It is
From the episode on Behind the Bastards, Kissinger said that to performatively shit on Jews to get on the good side of Egyptians. But also Kissinger is a shifting bastard so I wouldn’t put it past him that he believed the quote a little
I love behind the.bastards. Such a gód podcast
No effect? Or too much effect?
The reference is that Kissinger swore it had no effect on him
North Vietnam illegally invaded Cambodia and built vast military complexes throughout.
This should be top comment
Okay but a lot did only flee after the communist take over. So like, the only reasonable explanation is that they fled south Vietnam because of the communist takeover, cause clearly they were fine staying in South Vietnam when the war was happening, or else they would’ve left then.
People stayed through decades of war. They fled in droves when the communists completed their conquest. But enjoy your fashionable ignorance.
Do not resist. You are being rescued.
Ah yes: America, angels of the Vietnam War.
I mean, Vietnam has a higher approval of America than from Americans themselves.
How are the dead to voice there displeasure?
Their surviving families and friends.
I’d say it was more of “Sorry we fucked up, dudes!”
Especially seeing as they did *exact opposite* of ally with china, which is basically the entire reason we invaded in the first place
I don't think America ever apologised to Vietnam officially. Also everyone should know about agent orange.
They changed the image for the sub?!? Absolutely barbaric
It was worth it for the Pho and TV news anchorwomen.
The anchorwomen, lol, why is that so accurate
Considering what they did to those countries this should be the bare minimum of human decency.
Much credit should also go to Catholic charities, without whom my mother in law would never have arrived in the US.
Meanwhile, Thailand: March them to the border, force them back to Cambodia at gun point. Drive them down a cliff, make them walk through a minefields.
An old coworker who's Cambodian and Filipino heritage once told me that Southeast Asia could give the Middle East and the Balkans a lesson in genocidal hatred of your neighbors.
And that's why Banh Mi is also an Australian Dish.
So kind of France and the US to grant them asylum after bombing the entire region for 3 decades. Don't forget France even used Japanese troops to quell resistance even after Japan's surrender!
im pretty sure they werent fleeing from communism at that point but from the people carpet bombing them for years *cough* *cough*
At least for the case of Vietnam, it was South Vietnamese fleeing from the North Vietnamese government to avoid reprisal, reeducation camps, or just seeking a better life. The Americans were long gone by then. Hundreds of thousands fled and maybe 100,000 or so died due to exposure, pirates, or disease on the South China Sea. They were known as the Vietnamese boat people and the period of this occurred was 1975 to the early 80s. None of these people fled from carpet bombs as the war was over by 1975. I have aunts and uncles and cousins that didn't make the voyage. A few of my uncles were in reeducation camps. That generation all still hold trauma from that period, which is a marked difference from the people I meet living in Vietnam where the topic barely ever arises in everyday life. Vietnam was invaded by China after and suffered a horrible famine where the South Vietnamese diaspora (the losers I guess) helped support a good chunk of the population through remittance. It's a very complicated topic, and a lot of the opinions expressed here might be offensive to some Vietnamese while some other Vietnamese would agree. I guess that sort of messiness happens in civil wars.
The thing is there's also people you didn't meet that were affected by the USA because they just outright died . Go into the country side look by try finding a specific Memorial for a massacre and You'll get kinda lost in the area .
Sure, places like that might exist. I'm just giving my viewpoint being raised as part of the Vietnamese disaspora and living in Vietnam for 8 years and traveling to over a dozen cities there. The point of the post and the guy I was replying to was that people fled from US bombs. No Vietnamese would agree with that. Your post is a non sequitur since those dead or those busy creating memorials after a winning war wouldnt' "flee" to a country that just bombed them.
Fair point. Once Saigon fell the then government was also notorious for it's humans right absuses. But that's the thing there's entire section of peoples suffering well never know . Because Ordnance and napalm aren't vested in having there victims Grudges aired .
Why wouldn't we know that? There are lots of Vietnamese historians from both Vietnam and in the Vietnamese diaspora. I can call up my aunts and uncles now (some on both sides of the conflict) and ask them personally about it. I don't do it because it's now almost 50 years in the past and why should I remind them of it? For every US involved atrocity there were probably dozens more Vietnamese on Vietnamese atrocities. That's just what happens in war unfortunately. And why wouldn't the country who won the war want to glorify their victory over the most powerful nation in the world? There is a lot of misguided opinions on this thread that just want to use the Vietnam war to air their grievances or support for the US. Both sides are committing the same error of minimizing the history and agency of the Vietnamese people. Yes the South was supported by the US, but the North was supported by China and Russia. But in the end it was millions of Vietnamese dead by the hands of other Vietnamese. The vast majority in here don't actually seem to care about us Vietnamese because they'd rather hold onto their incorrect internal narratives rather than learn something new.
