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Dinesh

Dinesh club

Posted: 29 Dec 2022

Taken: 02 Nov 2022

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Berlin Wall •
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OF FEAR AND STRANGERS •
George Makari •
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1989

1989
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 Dinesh
Dinesh club
The Calendar Year of 1089 marked the beginning of a series of cataclysms tht created a crisis of identity around the Western world. In the span of three years, the Berlin Wall fell, the Soviet Union collapsed, the Cold War ended. In an astonishing and unprecedented turn, a global superpower peacefully gave up the ghost. Forty-five years of ideological war ended without a whimper. Almost no one was prepared for it. One of the orienting poles of bipolar world had vanished. Disorder and confusion, personal and political, were inevitable. The collapse the Soviet Union raised two monumental questions. What would happen when this gigantic entity dissolved? And what would happen to the United States, which had been so vigilantly poised against this Other for half a century, now that i]ts nemesis was no more?

The Soviet Union was a massive land empire whose gobbled-up colonies contained over one hundred different ethnic groups. Their constitution defined citizens by ethnic-national identities -- Armenian, Ukrainian, even the “nation” of the Jews. After Lenin, Soviet leaders understood that they had to manage a potential “nationalities” problem; especially in places like Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania, which had already tasted autonomy. Police-state oppression secured the peace, and a forced commitment to Marxist ideology brought the many together in thought and identity.

Such collective unity was enhanced and further defined by a common ideological enemy” Western capitalism and its champion, the United States. Throughout the Soveit Union, Americans served as an example of all that the Soviets were not. . . . These were Cold War tropes, coins and realm that could be passed out whenever needed. They are the bigots, not us. They are empty and unhappy. We march for progress and more egalitarian society. To question such dogma was, since Stalin’s show trials in 1936, potentially traitorous. And so, the same song was sung over and over again. ` Page 250

OF FEAR AND STRANGERS
17 months ago. Edited 17 months ago.

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