The Gipper killed the USSR ..
nice try.. but read this
"...The Soviet Union is history; it evaporated in just a few years, to the surprise of many.
Not everyone was surprised. Mr. Todd, a French historian, was not -- nor were those who have read this book.
Todd realized you had to analyze the S.U. in the same way as empires of the past -- places you cannot talk to, and whose records are incomplete and unreliable. And he examined the entire Soviet empire -- including its vassal states of Eastern Europe.
I won't try to summarize the whole book here. Suffice it to say that he describes why the Soviet Union was unstable, and what the causes of its downfall are.
http://www.amazon.com/final-fall-de...=sr_1_4?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1262462346&sr=8-4
I suppose that you will want to give the credit to the blowhard reagan but this was published before he was elected.
However Todd is not finished
What did he say about the great satan ?
"... A bestseller in Europe, this provocative but erratic manifesto stands Euro-anxiety about American hegemony on its head. French demographer Todd (The Final Fall: An Essay on the Decomposition of the Soviet Sphere) cites Paul Kennedy's theory of imperial overstretch and Michael Lind's notion of the American overclass to paint America as a "predatory" but weakening empire, its unilateralism and militarism a sign of frailty, not strength. Misguided free trade policies, he contends, have hollowed out America's industrial base and decimated its working and middle classes, polarizing the country into a society of plutocrats and plebeians. Dependent on imports, America has degenerated into a parasitic, Keynesian consumer-of-last-resort, injecting demand into the world economy while producing nothing of value. To mask its decline, America pursues a foreign policy of "theatrical micromilitarism," picking fights with helpless Third World countries like Iraq to convince the world's real power centers-Europe, Japan and Russia-of its military prowess and validate its spurious image as global policeman. Written in a witty polemical style, Todd's grand but cursory arguments range across economics, military history and geopolitics in ways that might make specialists cringe. Particularly reductionist is his demographic and anthropological view of political science, in which birth and literacy rates and peasant family structures are virtually the sole determinants of a society's politics (but, it should be noted, he used declining birth rates in the Soviet Union to predict its downfall). Todd's eccentric views-on the American trade deficit, the racial attitudes of "the Anglo-Saxon mind," the prevalence of marriages between cousins in Islamic countries, the "castrating" feminism of American women-pull in too many directions to be classified as right or left. His characterization of the United States may hold more than a grain of truth, but some readers might bristle before they see it.
http://www.amazon.com/After-Empire-...=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1262462346&sr=8-1
Happy reading !!!
Comrade Stalin
Comrade Stalin
I do remember BUSH doing a few STUPID things....
