robatsu
10-14-2007, 10:09 AM
Just Say Boo
Jay Roberts
Those of a certain age will always remember 1989 as the year of miracles. The year kicked of with Solidarity being legalized in Communist Poland. It ended with a bang and a cheer, specifically the executions of the Ceausescu thugocrats and the peaceful election of the writer Vaclav Havel to lead formerly Communist Czechoslovakia respectively. In between these milestones, the Soviets left Afghanistan, the Berlin Wall was breached, free elections for the Soviet parliament were held, and many other events, any one of which alone would have been earthshaking, that in total constituted the complete collapse of Communist tyranny in Europe. Freedom was in the air, and even the Chinese gave it a go in Tianmen Square, but with unfortunately less complete results.
This scenario was utterly unforeseen by the great and the good in the West. Should one have predicted the events of 1989 a year or two earlier, what we now call the MSM would have written off the odds of the Soviet bloc collapsing essentially without a shot as infinitesimal. Thus, there was a lot of introspection in the press following the collapse of Communism about how they could have missed all this coming, and how swift and largely bloodless it was, no Red Dawn, just people marching around in Leipzig with candles and so forth. The Economist summed up the year's events in an article whose title says it all, "They Just Had To Say Boo".
Read more here. (http://robatsu.blogspot.com/2007/10/just-say-boo.html)
Jay Roberts
Those of a certain age will always remember 1989 as the year of miracles. The year kicked of with Solidarity being legalized in Communist Poland. It ended with a bang and a cheer, specifically the executions of the Ceausescu thugocrats and the peaceful election of the writer Vaclav Havel to lead formerly Communist Czechoslovakia respectively. In between these milestones, the Soviets left Afghanistan, the Berlin Wall was breached, free elections for the Soviet parliament were held, and many other events, any one of which alone would have been earthshaking, that in total constituted the complete collapse of Communist tyranny in Europe. Freedom was in the air, and even the Chinese gave it a go in Tianmen Square, but with unfortunately less complete results.
This scenario was utterly unforeseen by the great and the good in the West. Should one have predicted the events of 1989 a year or two earlier, what we now call the MSM would have written off the odds of the Soviet bloc collapsing essentially without a shot as infinitesimal. Thus, there was a lot of introspection in the press following the collapse of Communism about how they could have missed all this coming, and how swift and largely bloodless it was, no Red Dawn, just people marching around in Leipzig with candles and so forth. The Economist summed up the year's events in an article whose title says it all, "They Just Had To Say Boo".
Read more here. (http://robatsu.blogspot.com/2007/10/just-say-boo.html)