Stopped them? Huh?
They collapsed on themselves. Without a shot's being fired, the Big Bad Soviet Union collapsed like a cheap dimestore umbrella in the face of some dockworkers and fled like Dracula from the Christianity THAT SELFSAME collective of power now uses to great political effect.
I am going to disabuse you of this fantasy, I swear.
How in hell could they have launched the "greatest peace movement the world has ever seen" whilst still the "Evil Empire"?
How better to disarm the West than to coming limping their way crying "Mea Culpa, Kapitalism!" when (as militant atheists and supreme materialists with their own ideas of New World Economic Policy) they've no semblance, even, of the morality on which "good capitalism" is based and can therefore clean our clocks with precision (if not absolute abandon)?
What in God's name was Bush I thinking when -- before the dust of the Berlin wall had even settled -- he was hooking us up for joint operations with the selfsame KGB and Eastern Euro intel sharks who'd been running heroin our way? I'm sure Clinton appreciated the alleged help he got from the Rooskies with Waco but I can't help noticing our own unconstitutional Federal Police Force's profile has grown more menacing in an almost exponential way since this so-called perestroika partnership of "policemen".
I realize I sound like some kinda freak yelling "THE POD PEOPLE ARE HERE" ... but I just like things to make sense, that's all. The "fall of communism" (or the "abolition of the IMAGE of the enemy" as they put it well in advance of getting down with glasnost) is bs.
HAHAHA the joke is on most of us.
I was wondering when you would do that! We've sparred gently over this subject a few times in the past without any explosive engagements. A Cold Debate, as it were.
I just can't buy the conspiracy line on this. Some Communists may have believed that they could survive the fall of the Soviet Union and the loss of their empire in Eastern Europe and Central Asia. Gorbachev, for instance, seems a prime candidate for this kind of delusion. He was--and continues to be--a very dangerous man.
But as Zviadist is so fond of pointing out, there is this nasty phenomenon of unintended consequences that tends to foil the most intricate long term plans.
Eastern Europe has tasted freedom again, and would easily submit to another tyranny. It is returing to its old Orthodox faith again--as is Russia. China continues to flex its muscle as a national socialist power and now represents a clear territorial threat to the Russian far East. The market reforms introduced in Russia, while far from a resounding success, make it nearly impossible to centralize the economy under government control.
If anything, the danger is that Russia will engineer more trouble in the world in order to justify and accelerate its realignment with the West, with Europe.
Even if you ignore these purely pragmatic considerations and choose to view recent history as an occulted battle of ideologies and transcendent beliefs played out on the field of politics, why would the Communists feel the need to overthrow the capitalists? We in the West have done more to create the rationalist-materialist worker's paradise envisioned by Marx than Lenin or any of his disciples. The transition from Communist apparatchik to neo-capitalist is so common and so easy because it is so logical.