[ExI] Moooon

[Dan]

Regardless of when the Soviet Union's decline started -- and there's good reason to believe you're right here or even that the decline might have started much earlier still* -- the Cold War was not over back then and was still on well after the Moon Race was over, no? (I would stick fairly close to the conventinoal view of Cold War starting in the late 1940s or at least by 1950 with the Korean War and ending in the 1980s. Of course, I can see reasonable disagreements on this dating, but I would see setting the date for its beginning too much earlier as questionable.)
 
Regards,
 
Dan
 
* Some even argue that the N.E.P. was a tacit admission that the Soviet system couldn't work and the decades following it were just playing out of an inevitable decline ending in the final collapse. I believe Martin Malia held something like this view. See his _The Soviet Tragedy_.

From: Stefano Vaj <stefano.vaj at gmail.com>
To: Dan <dan_ust at yahoo.com>
Sent: Friday, July 22, 2011 11:28 AM
Subject: Re: [ExI] Moooon


On 22 July 2011 15:39, Dan <dan_ust at yahoo.com> wrote:

Actually, no in both cases. Christian fundamentalism and Islamic fundamentalism both started much earlier and were rapidly expanding during the Cold War. E.g., the Iranian Revolution was in 1979 -- about a decade before the Soviet Empire started to crumble. And the US government helped to foster it in Afghanistan during the 1980s to undermine the pro-Soviet regime there.

I think it is essentially and issue of dating. 

In my view, URSS started its decline already in the Krusciov era, even though it managed to exploit some of its past momentum and to keep up the show of its own "manifest destiny" until sometimes in the early seventies. 

BTW, the loss itself of the moon race played a symbolic and psychological part in all that. 

-- 
Stefano Vaj
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