The USSR collapsed PEACEFULLY because Gorby allowed it to. If a more hardline leader had been in charge, things would have gone the way they did in Yugoslavia.
As a full-time student at the time, my taxes increased significantly.
Ronald Reagan was a bad precedent. He sold fiscal nonsense to those young and ignorant enough to swallow it whole. We still have Republicans trying to make federal “waste, fraud, and abuse” amount to 10% of GDP, so the taxes can be cut as low as their church tithe. :rolleyes:
It does, but consists of sacrosanct programs such as farm aid, the United Nations, and corporate welfare.
It only advanced into Afghanistan, and that did not work out well for them.
Perfect. You couldn’t have said it any better.
Only Afghanistan directly. Pro-Soviet regimes advanced all over the world.
Love that skit. And I agree with this. Reagan was pretty much a national “cheerleader” and spent a lot of money. I think those two things were really the key to his perceived success.
Dunno about that, the Commies never took over Angola or El Salvador, and didn’t last in Ethiopia or Nicaragua.
And in those cases, it was due to the US actually fighting those proxy wars, something liberals still haven’t forgiven the US for doing. Problem is, as ugly as such war is, what was the alternative? Let the Soviets fund whoever they wanted? Once that was done, the will of the people of those countries was already subverted. The US was doing no evil by intervening against the Soviet intervention.
It’s funny how many leftists in the US claimed those groups were authentic grassroots nationalists, yet as soon as the Soviet Union’s money was cut off, most of them just faded away.
The greatest virtue of the Reagan years was that it ended a lot of really stupid strains of thought among the left-wing intelligentsia. If a moron like Reagan could make such simplistic ideas work, then how could liberals push opposite truths with any kind of credibility? You should thank Reagan. The left and center left learned a lot from those years and came back stronger.
Such as?
In Nicaragua and El Salvador, there was no Soviet intervention, there was only American intervention.
The Sandinistas/FSLN in Nicaragua did not “fade away,” free elections have put them in and out of power several times since then. Apparently they had some real grassroots base all along.
Plus I spent some time in Nicaragua during the Sandinsta days of the 1980s and saw real grassroots support for them.
If they permitted real opposition once in power that’s fine. Not sure they do.
Stop bumping old threads unless there is some substantive update.
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