Briefing note: US Deputy Secretary Of State meeting with Andrei Gromyko (1985)
history.state.gov
history.state.gov
Two out of three ain't bad.
> Don’t blubber. You’re guilty as hell of violating whales
Little joke there - but a very important issue as the USSR was a major factor in almost making whales extinct, and for very little economic gain to themselves.
> Avoid strategic miscalculation: want to talk about Antarctica, Fiji, and Burkina Faso.
Burkina Faso: important once, I cannot remember why, and I've not heard that name since the cold war ended.
Probably because at the time it was in danger of becoming a successful socialist country (under then-president Thomas Sankara), a state of affairs which obviously could not be permitted to continue (Sankara was duly assassinated in 1987 by his best friend who was much more compliant to the West):
successful socialist country
What do you count as success? Just a few years earlier, and driven by the same socialist expansion strategy, another developing state turned socialist, Cambodia, with active help from Moscow. Is this what you have in mind as success?
Wasn't Sankara a charismatic leader, and military man who came to power by a coup d'état? Have you looked at the track record of military coup d'états in history ...?
> His foreign policies were centred on anti-imperialism, with his government eschewing all foreign aid, pushing for odious debt reduction, nationalising all land and mineral wealth and averting the power and influence of the International Monetary Fund and World Bank. His domestic policies were focused on preventing famine with agrarian self-sufficiency and land reform, prioritising education with a nationwide literacy campaign and promoting public health by vaccinating 2.5 million children against meningitis, yellow fever and measles
> Other components of his national agenda included planting over 10 million trees to combat the growing desertification of the Sahel, redistributing land from feudal landlords to peasants, suspending rural poll taxes and domestic rents and establishing a road and railway construction programme. On the local level, Sankara called on every village to build a medical dispensary and had over 350 communities build schools with their own labour. Moreover, he outlawed female genital mutilation, forced marriages and polygamy. He appointed women to high governmental positions and encouraged them to work outside the home and stay in school, even if pregnant. Sankara encouraged the prosecution of officials accused of corruption, counter-revolutionaries and "lazy workers" in Popular Revolutionary Tribunals. As an admirer of the Cuban Revolution, Sankara set up Cuban-style Committees for the Defense of the Revolution. Such programs led to criticism by Amnesty International and other non-governmental organizations for violations of human rights, including extrajudicial executions and arbitrary detentions of political opponents.
So large improvements in material conditions for an extremely poor country - but at the expense of political freedom.
> Have you looked at the track record of military coup d'états in history
As so often in history, those who come to power by violence leave it by violence; he was assassinated.
Political movements cannot meaningfully be evaluated by what they promise, for the all promise the world, but by
- Before they come to power: by what they are likely to deliver (which is predicted from what similar policies have lead to in the past).
- Post facto: what they did deliver.
This is obvious. Everybody in this discussion is aware of this.
There is an interesting social phenomenon at play here, that deserves intellectual curiosity and explanation: there is no identifiable political ideology in the history of humanity that failed to deliver so hard and so often with identical policies, as the Marxist position via Leninist cadre parties. Yet even today, we we see apologias like pjc50's despite Marxist / Leninist cadre parties. I've even pointed to the A/B testing that were the division of Germany and Korea.
Many times people have tried to answer this question. I'm broadly in agreement with Nietzsche on this one ...
He had stated goals of improving material conditions for the poor. Every strongman promises that.
Without doing the research, I feel safe assuming none of those improvements actually happened.
But I'll be very happy to have any Burkinabes correct me!
Aside, during the cold war, many leaders in developing countries played the US and the Soviet union off against each other, in order to get weapons etc. Erdogan in Turkey has been masterfully doing some variation of this for a while.
More likely it was meant entirely for the Soviets' amusement/confusion, that they would have been obliged to pretend they had not seen, and some other doc still secret was actually read by (or to) the US crew.
Or, it is really just an inside joke that never had any larger meaning, and got assigned a document number more or less by mistake..
If anything the last 4 years (mostly composed of "professional politicians" despite those at the top maybe being outsiders!) should be real "mask off" to the supposed genius and amazing tradecraft of the US.
Ocamm's razor here is that this was the memo.
[Edit: Apparently the photo is from the National Lampoon, May 1978.]
US diplomats (& members of the Blob) like their counter parts in the foreign service (UK) quite often use humour in internal documents.
Listen to podcasts by insiders like the bombshell's there is also a famous SIS (MI6) document about the death of Rasputin written in the style of teh Daily Mail.
When I think of all Ambassadors with grace and favour appointments it makes me grimace. The extraordinary testimony from Fiona Hill and Alex Vindman was at least reassuring that competent people were in government, even if they were being ignored.
I didn't get that at all. Maybe it's discourteous and flippant. The humour is broad rather than refined but I still chuckled.
