Mikhail Gorbachev: 'It All Looks as If the World Is Preparing for War'
time.comYou wonder how the world can sink into war and then you start to understand how it works when you study today's political climate.
It seems like a slow motion inevitability.
People's opinions are just so strong.
To make matters worse, seems like the smartphone revolution has provided quick communication channels that magnify the rhetoric.
Forget more information at your finger tips, smartphones and the internet provide easier means of finding like-minded people to raise pitchforks with.
It's not the speed that's the problem, it's that they aren't as well vetted, nor are they diverse. It's easy to avoid uncomfortable facts and opinions. It is necessary to get variety in order to triangulate and assess.
The Balkanization of news and opinions is a minor facet of the overall situation that's unfolding.
The biggest thing going on is opinion shapers and propagandists have been given powerful tools the 20th century PR men could have only dreamed about. Growth hacking, sentiment analysis, personal network analysis, and deep learning are all things that allow cunning people to do extraordinary things.
Messages can be tested and fine tuned to see which ideas resonate. Communication channels can be established directly to the recipient of your message by creating Facebook groups and the like.
People simply haven't developed this critical thinking skills to defend themselves from this new onslaught of opinion shaping tech whose efficacy is based on very timely data.
I imagine Boyd's Law of Iteration is going to be a huge factor in deciding who wins the new propaganda wars. https://blog.codinghorror.com/boyds-law-of-iteration/
Updated: Minor edits for clarity
Scary prospect for us all.
I read a Pilger article last year that sent chills down my back:
http://johnpilger.com/articles/a-world-war-has-begun-break-t...
His view of the world is very skewed. I wouldn't take him as an authority.
While I'm not discounting the current geo-political climate, but every so often you'll see reports that some calamitous event will occur. When it invariably doesn't occur, no one follows up and says "why did you say that, nothing happened". If it does happen though, they can say "See, I told you so!"
Clickbait-y title from Time magazine. No easier way to actually start a war than to talk about it and how the "others" are somehow more prepared.
Very sad to see such article from one of the few still supposedly reputable publishers.
Oh no, they are concentrating weapons in Europe!
Maybe we should stop shelling the east of Ukraine and get out of its south (Crimea)?
As a former Soviet citizen, I fail to see why anyone would care what this clown has to say. No one in Russia cares, for example. He basically ran a superpower into the ground in 6 years flat, from space shuttle to hunger and abject poverty for most of the population. Not even a CIA puppet regime would be able to do a better job.
Gorbachev inherited 65 years of Soviet communism: a super fragile system, based on very tight, top-down command & control. On the surface these command & control societies appear more orderly than democratic societies, but they are very bad at dealing with complexity and at adapting to big changes. Gorbachev made the "mistake" of perturbing the system too much through his attempts at reform.
Also, economically, I don't think the Soviet Union was in such great shape as you say. A space shuttle is not the same as having an economy that creates surplus wealth in real terms. The war in Afghanistan and having to compete with a West bouncing back from 1970s stagflation were other factors not under Gorbachev's control.
The same will at some point happen to e.g. North Korea or Cuba. It has happened to some of these Arabic regimes: when the top echelons are removed or the repressive nature is relaxed, the entire order collapses, leaving a big void and a population which has less than before. In some cases, much less... (Hopefully, North Korea and Cuba will receive lots of support from their neighbours, so it won't be too bad.)
It may also happen with our financial system, the continuation of which comes with ever escalating costs, top-down intervention, bluff, guarantees and outright financial repression. Like Gorbachev, some politician or bank would accidentally upset the balance and would get the blame. E.g. "he raised the rates too fast". Or "too slow", depending on what actually happens. But in reality you should blame the historical fragility of the system itself. (I like the term Soviet monetarism.)
The problem with your argument is the existence of China, to this day ruled by the Communist party of China. It's GDP grew by a factor of 25 since the fall of the Soviet Union.
