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This Week You Need To Know
On the Washington Post's Robert G. Kaiser on The World War Going Our Way: The KGB and the Battle for the Third World, by Christopher Andrew and Vasili Mitrokhin
November 6, 2005
Kaiser? "... Phoebus! What a name to bear the weight of future's fame!" from Byron on Amos Cottle.
The collapse of the Soviet system, from the close of 1989 onward, became the opening of the silly season for a U.S.A. which had been, thus, suddenly released from the grip of the kind of deadly seriousness which had held the attention of the leading powers, and others, of the planet, since the onset of the Great Depression and the rise of the Hitler regime. For the triumphant leading powers of the U.S.A. and what had been formerly "western Europe," the collapse of the Soviet system encouraged their wishful delusion, that the fearful "outside world" was no longer there. For some, real history had ended. For them, the world had become a doll-house world in which we of George H.W. Bush's U.S.A. and Margaret Thatcher's London had Europe in her handbag, such that we, as the leading powers, could make up children's stories we wrote, and games we would invent, tunes to which the rest of the world must now dance.
Now, things have changed again. We have come into a time when playing with nations as if they were collections of children's dolls, has come to an end. Contrary to fools like Francis Fukuyama, history had never actually stopped. Since 1989-1991, time had been playing with those fools who were wishfully deluded into confidence in playing their childish doll-house games on a hapless world. Now, we are faced with the paying of a terrible price for the foolishness we practiced during the silly season, the recent decade and a half of 1990-2004, which we had spent in that fantasy-land.
Unfortunately, some, such as some of those at the Washington Post, are still living in a state of desperate denial of the fact that the fantasy-world of their particular choice of silly season does not exist, and never really did. They turn over, murmuring, "Let me sleep a little longer," to dream their favorite dream. Their warmed-over old dreams of the recent decade and a half, are now worse than boring, even to them. They thrash restively in their dream-world, as the dreams become sillier and sillier, even for them. The Post's Robert G. Kaiser's silly-season dream, of the by-gone days of a Soviet past which never actually occurred, is a case in point....
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