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Mikhail Gorbachev has died

(www.reuters.com)
970 points homarp | 6 comments | 30 Aug 22 20:37 UTC | HN request time: 0s | source | bottom
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lapcat ◴[30 Aug 22 21:07 UTC] No.32655071[source]▶
The United States didn't do enough to help Russia transition to democracy in the 1990s. There was no "Marshall Plan" after the Cold War like there was after World War II. This was a huge mistake, and we see the consequences now, with Russia having turned back toward totalitarianism and imperialism. Sadly, it seems that Gorbachev's efforts were mostly for naught. But it was courageous at the time to open up the Soviet Union to glasnost and perestroika.

Of course Yeltsin was a big part of the problem too.

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duxup ◴[30 Aug 22 21:18 UTC] No.32655216[source]▶
The locals in power have to want to do it too. As soon as enough don’t want it, it is over.

I’m skeptical of the idea that you can impose Democracy.

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hotpotamus ◴[30 Aug 22 21:24 UTC] No.32655305[source]▶
Republicans have long said that the federal government is structurally incompetent and unable to effectively administer a large country. They made a convincing argument with their performance in Iraq and Afghanistan, and I doubt Russia would have been much different.
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1. Apocryphon ◴[30 Aug 22 21:26 UTC] No.32655336[source]▶
That was a very different situation, those were states that were militarily invaded and then occupied by American forces, who were involved in reconstructing countries devastated by war.
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2. codyb ◴[30 Aug 22 21:38 UTC] No.32655482[source]▶
Yea, and most young democracies are very vulnerable. You can look at the Arab Spring for examples of failed democracies, and the early United States (it took us 20 years to get off the Articles of Confederation and work on the Constitution we use today).

Myanmar's another one. India's been restricting its people's rights lately.

Democracy takes a while to establish as a stable system and often fails.

Alexander the Great was granting (non-representative) democracies to cities in Asia Minor 2400 years ago, I wonder what he'd think of Erdogan.

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3. AdamJacobMuller ◴[30 Aug 22 21:42 UTC] No.32655518[source]▶
I'm not sure the average Russian would have seen the situation much differently.

Look at the people today who decry chinese investment in the US economy? I'm not even saying those people are wrong.

All it takes is for one person or group in the country to poke us enough to the point where we feel the need to strengthen our security posture there (read: add more troops) and then some terrible situation like Abu Ghraib completely destroys any credibility we have with the local population and it just spirals into disaster.

I simply have no faith left in our government's ability to execute even a completely peaceful operation like the marshall plan (and similarly what we did in Japan).

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4. AmpsterMan ◴[30 Aug 22 22:01 UTC] No.32655745[source]▶
The Thirteen Colonies had a long history of democratic self governance. The revolution was mostly an independence movement. The revolutionary part was the Republican federation.

This long history of democratic rule was not present in many modern attempts to establish democracies.

5. avmich ◴[30 Aug 22 22:17 UTC] No.32655872[source]▶
What's your proposition then? How it's best to go forward from where we are, if you don't trust the current organization abilities?
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6. hotpotamus ◴[30 Aug 22 23:54 UTC] No.32656670{3}[source]▶
I used to find that drinking a lot helped but then my insides started to hurt. I'm thinking about maybe growing psilocybin mushrooms now.