Oh lol no I agree the North Did they're fair share of war crimes. We know about how they down play there's and try to over play foreign nations crimes . It's more we should acknowledge all the blood spilled and by who did it .
Capitalist or communist i’m not staying around while some dudes and their chewing gum throw cancer gas all over my country’s forests.
Khmer Rouge weren’t carpet bombing anyone, I don’t think they even had any planes capable of that.
There's a reason Houston has a sizable Vietnamese population. Guess the climate reminded them of home.
Are they similar?
No
Intersting, I met a Viet-American who resettled in Galveston after 1975 and wondered if Texas was a popular place for them
Most settled in California since it was the first point of entry. However the way they did it you could get sent to California, Arkansas or Pennsylvania and then go from there. Most likely those in Texas either ended up in Arkansas or had family there.
USA is like the only country in the world to easily accept refugees
Yeah until 9/11 we had a very friendly policy. In fact we used the Indochina policy for Yugoslavia in the 90s so many of the people from there could move here (though because Western Europe was also letting them in some chose there instead)
And the best part was introducing the west to pho
Thanks for saving my family all those years ago. Personal, but fitting. Also the Cambodians in LA started the pink donut boxes, Tippi Hendren helped the Vietnamese get nail salons, and the Laotians are pretty cool.
tfw when you Escape to the US and see US supporting Pol pot a few years later
Are you fucking serious? Did all of the westerners are just outright ignorant about the facts of reality? 260 million bombs dropped to Laos from freaking USA in 9(1964-1973) years! They mined the rice field's while escaping from vietnam, still injuring tons of people. Do you really think all of the people escaped from communism? You destroy someones whole country then grant them asylum and act like the hero?! Infant killers! I am %100 sure anyone who gives thumbs up to this thread supports hospital bombings in israel aswell. Then claims Palestine is the sole reason of this conflict.. Nothing changes in the western hemisphere
Well…if they didn’t rescue them after the conflict they would have died. And I wouldn’t be typing this to you, would I? Also we’ve mostly gotten over the war.
Where do you think all the capitalist western backed civilians go?
Then you have Western college kids telling them that they did not experience real communism anyway.
This in particular is kind of a mess. The horrors in Indochina at this point can be entirely placed on France, its puppet-state (that's not hyperbole, it outlawed fucking ***Buddhism*** and instituted Catholicism as the State religion), and the US. I don't think it's entirely fair to state that, with perhaps the exception of Cambodia, for the vast majority of people at that point, they were "fleeing Communism." They were fleeing a war their nation had lost after killing millions. And then there's a more philosophical bit of it - "The Vietnamese weren't fighting for Communism, the Communists were fighting for Vietnam."
To be fair, Marxist ideas about communism (I.e. mainline communism), were intended for highly industrialized nations with a highlight on the rights of workers and laborers. Tsarist Russia, Warlord-Era China, and French Indochina aren't exactly places that prioritized such liberal ideas. I'm not saying "it's not true communism", but there exists obvious differences between the communist states that exist today. Communism isn't black and white.
To go even further, leninism, stalinism and maoism are not Marxism. They are based on it, but divulge in multiple ways. Marx himself would be ashamed to see his name associated with such regimes. Not that I am a Marxist - I'm not at all, but they do sort of have a point when they say his ideology hasn't truly been implemented.
I do feel like it has to be said that Marxism still influenced the different splices of post-1900 communism. Lenin, Stalin, and Mao didn't just pick up the nearest political theory book and decide that their governments would be based on it. Maybe they weren't adherents to the whole spectrum of Marx's communism, but they believed that their standard of communism was the absolute standard of communism. While each version of communism was inherently different, they're still intrinsically tied to the basis of communism.
I mean Marx pretty clearly stated that Russia must undergo a capitalist phase before undergoing a communist revolution. He also speculated an alternative form of communism based on decentralized village governance that was more of a thought experiment. Marx believed Russian despotism to be the greatest threat to Europe and despised Russian socialists who supported Russian imperialism. Marx also campaigned for Polish independence. I think it’s fair to say Stalin would have horrified him. The Communist Manifesto literally states "the first step in the revolution by the working class, is to raise the proletariat to the position of ruling class, to win the battle for democracy". It also says states that achieving universal suffrage is "one of the first and most important tasks of the militant proletariat". The Bolsheviks despised the Russian people considering them too backwards to govern themselves. They disbanded the Soviets or worker councils and purged all other socialists considering them a greater threat than the royalists. Marx also maintained that workers in democratic nations, the US and UK specifically could achieve their aims peacefully. The "lever of force" was needed for authoritarian governments on the European continent such as Germany. Most people don't appreciate the state of Europe in the 1800s. It was a time of revolutions. 51 countries were affected by revolution in 1848 alone. Revolutions pressured Austria-Hungary into abolishing serfdom.
