Thirty years ago the Berlin Wall came down: how about those “experts”?
It was momentous when it happened thirty years ago: the fall of the Wall.
No one quite foresaw exactly what it meant, and yet it seemed a day of great hope and optimism:
By the time the Wall came down, the Communists had already lost their grip on Poland and Hungary. Before 1989 was out, Soviet-style regimes would surrender power in East Germany, Czechoslovakia, Romania, and Bulgaria. Within the next couple of years, Yugoslavia and the Soviet Union itself would throw over their Communist leaders and break up along the lines of nationality…
For those who had lived much of their lives since the Second World War in a bipolar global configuration, and under the constant threat of “mutually assured destruction” in a nuclear holocaust, the fall of the Wall was an event they never expected to see. Both sides had long made clear their intention to give no ground along it, after all, and their armed forces glared at each other in high states of readiness day in, day out, around the clock, across its crude divide.
I certainly had not expected to see the event; it caught me unawares. But as I wrote previously:
If the experts – academic, governmental, and media – had been unable to foresee this, then how could I trust them to guide me in the future? In retrospect, it was probably the first time I began to distrust my usual sources of information, although I certainly didn’t see them as lying – I saw them as incompetent, really no better than bad fortunetellers.
What they seemed to lack was an overview, a sense of history and pattern. Newspapers could report on events, but those events seemed disconnected from each other: first this happened, then that happened, then the other thing happened, and then the next, and so on and so forth. In the titanic decades-long battle between the US and the USSR, there had been a certain underlying narrative (yes, sometimes that word is appropriate) that involved the threat of Armageddon, and the necessity to avoid it at almost all costs, while stopping the spread of Communism. Although T.S. Eliot had said the world would end “not with a bang but a whimper,” who ever thought the Soviet Union would end in such a whimpery way, and especially without much forewarning? It seemed preposterous, something like that moment in the Wizard of Oz when Dorothy throws the bucket of water on the Wicked Witch, who dissolves into a steaming heap of clothing, crying “I’m melting, melting.”
I realize that if I’d been more aware, there were signs that this was happening, and there were people – precious few – who planned and foresaw it. But in general:
Predictions of the Soviet Union’s impending demise were discounted by many Western academic specialists, and had little impact on mainstream Sovietology. For example, Amalrik’s book “was welcomed as a piece of brilliant literature in the West” but “virtually no one tended to take it at face value as a piece of political prediction.” Up to about 1980, the strength of the Soviet Union was widely overrated by critics and revisionists alike.
In 1983, Princeton University professor Stephen Cohen described the Soviet system as remarkably stable.
The Central Intelligence Agency also badly over-estimated the internal stability of the Soviet Union, and did not anticipate the speed of its collapse. Former DCI Stansfield Turner in 1991 wrote in the US Journal Foreign Affairs, “We should not gloss over the enormity of this failure to forecast the magnitude of the Soviet crisis . . . Yet I never heard a suggestion from the CIA, or the intelligence arms of the departments of Defense or State, that numerous Soviets recognized a growing, systemic economic problem.”
More background about the Wall itself:
Before the Wall went up in 1961, hundreds of thousands of East Germans had availed themselves of unhindered access to the West through Berlin to gain the precious gift of freedom. During the 28 years the Wall was in place, scores of mostly young people, trying to escape the prison encased by its concrete and barbed wire, died from East German bullets.
On Nov. 9, 1989, when East Berliners once again acquired the liberty to pass through the inner-city partition, it seemed as if all was somehow right with the world. The strains of Beethoven’s immortal Ninth Symphony soon filled one of the great Berlin concert halls, with the word for “Freedom” substituted for “Joy” as the focus of celebration in the choral text of the final movement. And, as subsequent events cascaded toward the reunification of Germany, the end of the Cold War, and the more widespread collapse of Communism, many of us allowed ourselves to believe that world peace was at hand.
I was not one of those people who believed any such thing. But I knew a big change had occurred, and I celebrated.
I also knew I had no idea what a change such as this ultimately might mean. But we go forward into a future that’s ever-evolving, and ever-surprising us – even (or maybe especially) the “experts.”
Steve Hayward also has a good piece at Powerline, which also discusses what had previously happened in Poland and Hungary.
I visited Leipzig a while after the fall and saw how beautiful old buildings had been left to fall apart, how a famous shopping center in the center of town still had empty cardboard boxes for screws in one of its windows, and how the town hall bathrooms had plastic faucets.
