Was the fall of the Soviet Union the biggest catastrophe of the second half of the 20th century?

The Free World.

Cry harder, Communist.

that was actually well done though

I thought people agreed that the last 25 years have been objectively shit for entire regions of the country, mostly the Midwest and the south.

Wasn't this Trump's entire campaign?

>president being directly in touch with the people, rather than worrying about interest groups is a bad thing.

That's what's great about Trump, he doesn't need to be president to make money, he is in office attempt to get things done.

Russian mafia (read: former Soviet nomenclature) going global and without any ideological restrictions sure did good to the rest of the (((free))) world.

And yet you Alt Right dweebs never stop complaining about how bad civilization is or how bad the economy is or how bad your lives are???

Trump is just another establishment boyraper

Why is he denying Pizza Gate when he has been directly implicated???

>he thinks the midwest and the south being shit started 25 years ago

lol try fifty years ago for the former and about a hundred and fifty for the latter

Things stagnated for entire swathes of the heartland, midwest and south in the 80's, the rapid advance of digital tech n the 90's was a huge distraction up until 2007 when the recession hit and it pushed an difficult situation for working class, college-less sections of America into an unbearable one

so is this for anyone who's not an alt-right activist

we're Post Truth now these kids actually hate people who use objective facts

the only thing that registers with the millennial crowd is something that makes them feel good

>KGB was so good for the world guys!

>YOUR LIFE IS BAD BECAUSE I KNOW WHO YOU ARE

Why do leftists always resort to armchair psychology whenever challenged?

Yes, I was using Obama as an example since he is the most recent former president.

People can believe whatever they want to believe, but I just can't see liberals destroying this country.. If you look at what Trump is going to put in motion legislatively, some of it was part of the liberal platform. Relieve student debt, and make health care affordable. Hopefully trump's method is better than the disaster that is Obamacare.

To answer your question OP, no. Biggest tragedy in the second half would probably be Chernobyl and 3 Mile island. They made us too afraid to pursue clean nuclear energy, and increased our reliance on fossil fuels.

enjoy your anonymity because your cuckold's ideology cannot stand up to the slightest of scrutiny

Would you openly admit you fucc'd little boys if you had been made president?

wtf r u talking about dude

The collapse of communism wasn't, it was good. The dissolution of the Warsaw pact wasn't.
However, i'd say that the breakup of the USSR was the worst geopolitical occurrence since WW2, as it basically left the USA as the global hegemon.
NATO has outlived it's purpose with the fall of the Warsaw pact, and should have been disbanded.

>KGB was so good for the world guys!
What part of
>without any ideological restrictions
went over your head you retarded alt-right shitter?

The first Cold War was good as an ideological standoff between the free and "kind" United States of America and the oppressive and "cruel" Soviet Union.

This second Cold War we're experiencing right now is much more blurred thanks to globalization, freedom of information, and lack of clearly-defined opposing ideologies standing behind each side. The first Cold War was a clear standoff between black and white, good and evil, this new one is nothing short of a clusterfuck. It's only logical that someone like Donal Trump would come out as president from this clusterfuck.

It was certainly one of the most impactful events.

Yes, but it's too politically incorrect to admit the Soviet model appeared attractive worldwide during the 50's and 60's. Sustaining an annual 3.4 percent growth rate to the US's 2.3.

Too painful to even mention that the Soviet economy had begun accumulating capital in most enterprises by 1965, right before the economy began stagnating.

Too inconvenient to concede that Soviet workers valued the economy's benefits, or that almost all born before the 70's were genuine communists.

And far, far to dangerous to talk about how by the time of Gorbachev's social-democratic crusade half the party was already openly denouncing Marx and Lenin, calling the destruction of what little was left of socialism against every Soviet citizen's wishes. That would be tantamount to conceding the "communism collapsed" meme, the greatest propaganda victory of the century, was a lie.

Read your theory kids.

same reason Rome gotten to shit after the Punic war

no real threat to strive against

Not the last 25 years, just the last 15. 90s were objectively good.

>unless liberals literally implode the entire country to spite trump
Trump will do that himself. His cabinet picks are awful

Oh, please.

