Former President Mikhail Gorbachev said Friday that the fall of the Soviet Union, which he helped bring about, ushered in an era of U.S. imperialism responsible for many of the world's gravest problems.
I truly don't understand how something this important could get absolutely zero coverage in the western world. This issue is at the forefront of what has gone wrong with the world in the last 20 years.
In the insane days of the Cold War, there was a counterbalance between the Communists centered in the Soviet Union and the capitalists centered in the United States. With both sides mounting multiple warhead ICBMs (InterContintinental Ballistic Missiles) capable of horrific destructive capacity, there was an atmosphere of Mututally Assured Destruction (MAD), which didn't allow either side to get too agressive.
Michael Gorbachev ascended to the rule the Politburo of the Communist party, and this man of vision clearly saw that the adversarial and antagonistic attitudes of both nations was hurting both parties. In a bold move, he unilaterally began opening up the USSR to change in a show of good faith thru such measures as perestroika and glasnost (google or wikipedia them if you are unfamiliar).
Gorbachev was a man of peace and made the first overtures of reconcilliation, expecting that the US would follow suite and initiate their own domestic measures of trust and disarmament. Unfortunately, under the conservative cultural change embodied by the great deceiver Ronald Reagan, the powers that be in our county interpreted every concession by the USSR as further cause what we were right in the first place.
This is like some schoolyard squabble where one kid realizes thats its ridiculous to fight, so they begin to seek compromise (regardless of who was right in the first place or who threw the first punch). Let bygones be bygones and lets just walk away so to speak. But this other kid doesn't have peace on his mind, and see's every gesture of the first kid as being a pussy, so gets even more aggressive. Without a playground monitor, you can guess where this leads.
The US had and continues to have a moral obligation to stand down. We must dismantle our gargantuan sized military industrial complex, and use the peace dividend to rebuild our nation. No more world police, no more CIA overthrows of foreign governments, no more invasions of sovereign countries. The end result of us showing our truly peaceful character is a better world. The result of us bullying the world in a show of superiority is for other nations to rise up and confront us in the future. Its our choice.
