"We won the Cold War," but didn't want it to end: reflections on the Thatcher-Gorbachev revelations

WWW--We did? Who won it? It wasn't the average person. Considering the recent revelations about former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher ("Iron Maggie," a beloved to neocons along with the Maoist veneration of Ronald Reagan) and her discussions with the final Soviet President Mikael Gorbachev--that Thatcher and the rest of the West including America--didn't want reunification of Germany under any circumstances, you'd think it would be everywhere in our media.

Fine, it came out on September 11th, our new sacred national day, but this is earth-shattering news, it downs many myths about the Cold War, including the legacy of President Ronald Reagan. The contention of "we won the Cold War" just doesn't float anymore, they wanted to keep it going, and it served many purposes for the power structures on both sides, and Thatcher's comments underscore what many have suspected all along: the Cold War was a lie, a big lie. I could have told you that, but now we have solid-proof.

As usual, the official line and rhetoric are just window dressing, a lie, cover. The Western powers wanted the Soviet Union to stay-in-place for the foreseeable future during Peristroika (the thaw of authoritarianism in the Warsaw Pact nations) and the collapse of the Berlin Wall. This exchange comes less than three months before the fall of the Berlin Wall, and it is extraordinary.

From the Times:

September 23 1989 : transcript

Thatcher: I wanted to raise some questions regarding the situation in the countries of Eastern Europe. I was deeply impressed by the courage of General Jaruzelski in Poland and by his patriotism. Of course, the future of Poland and its alliance with you are very important. I noticed that you reacted calmly to the results of the Polish elections and generally to processes taking part in this and other Eastern European countries. My understanding of your position is following: you welcome each country developing in its own way on the condition that Warsaw Pact stays. I understand this position perfectly.

Now I would like to say something in complete confidence and would ask you not to record this part of our conversation.

Gorbachev: I agree to your request.

(The following part of the conversation is reproduced from memory)

Thatcher: We are very concerned about the processes taking place in Eastern Germany. Some big changes could happen there, forced partly by the state of the society and partly by the illness of Erich Honecker. One example of this is the flight of thousands of people from the GDR to the FRG. All of this is on the surface, it is very important but even more important is something else.

The reunification of Germany is not in the interests of Britain and Western Europe. It might look different from public pronouncements, in official communiqué at Nato meetings, but it is not worth paying ones attention to it. We do not want a united Germany. This would have led to a change to post-war borders and we can not allow that because such development would undermine the stability of the whole international situation and could endanger our security.

In the same way, a destabilisation of Eastern Europe and breakdown of the Warsaw Pact are also not in our interests. Of course, internal changes are happening in all Eastern European countries, somewhere they are deeper than in others. However, we would prefer if those processes were entirely internal, we would not interfere in them or push the de-communisation of Eastern Europe. I can say that the President of the United States is of the same position. He sent me a telegram to Tokyo in which he asked me directly to tell you that the United States would not do anything that might put at risk the security of the Soviet Union or perceived by the Soviet society as danger. I am fulfilling his request.

Gorbachev: Thank you for this message. In broad terms, you have outlined our position correctly. We believe that socialist countries should solve their internal problems themselves, chose themselves the course and speed on the way of implementation of their socialist choice. We do not want and will not interfere but will, of course help our allies as we have always done.

As for the state of health of Erich Honecker, he is planning to take part in all events commemorating the 40th Anniversary of the GDR. I can tell you that I am planning to arrive to the GDR on 6-7th October to celebrate this anniversary.

In other words, Reagan was in total agreement with Thatcher and considering American might, could be presumed to have been pulling some of the strings here. And there is more, much more to establish the veracity and legitimacy of these documents. Where was it in the American press? The virtual "page eight," if it was there at all.

This is a stunning rebuttal to the mythology surrounding the Cold War, former Prime Minister Thatcher, and the late President Ronald Reagan. Former President Gorbachev comes off looking very good, even better than before. Western leaders of the time look like the lying, scrambling, unimaginative clowns that they were and are. "Conventional wisdom" is often misinformed, now we know. The real history tends to be unwritten for generations. We lucked-out on this one. What a "Man in the High Castle" moment.

"Thatcher Told Gorbachev Britain Did Not Want German Reunification," The Times online, 09.11.2009: http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/politics/article6829735.ece

Excerpts from the Thatcher-Gorbachev talks and related excerpts:
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/politics/article6829416.ece

Winner of the "Oops! I Spoke Too Soon!" Award, Dr. Francis Fukuyama

"The distant origins of the present volume lie in an article entitled “The End of History?” which I wrote for the journal The National Interest in the summer of 1989. In it, I argued that a remarkable consensus concerning the legitimacy of liberal democracy as a system of government had emerged throughout the world over the past few years, as it conquered rival ideologies like hereditary monarchy, fascism, and most recently communism. More than that, however, I argued that liberal democracy may constitute the “end point of mankind’s ideological evolution” and the “final form of human government,” and as such constituted the “end of history.” That is, while earlier forms of government were characterized by grave defects and irrationalities that led to their eventual collapse, liberal democracy was arguably free from such fundamental internal contradictions" --Dr. Francis Fukuyama, in his introduction to his book, The End of History and the Last Man, 1992.

