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>>As to Reagan ... if you believe the perpetuation of the USSR would have been a good thing then Reagan was definitely a bad thing. I don't and he wasn't. Not a big fan in some areas, but on the Evil Empire he had it right. Remember which way people ran when the wall went down and how quick the statues came down.
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>He got them down the wrong way and for the wrong reasons - and some other analyses mention that the system there has already crumbled and would fall by itself. But that would have taken away the joys of victory, wouldn't it.

I think the victory dance was pretty restrainted considered the blood and treasure that went into it. I don't think any other nation in history has ever done so little gloating at the end of a war as the US did at the end of the cold war. Really didn't get into a lot of kicking them when they were down. ( their own citizens were doing quite enough happy-dancing. I also don't think there was ever a war lost where the citizens of the losing side were so happy they lost )

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>>I don't know where you were from 1980 - 88 but as to the arms race petering out that just wasn't the case.
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>1980 - 88? Aren't those the Reagan-Thatcher years? That's when the rearmament began. It was about to peter out, but no, the country wanted someone who'd slam a fist on the table. And who could spin anything into a victory.
>

I just question the idea that somehow the cold war was about to peter out. Sure, didn't look that way from where I was standing. USSR had devolved into a vor-ocracy and the party no longer could even pretend to be anything other than a new aristocracy ruling with the knout, but there was no serious diminution of military tension in the Carter years. Reagan came in at a time when Soviet troops had just invaded Afghanistan (where the flies were about to conquer the flypaper ) That wasn't exactly a sign of anything petering out.

>>Everyone was armed to the teeth, so it wasn't about throw weight or the number of missles anymore, but it was about a hundered proxy wars so that the missles wouldn't fly. And the subtext was about whether or not the West would accept that this totalitarian abomination would continue.
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>Whereas its own totalitarian abominations, like Pinochet, Reza and who knows how many others were perfectly fine, they were our thugs.
>

A dictatorship that disappears political dissidents is a terrible thing. But a state-as-prison-camp that uses family hostages, barbed wire and guard towers to imprison *everyone* , on top of having a police mechanism at least as oppressive is stepping it up a notch. It was a lot easier to get out of Chile or Iran than East Germany, Romania or the USSR.

>My apologies if I'm mixing rants here, but it's the totalitarian==USSR==socialism mantra that mixes them, trying to paint the image of these things being not just properties of each other (yes, USSR was totalitarian in many ways, and yes USSR was a socialist country, but that doesn't mean it was totalitarian because it was socialist, it was actually a contradiction in itself). Actually, I'm announcing Dragan's rule: whoever uses the totalitarian/etatist nature of Stalinism as a representative of socialism, either loses or gives me the equal chance to apply Spanish inquisition as a valid representative of Christianity, and fascism/colonialism as a valid representative of capitalism.

I don't equate socialism and totalitarianism at all. And I don't consider the Union of Soviet *Socialist* Republics as anything other than an oligarchy. The pretention to a workers' state was theirs. We didn't believe it for a minute.

Voluntary socialism involving basic human rights is certainly a legitimate voluntary choice for a society. That has nothing to do with the USSR in its history or practice.


>>Carter's peopel - notabley Zbiggy - accepted the advance of Soviet power as inevitable. Reagan - and good ol' Bill Casey - didn't believe it. They upped the ante and pushed the Soviets into bankruptcy (albeit without knowing how sucessful they were being.) But don't think for a minute the USSR just fell - it was pushed. Historical inevitablity wasn't so inevitable when the right people refused to believe it.
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>They could have dragged along for a number of years more - the push just made it happen a bit earlier. Stronger pushes didn't do it before.

The important thing is to push at the tipping point.

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>Just don't dismiss good ol' Zbig too early. He invented the mujahedeen in Afghanistan, just to give the USSR their own Vietnam: http://emperors-clothes.com/interviews/brz.htm; he knew the effects of soldiers coming home from a pointless war upon the populace at home. Which means he appreciated the importance of masses ;).

I don't think Zbig deserves all that much credit for arming the mujahadeen. The Soviets only went into Afghanistan because Carter's sytematic bungling of foreign policy led them to believe they could get away with it.

I'm bored with the international banking thing. I understand you see it as capitalism, bad, oppressing poor victims - and we are probably both half right but it really isn't my area.

>>>You may try to reduce it to a bumper sticker soundbite, but it won't go away from the foundations of Judeo-Christian culture.
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>>But it will continue as a platitude rather than a methology. The problem in if someone is doing something that you believe must be stopped you cannot simply say "Well, I wouldn't want *him* to stop *me* so I will do unto him as I would have him do unto me.
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>Why would you not want to be stopped from doing something you think is wrong when done by someone else? "I wouldn't wand him to stop me, because I want to do something of the kind myself"?

Someone who commits an evil act does not want to be stopped. That is my point. The obviously *want* to do something so from their point of view they do not want interference. When I do something I want to do, I do not want interference. By the golden rule - in its most basic a literalist "bumper sticker" reading, I should not interfere in their actions as I would not want them to interfere in mine.

