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Pastimes : Don't Ask Rambi -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: epicure who wrote (34766)	8/12/1999 6:02:00 PM
From: jbe	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 71178

X, I would certainly agree that the collapse of the Soviet Union left a dangerous vacuum of power. And although the last thing I want to sound like is a conspiracy theorist, there unquestionably are plenty of foreign powers (including the USA) that have their own ideas about what should fill that vacuum. In the area that specifically interests me right now (the North Caucasus), we have every reason to believe that "certain circles" (love that expression!) in the Islamic world have not just been financing militant fundamentalist Wahhabism there, but were even responsible for its introduction in the first place. (The area has always been Sufi; uncongenial soil for Wahhabism.) What I do not agree with is this statement, from your earlier post: It seems to me that the breakup of the former USSR left.... a populace unprepared to fill that vacuum with anything positive. Without a populace that is educated and enlightened the only leaders they can expect are hard liners of one orthodoxy or another... Quite the contrary, I would say. By comparison with practically any "populace" in the world (including this country's), Soviet citizens were extremely well educated. The successor states of the Soviet Union have been investing a lot less in education than used to be the case, but the over-all level is still quite high. The problem is that the institutions of a civil society were absent in the Soviet Union, and they are still very weak in most successor states. That is the root of the problem, not the "darkness" of the masses, IMO. Sorry for sounding too pompous for DAR. <g> Joan