On a subsequent visit, I tried to see how normal people were affected. I saw a department store that now had western cosmetics all over the the first floor and yet on the fourth floor, older women were holding up relatively cheap western household items and studying the prices to see if they could afford them. I saw the books store on the main street that must have been the pride of the city that hosts the Leipziger Buchmesse now have its show windows filled with books on taxes, insurance etc. instead of classic German literature. I sensed then that Westerners were so sure that that new consumer products would solve all the problems but would not be enough to replace for the Easterners the feeling of a lack of respect. The educated adapted well to the changes, but the working class, not so much. We have a hard time walking in the shoes of people who don’t live in our bubbles.
OMT: Here is an excellent article about Erdogan and Turkey, which anyone trying to evaluate Trump policies should read for background:
https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/15054/erdogan-campaign-against-west
If you have read Douglas Murray’s The Strange Death of Europe, you can understand why Europe needs a wakeup call. There is no way the US could have stood up to Turkey’s move into northern Syria without starting a war or allowing the release of hundreds of thousards more refugees into Europe.
“Up to about 1980, the strength of the Soviet Union was widely overrated by critics and revisionists alike.”
I certainly didn’t see the fall of the Soviet Union coming either, though in retrospect the signs were there. Part of it was how little opinion to the contrary made it past the West’s media and government filters. But at base, I think fear itself prevented any other perception of the Communist threat.
Now 71, a lifetime of experience and observation leads me to the same conclusion regarding the two major external threats America faces, i.e. Islam and China. Both totalitarian systems, neither has the logistical and technological resources to defeat America. Nor does either have the intellectual freedom necessary to paradigmatic breakthroughs in invention. Much less the risk taking necessary to entrepreneurial progress.
Those observations lead me to conclude that Lincoln had the right of it; “America will never be destroyed from the outside. If we falter and lose our freedoms, it will be because we destroyed ourselves.”
That is the real threat because the ‘progressive’ Left would rather see this country destroyed than for it to remain outside their control. And in that opposition, they impede and obstruct any and all attempts to effectively address the external threats that face America.
So any ‘expert’ who discounts the Islamic and Communist threat is either a fool or a knave. Though given their ‘expertise’… almost certainly a knave.
Richard Grennell (our ambassador to Germany) was on Neil Cavuto at Fox today to talk about the fall of the wall. He brought up that the denial of a free internet as in China was a new wall that is being built. It is sure not the end of history.
I was also amazed when the wall came down. Never thought it would happen. I learned a few things from it.
The first was that the CIA was completely fooled about the USSR. In 1990 two bicyclists rode from Moscow to Vladivostok. They wrote it up. They found a country that was basically Third World except in the largest cities, and even there things were grim. What was the CIA doing/thinking?
The second was that Communism really doesn’t work. Russia and its satellites are loaded with natural resources. They have oil, gas, gold/silver, iron, coal, timber, and some excellent farm land. They have excellent education and smart people. All the ingredients for economic success. But top down management with no individual incentives just doesn’t get the job done. David Foster mentioned in comments a few days ago a book about how the Soviet bureaucrats tried so mightily to make it work, but could not. What a revelation that economic failure was to me. I had believed that our system was better. Until the Iron Curtain fell and we saw what was(n’t) there, I thought maybe the CIA was right about their good economy. But this was absolute proof that it didn’t work. And we have other examples – Red China, Cuba, Zimbabwe, Chile under Allende, and Venezuela. The evidence piles up.
The third was that Ronald Reagan was right. You have to be strong and willing to stand up to aggressors. Appeasement never works! His resolute stand against Communism helped drive the USSR to the brink of bankruptcy. Their being bogged down in Afghanistan and low oil prices helped, but had Reagan not forced them to spend bigly on armaments due to his build up, they might have survived the low oil prices and their misadventure in Afghanistan. At least that’s the way I see it.
J.J.
And all those facts are verbotten and how many people younger than 30 know any of them? After all in “their truth,” socialism just hasn’t been implemented correctly, not yet anyway. They can make it work this time …..
I remember seeing the wall coming down, piece by piece, on TV. I cried tears of joy. All those years of my childhood, practicing duck and cover under my school desk (as if that would really save me), and now the Evil Empire was crumbling.
As unexpected political shockers went back in the day, seems to me I was far more floored the morning in ’94 I went to the front stoop to pick up my WaPo there to read the headline **Republicans Take the House**. I was stunned. And delighted.
The CIA and military needs the Soviets to be strong. It justifies their budget and the corners they cut. When conflicting information about the USSR came out, they needed to choose that which made it look strong.
Today they need China to be strong, for the same reason.
