Did fart blossom Reagan end the cold war?

[Dees]

Did this one man stop the Russians dead and end the the threat of communism all by his self or not? I think the Russians thought he was a joke.

[DireStrike]

1. Yep. Killed 'em all he did, with his bare hands.

:eyes:

[genius]

9. He wanted WWIII. Gorbechev unilaterally ended the cold war w/ any

help from Reagan.

[XNASA]

2. Actually, the war in Afghanistan...............

Had as much to do with bringing down the Soviet Union as anything.

[tk2kewl]

3. he just happened to be there towards the end

there was 30+ years of cold ware before he even arrived on the scene

[barb162]

6. yes, this is how I see it too. Also Gorby had enough brains and

balls to see the system in the USSR wasn't working.

[tk2kewl]

7. Perestroika!

eom

[WMliberal]

12. perestroika what? that wasn't even his idea.

The Chinese did it first. Deng Xiaoping started it in 1978. They are proof that perestroika does not necessarily lead to Glasnost.

[Nordic]

14. exactly. It's like if my neighbor's house burned down and I got blamed

only in reverse.

Or if Charles Manson got shot in my front yard, I could take the credit even though I was watching TV the whole time.

Reagan was an idiot and a fool and everybody knew it, even people working for him, like my own FATHER

[blm]

4. I think the ONE man who made the biggest difference was Ted Turner

when he put that satellite to good use and started INTERNATIONAL news that reached into more countries, sharing how people really lived and how they were actually effected in their daily lives by their government's policies.

Too bad that CNN is now being used to STIFLE information and spread disinformation to protect BushInc. and his corporate cronies.

[Dees]

5. The Russians thought that SDI was unworkable.

The Soviet Union crumbled from within.

The arguement I hear from the wingnuts is if Raygun stopped the Commies then BunnyW can stop the terrorists.

[ObaMania]

8. No

Spit bubble boy was just in the right place at the right time. The USSR was going down anyway and the dumb ass Re :puke: s in their infinite wisdom just happened to jack up defense spending enough that Russia couldn't keep up.

All Raygun did was show up for the photo op.

JM .02

[eternalburn]

10. Visiting Soviet Physicists in the 70's.......

I didn't get the "Cold War", then again I was a child. I played with Soviet children. My mother took the visiting scientists wives on trips throughout America freely. My father worked with many Soviet physicists here at Fermilab (previously known as N.A.L)long before the wall ever came down and long before Reagan was president.

[WMliberal]

11. oh lord. if you think a country as powerful as the USSR fell

in only 8 years...

I have a shiny new history degree and have lots of knowledge and papers written on post-WWII Europe. Here's my take:

In the 1950's and early 60's, Russia was on the rise. Their economy was booming and standards of living were improving at roughly the same rate as here in the U.S. Furthermore, the oil fields in the Caucasus and Siberia were beginning to produce and providing LOTS of cash. With this newfound wealth in the treasury, the Soviets had several options on how to spend it.
1. Reinvest in industrial machinery. Their heavy machinery was mostly a generation old, as ours was. This is what most U.S. manufacturers did.
2. More healthcare all around, better housing for all, better food rationing, public works, etc.
3. (what they ended up doing) Neither of the above. Spend money on imports to replace inferior products made domestically.

Doing number 3 was a solution to none of their potential long term problems. Machinery and methods that were becoming outdated further deteriorated. The treasury became more and more depleted as the amount of products needing substitutes imported increased.
With even less money, they were less and less able to provide a decent standard of living, let alone improve it. This fanned into the fires created by black markets and samizdat. Perestroika and Glasnot helped make a nonviolent end to the Eastern bloc possible.

[ernstbass]

13. I love the way the repugs have rewritten history

on this issue. I about died the first time I heard Sean Hannity make this claim. the soviet Union imploded economically.

[Dees]

16. He does it almost nightly.

It goes unchallenged night after night. Some wicked evil Dem guest needs to step up and say, "Sean, you need to stop repeating that lie and myth. Why don't we have a little discussion on this Reagan/cold war issue?" But then again we wouldn't want to anger Karl now would we.

[Inland]

15. Seriously, he did something--he aided Gorby, who sheparded

the SU and Eastern bloc into the dustbin of history quietly instead of a transition whereby the SU hangs on for another thirty years, followed by a big boom and civil war.

The righties like to argue that it was Reagan's bellicose rhetoric and huge defense spending that did it, and in truth, it was making nice with Gorby that helped. Everything else was at best an expensive waste that alienated the world (sound familar?) or counterproductive.

[K-W]

17. The Cold War wasnt really a war.

And it didnt have a winner.

As far as I can tell, everybody lost.

[ProfessorGAC]

18. Laughable Fantasy

No. Communism began its implosion due to economic conditions and a horrible industrial base as early as 1965. If not for WWII and the nationalist pride instilled in the Soviet people, it would have collapsed far sooner than it did.

Two people get the maximum credit from me:
Gorbachev: He saw the writing on the wall and STOPPED any military build-up. He cut the Soviet military budget by over 50%! He opened newspapers. He opened chuches. The genie was out of the bottle and he recognized it. The genie was let out the bottle by;

Ted Turner: Turner stood the capitalist world on its head by proving that satellite broadcasting could be highly profitable and influential and then did it again by proving that a 24 hour, all news all the time, network could work. By the time the USSR imploded, there were capitalist world competitors galore, all over Western Europe. The information age was launched and there was NO POSSIBLE WAY that all the information from the west could be filtered by the Soviet hierarchy. The people of the USSR saw that they had been living 50 years of the big lie. They wanted change, they wanted it NOW, and once again, Gorbachev saw the inevitable result was either freedom or revolution.

Reagan had NOTHING to do with it.
The Professor

[CroixRoussienne]

19. Pope John Paul II

The Pope and Lech Walesa did more to end the Soviet state than anything that crooked pimp Reagan ever did.