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Thursday, November 07, 2019

The Fall of the Wall, 30 years later

This week's post appears here.

4 comments:

Energyflow said...

I read often enough about the crucial mistakes made post cold war:nato expansion, war on terror, middle East wars, repeal of glass steagall. Russia was on its knees and would have entered Nato. Why expand and demonize. Let them into trade partnership with EU. Why just accept the Poles, etc. Are Russians any different really or is it just like middle east. We really just wanted oil resources. So they arre sitting on our oil, like Iran unter motassadeq in 1953 who wanted to nationalize BP Iran. Get rid of him. It is tranparent enough. World order but only in our interest. Of course Putin and Xi are making a global architecture to fit their needs. History's ebb and flow from order to chaos is one sided view of America. Russia sees perfect order where they pick up the pieces, making themselves the north south, east west nexus of a Eurasian community which Americans are free to join. If the West thinks they must create the new architecture but are stuck in old ways of doing things then they are decades behind. Obviously Russia had its crisis in the 90s, 75 years after the revolution. Ours is now. Dysfunctionalities abound. We await a puff of wind to blow it all down. Then ten to 20 years of perestroika, restructuring in humility and confusion before we can consider join the long matured Eurasian Union. By then perhaps our model will be fresh and have picked holes in their already staling globsal order. But we, as Putin in 2000, will have nothing to lose. So moves history in a pendulum from one power to the other and back again.

Bozon said...

Professor
Interesting summary as usual.

Attacking McCarthyism played into the hands of the Soviets.

You, even now, in Time Magazine, are mouthing anti McCarthy views, which at the time, back then, and even now mask the Soviets actual enormous hand in events both before and after 1950.

Thus, you are an ad hoc mouthpiece for the Soviets today. See Christopher Andrew, The Secret World, p 672, 673.

I will go with Andrew, formerly head of the department at Cambridge, on this.

All the best

David Kaiser said...

I have not denied any of the actual Soviet role in events. It's well documented that McCarthy never unmasked a single Communist. The people he named either weren't Communists, or had already been unmasked by some one else. McCarthy, like Trump, did enormous harm to American democracy.

Bozon said...

Professor
I agree with you about your rejoinder.

The point, however, is not only the damage done to innocent Americans by McCarthyism, bad as I agree it was, but the much greater damage done to American democracy and to modern world history, by the resulting denial by everyone here, for the entire Cold War, as Andrew points out, of the real extent of Soviet influence and penetration here, resulting from the discrediting of McCarthyism.

All the best