China learned from Russia's experience and slowly loosened the reins on key industries before loosening the reins on other industries without completely relinquishing control.
The key problem with command and control economies in the 20th century was those economies were fundamentally limited by the command's ability to capture accurate market data, learn they key insights about that data and then execute smart decisions.
I'm not claiming China is capable of doing that today, but information technology has significantly improved the efficacy of the leadership's influence on economic activity. However, they were also wise enough to distribute the work of optimising markets by allowing business owners and capital investors to benefit from the efficiencies they introduce.
Simply put: The Communist Party of China has been using a very different playbook for the past 30 years and they've benefitted significantly and the effect of IT has had a profound impact on their efficacy.
I think you're over complicating this a bit. Simply put, they first gave their people economic freedoms (and then not all at once) and then started loosening up in terms of political freedoms. If it takes them 50-100 years, so be it. That actually strikes me as a much more viable approach. You can't really give people freedom if they don't know what to do with it. Not without repercussions at least.
If Russia's GDP per capita reaches China's, its total GDP will shrink 50%, ok?
Don’t really know much about China to be honest. They definitely managed to open up gradually, even if mainly in terms of allowing private investment decisions.
Let's see how the Chinese communist party handles a situation where the low hanging fruit of pedal-to-the-metal big percentage GDP growth has been picked.
Apples to oranges. China, while communist, does not have a centrally-planned economy like the USSR had. They began a series of extensive economic reforms in 1978, leading to privatization of industries, opening to foreign investment, allowances for entrepreneurship, etc.
Also, I think when China began its gradual reform, the country quite simply already had hit rock bottom, coming out of the utter chaos of the cultural revolution. Chaos is different from a fragile order. You can't burn down ashes.
But we seem to have strayed off course somewhat.
I wish people wouldn't downvote someone for an alternate opinion. It's interesting to see the Russian view point on these things. I think the parent poster is indoctrinated with the typical anti-western mindset, but it's still valid and adds to the discussion.
> He basically ran a superpower into the ground in 6 years flat, from space shuttle to hunger and abject poverty
The Soviet Union was in free fall economically long before Gorbachev. It was a systemic failure. To pile the genocidal failings of 3 generations of communist rule onto the first leader to free his people from that oppression is a terrible perversion of history.
I lived in Soviet Union as well during the collapse. I think there is a lot of propaganda from the west that makes you think it wasn't Gorbachev's fault.
People were happy, had children and believed in their country and made progress in art and science. Then one person who possibly had good intentions "gave everyone freedom". You can't just do that without consequences. It should have been a very gradual transition similar to how it is in China. Instead the country got completely destroyed. Every single thriving industry collapsed and people's savings were worth nothing basically overnight. Police stopped enforcing laws, gangs appeared all over the place, everyone started doing drugs. It was a disaster.
Gorbachev was almost immediately hated throughout the country.
If USSR economy was in free fall, how come GDP per capita was about 2x smaller in Soviet Union compared to USA in 1989 while income distribution was much more even?
Edit: If you believe propaganda in US doesn't exist, look at this law https://foreignpolicy.com/2013/07/14/u-s-repeals-propaganda-...
> People were happy
Russians - may be, All the other oppressed and occupied nations - no. Cant vouch for other but almost every Estonian secretly hoped for freedom and despised Russians. When our chance came we acted swiftly. Soviet Union was just another form of Russian Empire and a way to try to control the world.
This is a similar tale told by friends from Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Czech Republic and Slovakia.
However, for people in these countries it wasn't a tale. It was a harsh reality...
> I lived in Soviet Union as well during the collapse. I think there is a lot of propaganda from the west that makes you think it wasn't Gorbachev's fault.
The Soviet Union, when Gorbachev took over, had spent itself to the brink of collapse in a decades long military spending competition with the richest nation on the planet and it's rich allies, and papered over that with propaganda, which was itself weakening after some notable and hard to cover up setbacks.
