The inanity of Reagan having won the Cold War versus Pope John Paul II

[lobato1]

& Please note I give my usual references to all of my contentions on the inanity of the myth that Prez. Reagan defeated the USSR.
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IMO: the best way is to compare the military defeat of the USSR in Afghanistan (& that is the basis for the Prez Reagan myth) to our de-facto military defeat in Vietnam where the Soviets wasted a fraction of a fraction of a fraction on manpower, lives & consequent cost in comparison to our country & in relation to our population as follows:

Vietnam USA military involvement​

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USA Population in 1970: 203,392,031

My Reference : 1970 United States Census - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
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Not counting American casualties in Eisenhower’s secret wars in French Indochina & counting only the time of our 1st military KIA on July 8, 1959 to the fall of Saigon & the departure of our last military personnel on April 30, 1975 for a total of: 15 years 9 months & 22 days of American Military involvement.


1st KIA July 8, 1959

My Reference : Vietnam Veterans Memorial - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
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Total US KIA: 58,286
Percentage in relation to our USA’s population: 0.029%

My Reference : Vietnam War casualties - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
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Maximum serving at one time: >543,000
Percentage in relation to our USA’s population: 0.27%

My Reference : Troops in Vietnam: Reached a peak of 543,000 in the last year (1968) of the Johnson Administration
Other References : Vietnam Veterans Memorial - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
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Afghanistan USSR military involvement:​

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USSR July 1985 Population: 277,700,000

My Reference : Demographics of the Soviet Union - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
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December 25, 1979 & Ended February 15, 1989 for a total of: 9 years 1 month & 21 Days of USSR military involvement..

From WIKIPEDIA’s pro-USA reference in a USSR worst case Afghanistan defeat scenario that includes multiple references from Congressman Charlie Wilson including his version of how he won the Cold War in his “Charlie Wilson’s War” later made into a movie staring Tom Hanks.

My Reference : Soviet war in Afghanistan - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
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Total KIA: 14,453
Percentage in relation to the USSR’s population: 0.0052%

Maximum serving at one time: 104,000
Percentage in relation to the USSR’s population: 0.037%

My Reference : Soviet war in Afghanistan - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
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Versus

The USSR’s financial collapse coupled with events in Cardinal Karol Wojtyla’s Poland​

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When Prez Reagan died in 2004, Mikhail Gorbachev came to our country to pay his respects & was interviewed by a Fox News commentator that shoved a microphone into Mr. Gorbachev’s hand & demanded his views as to how Prez Reagan had defeated the USSR, however when Mr. Gorbachev tried to explain the financial crisis & consequent demise of the old USSR the Fox News commentator not liking what Mr. Gorbachev was saying rudely grabbed back the microphone saying that it was Mr. Gorbachev’s explanation of how Prez Reagan had defeated the USSR leaving Mr. Gorbachev & his translator looking at each other in disbelief.

Specifically & to the point what Mr. Gorbachev tried to explain was that the financial bankruptcy & demise of the USSR was because back in the 80’s at the height of the oil crisis & due to the Iran Iraq war, the Persian Gulf was closed to oil exports from the region producing a tenfold increase of the barrel of crude oil. Western Europe then had to scramble to the USSR begging for oil at any price but once the war was over, the price of oil dropped back to the original pre-war levels that bankrupted the USSR that couldn’t balance it’s oil exports in relation to the cost of it’s massive imports it had grown dependent upon.
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Without a doubt, the USSR’s global dominance ended with their financial bankruptcy & cracked in Poland (not in the military defeat in Afghanistan), with their failure to crack the Lech Walesa’s Solidarity trade union with the ample support of the Catholic church headed by Cardinal Karol Wojtyla in Cracow & others.

The importance of Solidarity Trade Union cannot be overemphasized enough because this was the 1st Non-Communist Trade Union in the Soviet bloc & they the Soviets viewed this as a mortal threat for their totalitarian Soviet communist states & on December 13, 1981, the Polish General Wojciech Jaruzelski declared martial law & their leaders & priest that didn’t cooperate with the government were beaten & given long prison term.

