July 13th, 2012
Where Are You When We Need You, Nikita Khrushchev…
Seriously, I often say I am thankful for the cold war in that regardless of how scary it sometimes was…
…it gave me a decent education.
But there is something else I miss about the cold war…horrible as it was. The communist line was that communism was a better deal for workers then capitalism and developing nations should go communist to protect their workers’ interests over the evil running dog capitalists. So we had a propaganda war going on between us and them and Wall Street and big business were keen to prove to the world that our system was the better one for workers.
Nowadays they don’t even pretend to give a fuck.
Where are you when we need you Nikita Khrushchev…
July 15th, 2012 at 6:42 am
When we had an adversary who could build things and also take overother countries (and do some major damage to ours) we fought them. Butwe fought them mostly without shooting at each other. We did try toshow that our system was better all around and aspects of our systemthat looked bad (like race) we tried to fix. And things that were goodwe tried to make better (education, worker’s wages). Yes there werepeople within our country fighting against it, but they were a smallgroup and didn’t get on TV.Now our adversaries are divided into two groups:1. A very small group of people who would like to use terror againstus, but aren’t able to inflict such damage on us that it could destroyus (unless we do it to ourselves).2. A group of oil exporting countries, whose governments mostly haveopposite values from our values and in many cases don’t like us atall. But our biggest companies rely on them for their profits and arejoined at the hip.So it doesn’t matter what image we project to the world as long as theexecutive compensation and bonuses keep flowing.We don’t even have to try to change hearts and minds in other countries.This is a big reason why the Republican party can work so hard to getback in power no matter what it does to the economy and population.