Gul's Delusional State.

Well, maybe when it finally reached it's shuddering climax, but it was under Ronnie that things first got down to the "short strokes".

@gul posreps my posts more than anyone else. This proves that the man is a genius and that the premise of this thread is flawed.

Ha! Nonsense. In the early 1970's the rot was well and truly set in to the Soviet system and they were struggling just to feed and cloth people much less provide consumer goods. They were going down no matter who was in office. Oh, and Reagan wasn't even in office when the USSR broke up. That is just a lie right wingers tell themselves and everyone else laughed at.

The crash-n-burn was unexpected, and wouldn't have happened if Reagan hadn't gone to extraordinary lengths to sabotage the Soviet economy. Also, Reagan and Casey were coordinating the unions. We were using intermediaries like Norway to send them equipment from the CIA, such as printers, FAX machines, and burst-mode encrypted radios. Even the AFL-CIO leaders and the Pope were working with the CIA on the effort.

Er, no. Helping them out, sure. But coordinating? You're living in a fantasyland.

If by "we" you mean "virtually the entire free world", I'd agree with you. Damn near everyone supported Lech Walesa's Polish Solidarity movement. Reagan and his cronies supplied some aid, sure, but their biggest contribution was to merely stay out of the way of a groundswell that would have occurred with or without 'em.

Uh, have you read anything about the Cold War?

The Soviet economy was set to boom through the sale of natural gas to Europe, just as they're doing now. Reagan went to incredible lengths to keep that from happening, along with getting the Saudi's to let the price of oil plummet. Interestingly, George W Bush wasn't informed of the oil policy and on his own volition flew to Saudi Arabia to scream at them about the low oil prices, which were devastating the economy of Texas. When he got back Al Haig chewed him a new ass for bucking Reagan's policy. Reagan also got the South Africans to let the price of gold and diamonds collapse. That all but cut off the four major hard currency streams to the USSR, oil, natural gas, gold, and diamonds. Had he not done that, the Soviet economy would've boomed instead of collapsing.

And much of what Reagan and Casey were doing centered around the East Bloc labor unions. Reagan wanted to attack the Soviet system from inside, through the unions. So he funded them, sent them sophisticated equipment, including printing equipment for all their posters, and linked them together into a network that the Soviets and East Bloc rulers couldn't crack open. Even Pope John Paul II was involved in the plots, talking directly to the CIA. Some of our own union leaders were likewise brought in to the program, and Reagan had them meeting directly with their East European counterparts. If you recall, Reagan had been a union president.

Clearly, more than you, or at least, from less revisionist sources than you.

My sources are the government officials, intelligence officers, and historieans who wrote books on the history of the Cold War once the information was no longer classified.

Ditto. Though I wasn't taken in by all the Conservative spin that those guys gave the tale, because I'd also paid attention to what was going on as it actually happened, and saw that damn near everything that went down at the time, had been talked about by people in a position to know these things, way back in the mid-70s.

Just about everyone who wasn't blinded by fear of the commies, knew for certain that they couldn't economically sustain their needed level of "growth" for much longer. When you need to build a couple of hundred totally unneeded sports stadiums every year, and eight lane highways between towns where only 1 in 50 people owns a car, and other such bullshit projects, just to keep your construction crews off the dole, and to feed the propaganda machine with ample signs of growth and prosperity, you're pretty much assured of eventual economic ruin.

At best, anything that Reagan did merely pushed the inevitable to happen a few months earlier than it likely would have happened anyway, and was likely undertaken so that the administration could claim credit for something that was most likely going to happen anyway, with or without their help.

The funny thing about this fantasy that Reagan crushed the Soviets is that it requires a belief in the viability of Soviet economics. To believe the Reagan mythos, you have to believe in communism.

How? It looks an awful lot like this one is being tolerated too, seeing as how it's still here.

How are they abusing it? What would you have them do - ban everything that you don't like?

We need a "Mirror "Wordforge" day. Dayton can be a mod for a day.

This is an outstanding idea. I'm going to think about how to implement it -- most likely a special room that he can mod. I'll confer with others, see if we can come up with something fun.

I've said it before, if the industrialist scumfucks that own this country could have gotten rich off communism, we'd have it.
They didn't like that it would take their power, and give it to someone else.
It had nothing to do with patriotism, or moral qualms.
The Cold War was pure primate monkey power games over the big dung hill.

The Soviet system and economy stayed alive for more than 70 years. Three generations, a human lifetime.

Yet it just "happened" to fall apart less than a year after Reagan left office while his successor was in power.

Why didn't it collapse during the Carter or Kennedy administrations? Or Truman or Eisenhower for that matter? Or Clintons or Bush IIs presidencies?

Hell of a coincidence that Soviets started collapsing just months after the one president who made it his goal of destroying the Soviet system (not just containing it) left office.

^I think you're offensive and an idiot, Dayton, but compared to Chardman, you're a fuckin genius - but good god please don't let it go to your head, Chardman is practically sub-oerdin. Anyone who lived through the 80s knows how ridiculous Chardman statements are in this thread, beyond stupid, absurd, and simply wrong.

Dayton believes that left to its own devices, Soviet communism would have thrived. I'm not sure it gets any more offensive and idiotic.

I never said that it would've thrived. But I do believe that absent the efforts of President Reagan it could have staggered along for another couple of decades before burning out. If it had made it another 10 years oil prices in the late 1990s starting to rise dramatically again would've boosted it considerably.

And that is why I say you are a liar. I never said it would have "thrived". Or any word similar to that. You're too much like Ed and a number of others.

*Whispers in Dayton's ear*
A cabal of Jews is putting glass in your butter.

In the real world actual conspiracies are almost nonexistent.

I made that list, again.

Sweet Jesus, that's the funniest thing you've ever written and it wasn't even intentional.

Yes, I am indeed like the others who see reality for what it is. You nailed it!

That is what makes the position the right is have taken so hillaripus. You can practically see the spittle fly from Tuttle's lips while he screams his invectives in a shrill girlish voice. That he knows, deep down, that his side is completely wrong yet he can't bring hI'm self to gI've up the right wing man-god myth... Well, that is just the icing on the cake.

Soviet communism was doing just fine when Reagan took office, and most analysts worried that it was ascendant. That's one of the reasons the country elected him, because during the Carter years it looked like we were losing ground all over the globe. They were no more going to collapse than Cuba, North Korea, or Vietnam, because top-down command economies, though not competitive with the West, can survive indefinitely just like any absolute monarchy or imperial dynasty.

And Reagan was an anti-nuclear Democrat before his party abandoned him. When Bush-41 took over from Reagan he made almost all Reagan officials resign. Reagan wasn't so much a Republican as a conservative Democrat who refused to drink the liberal Kool-Aid.

Remember when you wanted your lies to be pointed out to you? Here's one. The Soviet Union was in a state of economic crisis from the late 70s onwards which prompted failed attempts at economic and political reform. That's hardly "Soviet Communism doing just fine". Do some fucking research you absolute cretin.