Now that we've done
a series of videos on America's interventions
during the Cold War in Korea, and Cuba,
and Vietnam, I thought it would be fun
just to think a little bit about whether there
are any patterns here. And once again, in all
of these history videos, you have to take
anything I say-- or really anything anyone
says about history-- with a grain of salt even
when it comes to the facts. Obviously, the facts
can only be written by the people who survive. Who knows what might have gone
on behind scenes that never got documented by
the historians. So you have to take everything
with a grain of salt. And even in this
video, I'll talk about, maybe, some patterns, or
some themes, that I've seen, don't take that
as just the truth. Think about it for yourself, if
it makes sense, it makes sense. If it doesn't, try
to look into it more, and try to come up with your
own themes, or your patterns, or things that you
can learn from. So the general pattern
across all of these, is that before the
US got involved, and before a communist-leaning
regime got involved, these were all, in some
ways, subjugated populations. In Korea, it was
subjugated by the Japanese. It was a Japanese colony. In Cuba, it was subjugated
by the Batista government. And this was a dictatorship,
a corrupt dictatorship, and it was heavily influenced
by the United States. You could almost view it
as United States influence, a United States colony, they had
so much influence with Batista. And in the case of Vietnam,
it was a French colony. So you can imagine, in
all of these situations the existing rulers
were not that popular. People were looking for
rulers who could liberate them from the messes they
were in inside of that. On top of that-- and this
comes to the whole discussion of capitalism versus
communism-- you can imagine that when
you are colonized, or when you are in
a corrupt regime, you do have people
accruing wealth. So there are people accruing
wealth, some of whom will get it without
being that legitimate. And so these
circles are the size of different people's wealth. So you can imagine, in
Korea under Japanese rule, maybe there were
a few people who were successful by being
legitimate entrepreneurs, but there were
probably a whole bunch of people who were
successful by just, kind of, sucking up to the
colonial powers, in the case of a corrupt
regime, doing things that were corrupt
with the regime, using the regime it to get
undue power in a certain market, and it's always a combination. In any of these countries,
there were probably some entrepreneurs
and some other people who got wealth, maybe,
with good means, and then some other people,
who under these regimes got wealth under
questionable means, maybe because they sucked
up to the corrupt regime. Or maybe, they even did
outright criminal activity, which was probably the
case in the Batista regime. You probably did have
people who were just outright criminals doing
very well for themselves. Same thing in Vietnam. Some of the Vietnamese
who really were aligned with the French, probably
got extra favors, and so their wealth wasn't
necessarily due to innovation or competence, but
really just where they fit into the
political order. Maybe some other people
did have legitimate wealth. So you imagine, when any
of these type of situations start to emerge from
subjugation-- so you start having independence movements
in all of these situations. You could imagine it's a very
popular notion to run on, and depending on how true it is. But it's a very popular
notion to run on, to tell people, look, you've
seen all of these people who've gotten questionable
wealth, and maybe, some of these people who got
questionable wealth got it by being aligned with our
subjugators, by being, to some degree,
traitors to our people. And once again, maybe not
all the people, but you could see how it's a popular
line for someone coming to power when you're
emerging from independent-- or emerging into independence--
to say, why don't we redistribute wealth? Why don't we take the
wealth from this person right here, who got it
in questionable means, and redistribute it to
the rest of the society? Why don't we take it from
this person over here and redistribute it to
the rest of society? Why don't we do that
with this person here and redistribute that
wealth to the rest of society? And if you're looking for
a political ideology that seems to fit with this idea of
trying to correct things that maybe looked wrong
during the colonial or the subjugated rule,
communism seems to fit that. It's kind of a
redistributing of wealth, or maybe the state
takes over all wealth, or maybe it's something in
between where it's socialist, where the state is
redistributing wealth fairly aggressively, but
you still have, kind of, the underpinnings
of capitalism. And so you could imagine
that communism-- especially to a population where you have
many, many, many poor people, the wealth concentrated in a
few people, many of them who are aligned with the old
regimes-- communism at least seems like a popular notion. And you have people who ride
this nationalistic communistic feeling. In the case of Cuba, you have
people like Fidel Castro. In Vietnam you have
people like Ho Chi Minh. And then Korea is a
little bit different, because you did have a communist
nationalist independence movement, but Kim Il-Sung
wasn't necessarily the leader of that movement. The Soviets actually didn't want
any of those people in charge, any of the nationalist
communists, the leaders of those movements. They kind of marginalized
them, and installed Kim Il-Sung probably because he was
more aligned with them, but he was communist. Now the reality is,
these guys come in under these very egalitarian,
equality for all, let's get retribution
for the wrongs that were done to us before,
but probably all of them start to not just redistribute
wealth from people who might have gotten
it in bad ways, but they're also just
redistributing wealth generally, maybe because it's
just a popular thing to do, or maybe because these
people didn't give them proper support. So they're getting retribution
on their political enemies, as opposed to just kind of
doing it for social good. So they might do it from people
who have legitimate wealth, and so those people
aren't too happy about it. And they ride this kind of
communist egalitarian movement to install themselves. And instead of just being
a purely Marxist state, they want to be more
Marxist-Leninist, where you have this
Communist Party that has this continuous
revolution, which is a justification for them
to never hold real elections and always stay in power. So by no means is
this a rationale why these people are legitimate. But what happened in
every one of these cases is that the United States was
in the middle of the Cold War, they feared the
spread of communism. Communism tended to correlate
with a non-free state. It doesn't have to be that
way, but every time communism was implemented, it
also was these kind of authoritarian
rule, no democracy. And you could also
imagine, there were many capitalists in
the United States, who for their own selfish reasons,
were afraid of capitalism spreading to the United States,
because maybe their wealth would be redistributed. But regardless of what the
justification, whether it was a more noble wanting people
to have freedom of expression, freedom to own
property, or whether it was the more
selfish, that hey, we don't want our own wealth
to be somehow taken away, or it just might have
been a balance of power between the US and
the Soviet Union, that every time a country
fell to communism it's somehow the US losing some
power in the world. Regardless of the
US's rationale, they always say, OK,
these guys are communist, we're going to take the
other side of the equation. So the US ends up
supporting Syngman Rhee in South Korea,
who we know was not the best character in the world. They end up supporting Diem
in South Vietnam, who we also know was not
necessarily the most savory person in the world. In the case of Cuba,
the US, at least-- they did support Batista
while he was in power, but we saw in that video
that Kennedy later came out and said, you know
Batista was a pretty bad dude, and it was probably a
big mistake for the US to support him. But the US goes
on the other side, and they support the exiles
against Fidel Castro. And here, the Cuban
exiles they're not-- they are definitely not in the
category of Syngman Rhee or Diem, and they
probably favor democracy, and overall, good people. But what they probably
did feed Kennedy is a story that Fidel
Castro wasn't as popular as he actually was. And he probably was
more popular especially after the revolution, because
he had this egalitarian-- people were getting over Batista,
anybody but Batista they would be happy about. Fidel Castro was this
charismatic leader who was kind of
working for the poor, at least it looked like he
was working for the poor. So at least in the get
go, especially the Kennedy administration
might have been fed an overly optimistic
view that got them involved in the Bay of
Pigs Invasion and all of that. But this is just
the general pattern that happened every time. And every time, it ended
up in either a US defeat or a stalemate. Take whatever lessons
there are from this, but it is a kind of an
interesting pattern that had happened multiple times,
pretty much every engagement that we had during the Cold War.