Friday, September 11, 2009

Not Exactly A Surprise, But Still

Remembering the quite public muttering after the collapse of the Warsaw Pact and the impending reunification of Germany (not to mention the very real potential conflicts in many other collapsed communist states), the fact that Maggie and George actively sought to prevent the end of communism in Central Europe isn't exactly news.
Thatcher met with Gorbachev and personally begged him to do whatever he could to prevent East Germany from merging with West Germany, guaranteed protection for Communist rule in Soviet-bloc nations, and offered a unilateral non-aggression pledge to the Soviet Union itself. George Bush and Francois Mitterand, right-wingers who also presided over noisy anti-communist parties in their countries, backed her assurances to the Communist leader and pledged themselves to prevent German re-unification in any way they could, including with military alliances with the USSR against their official ally West Germany.

What should be a source of disgust, and even outrage, is the very public discovery of what many of us believed all along - that the entire Cold War was bullshit from start to finish. Far too many human beings, whole countries in fact, were decimated by leaders who pledged adherence to a political ideology and practical policies they not only didn't believe in, but sought to undermine just as the goal of those policies was about to bear fruit.

One note: Mitterand was a socialist, not a right-winger.

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