🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <4828@crl.LABS.TEK.COM> ellis@daffodil.LABS.TEK.COM (Cynthia Ward) writes:
Deletions...
>
>>Bush ignored the Russian revolution until the reality slapped him in the
>>face, while coddling China's dictators after they massacred they students.
>
>I thought Bush REALLY blew this one by not supporting Gorbachev with $$$$
>while he was still in power. If Bush had given him some money, just a
>fraction of what was wasted on the Persian Gulf War, the Soviet Union 
>might well still be united, and I think this would have cut down on the
>bitter ethnic civil war that we're seeing all over Eastern Europe, IMHO.
>Even if it had been decided that it would be better to not have Gorbachev
>remain in power, the transition could have been managed better.
>

Seeing as how the Soviet Union was assembled through conquest, and
the warring factions were only kept away from each others' throats
through the use of centralized state police power, *any* increase in
freedom in Soviet Union would have probably had the same result.
Gorbachev was ousted in the coup because the leftists (the ones the
press calls the "conservatives" :-)  ) thought he wasn't doing enough
to combat these ethnic movements.  Any major support of Gorbachev would
have been hitching our foreign policy wagon to a falling star - if the
money had been sent in before Gorbachev's departure, it would have
fallen into the hands of the leftist totalitarians who would have used
it to either postpone the inevitable breakup of their corrupt regime,
or finance the biggest genocidal crackdown since Stalin.  Gorbachev
sealed his own fate, and that of the Communist party and the empire
which served it (the state served the party, *not* the other way
around), with his glasnost and perestroika policies.  Nobody wanted
the Soviet Union to stay united except the ruling elite of the Soviet
Union.  What we're seeing in eastern Europe today are the final
skirmishes of World War I.  Better to have them shooting each other up
now than to wait until some of them get their hands on nuclear or
biological weapons.

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