Yes, what a moron he was and is, but that's a given. Fukuyama's been spreading the love since 1992. Would he really know democracy if it bit him?

But even at that time, it was becoming obvious through developments of the successful Zapatista uprising, the subsequent rise of the "anti-globalization movement," the "Battle for Seattle," the rise of an unending proactive antiwar movement, new forms of resistance and theory arising throughout the globe to neoliberalism (notably in South America in the last decade where it has been rejected almost entirely), and so on, that Professor Fukuyama couldn't have been more wrong. He still is wrong, as is his wont, and he isn't going to be satisfied until he has no reputation left but that of a laughingstock. Mission accomplished--time to retire along with George Lucas.

Fukuyama was defending himself even when his book version of The End of History was released, with the author even going as far as to use Marx and Hegel as a shield in the above introduction. That they posited some "end-point" to human social and political evolution--the evolution of ideology--is well known. On this point, he's correct, and he shold have enjoyed being right, at least for once. Yet, Marx and Hegel were never so brazen, ignorant or insolent as to claim when that end-point time would actually come, and it's clear from their writings that it would probably take centuries, if not millennia. Never mind all that: someone's paying the bills, and it's good business to agree with oneself.

No, Marx and Hegel weren't being paid by a bunch of rich capitalists (although the factory owning Engels could fit into that category, he was headed in another direction...) to be one of the shrill voices during the fall of a global power (the Soviet Union) lauding the invincibility of another global player (American style economics, themselves). People like Limbaugh, Gingrich, and Fukumaya were drunk on their short-lived "victory" over the ending of the Cold War and their plans to take Capitol Hill "permanently," if not the White House. Sober minds in the Kremlin warned, ominously, that the United States would fall as a power after the Soviet system. They were right, and now we find ourselves where they were twenty years ago: Afghanistan. The warning signs have been flashing for decades, but never so brightly as now. But power is tone deaf.

As should be common currency by now, power corrupts, and that was the voice speaking from the well-fed yob of Fukuyama back in the 1980s-90s. His utterances in the present historical moment don't show any sign that he, his class (academic historians of all sorts), or those he serves, have lost any of their lust for power for its own sake. That he's looking like even more of an ribald ass now than he did at the time of 9/11 is a given. When you don't have the truth on your side, you resort to jargon and jingoism, and that's about all that Fukuyama and the so-called conservative side of the fence ever had besides the willingness to use barbarous violence to impose neoliberal/Reaganist capitalism on the rest of the world. You lie, rhetorically, throwing out the words "Liberty, Fraternity, Equality," and other myths regarding our way of life.

What does any of that have to do with "liberal democracy"? Nothing, it's just rhetoric on their part, and the new president surely shares many of their assumptions. But things have changed.

Now that America's dominance is slipping--most importantly, on the economic side--it appears that history is far from over, not even by a longshot. At best, Fukuyama's writings on whether the historical development of ideologies have ended are political-philosophical tracts written by a conservative hack on the payroll. In the future--if we're left with one thanks to people like them--they'll make for a very humorous read.

If you've actually ever read Adam Smith's The Wealth of Nations, you know that one of the central tenets of the book is that all nations have their time at the top, but that history deems there is a time when that dominance ends economically. Contrary to what many are saying, America doesn't have to suffer under this cycle--quite the contrary. Without all the unnecessary expenditures revolving around an empire, the average American will have lifted a very heavy lodestone from their neck. As a result of the ending of empire, illegitimate control over their lives by domestic elites will be severely weakened. The power structure in America is under serious threat, caused by their own hand.

What comes next is the groundswell of people demanding a better life, which isn't always a pretty or even tidy affair.

This is why we saw the passing of so much repressive legislation under Bush II and why most of it isn't going away anytime soon. Far from being a "coup," American elites are doing their best to hold onto power, and castles have a dramatic way of falling (watch your heads). History is over? Tell that to the people of Iraq and Afghanistan and tell it to the average American solidier or military contractor on the ground. They might point to the dead and ask, "What's that?" Dr. Fukuyama should be taken on a tour of our torture and rendition facilities to ask inmates whether they think "history has ended," and he might also take a tour of South America today and ask the leaders of those nations whether they think history has ended.

