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I meet your skepticism with a video of him telling the joke: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QQh6q9gNCIQ
Mikhail Gorbachev has died
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Re: Mikhail Gorbachev has died
#72Like Bill clinton, he helped define 90s geopolitics. It's remarkable how he faded away like he did. Nelson Mandela, Yassir Arafat , Ariel Sharon..that whole era.
Re: Mikhail Gorbachev has died
#73The United States didn't do enough to help Russia transition to democracy in the 1990s. There was no "Marshall Plan" after the Cold War like there was after World War II. This was a huge mistake, and we see the consequences now, with Russia having turned back toward totalitarianism and imperialism. Sadly, it seems that Gorbachev's efforts were mostly for naught. But it was courageous at the time to open up the Soviet…
> The United States didn't do enough to help Russia transition to democracy in the 1990s.
Some how people manage to blame everything on the United States.
Re: Mikhail Gorbachev has died
#74Hard to know the man behind the image, but Gorbachev seemed like a fundamentally decent man, who was perhaps over his head at a moment no one could be reasonably be expected to prepare for. Still, with him at the helm of the sinking ship, chaos and conflict was at least avoided, or at least deferred, and for that we should be thankful. RIP
> but Gorbachev seemed like a fundamentally decent man
I caught this movie at the Tribeca Film festival: https://tribecafilm.com/festival/archive/meeting-gorbachev-2...
It was very sympathetic toward him. And I don't think it is a "great" film in any sense. But I did feel like I got a taste for who he was. And I also felt he was a fundamentally decent person.
Re: Mikhail Gorbachev has died
#75The United States didn't do enough to help Russia transition to democracy in the 1990s. There was no "Marshall Plan" after the Cold War like there was after World War II. This was a huge mistake, and we see the consequences now, with Russia having turned back toward totalitarianism and imperialism. Sadly, it seems that Gorbachev's efforts were mostly for naught. But it was courageous at the time to open up the Soviet…
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That's a very serious claim, could you please provide some citations?
Re: Mikhail Gorbachev has died
#76The United States didn't do enough to help Russia transition to democracy in the 1990s. There was no "Marshall Plan" after the Cold War like there was after World War II. This was a huge mistake, and we see the consequences now, with Russia having turned back toward totalitarianism and imperialism. Sadly, it seems that Gorbachev's efforts were mostly for naught. But it was courageous at the time to open up the Soviet…
On the contrary, the "shock therapy" approach that Russia took in the Yeltsin years was, in many ways, prescribed by the West, and ended up being a complete disaster for both your average Russian person, and for capitalism and democracy as a whole, because most people just learned to associate these things with the kleptocracy that occurred in the 90s.
I think there's a lot of historical support for this view. Here's a summary from 1998:
https://www.thenation.com/article/world/harvard-boys-do-russ...
Re: Mikhail Gorbachev has died
#77No post body was provided.
Re: Mikhail Gorbachev has died
#78The United States didn't do enough to help Russia transition to democracy in the 1990s. There was no "Marshall Plan" after the Cold War like there was after World War II. This was a huge mistake, and we see the consequences now, with Russia having turned back toward totalitarianism and imperialism. Sadly, it seems that Gorbachev's efforts were mostly for naught. But it was courageous at the time to open up the Soviet…
The locals in power have to want to do it too. As soon as enough don’t want it, it is over. I’m skeptical of the idea that you can impose Democracy.
Republicans have long said that the federal government is structurally incompetent and unable to effectively administer a large country. They made a convincing argument with their performance in Iraq and Afghanistan, and I doubt Russia would have been much different.
Re: Mikhail Gorbachev has died
#79Quoted post unavailable.
Let me tell you why I think this is an inappropriate comment: The point of it seems not to be collaboratively extending the line of thought proposed by the original post or the parent comment, but to make the parent commenter feel some kind of personal shame or stupidity. Good commenting is more like a team sport than a martial art.