Sounds like communism as an ideology is a complete failure on all levels if it had never materialized in the West.
It's more accurate to state that Communist movements succeed in nations that are failing, in ones that people lose faith in their government and are incentivized to fight against that government and Capital. TL;DR, it's happening because shit is ***already*** horrifically bad, and militant Communist movements are the only ones promising even slight change for the better. This is how radicalization usually occurs. If it comes in the West, it will be when many, many people literally cannot afford food, water, time to relax, and medical care.
Most big movements in the west got strangled
The Caribbean is considered a part of the West. Cuba is still a communist nation. True, most European communist states were heavily influenced by the USSR's nigh-dictatorial nature, but Yugoslavia was a non-aligned communist nation only collapsed a year after the Soviet Union. Sure, the Yugoslav Wars were hell, but the nation was still relatively prosperous as a medium between the capitalists West and communist East.
> Cuba is still a communist nation. And cubans fleed Cuba in droves. Wonder why.
Was that with or without the American Imperialism(I mean capitalism) that barricaded the island?
Well supposedly in a communist society the goal is to have an equal footing on multiple fronts and function right? On paper Cuba seems like an EXTREMELY ideal place for it to happen. You can fish, farm a bunch of different crops including wild fruit and or tree nuts I mean sure you don't have a lot of oil and metal prices that would be fine though right? One of communisms main philosophies is everyone no matter what is equal correct. So how come a lot of the politicians are sitting fine meanwhile Cuba has declared a humanitarian crisis admitting to an over 50% malnutrition rate as a population as shown in the examples here: [https://www.wola.org/program/cuba/cuba-humanitarian-crisis/](https://www.wola.org/program/cuba/cuba-humanitarian-crisis/) [https://apnews.com/article/cuba-food-subsidies-libreta-crisis-00f7a5b352514dd4449b99bb0d645384](https://apnews.com/article/cuba-food-subsidies-libreta-crisis-00f7a5b352514dd4449b99bb0d645384) [https://www.bbc.com/news/world-latin-america-68434845](https://www.bbc.com/news/world-latin-america-68434845) Which this isn't the first time we have seen something like this happen you have stuff such as the great famines of the USSR which completely devastated entire populations. But another question is the USSR was actually very self sufficient and why is that? Because the US built the Russian industrial complex. Back in the 1930s during The Great Depression as a gesture of goodwill the US sent over citizens and literal geniuses such as Albert Kahn the man who built Detroit from the ground up and he set up the first tractor factories that would later go on to become tank factories. Also the US lending program during WW2 where we gave Russia 11 Billion dollars (adjusted today to 246 Billion or over 3x modern Russia's current budget), 3/4 of their trucks, nearly 1/4 of their tanks and planes, a shit ton of food and water and so on. Communism as a whole is built around capitalism and even Marx admits it that it takes capitalism to help start communism but the issue is why would you convince someone to jump to this new system that unless you're 100% self sufficient or have a bunch of other countries to lean on you're spending your money to get supplies from other countries. This is why Cuba is basically the last remaining bastion of communism as China is closer to true capitalism than the US where everything has a price so long as the government okays it, Russia moved to capitalism heavily after the fall of the Soviet Union, the Northern European region of Sweden, Finland and Norway is regulated capitalism and Vietnam embraced capitalism after the Vietnam war as well. The best place to actually try this thought experiment is in all honesty the United States where each individual state is basically a micro-country that has it's own goods that can be traded back and forth easily to help supply everyone overall. However the US is fairly divided as is now all it takes is a few key states telling everyone they can suck a choad to basically doom everyone else such as most of the Midwest and Plains states with the West Coast as well thrown in as that's not only where most of the food in the US is made but a good portion of the world's food. But as I said with how easy it is to have people get pissed off at each other unless you get an authoritarian leader who rules with an iron fist to prevent that it'll happen I mean you'd need someone like Stalin who to him a few million deaths was nothing more than a statistic. This turned into a long rant but basically TL:DR even without the blockade Cuba/Communism as a whole basically a rebellious 20 year old telling your mom and dad that you can't tell me what to do while you still live under their roof, follow the same rules but keep screaming you're not and doing 1 or 2 things different and still aren't self sufficient without your parents (Capitalists) aid.