If that means them telling half-truths, then they will. We are continually being told how strong the Chinese army is, for example. We aren’t told how half of them are basically factory workers because the Chinese Army is a major industrial concern. They forget to mention that they have to leave much of their army to hold down disaffected areas and how all the best units guard the capital. They forget to mention the gross corruption. They forget to mention that the Chinese have lots of tanks, but they don’t make many of their best model, as they can’t afford them.
When I started reading this article, I immediately thought of Amalrik’’s book (Will the Soviet Union Survive Until 1984). Lo and behold, I merely had to keep reading to find a mention of it. 🙂
I recall reading a Harper’s Magazine article in the early 1980s which gave numerous examples of how life in the Soviet Union indicated the country was rotten to the core and didn’t have a good future. The basic tone of the article was that day-to-day life in the Soviet Union indicated that it was governed by a bunch of idiots. Unfortunately, I haven’t found internet access to the Harper’s Magazine archives that are not restricted by a paywall or a university ID.
I knew a professor who attended an international conference in Moscow in the 1970s. Unlike most of the professoriate, he was a Cold Warrior, probably a result of having been drafted into the Army in the 1950s. He told me that yes, he and his colleagues had seen examples of Stalinist mistrust of foreigners- a Russian visiting Americans in a hotel room got a phone call which resulted in his immediately exiting. But overall, he had seen so many examples of shoddy goods, incompetent ways of doing things etc. that he no longer feared the Soviet Union.
On the other hand, there was another professor from another specialty and who had made a visit in previous years to Moscow who said, “They’re just as bad as we were.” (Not the only reason I considered him a fool- especially because he thought he knew it all.)
I was also surprised by the fall of the Berlin Wall.
Robert Heinlein visited the Soviet Union in 1960 and got it right.
The academics did work for the state..
but there is one person that predicted it, and about 130 other things
dont worry we wont discuss him given i have mentioned him before
we wont even remember that i mentioned him with this fact
and yes, it was a book recommendation that no one read as if we are afraid to know
and he did it WAY ahead of everyone else
and from page 339
So here we have over a dozen very specific predictions, all of which later proved to be completely correct
ALL OF THEM… in the year 1984..
So here we have over a dozen very specific predictions, all of which later proved to be completely correct
Actually, what you have is a witless political fantasy you’ve constructed.
1959 Nikita Khrushchev boasted to a US cabinet member “You Americans are so gullible. No, you won’t accept communism outright, but we’ll keep feeding you small doses of socialism until you’ll finally wake up and find you already have communism. We won’t have to fight you. We’ll so weaken your economy until you’ll fall like overripe fruit into our hands.”
someone had predicted glasnost and perestroika, in detail, even before Gorbachev came to power. This person’s analysis of events in the communist world had even been provided to the Agency on a regular basis.
Golitsyn provided an entire chapter of such predictions, containing 194 distinct auguries.
of Golitsyn’s falsifiable predictions, 139 out of 148 were fulfilled by the end of 1993 — an accuracy rate of nearly 94 percent.
why we dont want to know this and the other stuff if he was so accurate is beyond me… but you can search neo and its been pointed out before, and i guess some odd thing keeps happening to it as if it just gets erased..
note that his point was that the fall of the USSR was not a fall but a deception
and the west was so happy that this was it, they would not look carefully to notice that the same people are in power. it was more a reorganization than actual fall.
The collapse of the Soviet Union came quickly, but I disagree with the failure to predict it. I’d been reading that their system was unsustainable for years prior to the fall. It just seemed that the predictions were incorrect. I was on active duty in the navy and recall watching with glee when the wall came down – knowing that we had won the Cold War.
Artfldgr,
Seems like you are cherry picking your facts to draw a timeline back to predictions you favor. If this is all a long range plan of the Communist party, how do you square Russia losing so much territory; Germany, Poland, Hungary, the Baltic states… The former eastern bloc EU nations oppose the socialist policies of the western members. France is lobbying for Socialism. Poland is fighting against it and ready to leave the EU if unfettered mass immigration doesn’t cease.
I concede Putin is a crafty, deceptive leader, willing to sacrifice a bishop or two in the multi-decade game of chess he has been playing, but much of the past thirty years has not gone according to his, or Russian communist interests. And the government no longer has a monopoly on information. Russians are well informed.
I’ve been reading parts of a biography of Peter the Great, best known for modernizing Russia in the 17th century. It’s fascinating to see the parallels between then and now, and the persistence of the Russian national character, as well as how that country is viewed by outsiders.
On a related note, I think that many of those same “experts” were behind the recent expansion of NATO, practically right up to Russia’s borders. I agree with the Pat Buchanan view that such an alliance can become too encumbering with so many members, and may prove to be needlessly provocative.
This event had a huge affect on my life. One of those, fork in the road situations that are impossible to fully comprehend.
