What bothers me most is that they spelled out 'eighty seven'' but then just wrote 75 right after. Is it too much to ask for both no nuclear wars and some consitency?
I feel like (a) if push came to shove some might have changed their answer and that (b) there are plenty of people here and now who give that answer--just sub in something different for communism.
in a diner in canada in the 90s I was talking with friends about anticommunist propaganda and an american biker came over to explain that when people in the US said better red than dead that they really meant it and that we would never really understand how that sort of fervor had shaped his country
I dunno. Kinda nice to *believe* in something, and that it's worth fighting for?
I mean, there's SOME space for the notion of "freedom" being an existential necessity as a noble idea, even if it's tied up into problematically simplistic BAD GUYS/GOOD GUYS Manichaeism, no?
This is why I can’t take people that want a communist revolution in the US seriously. Everybody in the US has an opinion on communism and it’s probably still at least 50% that would rather die and idk maybe 20% more that don’t want death but don’t want communism.
Am I badly misreading some sarcasm here or what? Both of those regimes came about through full on civil wars. The Chinese one lasted so long they had to call a temporary time-out for WWII.
A present-day thing that seems weird now is that in those days, "communism" was synonymous with "the Soviet Union" (China went largely un-talked-about) and now there are all those Republican anti-communists colluding with Russia. I know Russia isn't communist anymore but I'm surprised they do.
I feel like this needed to be coupled with a question that revealed what they thought the outcome of such a war would be. Did they (delusionally) believe that the US could "win" such a war in a way that their lives could continue in some semblance of normality? Did they understand M.A.D.?
i think there was a lot of propaganda aimed at making full on nuclear war seem if not reasonable at least vaguely survivable/winnable, like all the duck and cover shit had no other real purpose
See, I don't take that as meaning "willing to die". The kind of person who answers like that wholly believes that it's just the OTHER people who will die from... global nuclear war...
To be fair, it's not like anyone being asked this question imagined communist rule as homegrown & reflective of popular sentiment. It's normal to be willing to do whatever it takes to overthrow a foreign oppressor
I would want to know what the respondents knew about nuclear weapons, or what they assumed a nuclear war would do to their lives.
A lot of people back then were pretty ignorant about the subject -- see "Duck & Cover" for example.
I'm sure a large number would still prefer annihilation, but y'know.
Sorry, had a keyboard cat situation. Meant to say - Present people with two situations with a near zero probability of happening, and you'll get meaningless answers.
the good news is, surprisingly few Americans probably would have died in an all-out nuclear war in 1961, the bad news is that this was not widely understood in the missile gap era.
Honestly the fact that this was not understood in the missile gap era was almost certainly a good thing, if Curtis LeMay had an accurate idea of the sheer disparity between US and Soviet nuclear capabilities in 1961, he would have probably have tried to implement SIOP-62.
we have trouble wrapping our brains around the idea that yes, the US could have won WWIII up through the early 1960s, albeit at the consequence of inflicting something much deadlier than WWII on Europe and Asia.
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is what we said to justify our wartime conduct toward Koreans and Vietnamese
and then we had to pretend that applied to us too
Wonder how they'd poll today, all out war with Putin's Russia or be very happy living under his regime?
I'm thinking a fifty fifty split. If not 75 in favour of Putin's dictatorship.
I mean, there's SOME space for the notion of "freedom" being an existential necessity as a noble idea, even if it's tied up into problematically simplistic BAD GUYS/GOOD GUYS Manichaeism, no?
Try it in the US and it’s a full on civil war.
A lot of people back then were pretty ignorant about the subject -- see "Duck & Cover" for example.
I'm sure a large number would still prefer annihilation, but y'know.