Gorbachev pulled back some of the veil of propaganda simultaneously with (and as part of) trying to engineer a soft landing. It's true he largely failed, but I doubt anyone could have done much better (an authoritarian might have managed to paper over things longer and direct blame at external actor when the bottom eventually fell out, and by doing so remained more popular at home -- at least, among Russians if not the rest of the people under Soviet rule.)
I think much of the perception that things were his fsult is a result of pre-Gorbachev propaganda (mostly Soviet, but also Western propaganda about the strength of the USSR that served to shore up support for the Western side of the spending war.)
Free his people? The man actually walked all over the will of the people: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_Union_referendum,_1991
Those who grew up in Russia in the 90s see this differently.
People had to turn to growing vegetables in their rural cottages (dachas) to survive. Massive unemployment, staggering inflation. Gang leaders elected as mayors and governors who murdered anyone who dared to oppose them.
Does any of this sound like you would want in your country?
People always had to grow vegetables in their dachas to survive up until the collapse of soviet union. In the beginning(1944+ for Estonia) authorities snatched everything you grew and shipped it to russia and murdered anyone who tried to oppose and some who didn't, just in case. No wonder Moscow lived prosperously:) I remember very vividly the empty shelves in shops as long as I can remember and my memories span few years before Gorbatchev came to power.
The referendum results are interesting. Estonian independence referendum results division matches closely the ratio of natives and civilian population of that the occupying power(USSR) transferred into the occupied territory. Same with the voluntary referendums organised by pro-Soviet front-organisations. The count of voters is close to illegal occupant's population. We were lucky. After breaking free we did not suffer such harsh conditions as you have mentioned(Gang leaders elected as mayors and governors who murdered anyone who dared to oppose them.) Economy boosted and living conditions improved drastically every year.
We can safely establish that part of the soviet union wanted to stay together and part of it did not. And the results varied drastically country-by-country - nation-by-nation.
Methinks if you guys didn't help the Nazis, you'd be treated more humanely immediately post war. I can sorta understand the lack of love the Soviet government would have towards you at the time.
At the same time the Baltic republics always felt like an artificial part of the USSR, only a little closer than e.g. Bulgaria or DDR. The same can't be said of Belarus and Ukraine, which were culturally, ethnically, and territorially more cohesive in the greater whole, and the loss of which was tragic, and has repercussions to this day.
Yeahh, go to Poland and tell them how they "helped" nazis and that's why they were run over by Soviets:)
EDIT: Culturally we were even farther from CCCP than Bulgaria, I guess, but that is my opinion only formed from my own experience visiting all those countries You have mentioned.
And I guess we should just forget about Forest Brothers and stuff, amirite?
As I remember, the price of oil and the previous Soviet neglect of their oil field infrastructure figured in heavily, there.
Not to mention the tremendous cost of handling the Chernobyl catastrophy...
You "remember" wrong. I actually _was_ there. Neglect and price of oil weren't in any way fatal to a largely self-sufficient country. Complete collapse of all branches of the government was.
The empire certainly wasn't self-sufficient, although the Russian center was richer. The empire depended on very large-scale oil exports, to subsidize the bloc. Even with those exports, the line-ups for basics was real in Russia, too. Russia's self-sufficiency isn't much in evidence today, either, as the economy shrinks year-on-year, and three-quarters of a million of the most capable people emigrate each year.
I'd like to hear more. Can you be more specific about what you think led to the fall of the Soviet Union?
It didn't help that the US did everything it could to drop the price of oil specifically to destroy the income source of the USSR. USSR is too dependent on that single income source and left itself open to attack.
Can vouch that this is a mainstream point of view in Russia.
Virtually nobody takes Gorbachev seriously no matter their political views.
This Attack on the man is flawed. Cold war lasted longer than his 6 years in power.
Never made this old schizophrenic, he's always keen to get attention