My Reference:
Lech Walesa historical biography : Solidarity
Other Reference:
Poland looks to Pope John Paul II with new eyes as Russia stirs | Alaska Dispatch
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Best Regards
Lobato1

 

[oldfart]

When Prez Reagan died in 2004, Mikhail Gorbachev came to our country to pay his respects & was interviewed by a Fox News commentator that shoved a microphone into Mr. Gorbachev’s hand & demanded his views as to how Prez Reagan had defeated the USSR, however when Mr. Gorbachev tried to explain the financial crisis & consequent demise of the old USSR the Fox News commentator not liking what Mr. Gorbachev was saying rudely grabbed back the microphone saying that it was Mr. Gorbachev’s explanation of how Prez Reagan had defeated the USSR leaving Mr. Gorbachev & his translator looking at each other in disbelief.

Specifically & to the point what Mr. Gorbachev tried to explain was that the financial bankruptcy & demise of the USSR was because back in the 80’s at the height of the oil crisis & due to the Iran Iraq war, the Persian Gulf was closed to oil exports from the region producing a tenfold increase of the barrel of crude oil. Western Europe then had to scramble to the USSR begging for oil at any price but once the war was over, the price of oil dropped back to the original pre-war levels that bankrupted the USSR that couldn’t balance it’s oil exports in relation to the cost of it’s massive imports it had grown dependent upon.
​

Without a doubt, the USSR’s global dominance ended with their financial bankruptcy & cracked in Poland (not in the military defeat in Afghanistan), with their failure to crack the Lech Walesa’s Solidarity trade union with the ample support of the Catholic church headed by Cardinal Karol Wojtyla in Cracow & others.

The importance of Solidarity Trade Union cannot be overemphasized enough because this was the 1st Non-Communist Trade Union in the Soviet bloc & they the Soviets viewed this as a mortal threat for their totalitarian Soviet communist states & on December 13, 1981, the Polish General Wojciech Jaruzelski declared martial law & their leaders & priest that didn’t cooperate with the government were beaten & given long prison term.
​

You have a lot of overlap with another thread:
http://www.usmessageboard.com/histo...-s-foreign-policy-was-the-worst-the-best.html

especially my post #12

I attended graduate school in the late 60s on a national Defense Education Act fellowship doing work on the Soviet economy (I was tasked to labor force and population analysis). The program was funded through the Harvard-MIT Joint Center for East European Studies and involved scholars and graduate students at about 50 institutions. I got free trips to a few symposia as part of the deal and met a fair number of researchers.

The consensus at the time was that we did not understand what kept the Soviet economy from collapsing. Our estimates 1968--1972 were that almost 40% of GDP went to the military, space program, security services, intelligence services, targeted foreign aid for geopolitical influence, propping up dependent states, and the heavy industry to support these ventures. Most of this could not be diverted easily to consumer or light industry or other "normal" economic development. It was a deadweight economic loss, drag on the economy, and incredibly inefficient. The Soviet economy was in short perceived as a hollow shell grinding itself into dust.

Later we learned that we were basically correct. From the early 70s the Soviet economy was inevitably doomed, it could not continue on its then-current path without a collapse. Glasnost and perestroika were not enough. What tipped it over the edge was the public reaction to the nuclear catastrophe shown in real time on Soviet television, the body bags coming back from Afganistan, fall in life expectancy, and the complete exhaustion of the Soviet peoples who no longer had any hope. It was an existential collapse and it was total.

Did American policy have anything to do with that collapse? I would argue not much. There was very little we could do that would accelerate the decline and nothing we could do to reverse it. Ultimately every society must determine it's reason for surviving. As the Soviet generations that had believed in Revolution, or in the necessity of the Great Patriotic War died out, the generation rising behind them had little stomach for the sacrifices of their fathers. And for good reason. No people should suffer what the Soviet peoples suffered 1917--1953.

I don't expect everyone to agree with me and welcome a robust debate on the issues, but I would have one request.

Please have the decency to understand that the Soviet peoples did nothing to "deserve" the hell they went through. They did not dictate the terms at Versailles that triggered German revanchism; they did not create the international order that reinstituted the colonial system, and they were not the authors of the economic system which so disastrously failed in 1928--1933. But they did absorb 80% of the casualties and ruin it took to defeat Nazism while America and Britain stood by unable or unwilling to bear more than a token effort for almost five years.

Without the sacrifices of the Soviet peoples, America today would likely have jackbooted skinheads wearing swastika armbands marching in the streets. No, wait........

