This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.
Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.
We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:
-
Shaming.
-
Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.
-
Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.
-
Recruiting for a cause.
-
Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.
In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:
-
Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.
-
Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.
-
Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.
-
Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.
On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
I agree that other countries have some agency, but there is a long history of US-backed regime change in Latin America. That can have chilling effects on any government that wants to do something the US won't like.
The United States may have a much more "hands off" form of imperialism, but it is historically willing and able to turn a country into a basket case if it furthers its economic interests. This limits the live options available to countries in Latin America, even if they still have agency within that limited set of options.
On a historical front, your long history of US-backed regime change is predominately the Cold War, when Latin America underwent a number of civil wars, with coups and attempted coups by various factions. If there is to be a chilling effect here, it would be because everything is chilling, not because the Americans are uniquely so.
More to the point, your list is anachronistic. There's a reason that only two cited events are after 1980, with one of them being the Panama invasion against a person who had functionally couped the Panamanian government, and the other being that time when the modern Venezuelan government ousted its own opposition-led legislature (which did not, in fact, involve a coup). This is neither a particularly long history, except by the short-history paradigm of Americans, nor is it particularly recent history, and the parts that are recent don't particularly mesh with the narrative of the past history. It does, however, miss all the other sorts of oustings / coups / palace maneuverings, which would be relevant to determine how much of something is a relatively important factor versus not.
On the agency-front, your framing is demonstrating the issue Nybbler was raising. Simply calling something like the Cold War military coups US-backed regime change is a framing device to re-characterize what would normally just be recognized as a internal government coup- which Latin America has had a history of without American involvement. While it fits a narrative, since it can imply that the coup governments wouldn't have occurred / wouldn't have been successful / wouldn't have done as they did without the Americans, this obscures rather than addresses the point that the post-WW2 Latin America had a number of civil wars and active insurgencies going on, for reasons the Americans were not responsible for, and that the Latin American governments have had a history of government instability- i.e. regime change- both before and after the American moment.
While Latin American nationalism, especially of the leftist slant, does like to rally against the Yankees, it doesn't really address that large parts of Latin American countries were willing to kill eachother, and that willingness or ability didn't come from the Americans.
This cultural chauvenism denies due credit to all the Latin Americans, who have a long and well established historical and contemporary records of turning regional countries into
breadbasketsbasket cases in further of personal or ideological interests, without needing the assistance of the Americans to do so and often in direct opposition to the yankees.Down with Yankee-centricism! Give the Latinos their credit!
More options
Context Copy link
Apparently not, since the US has famously not been fond of Communism and Latin America loves it.
Chilling effects don't mean no one will ever do something. When people talk about "chilling effects" on free speech, they're not saying literally zero people will speak their mind, just that fewer will speak their mind than would have without the chilling effects.
There are plenty of examples like the US orchestrated 1954 coup against President Jacobo Árbenz in Guatemala, the 1973 coup against President Salvador Allende in Chile, the backing of the Contras against the Sandinista government of Nicaragua in the 1980s, and the failed Bay of Pigs Invasion of Cuba in 1961. Any Latin American government wanting to be and remain socialist, not only had the challenge of propping up a socialist government but also of resisting US plots, and very few had resources to do both.
Add in the use of Structural Adjustment Programs by the IMF and World Bank, as a means of insuring liberalization of trade and privatization in countries that wanted loans, and you have a recipe where the number of live options for most Latin American countries were quite small. So yes, they had agency, but it was very much constrained by the circumstances of international relations.
We're not talking about "literally zero"; we're talking about a Latin American affinity for Communism. Claiming that this is due to the US's policies, as @Lizzardspawn did, is what I am objecting to. Your proposed mechanism for the US affecting Latin American countries would tend to result in a reduction in affinity of Latin American countries for Communism, not an increase.
I was saying that there is state level distrust of oxygen in Latin America if US is breathing it. Unfortunately US is somewhat competent at managing an economy so the good economic ideas are tainted by default.
In the historical context, I suspect your thesis (as I perceive it) is largely overstated, and gives the American / Monroe Doctrine undue credit for much more banal causes for Latin American socialist theory credence.
At the end of the day, while Communism as a theory started as an urbanized worker ideology that believed it could/would only occur in developed industrial countries, communism as a practiced revolutionary ideology was primarily an agrarian peasant-based force, and often garnering the most support when focused on land reforms and relations between tenet farmers - landowners rather than factor workers - capitalists. While Communist themes / vibes of being tied to heavy industry were part of the early marxist theory and the Soviet Union's approach to industrialization, the general framework was agrarian peasant revolution -> revolutionary victory -> then industrialization. The agrarian angle was the dominant focus from the Soviet revolution, to the Maoist, to the Asian uprisings such as Vietnamese and in Latin American as well.
While there are overlaps with the American history in Latin America- the plantation corporations most notoriously- at the end of the day the latin american peasant-elite relations were due to local conditions and the post-colonial/independence political patronage systems, not the American involvement during the Monroe Doctrine. The American latin american sphere of influence worked through the pre-existing political structures, rather than creating and enforcing them, and while the Americans were the associated 'capitalist outsider', their actual role in the lived experiences was interchangeable (and, in various places, interchanged). Local elites wanted the investments (and bribes) no matter who provided, and outsiders wanted the fruits of exploitation for non-ideological reasons.
This structural dynamic matters to the appeal of socialism in Latin America because the structural incentive occurs regardless of the Monroe Doctrine. While the Monroe Doctrine makes the most common outsider the American Yankee, the absence of it just substitutes another outsider willing to make deals with the elites who run the land system, and the revolutionary appeal is based on the land system abuses, not the outsider it's done in service of.
The Monroe Doctrine absolutely had longer-term blowback, and it made the US a natural/obvious outside foe for various pan-Latin American groups to use as a unifying against, but that's a geopolitical foil consequence, not an economic theory consequence. Revolutionary socialist influence are popular in Latin America because large agrarian populations were suppressed and exploited by local elite patronage networks selling their labors to outside producers, and those sales and the system that kept them going would have continued regardless of the Monroe Doctrine.
(And, arguably, been worse had Latin America been more up for colonial exploitation more akin to Africa, but that's a not particularly relevant alternative.)
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link