Barnes the self-deluded goon says:
BARNES: Well, I guess I'm just -- I don't know whether I'm pessimistic. I'm just less optimistic than I was. I didn't realize that that would be a problem.
Look, it's different from what America faced in Germany in dealing with the non-communist countries -- the former communist countries. Remember in Germany, Germans could remember a dozen years earlier when there was a democracy and elected government and a free economy, so on in Germany.
-- Yeah! Weimar! 10,000,000% inflation! That free economy rocked! The democracy that elected Hitler! Wa-hoo! ---
The non-communist countries had a 10-year transition, where there was liberalization in these countries and the terror was gone, even in the Soviet Union, but in Poland and other communist countries.
--- There had been no "terror" in the Soviet Union since the early 1950s. Why do I get the feeling that the American view of the outside world is mostly composed of shit they make up?
Incidentally there was a quite interesting documentary on Andropov on TV the other night. Very interesting guy. Not many people in the West seem aware that perestroika was Andropov's baby. Gorbachev was his protege, basically continuing (incompetently) what Andropov had started. I had no idea that he had been against exiling Solzhenitsyn. No wonder he's so fondly remembered by the public. "Vot takoi, Andropov!" (Andropov, what a guy!) as people say. It's a damn shame he wasn't in power longer. Actually there are rumors he was "helped to die."