Depends on your pov I guess
There is a lot of shit written about Russian in the West.
You can bet there is a lot of shit written about the West in Russia.
You say countries "choose to join", Russian will probably have a very different view on that
The existing members of NATO had very little to gain, geopolitically, from accepting the Eastern bloc into the treaty
other than keeping them out of Russia's hands. Which suggests that they might have been in Russia's hands (as opposed to being non-aligned countries).
How are education and healthcare in the UK not socialist institutions?
There's lots of things run publicly that people enjoy, like the state school system and health service. And lots of things run privately that people don't, like the energy companies, and other things tendered out to private contract that people hate, like rail networks and fucking G4S. The issue is does voting for a particular political party do anything to change the trajectory we are on? The Tories are finding it difficult to change anything about health and education, would a left-wing party be able to reign in energy companies or even stop giving contracts to G4S because they keep losing prisoners and generally fucking up.
Schools and the NHS are very popular and all major parties support them. It's the other bits, the bits that
have been left behind, that people didn't support (and, given we still have the NHS and still have nationally funded schools, I assume it's those other bits that you're pining fort). That's why, when they could have voted for Michael Foot in 83 they didn't, when they could have voted for Kinnock in 87 they didn't, when they could have voted for Kinnock (again) in 92 they didn't. The only time the people have elected a PM who wasn't a Tory since the 70's was Tony Blair, who had to get up on stage and say "GUYS, WE'RE CUTTING THAT NATIONALISING SHIT OUT, OK?" before they'd vote for him. He turned into a messianic warmonger and left, and since then it's back to business as usual - the boys in blue for us, please! We had 5 years of coalition cuts and austerity and, given the opportunity to vote for a softish-left candidate in Miliband, the people said "Nope, we want the Tories - and this time, sack off the Lib Dems, too". I mean, OK, FPTP makes this caricature more complicated than
I'm making out, but not dramatically so. The upshot is that people have had plenty of opportunity to move the country back towards the sort of society we had in the 70's - ie, a shit one - and they'd opted not to each and every time.
This to me is why people keep talking about "neoliberalism". It's as though neither traditional labour or traditional conservatives are getting anything out of voting. We're going one way and both parties can tinker with the edges but that's it.
Well, it's called the center ground. The people don't like Kinnock (let alone Foot), and they don't like Howard either. We had our big ideological battle in the 70's, and the glorious Hegelian dialectic result was that we have a largely pro-market government who feeds and heals people without the need for direct payment. It is, to some extent, a result of taking popular parts of both the left and the right and melding them together. Blair was the epitome of that, with Cameron being a descendent who dragged the Tories to the left socially somewhat. We are where we are because people like it, and they don't want another big ideological war.
_/¯