@yogthos Soviet "military advisors" were all around Asia, Europe and America these times, including Vietnam, Korea, Yemen etc while KGB managed many of the terrorist organisations like PLO, RAF etc. People like Abu Nidal (Fatah) and Brigitte Monhaupt (RAF) were supplied arms through Eastern Germany and Poland, and frequently went into hiding in Warsaw and East Berlin.

@yogthos So at best, USSR involvement into state terrorism matched that of CIA. In reality, it was much more aggressive, since CIA never organised outright terrorist acts on USSR territory as KGB did with RAF in Germany.

@kravietz I'm talking about the kinds of regimes USSR and US supported. Pretty much every US backed regime is either a dictatorship or a terrorist one. USSR created socialist governments like the one Vietnam still has today. So, that's a pretty big difference between the two.

@yogthos And also USSR created other socialist regimes, such as those in Poland, Romania and other Warsaw pact countries, then Afghanistan (1978-90), East Turkestan Republic, Mongolia - all of which were authoritarian and ceased to exist.

@kravietz right, and compare those to the regimes US created. Afghanistan under USSR had things like gender equality, free education, social services, and modernization. Under US, Afghanistan got the Taliban. That's kind of my whole point here.

Not saying that either USSR or US occupying countries is a good thing, but saying they were the same is false equivalence.

@yogthos Under US Afghanistan got Taliban?! You got your calendar quite wrong.

1973 coup d'etat, overthrow of king Shah, president Daoud takes over, famous US embassy evacuation photos; Daoud resists alignment to both US and USSR policy.

1978 Saur Revolution - assassination of president Daoud - political repressions on unprecedented scale, partial alignment to Soviet policies.

1979 Soviet occupation, rise of anti-Soviet guerilla who later gave birth to Al Quaeda and Taliban

@yogthos Saur revolution president Babrak Kamal later said:

> It was the greatest crime against the people of Afghanistan. Parcham's leaders were against armed actions because the country was not ready for a revolution... I knew that people would not support us if we decided to keep power without such support.

@yogthos And just looking at the economic side - this is Afghanistan GDP per capita, where you can see the beginning of Soviet invasion and the beginning of Western

@kravietz GDP doesn't measure quality of life, and it's a pretty useless metric that gets a lot of abuse in my opinion.

@kravietz Afghanistan is certainly exploited a lot more efficiently by US, and capitalism is an excellent tool for that.

@yogthos It's not the best metric but sometimes it's the only we have. Propose a better one if you don't like it.

The problem with US and USSR is that both had pretty aggressive and imperialist international policy. Both staged coups, created puppet states, staged political assassinations and used criminals.

@yogthos If you don't like GDP per capita, propose a better metric for comparison. For some countries it's the only metric we have I'm afraid because it's easy to estimate even if the country in question doesn't have this data, or just lies.

@kravietz GDP is a fundamentally wrong measure because it says moly measures economic output. High economic output often has strong correlation with exploitation of the local population.

PQL is a far better measure https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Physical_Quality_of_Life_Index

And I agree that emperialism of both USSR and US is a net negative for the countries subject to it. Just saying that one is a lot worse than the other.

@yogthos Comparison of standards of living doesn't support this theory.

Also, you can't really argue a system was better the other if it defaulted economically and politically, which essentially means it lost any competition by walkover.

@yogthos PQL has the same issue as USSR: it does not exist.

It was proposed in 1980 but I cannot find any systematic calculations so how could you use it for for comparison?

It's a bit like saying faster-than-light engine is better than ion thruster for space travel :)

@kravietz you were asking to propose a better measure, and I think it is one. The fact that it's not widely used is a separate problem.

@yogthos Well I asked for an alternative to use in this discussion

@kravietz there really isn't a good one, but lack of an alternative doesn't make GDP into a meaningful or a useful metric.

@yogthos But it does, at least to compare very poor with moderate or high income countries. GDP fail when comparing high income countries certainly.

@kravietz it also fails when comparing poor countries. You can have a country where majority of the population is poor and miserable that produces high GDP.

In fact, there tends to be a direct correlation between the two because exploiting people in a country will result in a high GDP.

So it's measuring the completely wrong thing. GDP tells you nothing about working conditions, social services, education, or free time of the citizenry.

@yogthos My Mastodon instance crashes on picture uploads so you can find the chart here https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=gdp+per+capita+afghanistan