My wife and I got engaged a month prior and were to marry in June. We had lived apart during our 3 year courtship and thought it may be fun to live in the same zip code now that we were marrying. Looking at our options we decided to give Germany a try. She was fluent and a medical professional and in our research we learned there were openings in her profession on U.S. military bases. She applied for, and got a job as a contractor for the U.S. Army. She was to start after our wedding. I would accompany her as a spouse, learn the language and apply for work as a computer programmer.
We blissfully made wedding plans and were amazed and delighted when the wall came down (especially happy for her family over there). About one month later her pending supervisor in the Army called. “Ummm, just a heads up, we are getting word there will be some base closures.” In another month, “Ummm, there is a hiring freeze on. We’ve been told to cancel all recs. for new positions and don’t fill any open positions.”
So, I moved to the city she was in, where we still live today, but who knows what might have been? Would we have lived in Germany and/or Europe for years? In what ways would our children be different? A whole thread of possibilities we can never know. If the wall wouldn’t have come down then, or even come down six months later, our lives might have been very different.
On a different tangent I saw at least a couple of FB references from my leftist former friends along the lines of “And now we’re building a wall between Mexico and the United States – we never learn.” Do people think that the Berlin wall – constructed to prevent citizens from leaving a totalitarian state – and a wall at the southern border – constructed to reduce vast floods of people are not citizens from flooding into our country – are in any way comparable? Are they that uneducated? Or does it simply not matter to the open borders crowd and their gullible minions?
The best kept secret of the Cold War was how poorly prepared the USSR was to actually make good on their threats. But, it makes sense, in retrospect… What Cold Warrier would downplay their main enemy? This was the conflict that defined them. To diminish their enemy’s prowess would diminish themselves.
I once read a funny and clever description of them, “The Soviet Union is a third-world country, with first-class missles, run by men whose minds are not even second-rate”
I think there is always a tendency to over-rate our mortal enemies. However, there is one area in which the Communists (Socialist, Leftists, Reds, whatever…) have always punched above their weight-class and that is in the Intelligence field. The descendants of the KGB, the Stazi, and the Cuban G2 are still bedeviling us to this day.
Roy Nathanson
I once read a funny and clever description of them, “The Soviet Union is a third-world country, with first-class missles, run by men whose minds are not even second-rate.”
German Chancellor Helmut Schmidt characterized the Soviet Union as “Upper Volta with missiles.” Which reminded me of the crack about the Soviet Union manufacturing the world’s biggest microchips. World’s biggest steel producer, biggest cement producer…
Agreed on punching above their weight in the intelligence field. Without the Cuba’s G2/DGI, Maduro in Venezuela and Ortega in Venezuela would have already relegated to the dustbin of history. How Has Maduro Survived? With Lots of Help From Cuban Operatives. When Chavez nationalized telecom a decade ago, some analysts pointed out that there were now Cuban intelligence agents monitoring phone conversations and the internet. Diosdado Cabello had recordings and videos on his TV show that could only have come from intelligence operations.
But the Soviets were not always winners in the intelligence field. Operation Solo: The FBI’s Man in the Kremlin (Cold War Classics).From the Amazon review.
Agent 58 had made friends with Suslov, the future Party ideologue, when he was in a Party school in Moscow in the 1930s- thus the access to the higher tiers.
I am grateful the Edit function is functioning. 🙂
“Are they that uneducated?
A mix. Some are uneducated, most lack critical thinking skills, some are too stubborn or egotistical to even consider they may be wrong, and some know the difference, but are willing soldiers in the propaganda war.
Art Deco on November 9, 2019 at 11:47 pm said:
So here we have over a dozen very specific predictions, all of which later proved to be completely correct
Actually, what you have is a witless political fantasy you’ve constructed.
I didn’t construct it…
Where is YOUR proof that this is wrong and witless?
your forgetting that Margaret thatcher, Ronald Reagan, and James Angleton didn’t think so.
AT the time of this, where your thinking witless…
The CIA’s annual budget in Fiscal Year 1963 was $550 million
(inflation-adjusted US$ 4.5 billion in 2019)
we would spend the equivalent of 4.5 billion over witless?
how about now?
The government showed its 1997 budget was $26.6 billion for the fiscal yea
The CIA’s fiscal 2013 budget is $14.7 billion, 28% of the total and almost 50% more than the budget of the National Security Agency
a quarter of a trillion dollars for one agency is for witless stuff?
we should believe YOU over that? you get a quarter trillion to be right?
note that above are guestimates..
because:
There have been accidental disclosures; for instance, Mary Margaret Graham, a former CIA official and deputy director of national intelligence for collection in 2005, said that the annual intelligence budget was $44 billion
we spent about as much as the Marshall Plan on it..
