I bring present for warming of house, but instead find you grappling with local oaf.
So sweet of you to put up a special post just for Megan!
2: I haven't caught up on the other active threads. Did this come up already somewhere else? If so you guys can talk about cheese or something.
Sorry Newt, we've got some of the best poster art around. In arbitrage opportunities I remember walking into a Chelsea gallery and seeing a poster I own on sale for $450 that I'd bought a few years earlier for twenty. Just out of curiosity I checked a few months later in Poland and it had gone up to forty something in the meantime.
And while we're on the topic, a nice techno mashup of various Party leader speeches by Kult with good accompanying video, done twenty years ago:
OK, html screwup, try again
Kult: 45-89
3: No, I was referring to the post title and Megan's well-known love of puns.
I was in my first quarter of law school when the wall went down, so it was mostly just one more cool thing I didn't have time to pay attention to.
And I think American policy was real clear. Yes, we're for a united Germany except getting there was a whole other matter.
'We're entirely in favor of the liberation of Germany and Eastern Europe from the Russian communist enslavement, unless this might actually happen. Also, if the Communists quit now, they're a bunch of losers! Just because were leading, they pick up their ball and go home. Guess we'll have to go watch TV or something.'
And with the hallmark of the Bush administration, I think, during 1989 is worry, anxiety, insecurity. And you see it over and over in the internal notes, the diaries where they say Gorbachev's out in front. He's more popular than we are. He's got the initiative.
Actually, I think the hallmark of the Bush administration is worry, anxiety and insecurity for four fucking years. A man who forgot all of Reagan's or Nixon's successes and mimicked all their idiocies. And then, he got his son into the Presidency.
Remember kids! Never vote for a member of the Bush family for any office higher than dog catcher.
max
['You could, of course, take pity on the poor canines as well.']
Bush I was a pretty good foreign policy president. He had good reason to be worried, sudden socio-political change and a revolutionary climate can lead to very unpleasant consequences. We were lucky that Gorbachev was willing to stick to his no armed intervention guns and that he was (just) strong enough to maintain that line against Party hardliners. By July the controlled thaw envisioned by the Polish leadership had completely spun out of control, Honecker was calling for a 'Tiananmen' solution, and speaking favourably of '56 and '68.
11: As much as anything, the NPR piece pointed to the fact that it was a super-complicated moment, or series of moments, in history. That's all lost in the current political rhetoric about the Cold War, not that I'm surprised by that fact.
I remember that year as being one of exhilarating joy with undertones of terror. I also remember being in Poland during the Moscow coup the following summer. That was... weird. I was with some very politically engaged relatives who were simultaneously passionately engaged in the political breakup of the Solidarity camp, discussions of when Poland would join NATO, etc, while simultaneously wondering if the Red Army tanks were going to start rolling in.
And just for strange coincidences, the Polish elections occurred on the same day as Tiananmen.
There's some story, possibly apocryphal, about a French politician during the cold war answering a question about France's relations with Germany by saying, "We like Germany so much, we're glad there's two of them."
Writer: Francois Mauriac, asked: "Aimez vous l'Allemagne" answered "Je l'aime tellement que je suis heureux qu'il y en a deux." Had to google that one, thought it was Malraux. [French politically engaged interwar and postwar writers beginning with an M for two hundred]
And the non apocryphal story of NATO's first secretary general describing its purpose as "to keep Russia out, America in, and Germany down"
No comparison. Quote number one was directed at intelligent people whom the speaker respects; quote number two was directed at absolute morons whom the speaker holds in contempt.
11: I agree with this, at least as far as the Eastern European transition out of the Cold War goes (middle east, something else). Bush I successfully cooperated with Gorbachev to peacefully manage a dangerous transition.
Gingrich is one of the more entertaining buffoons on the establishment right.