Summers dictates

[ChrisD(RJ)]

If this is the best defense, then I can't see any reason then why loans
for shares shouldn't be identified as "actually existing reform;" why no
reform at all wouldn't have been preferable on Hippocratic principles; and
why the US can't fairly be blamed for a Russia's economic destruction,
since the policy was clearly intentional.  They were out to kill
communists of a sort that didn't exist anymore.  And they were consciously
willing to destroy Russia to do it.

Michael
--------------

They were dueling with phantoms. "Communism" died out in the USSR in the
late 1980s, killed by Gorbachev.

For all Talbott's bleating about not being ctnical, nodding at the
destruction of a country and the obliteration of living standards for the
great majority of the population just to help your personal favorite stay in
power -- completely against the will of the majority of people in Russia --
sounds pretty damn cynical to me.

I just loooove the "oligarchic capitalism is better then communism"
bullshit. Maybe Talbott should try being a heroin-addicted street bum living
in the Moscow sewers. There are tens of thousands of children down there. To
paraphrase: "Russians, with their faulty memory of how bad Communism was,
have no right to complain about its demise. I, Strobe Talbott, on the other
hand, who never lived under either Communism or post-Communism, am a
Platonic Guardian who remembers how bad it was. I know, because I read about
it in books!" What a dick.

Chris Doss
The Russia Journal