The Marshall Plan cost about $13.3 billion at the time, but dollars during the 1950s could purchase much more than today’s dollars. Adjusting for inflation and stated in today’s dollars, the Marshall Plan investment would be equal to $103.4 billion, SIGAR concluded
-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
We dont need propaganda… we have Art Deco to disseminate it and promote it FREE
-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Me? i am just telling you what those witless people who got poisoned by a chemical you have to have access to a nuclear reactor to get… do you have that kind of access? can you get it and walk out without a problem? or the other poor people who were killed with nerve toxins were..
Be careful cooking in the kitchen, that stuff is easy to make, right?
(though it does include the same ingredients that are in ink pens)
-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
did you read the book way back in 1984? where you around then, or born after?
Did you realize people have been arrested on the witless information?
here… This is what the UK did
He was an Honorary Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) and, as late as 1984, was an American citizen
I hear they give them out like candy..did you get one for being smarter than they are?
given you know its witless, you should write and see if you can get one for being SOOOO smart!
QUICK… you should write to Trump too.. as you can refute this too!
Andrew C. McCarthy, the deputy U.S. attorney who prosecuted the first World Trade Center bombers in 1993, wrote in The Wall Street Journal in 2006 that “Riebling’s analysis has now become conventional wisdom, accepted on all sides. Such, indeed, is the reasoning behind virtually all of the proposals now under consideration by no fewer than seven assorted congressional committees, internal evaluators, and blue-ribbon panels charged with remedying the intelligence situation.”
I have given more than a nasty insult as refutation of your nasty insult
why dont you give us the information you have to know i am witless, the queen was witless, reagan was witless, the british empire was witless, the CIA was witless, McCarthy was witless, rieblings was witless, and SEVEN congressional committees
You could save us billions!!!!!
did you find the above witless too? just curious?
Before you point out that Riebling is not Golitsyn, it was Riebling who did the analysis on those 12 points and the other 139.. so take it up with him…
J.J. et al:
In fairness, the fall of the Iron Curtain was the culmination of the foreign policy first elucidated and promulgated by Harry Truman, “We will confront Communism on every front.”
Every president after him carried out, to greater and lesser degrees, the same policy. They all knew that the Soviet system could never stand up to the free world in the economic arena. Where Reagan gets the credit is for successfully negotiating the collapse of the USSR without any missiles being launched.
Chuck on November 9, 2019 at 10:13 pm said:
“Robert Heinlein visited the Soviet Union in 1960 and got it right.”
I also read that a long time ago about the population of Moscow. I was last in Moscow in 2005. I am no expert in logistics, but it just didn’t “feel” like a major metropolis. It felt to me like about the size of Sacramento, California. Today it is reported in Wikipedia as having 15.1 million people within the city limits. Preposterous!
Yet, everyone seems content to let Russia continue the lie. Why?
I did a little search on the Russia Population Lie. I did find this…
https://observers.france24.com/en/20101028-russia-2010-census-data-fake-fraud-police-video
On the anniversary of the demise of the Berlin Wall, rest assured that Bernie Sanders and many others in the “democrat” party are in mourning.
I visited West Berlin in 1977; away from checkpoint Charlie (where there was no wall) it was easy to stand right next to the wall. Note that the only armed sentries in the guard towers were on the E.German side.
My “guide,” a college student (age 28 at the time – a professional student subsidized by the W.German govt) proceeded to tell me that the purpose of the wall – get ready for this; I am NOT making this up – was to prevent American and W.German spies from entering E.Berlin.
This was the first time in my life ( I was 26 at the time, on summer vacation from grad school) that I met a totally brainwashed, literally delusional , non-thinking human being.
The reality of what we could see( the wall, the armed sentries on the DDR side in guard towers) meant nothing to this guy; his belief in the communist theology was as profoundly deep as the Pope’s (not the present one) belief in Jesus.
Of course the lessons of E Germany seem to escape not only folks like Bernie Sanders, AOC, et. al., but also the present day inhabitants of the German communist party (don’t they F’n learn !!) and the equally intolerant and fascist/communist German Green Party.
Got to hand it to the leftists; they never, ever give up.
About the speed of the Wall’s coming down:
John Tyler:
On the anniversary of the demise of the Berlin Wall, rest assured that Bernie Sanders and many others in the “democrat” party are in mourning.
When I investigated this, I was rather surprised at what Bernard Sanders had to say. Bernard Sander in Harvard Crimson:Time for an American Glasnost (November 28,1989)
Bernard , a.k.a. Bernie goes on to list four questions. I will list only one. After all, there is a link.