It's not hard to sustain an enormous growth rate when you're starting out from nearly nothing, with a largely rural, uneducated populace, low rates of industrialization in most of the country -- oh yeah, and a sizable chunk of the last few generations having just died off in a series of massive famines and wars.

In 1950, despite decades of urbanization, the USSR was still about 50% rural (with little mechanization of agriculture, many peasants sitting idle for much of the year, essentially unemployed although they were not officially recorded as such), with low participation in the global economy. Despite a massive campaign to eradicate illiteracy, immediately before WWII only 1/3rd of urban youth and 10% of rural youth were enrolled in full elementary education programs (a rate that fell during the war and recovered in the 50s). Consequently most weren't capable of very technical work, there was little innovation, etc.

The Soviet Union's growth rate in the 50s and early 60s WAS impressive, but it wasn't sustainable. That's not a fault of communism any more than the impressive rates can be credited TO communism. It's just math. When you double school enrollment rates, invest in labor-saving technology and relocate idle people to the cities, of course your GDP is going to skyrocket, but that's only a process you can undergo once -- every time you halve your unemployment rate, you're achieving a smaller gain than last time. You can double school enrollment from 30% to 60%, but you can't double it again.

Myanmar has one of the fastest-growing economies in the world today. Dem. Republic of the Congo has another. Is that because they have particularly efficient systems? Or because when you make a serious effort to develop from a very low starting point, massive productivity come naturally?

The Soviet Union achieved many things, some remarkable, but by and large its economy was not very efficient, and it wasn't a very pleasant place to live.

>oppressive and "cruel" Soviet Union.
The ussr was shit in many ways, but this characterization also papers over the moral ambiguity of the Cold War and the fact that the Soviet Union was tolerable or even pleasant to many people who lived under it.

We should just go full Goebbels on Muslims your saying? Tsk tsk tsk

>Reagan did us proud
>Giving Reagan credit for the liberal reforms that started well before his administration
Okay then

But to add further, I do agree the "multipolar" world we live in and the current standoff with Russia has less of the ideological justification that the Cold War did. Still, it can be construed as "liberal democracy vs. authoritarian nationalism/populism"

>the Soviet Union was tolerable or even pleasant to many people who lived under it.
You, I like you.

>Country is undergoing massive liberal reforms
>*Collapses*
>Current country is what we ended up with
I wouldn't call it the "biggest catastrophe of the second half of the 20th century", but we would have been better off without it.

t. Slav, son of Slavs

For America maybe, tell that to Sierra Leone, Yugoslavia, the Congo, Rwanda and the former Eastern Bloc.

Eh, America has been through periods like this in the past, but it has only imploded. Objectively, crime is at a 30 year low, people live longer lives in average, and technologically the US is at the forefront of R&D. It has a long way to go before it truely implodes

Rising wages and prices distracting us from setting the stage for the Great Recession isn't what I'd call objectively good, unless you unironically think NAFTA and the Gramm=-Leach-Bliley Act were good ideas.

Only imploded once*

This. The 60's were objectively worse than what we have going on now.

>b-b-but i was young in the 60s so it was better

>the Soviet Union was tolerable or even pleasant to many people who lived under it.
It wasn't hellish for most of its citizenry the way some people've portrayed it, but Soviet life was considerably less pleasant for the vast majority of its citizens than life in any western capitalist democracy would have been.

Boomers were the worst people.

Still a large improvement considering the state of Eastern Europe pre-revolution. Though whether that's due to communism is up for debate.

Is this something all Millennials regardless of political orientation can agree on?

Earl 60's were decent as a continuation of the 50's.

Except we're talking about America and not those shitskin non countries. Lrn2context

I don't agree. Boomers were just a product of their time. 99% of the shit people lash out against boomers about are simply things that are built into the system.

Up until Johnson took office. Shit started going downhill once Kennedy got rekted.

The 70s were objectively the worst decade we had post Great Depression.

>Croats and Serbs

>Shitskins

Croats are white, Serbs are Gypsies and Turks.

it collapsed because it deserved to. its institutions were useless and incompetent; nothing worked anymore.