I made no direct reference to Poland, but did mention "propping up dependent states." Elsewhere recently I made a fuller reference to the costs of intervention in East Germany and Hungary (1956), de facto intervention in Poland to back up Gomulka and later Jaruzelski , and Czechoslovakia in 1968. I also think your argument is complemented by what I meant when I said the crisis was existential in the Soviet Union. If your position has a weakness, it is not recognizing the impact of Chernobyl.​

 

[CrusaderFrank]

The USSR could no longer support their liberal failures and the USA can no longer ours

Sent from smartphone using my wits and Taptalk

 

[lobato1]

Since you’ve asked me about my views on the Chernobyl tragedy consequences on the Soviet bloc& in the interest of opening an honest debate I will defer on your views of the Chernobyl tragedy contributing to the collapse of the Soviet bloc based on my personal experience which of course, this being an opinion from personal experience, is debatable.

For starters & as an analogy; Think November-December 2002 when our country knew Iraq had Nuclear WMDs thanks to our liberal media airing these treats to our country after 9/11, but the following month of December 2002, the rest of the world knew our government had forged Iraq’s Weapons Declaration (that they had submitted on November 2002) by removing >8,000 pages & leaving only the part of Iraq’s explanation of how they had acquired those weapons & omitting the part of how they had disposed of them as was exposed by the Berlin newspaper’s “Der Tageszeitung” Geneva reporter Andreas Zumach where Iraq had also submitted their 11,800 page document, but & this is the gist of my analogy; Our Liberal Media censored these international events in our country & we Americans “KNEW” Iraq continued to have Nuclear WMDs while the rest of the world knew otherwise (Ref: The Case of the Missing Information about Iraq's Weapons ).

BTW:
Please, please, note that I’m only using this example as an analogy& in no way will I reply to this particular example because it would be a demerit to your beautiful essay & contentions about Chernobyl as well as my efforts to debate them.
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Back in 2008 when I was in France, the Ukraine was already the subject of deliberation in French Television with their usual thorough interviews from opposite sides & what was most impressive was the hostilities towards the West of many of the Ukrainian participants, specifically on the subject of the Chernobyl tragedy where literally an army of Western Nuclear experts, engineers, scientist, you name it, had rushed to the Soviet Union to downplay the population’s fear about the danger so as to negate their mistrust on their government & all these guy’s opinions were aired 24/7 on all their state televisions that was the only source of information. Some ten years later when the true health consequence & in many cases mortal consequences started to exact their toll & that was the essence of their bitterness, then & only then did they the Ukrainians realized how badly the West had collaborated with the government to lie to them.

Reading the international addition of Newsweek a couple of months after the source of the radioactive fallout was traced to the Ukraine supposedly our intelligence were surprised at satellite photos of Chernobyl residents at a football soccer game stadium only some 6 miles away from the stricken nuclear plant.

Once the Soviet Union crashed & that the Ukrainians became aware of the realities of Chernobyl the recriminations started & have continued to this very day as we now see in the present Ukrainian turmoil.

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On a 1st hand personal level in relation to my previous analogy as to how the media is used to control public opinion, I was an American expatriate in Western Europe for over 44 years & at that time, I was working on a project off the African west coast in the Canary Islands. When I returned to Madrid to report about the progress of my assigned project, I mentioned I hadn’t seen any news on the then state TV about radioactive fallout in the peninsula & an alférez (2nd lieutenant) stood up & categorically told me that no radioactive fallout had occurred in Spain. I then committed the mistake of mentioning that according to the American magazine Newsweek, high levels of radioactive fallout had been registered in Portugal & the alférez became upset & emphatically annunciated that Spain was safe because the Pyrenees that I was unaware of, were very, very high & served as a barrier. I then immediately dropped the subject & returned to my report, to the obvious relieve of the rest of the officers present at that meeting.


Best Regards
Lobato1

When Prez Reagan died in 2004, Mikhail Gorbachev came to our country to pay his respects & was interviewed by a Fox News commentator that shoved a microphone into Mr. Gorbachev’s hand & demanded his views as to how Prez Reagan had defeated the USSR, however when Mr. Gorbachev tried to explain the financial crisis & consequent demise of the old USSR the Fox News commentator not liking what Mr. Gorbachev was saying rudely grabbed back the microphone saying that it was Mr. Gorbachev’s explanation of how Prez Reagan had defeated the USSR leaving Mr. Gorbachev & his translator looking at each other in disbelief.