Bernie dixit: “Yes, the Soviet Union was bad, but we have our problems, and if you do what I say, our problems will be eliminated.”
This is a fairly common Bernie tactic. Consider his honeymoon the previous year in the Soviet Union. Bernie Sanders praised communist Cuba and the Soviet Union in the 1980s.
Bernie Sanders also admitted during that trip that US health care was superior. By 1988, the whole world knew about Chernobyl. After the demise of the Soviet Union, many more environmental problems of the Soviet came to light. Once again, no comparison. Yes, Soviet agriculture and US agriculture both had problems, but any fool knew that the US system of agriculture was vastly superior.
.
Once again, the US system was vastly superior.
Mayor Bernie made a trip to Cuba in 1989. “Cuba is not a perfect society. There are political prisoners in Cuba,” Mayor Bernie told us. But the US has problems with homelessness, illiteracy, and unemployment, Bernie scolded us.
Also recall that Bernie LOVED Cuba. He told us that the Cubans had an “almost religious” affection for Fidel,and that the Cuban revolution was “a revolution in values.” Just like the New Soviet Man in Lenin’s time.
Any time one of his model societies has problems, he uses this admission as an opportunity to scold the US.
Regarding Bernie’s ultimate loyalties, recall that in the 1960s he spent time on a kibbutz in Israel, Shaar Haamakim, which was considered pro-Soviet, even Stalinist, in its orientation.
Yet, everyone seems content to let Russia continue the lie. Why?
Because they trust Russia’s census enumerators more than they trust your ‘feeling’.
Ropy Nathanson: “In fairness, the fall of the Iron Curtain was the culmination of the foreign policy first elucidated and promulgated by Harry Truman, “We will confront Communism on every front.”
Quite true. That’s why we were always involved in nations under threat of falling to Communism. Unfortunately, that strategy was undermined by the leftists here at home. Our abandonment of Vietnam was a leftist triumph. (I laugh when I hear people say no one will trust us if we abandon the Syrian Kurds. As if we hadn’t abandoned others in the past.) Reagan recognized that the world looked at us as weak after what we did to Vietnam and what Carter did to our military. Not to mention Carter’s incompetence vis a vis Iran, the Shah, and the hostages. We had accepted the idea of MAD and détente, which took the pressure off of the USSR. They were emboldened to venture into Afghanistan. (I wonder if Putin’s involvement in Syria might not become another pit of blood and treasure for Russia.) Reagan decided he wanted to follow a different strategy. We win, they lose. It worked.
Unfortunately, we believed that Communism had been revealed as a failure and relaxed our vigilance. The “end of history” and all that. While our attention has been focused on Islamic terror, Communism has been burrowing into our institutions. Now it is among us and seemingly growing stronger. Again, we need to follow Reagan’s example – be resolute and realize it is still stalking our existence.
Communism has been burrowing into our institutions.
Nothing resembling ‘communism’ is to be found in our institutions. We have real problems. That’s not one.
THE news from the Soviet Union is breathtaking. Events which no one would have predicted 10 years ago are now occuring at lightning speed.
Glasnost; perestroika; free speech; open parliamentary debate televised before millions of viewers; the beginning of organized political opposition to the Communist Party — Bernie Sanders
I said over and over, you can read the tech books on the process…
but in 12 years NOT ONE PERSON here has asked me about any of them (not even Neo)
regardless of argument, they are like the young soviet giving the tour by the berlin wall!!!
just as dumb, but in a more socially acceptable way, so they dont appear so
in fact. if everyone is dumb the same way, wouldn’t the smart be witless (idiocracy?)
the ‘plan’ goes back a long way, and there is plenty to read…
“Our day will come in 30 years or so… ” – so to anyone who attended that school, the plan as Golitsyn put forth, was not all that much a secret. they really didnt even hide it, cause the western people, like the one that said witless, would not believe it, would not read it, and would not do anything meaningful about it…
Now available on Amazon:
The Perestroika Deception : Memoranda to the Central Intelligence Agency
September 25, 2009
The Perestroika Deception
https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2009/09/the_perestroika_deception.html
Challenge them and be alienated by the people you are with in your new home. Why be hated, disliked, called witless, and all that to save people that obviously wont like you more for it, and who wont listen, and who wont read, and who prefer to make up stuff from whole cloth to fill in blanks in a supposition contest where the best made up thing “wins”.
[c’mon, that’s not worth popcorn?]
“Perestroika is closely connected with socialism as a system.”
The second facet of the “perestroika deception” has been to engineer a “peaceful transition to socialism” in the US by way of a manufactured economic crisis.
