I think the parent poster is just trying to count the total number of functional democratic vs. {nonfunctional democratic, non-democratic} regimes at any given point in time. WWII didn’t create the USSR, so that doesn’t make the count go down; nor did those dictatorships they later propped up just come into existence. (Propping up newly-formed dictatorships when they emerge out of previously-stateless areas is more the US’s thing.)

But WWII did take a few rather large European empires with disenfranchised colonies, and turn their member states into independent, (at least temporarily) functional democratic nations. It also produced semi-global representative-democratic “treaty organizations” in the form of NATO and the UN, which, again, were at least temporarily functional and taken seriously and used to enact changes by the will of their members.

(Really, though, the member nations of NATO/the UN just all had a good temporary working relationship due to being either on the same side of the war, or being made powerless by the means of their defeat, so these bodies were just a formal representation of the way their leaders were already talking to one-another at the time. As soon as everyone in these nations got newer leaders, these bodies stopped “working”—because it was never the bodies themselves that functioned in the first place.)

> WWII did take a few rather large European empires with disenfranchised colonies, and turn their member states into independent, (at least temporarily) functional democratic nations.

Outside of the Axis powers .. did it? How? Which countries? The more I try to think of a list the more I come up with examples that were due primarily to local action (e.g. India), their own wars (Kenya, Algeria), or happened a lot later than 1945.

True, but WWII was the precipitating event nonetheless, partly because nations like the UK could barely afford to hang onto their empires, and were increasingly dependent on the US which was generally anti-colonialist (if inconsistently so).

>The other side had a tendency to prop up dictators as long as they opposed the Communists.

As opposed to the democratic governments the Soviet Union supported? Give me a break here. The Soviet Union pushed for disastrous political systems based on their own autocratic socialist model, and funded ideological guerrillas to destabilize the nation if it didn't wholly adopt their ideology.

I cannot understand how people can look at history and be completely blind to the actions of Soviet Union.

Why did you take the parent post as an example of anyone being completely blind to the actions of the Soviet Union? The points seems to be that treating the immediate Post-WWII era as some high point for democracy is... well, requiring further support than is immediately obvious, anyway, since there were two victorious sides, one of which wasn't democratic at all, and the other which supported autocracies all over the world, too.

Pointing out that the spread of democracy post-WWII was mostly confined the defeated states in that conflict, and that neither victorious side did much to support democracy elsewhere and even the "free world" often did the opposite, isn't a defense of the Soviets.

> The Soviet Union pushed for disastrous political systems based on their own autocratic socialist model, and funded ideological guerrillas to destabilize the nation if it didn't wholly adopt their ideology.

That's the point, though. The USA did exactly the same thing:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Condor

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iran%E2%80%93Contra_affair

I am not blind to the bad actions of the USSR. I'm just also not blind to the bad ones of the USA and its allies during the same time period.

>I cannot understand how people can look at history and be completely blind to the actions of Soviet Union.

It's in the interest of those who control the present narrative.