Hard to evaluate "ill informed" due to distance in time and the fact that I lack insight into the context. It wasn't aiming to be comprehensive and insightful. It was a tongue in cheek crib sheet between people that appeared to know and get where each other was coming from.
¯\_(ツ)_/¯Cheers! :)
While the State Department might get a new coat of paint under Biden, it’s been being “gutted” for decades.
Humour and professionalism are not incompatible. I know Trump liked to pretend that he is being criticised for failing to adequately play-act the sort of stiff formality his basic understanding of "being presidential" encompasses. But that was never the case.
"Point to Make
—We have new proposal: why don’t you send Lenin’s body to US on tour. Just like King Tut exhibit.
—We are prepared to respond by sending Jane Fonda workout group on tour of Soviet cities."
This was most probably a joke but about 10 years ago I discovered this Soviet aerobics video [1] from 1984 which would have put many Jane Fonda videos to shame. The music all by itself is worth it a thousand times.
> If Soviets dismantle all SS–20s, we are willing to airbrush out Gorbachev’s birthmark in US photographs
edit: also, "make the world safe for conventional warfare". Hmpf.
To utter surprise, the opening argument for "total ban on IRBMs" got accepted wholesale.
The Sex Pistols was a British punk band, a project of Malcolm McLaren fronted by Sid Vicious (John Ritchie) and Johnny Rotten (Johnny Lydon), who enjoyed needling then-Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, who badly deserved it.
I was a baby when this album came out and knew who they were by the time I was probably 10 or so, despite the fact they had been long broken up. This is one of the most influential bands in rock music history... for an adult to be unaware, would almost be like a younger version of myself to be clueless about who Buddy Holly was.
Sometimes you're just in the tail end of the lucky 10,000.
On the band -
“Although their initial career lasted just two and a half years, they are regarded as one of the most groundbreaking acts in the history of popular music.”
On the album -
“It is frequently listed as the most influential punk album, and one of the most important albums of all time... In 1987, Rolling Stone magazine named the album the second best of the previous 20 years, behind only the Beatles' Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band. The same magazine named it 41st on their list of 500 greatest albums of all time in 2003, maintaining the position in its updated 2012 list. In 2006, it was chosen by Time magazine as one of the 100 greatest albums ever.“
I always thought the word “Bollocks” was internationally recognized slang because of it.
Even (especially?) communists will tell you the soviet ideology wasn't communism. The soviet state was totalitarian, which is essentially defined by the object against which it constantly militates, which is truth in all and any form. The total war on any truth that could allow for an island of private individual identity in opposition to the movement is the sufficient and necessary condition for the totalitarian urge (Arendt, etc.). What made Reagan the oddly ideal person to respond to that movement was it was his cowboy-actor personal boundaries that were anathema to the uncertainty on which the soviet mentality depended and cultivated in people. It was a unique situation.
Obama had a similar "openness," I think, which was not what most people think at all, but rather complete confidence in the boundary between himself and others that enabled him to seem open to any and all circumstances. Reality is nobody ever gets close enough to see the heat and steel behind it. Comparably, Bill Clinton even had more sharp edges than Obama.
Maybe the 80's were just this corny, but the briefing note has some tells of very polished people code switching to what they understood only from the outside as Reagan's aw-shucks earnestness.
communists will tell you
the soviet ideology wasn't
communism.
Let's also be clear that Soviets read the works by Marx and Engels in great detail, it's not like they didn't know what Marx and Engels wrote. For example, the Communist Manifesto [1, 2] outlines a few essential demands [3] for a transition that will eventually lead to communist utopia. Every single one of those was executed, and achieved by Stalin.
Exactly what "communism" should mean has never really been clarified, but whatever Marx and Engels meant by it, the fact that carrying out their 10 key demands exacted an 8 digit death toll is an extremely strong indication that there is something fundamentally wrong with Marx and Engels ideas.
Moreover, the world A/B tested this: two countries were split (Germany and Korea), one was ruled by a communist party (Soviet aligned) the other capitalist and within a decade the capitalist one was doing dramatically better than the other. So much so, that you Soviet aligned one had to turn itself to a prison to prevent the population from fleeing. (Yes I am aware that this is not a repeatable scientific experiment. However it is the most decisive 'experiment' you can hope for in politics and social theory. It is what we must learn from. To quote Marx: "A Nation should and can learn from other nations".)
[1] K. Marx, F. Engels, Manifesto of the Communist Party. http://activistmanifesto.org/assets/original-communist-manif...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Communist_Manifesto
[3] Briefly (and from [2]): progressive income tax; abolition of inheritances and private property; abolition of child labour; free public education; nationalisation of the means of transport and communication; centralisation of credit via a national bank; expansion of publicly owned land, etc.—the implementation of which would result in the precursor to a stateless and classless society.