Specifically & to the point what Mr. Gorbachev tried to explain was that the financial bankruptcy & demise of the USSR was because back in the 80’s at the height of the oil crisis & due to the Iran Iraq war, the Persian Gulf was closed to oil exports from the region producing a tenfold increase of the barrel of crude oil. Western Europe then had to scramble to the USSR begging for oil at any price but once the war was over, the price of oil dropped back to the original pre-war levels that bankrupted the USSR that couldn’t balance it’s oil exports in relation to the cost of it’s massive imports it had grown dependent upon.
​

Without a doubt, the USSR’s global dominance ended with their financial bankruptcy & cracked in Poland (not in the military defeat in Afghanistan), with their failure to crack the Lech Walesa’s Solidarity trade union with the ample support of the Catholic church headed by Cardinal Karol Wojtyla in Cracow & others.

The importance of Solidarity Trade Union cannot be overemphasized enough because this was the 1st Non-Communist Trade Union in the Soviet bloc & they the Soviets viewed this as a mortal threat for their totalitarian Soviet communist states & on December 13, 1981, the Polish General Wojciech Jaruzelski declared martial law & their leaders & priest that didn’t cooperate with the government were beaten & given long prison term.
​

You have a lot of overlap with another thread:
http://www.usmessageboard.com/histo...-s-foreign-policy-was-the-worst-the-best.html

especially my post #12

I attended graduate school in the late 60s on a national Defense Education Act fellowship doing work on the Soviet economy (I was tasked to labor force and population analysis). The program was funded through the Harvard-MIT Joint Center for East European Studies and involved scholars and graduate students at about 50 institutions. I got free trips to a few symposia as part of the deal and met a fair number of researchers.

The consensus at the time was that we did not understand what kept the Soviet economy from collapsing. Our estimates 1968--1972 were that almost 40% of GDP went to the military, space program, security services, intelligence services, targeted foreign aid for geopolitical influence, propping up dependent states, and the heavy industry to support these ventures. Most of this could not be diverted easily to consumer or light industry or other "normal" economic development. It was a deadweight economic loss, drag on the economy, and incredibly inefficient. The Soviet economy was in short perceived as a hollow shell grinding itself into dust.

Later we learned that we were basically correct. From the early 70s the Soviet economy was inevitably doomed, it could not continue on its then-current path without a collapse. Glasnost and perestroika were not enough.

What tipped it over the edge was the public reaction to the nuclear catastrophe shown in real time on Soviet television, the body bags coming back from Afganistan, fall in life expectancy,


and the complete exhaustion of the Soviet peoples who no longer had any hope. It was an existential collapse and it was total.

Did American policy have anything to do with that collapse? I would argue not much. There was very little we could do that would accelerate the decline and nothing we could do to reverse it. Ultimately every society must determine it's reason for surviving. As the Soviet generations that had believed in Revolution, or in the necessity of the Great Patriotic War died out, the generation rising behind them had little stomach for the sacrifices of their fathers. And for good reason. No people should suffer what the Soviet peoples suffered 1917--1953.

I don't expect everyone to agree with me and welcome a robust debate on the issues, but I would have one request.

Please have the decency to understand that the Soviet peoples did nothing to "deserve" the hell they went through. They did not dictate the terms at Versailles that triggered German revanchism; they did not create the international order that reinstituted the colonial system, and they were not the authors of the economic system which so disastrously failed in 1928--1933. But they did absorb 80% of the casualties and ruin it took to defeat Nazism while America and Britain stood by unable or unwilling to bear more than a token effort for almost five years.

Without the sacrifices of the Soviet peoples, America today would likely have jackbooted skinheads wearing swastika armbands marching in the streets. No, wait........

I made no direct reference to Poland, but did mention "propping up dependent states." Elsewhere recently I made a fuller reference to the costs of intervention in East Germany and Hungary (1956), de facto intervention in Poland to back up Gomulka and later Jaruzelski , and Czechoslovakia in 1968. I also think your argument is complemented by what I meant when I said the crisis was existential in the Soviet Union. If your position has a weakness, it is not recognizing the impact of Chernobyl.​

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