[Vision2020] Who was a friend of the big bad bear?

[Andreas Schou]

> Yes, we found ourselves drawn into a costly arms race with the Soviets.  We
> won because they could not compete with our production.  And interestingly,
> it was not offensive systems which ultimately broke the bear's back, but the
> defensive Strategic Defense Initiative or "missile shield" which
> precipitated Russia's capitulation.
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> I am heartened to hear that you recognize the moral and economic bankruptcy
> that is Marxism.  But you err when you say that the arms race was irrelevant
> in '69 because enough weapons already existed to mutually ensure
> destruction.  That's where S.D.I. became a factor.  The Soviets knew they
> faced yet another race, this one to produce a system of a DEFENSIVE nature.
> They weren't up to the task due to the inherent flaws in their system which
> you acknowledged.

The problem, Tony, is that neither were we. The SDI program produced
no results whatsoever. It was impossible with 1980s technology, and it
is impossible with 2000s technology. For all the good it did either of
us, we could have had a race to see which country could gold-plate
more of its skyscrapers or a multi-billion-dollar sandcastle-building
contest. In reality, SDI was more of a proxy arms race (like the space
race) than it was any sort of useful military endeavor.

> You say the Soviet Union was always a paper tiger and no matter who entered
> the oval office in '80, it would have imploded.  Amazing.  Tell it to the
> tens of MILLIONS of peasants starved to death by Stalin.

Where did I defend Stalin's actions? In fact, I don't even think that
I said that the Soviets weren't a threat to the United States -- they
were, and that threat was equally present in the 1980s. I simply meant
that there were deep and intrinsic flaws in Soviet society: they had
an incredible ability to project military power, but their
authoritarian politics and command economy made their internal
structure deeply fragile.

> Doubt they would
> share you view of the Soviets as harmless.  Fact is that the liberal
> community was sympathetic to, and in bed with, the communist movement then
> as well as now.  Your sorry attempt to rewrite history notwithstanding.  For
> an accurate tale of liberals and their involvement with the communists in
> the fifties and sixties, I recommend you read David Horowitz's Radical Son.

I daresay that's an argument I don't think you want to start. I don't
doubt that leftist radicals in the United States were infiltrated with
Soviet spies. But perhaps you might want to look into, say, Charles
Coughlin and Charles Lindbergh and Henry Ford and their involvement
with the Nazis? Those are American figures far more prominent, than,
for instance, the Weather Underground.

> More on the torture question later,          --Tony
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