It collapsed because H U M A N N A T U R E

Yeah, agreed about the level of improvement -- but that's exactly the thing, ain't it? A lot of the Soviet gains, esp. in terms of education, the economy, and quality of life, were things that *probably* would've been achieved under a liberalizing Russia, and quite possibly achieved with a lot less bloodshed -- in fact, some of them (campaigns to reduce illiteracy, urbanization and diversification of the economy) were things the Tsarist gov't already had in the works when he got kicked out.

Not that I'm trying to paint the Tsarists as the good guys or anything.

Yes. They fucked everything up, refused to address any problems they created, instead put that responsibility on their children, then throw shit fits when somebody tries to change something, and throws shit fits when people don't change anything. They literally cannot be appeased and this country will not improve until they're all dead.

Great meme, I upvote.

>bunch of gang-members in caves
>actual threat

Yes, they could have been achieved by a liberalizing Russia, but a liberal, democratic Russian state would have failed during the first half of the 20th century. A functional democracy requires a well educated, large, influential middle class. Russia was too backwards, it barely had any middle class to speak off, only the elites and the masses of --mostly rural-- poor. If in 1917 the Tsar was deposed by a democratic system, it largely would have become like what we saw in Russia during the 1990s --inept, poor, and controlled by oligarchs-- only worsened by the fact that that it would also have to worry about a even less educated populace, an even less developed economy, and whose borders contained many ethnic minorities all too eager to pounce on the opportunity of a weak government,

You do know how it collapsed right? Things were getting much better before it did. It was hardliners who fucked everything up, not "useless and incompetent" institutions.

Well, let's not forget that the Tsar *was* deposed in favor of a (more or less) democratic system, man. Alternate history scenarios with such radical changes are always dicey (well, even dicier than normal for alternate history) but it wouldn't have been at all impossible for Kerenski to make a handful of decisions differently and stay in power. Obviously it would've been decades before Russia was ready to function like a western liberal democracy, if it ever got there, but neither would it have been necessary to revert back into full autocracy. Go back in time, tell Kerenski to screw the western powers and just pull out of the war already, and there's probably no October Revolution, no Civil War, and things are looking pretty optimistic, although of course nothing's certain in life, especially in Russia.

> If in 1917 the Tsar was deposed by a democratic system,
ayy lmao
your answer is very thoughtful... but you realize that the Tsar was overthrown by mass protests, after which a constitutional government, which did eventually hold the most democratic elections in Russian history up to that point, took its place in early March 1917? The Bolsheviks spent the entire year discrediting this "provisional government" and overthrew it in 1917. The liberal government did make some grave errors but the Lenin threw a wrench in the whole enterprise by his refusal to acknowledge or compromise with it (which, to his credit, gave the Bolsheviks great legitimacy because their claim to be untainted by any association with the Provisionals). Had there been no Lenin it almost certainly would have survived, if just barely.

>overthrew it in 1917
in October 1917* (in what we call the October Revolution)

Bolsheviks were a mistake

man I hate people that come up with stupid useless shit to say like this

Yes. I do have a weak spot for Lenin because his indomitable will. Everyone thought he was an absolute madman for not joining the Provisional government but his stance had a tremendous payoff as the government ran into inevitable problems from the war effort, and its failure to follow through on critical land reforms and immediate elections (to which the Bolsheviks perfectly exploited with the slogan "peace, land and bread"). It's a tragedy but Lenin's life is a profile in perseverance and absolute dedication to one's beliefs.

Kek you're retarded. The Central Asian nations have fallen to Islam and have had a string of retarded dictators, the Caucuses is a nightmare and Ukraine and Belarus are retarded. Same goes for the rest of the former Eastern Block except the Baltic states (who are Europe's toilet cleaners now) and Poland (also toilet cleaners).

...

The Soviet Union never ended, it was just rebranded.

>Idiots still credit Reagan with destroying the Soviet Union

The geriatric fucker needed cue cards to remember the names of his cabinet members by 86, he had nothing to do with the death of the Soviet Union.

>Hurr durr my SDI and conventional military spending

Even the Soviets knew that shit would have never actually worked.