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>Probably the reason there are so many con artists in this country, and words "caveat emptor" must be somewhere in the Constitution. Nobody complains much because they don't abhor the deed - they'd like to preserve the right to attempt it themselves. They only complain when they're at the receiving end, and even then I've noticed some reservedness, as if they're trying not to change anything on principle, they just want this particular guy jailed.
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>Is that the Christianity or what?
>

You've got some personal issues with what you think 'this country' is all about and I really don't care to debate those. Your perceptions are as they are. I personally reject the generalization of a society of 300 million people as diverse as this one.

>> It is a moral cop out.
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>So instead we have a morally bold "we, as a country, will go on doing _this_ and _this_, because we don't see how anybody would imagine being able to stop us".
>

>>There were a whole lot of pretty ideological Communists who really did believe in something, who knows what they might have accomplished. But it wasn't the intervention that derailed that, but Lenin who had his own ideas about power.
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>And he was given ammunition by the whites, whereas they proved every point he made (about capitalism never ceding power peacefully, not after elections, not after a coup, so we must have a dictatorship by proletariat). He may have been sidelined too, or made into a propaganda tool without actual power. Imagine if Mahno's ideas were spread more widely instead.
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That was *fuedalism* that didn't want to yield power peacefully. <s>

Lenin never for one moment wanted a dictatorship of the proletariet. He wanted a dictatorship of the intellectual revolutionary cadre that knew what was best for the proletariat. That is exactly where he differed with his more ideological - and idealistic - competitors. He made this very clear in his own writing.

>> And the fact that so many of the Whites were scum didn't help. Russia was a prisoner of its history, so I guess I can see why the Marxist view of historical masses and helpless humans caught on.
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>I'm amazed over and over how it, as a method, fits with each time travel thing; practically all of them explain the aberrations in the timeline statistically, by history sorting itself out and things remaining the same with minor local differences... except in the crucial moments where the butterfly would have some effect. Asimov, Silverberg. The SF which tackles the matter differently, is, as a rule, comic: the Return to Future series, what The Hitchhiker's Guide says about the matter.
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>As to the inevitability of outcomes, I'm not that sure. A contradiction grows and builds pressure; it will have to burst somewhere - but the difference between possibilities of various outcomes, and their respective probabilities, may not be big. The marxist thinkers who explain certain outcomes as a direct result of the historic circumstances are usually right about the cause - but that was not a 1:1 relationship; the cause has produced that result, but it could have produced another, for a simple matter of people's perception of things; it's a material force which could have been swayed by an event.
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>For instance, a rock star has a bad day and overdoses because of simply being out of whack all day. The history of rock is changed. Now, given the number of stars and doses, it could happen to any one of them on any given day (which is the material reality), but which one of them, and when, will misstep, is practically random. And rock stars aren't exactly masses.
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>>And American bankers aren't the only team in the big leagues. The common language that drives international banking is money. That is one of the fiew shared cultural values.
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>Right, I didn't imply American - money is a whore anyway, knows no borders.
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>>>By Internet rules, you lost. You brought Hitler into dispute, twice.
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>><g> At least it was not to compare a current day politician with him because he voted against an increase of funding for some feel-good program <s>
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>Nor because another one compared will to talk with policy of appeasement.
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>Thinking this over, I wonder how much of that appeasement was done in the hope that Hitler will protect the West from the Spectre of Communism? He was up there on the frontier, more or less - the countries between Germany and USSR were stepped over in each war anyone ever had in that direction. I think there was some political pressure (from here too - there were important businesses, like IBM, Coca-Cola and who knows who else who had a lot of interest, and subsidiaries, in Germany) to leave him alone. Charles Lindbergh wasn't exactly an exception.

There is absolutely no doubt that a lot of support for appeasement came from factions in Britain and the US (Henry Ford, Lindbergh, Joe Kennedy, Lord Halifax, the Duke of Windsor) who had no problem with Hitler or Fascists and saw Communism as the enemy.

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>Which, if it was so, then makes Lenin right - capitalism would never cede power peacefully, not after elections, nor after a coup. It'd rather unleash nazism, hoping that it will spend itself on neutralizing Communism, than letting Communism become just a failed experiment. I think it was actually scared that it may work.

I don't think they were scared it would work but that it would spread. The problem with imposing redistribution of wealth on a society where it has already been distributed is that is inevitably involves coercion. Yeah, nobody with anything to lose is going to sign on to that voluntarily. Just isn't going to happen.

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>>>Or do you mean that we should watch for a silly illiterate guy with a fake Texan attitude?
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>>Yeah, Bush - Hitler . No doubt. Spot on. Is Perry writing your material is or that straight from Daily Kos
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>It's a weekend. I'm in no mood for this sort of games. The last guy who tried this on me was JVP and I never spoke with him again (actually, he tried it on Mike Helland, and when I tried to check whether he understood the implication - he did and then said something worse to me). If you think I can't think for myself, why are we talking? I usually take such allegations as an insult, but, it's a weekend.

I was simply saying that following anything about Hitler with a "Bush is a stupid cowboy" non-sequitur seemed unworthy of the generally interesting thinking you bring to these discussions and is more reminiscent of the sophomoric stuff for which you are notably *not* famous but some contributers and websites are.

I had no intention of offending you with the remark, though I do find it odd that you repeatedly threaten to not speak to me or go to another bar or whatever.

As I said before, I am interested in discussing history and ideas. I'm not really very interested in egos or their maintenance.