William B Ward wrote:
>
> Karen,
>
> I would guess that you have hit the nail on the head. The USSR was
> brought down with fax machines.
[snip]
An hypothesis about how America won the ColD War, for which
I have heard some oblique support in the media in recent years
is very similar to how the British beat the Germans in the Battle
of Britain (by small differences in kill rate vs replenishment
rate on the two sides).
America got Russia into an "arms race" that was enormously
expensive. The American economy was big enough to
survive (albeit at a huge "price" which has never been
calculated, to my knowledge, in large part because we never
imagined what we might otherwise have
had...). The Russians finally
could not keep up. They went bankrupt and cried "Uncle [Sam]",
and Sam said "Now you are free my children", and the
rest is the story of the self-rape of the Soviet economy during
the 1990s.
To the extent that this was actually understood by the
American government, it was an enormously successful
coverup of a brilliant strategy concealed under the "red herring"
threat of global nuclear
annihilation. To the extent that it was not
consciously foreseen, it lends credibility to
believing in The Invisible Hand.
In any case, America's abandonment of Russia to its
own [lack of] resources in the 1990s has always
seemed to me a massive example of
denying one's responsibility for one's fellow man
when one has torn him away from all he ever had and
set him loose in the darkness. But these
chickens may yet come home to roost if Russia's
nuclear pollution pays us a visit and decides to stay
because it likes it here, and, a fortiori, if plagues of
incurable diseases get loose from Russia and
do not let our immigration officials decide
whether to admit them or not. (This will
not be any form of bio-terrorism, except as the
unintended side effect of "tearing down that wall" --
the Russians want to all die from a plague of
resistent tuberculosis no more than we do.)
The living, even here in New York and Chicago and
San Francisco and Seattle... may yet come to envy
the dead.
\brad mccormick
--
Let your light so shine before men,
that they may see your good works.... (Matt 5:16)
Prove all things; hold fast that which is good. (1 Thes 5:21)
<![%THINK;[SGML+APL]]> Brad McCormick, Ed.D. / [EMAIL PROTECTED]
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