A REAL Threat To Democracy !

(A REAL Threat To Democracy !)

It has been a matter of Fath among Republicans that Ronald Reagan "won" the Cold War, without firing a shot. The truth is more prosaic. The fortieth President was determined in the ideological struggle between Communism and Capitalism and believed his Defense build-up could be a contributing in any demise of the Soviet Union. When the U.S.S.R. did collapse, it was more a consequence of what was happening in Moscow than any input that might have come from Washington.


A brief history lesson. The so-called Bolshevik movement that emerged in 1918 was already filled with so many contradictions that Lenin himself was prepared to move to what he was calling the New Economic Policy. In essence, it was a repudiation of certain Communist Party principles. Upon Lenin's death in 1922, however, there was a power struggle within the Party in which Joe Stalin emerged as General Secretary. What followed was the Great Terror in which millions of Russians perished and then the Great Patriotic War, on which millions more were killed.


Those who followed Stalin did not see the need to replicate the Terror. Khruschev, Brezhnev, Andropov and Chernenko, while Soviet Union was not free, it was stable. It had a global military reach that rivaled that of the United States. But the Soviet Union was also getting stale. When Mikhail Gorbachev became General Secretary in 1985, the first thing people knew was he was not going to die in the short term.


It was Gorbachev who tried to reform the Soviet system. He had two initiatives, glasnost, meaning "openness," and perestroika, or "re-structuring." For a while, as the Soviet political system was being re-assessed, the General Secretary assumed the title of "President." At the time, there was a humorous cartoon the New York TIMES where there were posters pasted across Moscow, "Gorbachev for President." The message being that, yes, one can vote but they can only vote for the Communist Party.


There is Democracy here in the United States but only if you vote for Biden and the Democrats. The one who would like to alter that state of affairs is Donald Trump and Republicans. Therefore, Trump is being called the threat to Democracy, because he is exactly that. A threat to Democrat Democracy.

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