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it seems to me that you cannot really start this game in 1945 and simply eliminate the americans from the picture. you have to start a bit earlier, as i suggested above, simply because by 1945 many of the institutional infrastructures that defined the postwar world were already in place and it is therefore simply absurd to erase the us from arrangements it was instrumental in setting up. it probably makes more sense to consider things from maybe early 1944,, at a point where the soviets were decimated by pushing the germans back, before d-day and bretton woods. because at that point you also can play around with the soviets as a variable, one that had any number of choices available--like concentrating differently on reconstruction in the postwar context---without the need for eastern europe, without the plundering of east germany, etc.--you might well have ended up with a fairly isolationist soviet union. there has long been an argument that the move into eastern europe was defensive in nature, prompted by the american moves to begin consolidating a new empire. so there is no need to assume an expansionist soviet union without its mirror image in the us.
if you structure the game around 1945, all you are doing is trying to set up a scenario in whcih the logic of the cold war would play out without the united states as an actor. and that is absurd. you have to play without the assumption that the cold war was necessary.
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a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear
it make you sick.
-kamau brathwaite
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