Quote:
Originally Posted by debaser
Maaaaaaaybe...
No one can deny that both powers acted in their own self interest, but at the very least the US was constrained to some small degree by the it's citizens. The Soviets acted in spite of, and often against their own populace. And yes, I know that someone will bring up Kent State and the McCarthy travesty, but these were aberations in a country otherwise at least nominally held to the rule of law...
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I didn't have the fortune to be born in the 1940s or 1950s to see this stuff for myself. What I know of the cold war is a combination of three things: historical records, discussions with people living during those times, and patterns in human/governmental behavior that I've lived through. The historical record is sketchy because some facts seem open to interpretation. How prevalent were psyops in the United States during the cold war? How wide was support for our various military excursions relating to halting the spread of communism or aiding the spread of capitalism? How many people actually died, particularly in foreign jungles most people my age have never even heard of? Personal details are illuminating, and you can guess at the bias of the storyteller, but the scope of information is narrow. Learning about Vietnam from an uncle certainly carries with it highly specific details of the life of an Army grunt in a terrible war, but it doesn't exactly fill in the blanks or question marks left by the historical record. The most reliable thing I have at my disposal is how people and government have behaved in my lifetime, because neither has really changed for a long time. I know what psyops look like because I get inundated with it daily to the point where there are topics which I should know clearly that I can't even begin to understand. I know that fear can motivate people to abject hatred and murderous rage even at the most innocent people on the planet. I know that the mob is petty, vindictive, and with sufficient power is very easy to control. When I look at the historical record and personal retelling through the lens of what I know, the cold war was about powerful, corrupt people fighting over even more power by using the little people as pawns. Soviet, American, it was all the same shit. The fact that the Soviet Union collapsed is not some indicator that the United States was more righteous or that the American people are more free, but rather that one power was going to win and the other lose, which is the nature of competition.
If one reason could be pulled from the thousands as the biggest reason for the country's collapse, it was oligarchy. America didn't have any more or less oligarchy in the 1980s than the USSR, in fact we have more in 2010 than the Soviets had immediately before collapsing, it's just that we don't have the same competition going on that we had then.
imho
/threadjack