Oh.. you mean warren will do medicare for all and collapse the monetary system, or a wealth tax, or maybe global warming (which Gorbachev kind of spoke about saying the green revolution would be a signal… )
In 1974, Alexander Sobolev of the Moscow Institute of Marxism-Leninism developed the means by which a “peaceful revolutionary process” could take place. To do this, Sobolev stressed the need for a “nationwide political crisis” to be followed by “effective measures to neutralize wavering social strata.” It was Lenin himself that said, “A revolution is simply impossible without an overall national crisis.”
The model that emerged during the final decades of the 20th century has turned out to be unsustainable…It was based on a drive for super-profits and hyper-consumption for a few…I have no ready-made prescriptions. But I am convinced that a new model will emerge, one that will emphasize public needs and public goods…. — Gorbachev
And funny, it will be the American Social Democratic (workers) party?
Because, before the bolsheviks and the menshiviks, came the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party
pass the popcorn..
cant wait to see what people will say among themselves
and just skirt over the speeches of world leaders and easy to find real quotes.
Art Deco:
Communism isn’t present in our institutions, nor in our precious bodily fluids.
Bernie Sanders is in the Senate. AOC is in the House. Antifa is in the streets.
Nothing to see here, move along. NBA and Nike kowtowing to communist China? Nothing to see here. Got any stats on that wisdom Art?
Art Deco is the anvil, Manju is the hammer
his answers are very ignorant… he thinks he knows the forms
but again… he just asserts like Manju, and gives no proof from no reference to compare the X with the X and find it different.
here i will quote him:
of course he and manju would then say, what does a man who grew up under communism, fled and now is running again know – trust our blind assertions (go back to sleeep)
Do note he did not care to let Americans know and meet up with the likes of the people who make statements like above.. he went home to tell the people whose country was made into a buffer zone satellite of the soviet union – look whats happening..
if you understand romanian, you can watch the actual interview here:
Profesioni?tii cu regizorul Andrei ?erban (@TVR1)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZkExNbsj7lg
Columbia professor who fled communism resigns, says university is becoming communist
https://www.thecollegefix.com/columbia-professor-who-fled-communism-resigns-says-university-is-becoming-communist/
this is going to get good..
pass the popcorn dont forget the butter!!!!
om, since nothing resembles it, ask him “what does communism look like”?
🙂
Thanks for defending my comment, OM and dgr.
The plans of the Democrat candidates, especially Bernie and Warren, shows how the socialist ideas are still alive and grasping for power. To me, the openness of their socialist plans in a U.S. campaign is almost as unexpected as the fall of the Wall. Marxist ideas are acceptable on most college campuses these days. But now they are front and center in our campaigns as if they were actually workable. Astounding!
Art Deco,
Apparently, you didn’t read the link I posted above. It seems that even the Russe ian census takers don’t believe their results.
You also didn’t read Chuck’s link which provided additional support for the hypothesis that Russian population figures have been inflated for many decades.
“If the experts – academic, governmental, and media – had been unable to foresee this, then how could I trust them to guide me in the future? In retrospect, it was probably the first time I began to distrust my usual sources of information, although I certainly didn’t see them as lying – I saw them as incompetent, really no better than bad fortunetellers.” — Neo
Now they are not just incompetent but also blatantly lying; so maybe they were lying then, as well.
Apparently, you didn’t read the link I posted above.
The prelude to your link was a contention on your part they’d exaggerated the population of their capital 10-fold. No, I’m not interested in what you’ve been reading from among the Wacky World of Websites.
We now have a new communist on our site!!! Art Deco is a russian troll!
You can figure it out when you have stuff against Russia!!
No, i am not interested in any of his protests or anything he says anymore because what he has been reading is from the workers paradise, where they murdered 100 million of their own people to build buildings and make roads… they put jews on barges and used them for target practice in WWII (not everyone who was forced to do that forgot!)… and they even took women and children and put them in cattle cars, and shipped them out to some of the most hostile environments on the planet… oh, and you cant forget how they fight, not brave at all, because with the GRU behind them ready to murder them if they turned around, they had to win to live as slaves
we have found another putin lacky!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
congratulations Roy Nathanson on helping draw him out and exposing him
Do not read anything that says he is something different, as that is how you treat him, as he treats others…
and if the stuff above isnt enough.. there are the over three hundred murdered jornalists, the assasinations in other countries, the weapons running to africa to destroy the continent..
there is TONS more…
like lying about Aids to cover up their illegal production of anthrax that escaped and killed their own people (again)…
“…mourning…”
Indeed, Bernie is a piece of work.
