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Politics : Politics for Pros- moderated -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: kech who wrote (203810)	4/23/2007 4:08:24 PM
From: Maurice Winn	Respond to of 793782

Kech, you are right that the Cold War ended with the collapse of the USSR. If we use that part of the long conflict as being defined like that. Putin and Russia, while much smaller than Yeltsin and the Soviet Union, are still quite chilly, if not cold. Glasnost is not bandied around as a popular word in Russia. There is still confrontation, but the borders are more tightly drawn around Russia now. We can indeed differ on the causes of the end of the USSR and the Cold War. But to me, it was the internal conflicts in the USSR. The "West" showed how life could be. People in the USSR knew that life wasn't all that great in the USSR. Nationalistic fervour was always there from the Baltic states to Borat's homeland over by China. The fact that there was an externality no doubt showed the local yokels in the USSR that there were alternatives to an eternal New Zealand style Big Brother government. As in New Zealand now, a lot of them went elsewhere when they got a chance. NZ now has laws that you can't leave unless you have paid your fines, so the barriers are going up, starting with the fine-avoiders. Next will be fathers owing money for children. Then it'll be people who are not members of the Labour Party. Anyway, when Gorby got control, and it was obvious that he wasn't prepared to kill en masse, and the rearguard commies got faced down, it was Game Over. Nothing to do with Ronald Raygun other than he provided an example, like the Statue of Liberty, not doing anything really, just standing there, saying, "Hey, look at our movies, even B-grade. It's much better here with Jerry Springer than in your frozen totalitarian communist wasteland". Examples are actually the best weapons. As I was explaining to UncleWest, guns don't kill people, people don't kill people, ideas kill people. The idea gets hold of a person who has hold of a gun. The real battle is in ideas. What The West did, was show Russians what life could be like with the right ideas. Unfortunately for them, they didn't get all the ideas right. China has got some of the ideas right and is working on the others. Gorby and the internal shifts in the USSR are what caused the end of the Cold War. Mqurice