Pattern of US Cold War interventions

now that we've done a series of videos and on America's interventions during the Cold War in Korea 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 survived who knows what might have gone on behind scenes that never got documented by the historians so you have to take everything with the grain of salt and even when you know in this video I'll talk about maybe some patterns or some themes that I've seen don't take that is 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 u.s. got involved and before a kind of a a communist leaning regime got involved these were all in some ways subjugated populations in Korea it was subjugated by the Japanese it was the Japanese colony in Cuba it was subjugated by the Batista government and this was a dictatorship a corrupt dictatorship and was heavily influenced by the United States you could almost view it as United States influence they had so knighted States colony they had so much influence with Batista and in the case of Vietnam it was a French colony so you could imagine in all of these situations the existing rulers were not that popular people were looking for rulers who could kind of liberate them from from the messes they were inside of that on top of that and this comes to the whole discussion of capitalism versus communism you could 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 who will get it without without being kind of that legitimate and so these circles are kind of the size of different people's well so you could imagine in Korea under under Japanese rule maybe there were a few people who were successful by being legitimate preneur but there are probably a whole bunch of people who are 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 to get undue power in a certain market and it's always a combination in any 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 with under questionable means maybe because they sucked up to the corrupt regime or maybe they even did did outright criminal activity which was probably the case in the Batista regime you probably did have people who are just outright criminals doing very well for themselves same thing in Vietnam the baby the Vietnamese some of the Vietnamese who really kind of 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 what other people did have 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 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 have gotten questionable wealth and maybe some of these people who got questionable wealth got it by being aligned with our subjugator z-- 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 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 a political ideology that seems to fit with this idea of of trying to correct things that maybe looked during the colonial or the subjugated rule communism seems to fit that it's kind of a redistribute redistributing of wealth or maybe the state takes overall wealth or or maybe something in between we're socialists where the state is redistributing wealth fairly aggressively but you still have kind of on the underpinnings of capitalism and so you can imagine that communism especially to a population that where you have all many many many poor people well 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 people like Fidel Castro in in Vietnam you have people like Ho Chi Min Ho Chi Minh and then Korea's 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 that the Soviets actually didn't want any of those people in charge any of the the kind of the nationalist communists the leaders of those movement they kind of marginalize them and installed Kindle song probably because he was more aligned with them but he was communist kim ill sung now the reality is these guys come in under these very egalitarian you know 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 as opposed to just kind of doing it for for social good so you know 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 date they kind of 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 kind of 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 fear 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 distribute redistributed but regardless of what the justification whether it was a more noble wanting people to have freedom of expression freedom of freedom to own property or whether it was a more selfish than hey we don't want our own wealth to be somehow taken away or it was just might have been a balance of power between the US and the Soviet Union that every time a community felt it communism it's somehow the u.s. losing some power in the world regardless of the us's rationale they always say okay these guys are communists we're going to take the other side of the equation so the u.s. ends up supporting the u.s. ends up supporting Syngman Rhee Syngman Rhee in South Korea who we know was not the best character in the world they end up supporting diem they end up supporting diem in South Vietnam who we also know was not the necessarily the most savory person in the world in the case of Cuba the u.s. at least they did support Batista while he was in power but we saw in that video that Kennedy later came on says you know Batista was a pretty bad dude and it was probably a big mistake for the u.s. to support him but the u.s. goes on the other side and they support the exiles against Fidel Castro and here the Cuban exiles they're not I wouldn't they're 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 kind of 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 in the get go the the the especially the Kennedy administration might have been fed an overly optimistic view that kind of 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 u.s. defeat or a stalemate and it you know 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