There’s nothing wrong with that. I just see this historical revisionism as a sad attempt by neoliberals to make their nonviolence look more powerful than it truly was.
There’s a little bit of truth in what Wikipedia is saying. It’s just not the whole story. The arms race didn’t destroy the USSR; liberalism did, and the gradual influx of western pop culture that occurred after Stalin accompanied a slow influx of liberal ideology into top levels of the Communist Party. The people who supported Gorbachev’s reforms (so-called) came generally from highly-paid backgrounds; they had the money to buy western goods and consume western media, and they were convinced that America and western capitalism had outgrown their earlier exploitative ruthlessness. Reagan was a right-wing extremist and a proto-fascist, but he was an anomaly (so went the fantasy); very soon, if the USSR cooperated, the peace-loving Americans would elect another progressive president like Roosevelt. Not until the Soviet collapse and the literal and figurative raping of the country that took place during the 90s did these people realize how wrong they were; a whole lot of them never learned.
There’s nothing wrong with that. I just see this historical revisionism as a sad attempt by neoliberals to make their nonviolence look more powerful than it truly was.
There’s a little bit of truth in what Wikipedia is saying. It’s just not the whole story. The arms race didn’t destroy the USSR; liberalism did, and the gradual influx of western pop culture that occurred after Stalin accompanied a slow influx of liberal ideology into top levels of the Communist Party. The people who supported Gorbachev’s reforms (so-called) came generally from highly-paid backgrounds; they had the money to buy western goods and consume western media, and they were convinced that America and western capitalism had outgrown their earlier exploitative ruthlessness. Reagan was a right-wing extremist and a proto-fascist, but he was an anomaly (so went the fantasy); very soon, if the USSR cooperated, the peace-loving Americans would elect another progressive president like Roosevelt. Not until the Soviet collapse and the literal and figurative raping of the country that took place during the 90s did these people realize how wrong they were; a whole lot of them never learned.
Sad, Queen is my favorite