Such a stalwart. A true believer. Waxing nostalgic for what might have been…
And never giving up…since what might have been WILL COME TO PASS!!!
So close, so close. The Berlin wall did not have to fall. And Socialism will work better the next time.
Always.
And so, “Onward comrades!!”
With a tear in one’s eye, yearning for the good old days….and determined to bring the kingdom of the Marxist god on earth.
For paradise, inevitably, will—MUST—be regained….
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-7655265/The-sprinter-ran-away-Incredible-story-East-German-athlete-tortured-Stasi.html
Related:
https://www.foxnews.com/opinion/puzder-hartley-berlin-wall-socialist-millennials
Out in FB Land, a real-life friend about my age with conservative leanings posted an item about the Berlin Wall in which it was mentioned that people were being crushed by socialism/communism. Someone else, who I don’t know, replied without any obvious sarcasm, questioning anyone being crushed by socialism. This is not one of the lefty-left FB friends I often reference, and I can’t picture this person generally associating with uneducated children or lefty-left minions.
I think that there actually are people who did not learn about reality.
Speaking of socialism/communism and borders. The news today is that Evo Morales resigned, and elsewhere Denmark just instituted border checks along the straight separating Copenhagen from Malmo, in spite of the fact that both are Schengen countries. Apparently too much violence, including bombings, have filtered from Malmo to Copenhagen.
The inevitable coming of a socialist Utopia always seems to get delayed.
Morales in office wasn’t rapacious a la Chavez-Maduro, but he scammed around to wage a re-election campaign contra provisions of the Bolivian constitution buttressed by a referendum in 2016 that he lost. An appellate court arbitrarily ruled he could run. And, we have reason to believe, his agents stuffed the ballot boxes. The situation resembles that in Peru in 2000, bar that Alberto Fujimori was more accomplished in office. He overstayed his welcome, and Bolivia is well rid of him provided the situation doesn’t fall to pieces completely.
I’ve always found it helpful in analyzing Russian behavior to ignore Communism. Virtually everything the Russians have done, are doing, and will be doing can be explained in terms of historic Russian foreign policy and Russian social psychology. The three legs of Russian foreign policy since Peter the Great are 1) surround the Motherland with buffer states; 2) exploit the resources of the east; 3) secure a warm-water port. So, during the Cold War you have the Warsaw Pact, adventurism in the Middle East and securing the bases at Tartus and Latakia, and exports of fur and gold and other raw materials. Today, Putin’s trying to reconstitute those legs by grabbing Crimea, seizing eastern Ukraine, putting up satraps in Transnistria, Abkhazia, South Ossetia, and elsewhere, and once again moving into Syria, Turkey, Iran and elsewhere in the Middle East. Russia is exploiting it’s oil and gas resources to influence, if not control, Europe. They’re reestablishing their relations with the -stans of Muslim Central Asia and with China. Same foreign policy under the Czars, the Communists, and the oligarchs.
Traditional Russian xenophobia and paranoia can explain much of Russia’s anti-Western and, specifically anti-American activities. The U.S. and other western countries invaded Russia a hundred years ago, and they still haven’t forgiven us. The Germans have been their enemies for almost 800 years Napoleon invaded them. Naturally they hate everybody and do their best to mess other countries up. And, of course, there’s good old Russian anti-Semitism, which hasn’t changed under any ruler.
This is not a perfect analytic model, but it sure explains a lot.
In any case, my grandparents hated the Russians, and I don’t see any reason to have a different opinion.
Richard Saunders, here find various resources concerning things Russian and much else besides: Michael Millerman @M_Millerman
KyndyllG
Did anyone, in reply to this savant, suggest that Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago be read?
Richard Saunders,
Yeah, the Russians are all that. I once read that in the soul of every Russian is a peasant who resents anyone who has one ruble more than they do.
On the positive side, they are fun to drink with…?
Related:
https://bonnerandpartners.com/the-berlin-wall-was-one-of-the-dumbest-experiments-in-economic-history/
Roy Nathanson —
There’s an old story–
A Russian peasant was walking down the road when he saw an old lamp half-buried in the dirt. Thinking he could sell it for a few kopeks, he picked it up and started scraping the dirt away. Suddenly, there was a cloud of smoke and a genii appeared!
“My friend,” said the genii, “You have freed me from this prison! But I wasn’t in there for very long, so in return, I will grant you one wish!”
The peasant replied, “My neighbor has a cow . ..”
The genii interrupted, “Oh, no problem! I will give you cattle in plenty, lands, and farm equipment to boot.” The genii noticed the peasant looked glum. “What’s the matter, my friend? Isn’t that what you want?”
“No,” answered the peasant. “I want my neighbor’s cow to die.”