/cwg/ - Cold War General

But it wasn't celebration for long. People wanted him out by 1989. He basically shot himself and the USSR in the foot.

I think people give Gorbachev way too much credit. The USSR collapsed largely because of the plummeting prices of crude oil and a large chunk of resources being tied to the Afghan war. It would've collapsed even if it had a hardline Stalinist in charge, it would be just more bloody.

Why did Afghanistan kill the Soviet Union but America survived Vietnam?

Because America had a killer economy to start with, extremely diversified between agriculture, manufacturing, finance, high technology, services etc. USSR was a one sector shithole that completely relied on oil, much like modern Russia.

bump

I don't understand why russia didn't launch a first strike from cuba

if they weren't prepared to fire at that point, why enter into an arms race at all
it would have been more sensible to focus on second strike

The Sixties miniseries by CNN is pretty good. Pretty U.S.centric, admittedly, but it examines several domestic issues during the Cold War.

The Ten Thousand Day War is a good doc on Vietnam. Pretty long iirc, ~10 1 hour episodes. It covers the important bits anyways.

They never wanted to enter a nuclear war, it was mostly used as a leverage to force the US to pull their missiles from Turkey.

The only person who genuinely wanted a nuclear war was Fidel Castro because he was an egocentric fuckwad who thought the planet revolves around his crocodile infested shithole of an island. He was genuinely asspained when the Russians pulled the rockets while rest of the planet felt relieved.

Gorbachev was actually trying to save the Soviet Union.

>US shown to be larger than USSR
typical brainwashed fatburger revisionist history

None of his actions seem to indicate that. Can you explain?

>not understanding basic mercator projection
On a map, the US is larger than the USSR was.

>It's a Jimmy Carter episode

Damn

>On a map, the US is larger than the USSR was.

Mercator scales you up but Russia is still the biggest nation in the world today and USSR was even bigger in territory.
The projection would simply apply the same scaling constant to both nations but if A is bigger than B, it will remain so after you multiply both by c, unless c is negative or zero.

This. He worked his hardest to prolong it. Naturally after all those years of consecutively older first general secretaries he wanted to change the falling party. He's still a commie although a bit let despotic. Of course now he's an icon of democratic values because people have short memory.

Is "the biggest murderer of the 20th century was Mao" just a meme or true?

>every nation is scaled the same on any given projection
Found the retard

No one murdered harder

Does anyone play Twilight Struggle here?

I'm not really an expert but no one else seems to answering you're questions, forgive me if I fuck up some facts.

>China's history under Mao and after
It was really shity, during the Great Leap Forward (1958-1961) and Cultural Revolution (1966-1976) gangs of thugs, many of whome were highschoolers, would go around confiscating and collectivizing property and basically killing anyone deemed to be bourgeoisie. By the 1970's, around the time of Nixon's visits cooler heads were beginning to prevail and Mao was pretty much just a figurehead.

>How Vietnam happened in more detail
Basically after the frogs fucked up and lost Indochina Vietnam was partitioned into a capitalist south backed by the west and communist north run by the successors of the Viet Mihn. Both countries were scheduled for an election in 1957 that would unify the country under either capitalism or socialism, since the north had a much higher population and many south Vietnamese supported the cause it was obvious to the US that the commies would win the election. So the US cancelled the election and guaranteed S. Vietnam's independence, fighting broke out between the two states and the Viet Cong rebellion began in the south, this prompted LBJ the deploy troops in 1964 and begin what the west calls "the Vietnam War".

>The Iranian revolution and general ME history in this time as it relates to the West
I don't know enough about this topic, as far as I know Israel fought it's neighbors a buch of times between 1948 and the mid 1970's, and a bunch of revolutions and foreign backed coups occurred culminating in the Soviet-Afghan War and the Iran-Iraq War (the later being extremely underrated).

>The "Year of Africa" and how the continent of Africa operated politically during the Cold War (Angola, Congo/Zaire, South Africa, etc.)
I don't know much about Africa during this time period besides the Rhodesian and Kenyan Bush Wars.

>many of whome were highschoolers, would go around confiscating and collectivizing property and basically killing anyone deemed to be bourgeoisie
So a Clockwork Orange?

>I'm not sure there exists any other video resources of such high quality to learn from, but anything you can recommend would be appreciated.

Brah, you should check out these things called "books", you're gonna freak

Most of the deaths weren't genocidal in nature, they were more like catastrophic failures that, by virtue of occuring in China, killed people by the millions.

To be fair a significant amount of China's history is composed of comically massive death counts that seem a decimal off compared to what happens in the rest of the world. But Mao was still unqualified to make most of his decisions.

>The projection would simply apply the same scaling constant to both nations
Lolno. On a map, due to projection, the United States appears larger than Russia and the USSR.

Except the Russia on the map is scaled up compared to US and even if you lined them up along the same latitude, it would only remove the scaling out of the equation because both of them would introduce the same disortion error.
Thus, they'd be back to original ratio where the US is smaller.

he didn't ditch communism Yeltsin did

Gorbachev just wanted to open trade to capitalist countries because the economy was stagnating

>Gorbachev wanted to created pseudo-free market because his economy was collapsing
>didn't ditch communism

Stagnating != collapsing

the economy though could do better was still stable

didn't really collapse until Yeltsin truly ditched it

USA had the M46 in the 50s.

Anyone know what that is?