Twenty years ago yesterday, Mikhail Gorbachev resigned his position as head of the Soviet Union. It was a momentous occasion. It was also slightly comic, since he was resigning from a government that didn’t quite exist any longer.
December 25, 1991, was the last day of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.
It was the end of an age. The republics that had allied to form the original empire withdrew their support and formed a new union, the Commonwealth of Independent States.
This was one of history’s most momentous developments — or “undevelopments”?
The abandonment of Marxian communism — indeed, of state socialism — marked a turning point in ideological thought, too. Total government control of economic life had been a joke — a miserable, bitter joke — within the Soviet Union during its heyday. The news of its demonstrated unfeasibility shocked the protected sensibilities of the West’s intelligentsia, even eliciting startling confessions from professional socialist rah-rah boys like Robert Heilbroner, who publicly admitted that “Mises was right” about the unworkability of socialism.
For my first 30 years of life, the Cold War with the Soviet Union dominated the newspapers and our imaginations. And then it collapsed. Surprisingly quickly.
As Russians take to the streets to protest Putin’s revealed corruption, and as the United States of America itself buckles under the weight of its own “internal contradictions” — that is, the attempt to live on debt alone — the lesson becomes clear: The mighty can fall.
Radical change becomes possible, even where impregnability was previously assumed.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
4 replies on “Two Decades Later”
Is it time yet for our sovereign American states to withdraw support from the less and less funcitoning socialist leaning national empire?
I know it is not the last minute and we as a country have a history of waiting till the last minute. Maybe this time we could be more proactive and avoid all of the associated devastation. I expect that instead, we will have so many folks that are clinging to the idea that things are still normal, that they will be like the World Trade Center evacuaees, who, while the floor above them was engulfed in flames, turned back from the stairwell to go back to their cubicle because they forgot to turn off their computer.
Nothing good lasts forever. The US is hardly invincible. The sooner we as Americans realize that, the better off we will be.
The End of the Soviet Empire –A Sad Day for the Left
The fact that the anniversary of the fall of Soviet communism receives such little notice by our press speaks volumes about the state our own nation is in. I think many of our media, academia, a large portion of the Democrat Party leadership, and most of the Left, actually lament, rather than celebrate the demise of the “morally equivalent” Soviet Union and the freeing of nearly 50 million Eastern Europeans.
This is because to these cloistered academicians, political theorists, fantasy driven idealists, and leftist journalists, this great moment in history, more than any other single event (Except perhaps for the bombing of the WTC) is to them not a testament to freedom, not a commemorative to the millions who died in gulags, or memorial to those who died trying to escape to the west across the infamous “death strip”. It is instead a reminder of how wrong they were about legitimacy and durability of Communism-both as an economic and a political system.
After all, the prevailing leftist thought-codified by Noam Chomsky, and championed by those mentioned above during those days of the cold war- was that the Russians, Poles, Czechs, Hungarians, Albanians, Lithuanians, Finns, Romanians, Yugoslavians, and East Germans, all wanted to be ruled by a ruthless government that had no respect for human rights. Democracy, freedom, self ‑determination, were all Western ideas and not necessarily shared by the people trapped behind the Iron Curtain. They were wrong.
Conservatives and patriots here in the US were labeled right-wing fanatics and war mongers by the Left for showing solidarity with Lech Walesa, Pope John Paul, Margaret Thatcher, and Ronald Reagan as they pushed the Soviets over the brink and pressured their economy into failure. The Left warned Ronald Reagan’s foreign policy would lead to WWIII. They were wrong.
They claimed that the intentions of the Soviet Union were peaceful and that the only way for us to survive and avoid a nuclear winter was via “peaceful coexistence”. We must appease Soviet demands for the end of the Strategic Defense Initiative, they claimed. They were wrong.
SDI was a defensive anti-ballistic system –dubbed “star wars” by the know-it-all leftists-which Reagan used to push the Soviets to the peace table and eventually led to full disarmament of each nation’s nuclear weaponry. Today “star wars”- in the form of high power laser weaponry and satellite guided missiles- is a successful and viable part of the US arsenal.
The archives of the old Soviet Government were opened to the public in 1995. They gave the details of the large spy network that had been very successful in infiltrating academia, the media, and the highest levels of our government. The Left had claimed that suspicions of Soviet espionage were the products delusional demagogues like Sen. Joe McCarthy. They were wrong.
The Left was wrong then, just as it is today. But like all elitists, who are habitually wrong and never have to suffer the consequences of their errors, they will never admit their mistakes. They will continue to live in their morally-equivalent-everyone- is-equal-culture, politically correct, fantasy until they are no longer relevant or until they get us all killed.
Or until they get us all enslaved by a central beaurocracy of the self-appointed self-defined enlightened.