9746208d   
   XPost: soc.culture.baltics, soc.culture.czecho-slovak, soc.culture.russian   
   From: holman@mappi.helsinki.fi   
      
   In article <0uos94dq7v906uec3reo82rc3ojdcv5ugd@4ax.com>, James A. Donald   
    wrote:   
      
      
   >   
   > True barter is voluntary.  The "barter" trade did not   
   > take place with anyone who looked much like a volunteer.   
   > Now if the Soviets had set up similar arrangements with   
   > various countries that they were wooing but were in no   
   > position to threaten militarily, then you would have an   
   > argument.   
   >   
   > Further, Soviet ideology made true barter anathema to   
   > them - for the reasons explained by Eugene Holman in   
   > this thread.  In the paranoid worldview of socialists,   
   > Eugene Holman's worldview, true barter is colonialism,   
   > imperialism, domination, and conquest is a form of war,   
   > which must be answered by war.   
      
   The part about war and my world view is nonsense. In trade relations there   
   is a conflict between the desire to maintain an asymmetry by which one   
   side gains more than the other, and the desire to achieve fairness, by   
   which the goods and services exchanged are of roughly equal monetary   
   value. The most obvious way to rectify such a relationship is for the   
   party being taken advantage of to break it off. Another one would be for   
   it to require the party that was benefitting more from the deal to render   
   it other, non-commercial services. That is what the USSR did. Finland was   
   bound by the 1948 Treaty of Friendship, Cooperation, and Mutual   
   Cooperation to stay out of NATO and be in a limited mutual alliance with   
   the USSR in the case of war with West Germany or one of it allies. It was   
   also informally obligated to go easy on its criticism of the USSR and its   
   policies, and to promote Soviet policies, such as the conference to   
   finalize the results of WW II *and* internationlize human rights abuses,   
   that Finland regarded as compatible with its geopolitical interests.   
   Finally, Finland served as a concrete example that countries that had been   
   bitter enemies a generation ago could, even if they had different   
   socio-economic systems, work out a system that allowed them to peacefully   
   coexist and benefit from each other's strengths and weaknesses.   
      
   In this sense Finlandization was a two-way street. Both countries had to   
   make compromises and do some creative work to make it work. Which country   
   benefitted the most from it is by no means clear, but it is an undeniable   
   fact that Finland, far more industrialized since the early 1950s than   
   Denmark or Norway, but with a population of approximately the same size,   
   and a prosperous democracy, exists and prospers, while the USSR has been   
   consigned, along with its umpteen-kazillion unsellable baggy men's suits   
   of Finnish manufacture, to the trash-heap of history.   
      
      
      
   Regards,   
   Eugene Holman   
      
   --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05   
    * Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)