The Grapes of Wrath was banned in the USSR because showed poor people had cars

Re:The Grapes of Wrath was banned in the USSR because showed... by WalterBright on Friday January 20, 2023 @01:11AM (#34449769)

Perhaps you don't realize the scope of the catastrophe in Germany. The cities were all bombed and burned flat. Industry was destroyed, anything left of the industry was looted. The dams were broken. A generation of German men was wiped out.

And yet W Germany rose to the most dominant economy in Europe by 1970. Britain was not and did not. The key difference was Germany embraced free markets, and Britain turned away from free markets.

How about Japan? Bombed, burned, and nuked to the ground. An island nation with no natural resources. By the 1970s it rebounded to be the leading industrial powerhouse behind the US.

Have any communist countries achieved such success? Any socialist ones?

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Re:The Grapes of Wrath was banned in the USSR because showed... by woodruffw on Friday January 20, 2023 @01:27AM (#34449835)

This is ahistorical to a fault: the UK introduced postwar social reforms that were already present in continental European nations. Britain's industrial decline can be traced to long before the Marshall Plan, and even the war: it's tied inextricably to the UK's "colonial prestige" politics, including the desire to run a massive and expensive empire long after its extractive value had been maximized.

> Have any communist countries achieved such success? Any socialist ones?

I don't know why you're fixated on this. Again: nobody in this thread has made this claim. The only thing under discussion is whether it's reasonable to naively treat postwar Europe's recovery as a triumph of capitalism, which it isn't.

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