[PEN-L:9381] Re: Re: Re: chopped liver

["Charles Brown" <CharlesB@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

I agree with Doug's point below. The Soviet Union and the other countries mentioned were not MILITARY threats. The mindbenders in the capitalist world developed the big lie of the Communist military threat, as a cover for attacking socialist countries which were a political alternative and therefore "threat" to capitalism, as said here.

The U.S. initiated all the escalations in the nuclear arms race. This seems unbelievable given the U.S. propaganda on the Soviet threat, yet the record bears it out. The first step :after WWII, when the U.S. was the only country with nuclear weapons, the Soviets , a U.S. ally in the war, proposed a ban on nuclear weapons. The U.S. refused.

This gambit was successful for the U.S. in that the arms race was a major factor in the collapse of the Soviet system. However, the Cold War arms race was driven by a U.S. threat, not a Soviet threat.

Charles Brown

>>> Doug Henwood <dhenwood@xxxxxxxxx> 07/20/99 12:46PM >>>
Michael Perelman wrote:

>Agreed.  We also hear of the North Korean threat.  Remember Reagan's line
>about the Sandinistas being close to southern Texas?
>
>I do not think that those people believe in the reality of such threats.
>Well, maybe Reagan did.

So was the "Soviet threat" real?

I think this point of view doesn't give the capitalists enough credit
for understanding their interests. If they'd let Nicaragua alone,
scores of countries might have followed their example. Ditto Cuba a
generation earlier. Ditto the USSR two or three generations earlier.
Of course there's some paranoid lunacy in the propaganda, but there
are very good reasons for the U.S. ruling class to want to squash any
potential threat to the global hierarchy.

Doug