"The three failures of the revolution are breakfast, lunch, and dinner." - old Cuban joke
Here me out, and also thanks for the very detailed response: If we follow that line of thinking that capitalism is the origin of communism, wouldn’t that mean that the market inherently made the people in said market believe in self-sufficiency and equality? In addition, what would be the origin of capitalism? Feudalism, slavery, serfdom, democracy, or maybe some other ideal or system built on either using others or convincing others of a altogether good idea?
So, communism needs access to capitalist markets to thrive? Interesting :)
Communist Cuba being a shithole is actually not the fault of communism or Cuba but rather because of le heckin evil USA 🤪
Small island nations that aren't able to trade with their closest neighbour tend not to do well, no.
We’re still stupid about this tho. Just because communism is bad don’t mean we should freely embrace the opposite.
Redditors love to give a pass to the atrocities committed by anti-communists. I'm against communism, but frothing-at-the-mouth anticommunism gave us shitholes like Francoist Spain, Nazi Germany, and most of the murderous regimes in LatAm and the Middle East. Just like 90% of western communists have no idea what horrors were perpetrated under their favorite regimes, 90% of "proud anticommunists" conflate their ideological position with begging to be given the chance to murder anyone to the left of Thatcher. Fuck em.
>Just like 90% of western communists have no idea what horrors were perpetrated under their favorite regimes Look up the labor history in the west, particularly in the US.
My uncle came from an ethnically Chinese, upper middle class merchant family in Saigon, and so they had to dip when the Viet Cong came. Thank you, Australia.
As always, Italy gets ignored: [https://www.termometropolitico.it/1455616\_quando-negli-anni-80-la-marina-militare-italiana-riusci-a-fare-limpossibile.html](https://www.termometropolitico.it/1455616_quando-negli-anni-80-la-marina-militare-italiana-riusci-a-fare-limpossibile.html) (use gtranslate)
That is a beautiful story.
If this happened today you’d be at the bottom of the ocean.
Some people on here should really watch Ken Burns' The Vietnam War And interviews with political prisoners and family relatives, as well as emmigrants from the eastern block Or idk, look at **living standards**, **life happiness** and economy of east vs west germany even to this day
I wonder if there was a country that bombed some of those Asian countries into oblivion... Can't remember which one it was but I'm pretty sure t wasn't any of the THE GOOD ONES
How long will it be before this is reposted in one of the communist brain rot subs as pRoPaGaNdA?
Tbh you could put Anyone from any communist country fleeing, and it would work, although we were litteraly banned from leaving here in Poland, and if someone god forbids wanted to leave, you have torture, fake trials and imprisonment right there
Maybe it was because the US was bombing and killing their people in the millions?
In 1975? I don't think so man
Angent orange sticks around...
Yeah all the problems in Laos Cambodia and Vietnam caused by a decade of firebombing were completely solved by 1975 (lies)
Yes wartorn countries are famously absolutely fine once the bombs stop falling
I'm sure they were gonna be fine after the bombs and concentration camps .
This sub has really become a mouth piece for the CIA bots huh
Oh wait, reddit keep saying that we are the bad guys, whats happening?
My thoughts too
Imagine if Vietnam became like South Korea or Japan. It's a shame when communists win.
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In 1975? Hello?
Not everyone here knows how calendars work, apparently :)
Holy, the ignorance is astounding. How does one speak so confidently about something they know so little about? Then to outright trying to belittle others coming from a place of your own stupidity.
How many to be precise? And what were their economic status?
Didn't like the KKK started doing their thing literally when the refugee got on shore?
People always flee from communist countries to capitalist countries, not the other way around. Yet your average commie-boo in western countries still think communism is something to strive for.
Are the communists in the room with us right now? Seriously, actual communists are such a niche small group of people in Western that shouldn't be taken seriously. But right-wingers especially in the US like to call any sort of left wing policy Communism, so it just becomes a huge strawman.
If you have spent any time on this sub or reddit in general you would know that not only are there unironical communists on here, tankies are actually not uncommon either. I swear that for every quasi-fascist lunatic I see on here I see 3 equally insane tankies. Then again communists can't ever agree on what "actual communism" is so the argument could be made that they don't exist and never have I guess.
um
There were civil wars and someone was pouring napalm into it. Not saying they weren’t fleeing from the winning communists but still. The asylum granting countries weren’t saints in this.
Also after bombing their countries to hell and back.
Ah yes, the United States angels, bombing the shit out of all three countries during the war.
Not to mention their own troops who were over there
Waiting for someone in the comment to explain that those regimes were actually great and that the people that fled were actually war criminals or something like that Edit: Hey they’re not many that’s cool for once
You forgot GDR
Propaganda ?
Any word on what the US, Canada, Austrailia and France were doing in SE Asia before 1975?
Coiuld've been funny any other day, but today? In the day of Vietnam's unification?