Lawrence: it was the pressure applied by every
administration from Truman through Reagan that was
necessary to the fall of the USSR in 1989.
Eric: People tend to forget that we were in a
death match with the USSR, with tens of thousands
of nuclear warheads pointed at population centers,
forget Khrushchev's announcement of a 100-megaton
nuclear weapon (I once calculated that the
crater--just the crater--from a single 100-meg
explosion would be fifty miles across. Could
easily kill most people in five states.)
As a result, the US is remembered for propping up
every evil dictator, every repressive regime. For
example, an old man in Brazil told me that America
gave Brazil two things, "John Wayne and the death
of teachers all over the country." Older
Brazilians remember that our CIA trained the
Brazilian dictatorship in torture and abetted the
disappearance of hundreds of suspected
Marxist-leaning school teachers.
Read Pinter's Nobel Prize Speech. Without
mentioning the fact that the survival of the
entire human race was at stake, Pinter brings all
these realpolitik moves back to roost. He wants to
blame, so he blames, context be damned.
We could have done better, sure in retrospect. But
at the time (and how we forget!) the entire planet
could have been rendered uninhabitable, and all of
humanity was at stake. Because in the present
conflict, less is at stake, we are not nearly as
Draconian as we were then. Yet people often lump
the entire history of misdeeds together, out of
context.
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