He isn't likely to get a positive answer, but probably more than a few laughs at his expense again. Laughter is the summation of his legacy. Fukuyama realized this--belatedly--in his boring and lie-ridden October 4th, 2008 oped piece titled, "The End of America Inc.":

All this suggests that the Reagan era should have ended some time ago. It didn't partly because the Democratic Party failed to come up with convincing candidates and arguments, but also because of a particular aspect of America that makes our country very different from Europe. There, less-educated, working-class citizens vote reliably for socialist, communist and other left-learning parties, based on their economic interests. In the United States, they can swing either left or right. They were part of Roosevelt's grand Democratic coalition during the New Deal, a coalition that held through Lyndon Johnson's Great Society in the 1960s. But they started voting Republican during the Nixon and Reagan years, swung to Clinton in the 1990s, and returned to the Republican fold under George W. Bush. When they vote Republican, it's because cultural issues like religion, patriotism, family values and gun ownership trump economic ones. ("The End of America Inc.," Newsweek, 10.04.2008)

In other words, the right has used cultural flashpoints as phony issues to sway a healthy chunk of American workers away from servicing their own economic and political interests. Europeans tend towards the left because of centuries of struggle by the average person, two devastating world wars that made it clear that a lasting peace could only come through social justice, better educational systems and traditional systems and networks of resistance that have no analog in the US, and because there was an incredible loss of faith coming from the fall of the traditional monarchies after the wars of the 20th century. America has experienced little of this, partly due to how young it is as a nation. If it's broken, don't fix it.

Like America's business class, the Monarchies had used religion as a weapon to control the masses, and they fell. Again, America doesn't have the same historical experiences, but these things have a way of playing-out similarly, these all being human systems of social organization rather than ones from Mars or Jupiter. Once the Monarchies were delegitimized, religion fell into disfavor throughout many parts of the European Continent. It's quite possible that the same could happen here, and for similar reasons.

In the 1980s and 1990s, it was the job of people like Dr. Fukuyama to drive people away from working towards their own interests by deceiving them with false invocations of patriotism, religion, "family values," and sundry other Shibboleths. That no longer works when the system crashes under its own in-built paradoxes, and the public correctly moves towards the left (or, more accurately, away from authoritarian thinking) because it's natural to do so in the "correction" part of this historical cycle. If there are no corrections, there is no recovery, a word to the wise who are wishing very vocally that President Obama's economic stimulus plan fails--then what?

Ultimately, the only thing Fukuyama could do in the fall of 2008 was to finally start covering his ass, and to do it as substantially as he could manage. How sweet it was of Newsweek to pay him for his services rendered. He might want to convert it into non-perishable foodstuffs and gold. Do he and his ilk really believe in anything at all besides power? Unfortunately, yes. We might find that at the heart of Reaganism there always contained more than a hint of the death wish and nihilism, especially when power isn't achieved, is under serious threat, or is lost altogether. False conservativism's implicit logic can be found in the writings of Dr. Fukuyama, a logic that offers no future at all.

"The End of America Inc.," Newsweek, 10.04.2008:

http://www.newsweek.com/id/162401/page/1

CONGRESS DECIDES TO SELF-DESTRUCT WITH BUSH PRESIDENCY: ON NON-BINDING RESOLUTIONS AND SUPERFICIAL TALK FROM JOE DONNELLY, ET. AL.

"The American people have lost faith in President Bush's course of action in Iraq and they are demanding a new direction."
--House Speaker Nancy Pelosi today (AP, 02.13.2007)

"I haven't decided yet."
--Joe Donnelly killing his own political future.

WASHINGTON D.C.--Like Athenian democracy, Congress has decided to shoot itself in the foot with non-binding resolutions. Thinking that this is going to make the public forget that many incumbents and presidential candidates voted for the authorization for the use of force in Iraq, they've deluded themselves as most corrupt individuals do.

Worse still, the public shares some of the blame in allowing the vote to occur at all with nary a fight. It's true, once again, those of us on the real Left had to do this, and few wanted to listen. We can blame George W. Bush as much as we want, but we're in Iraq because we want cheap-gasoline, and because we weren't civically active, let-alone responsible. That's right, it's not just the Bush administration, it's collective-guilt. That guilt is being acted-out--pathetically--in our House of Representatives right now.

But, if you look at the prewar statistics, over 50% of the public was against going in if the conflict was a prolonged one. This is why there was no postwar planning, and such low troop-levels in the aftermath--to do so would have altered the public to the fact that this would inevitably be prolonged based on the plans of PNAC and neocons within the Bush administration. A cabal. But it was an above-ground one that everyone knew about, tolerated it, and allowed it to flourish and hijack our political system. Only radical reform can undo the damage that was allowed by political elites who only view democracy as a means for their own advancement as politicians.

The public deserves this out, but was too-easily deceived to be safe. The GOP seems to be totally committed to self-destruction in their blocking-measures, and their tepid bills that merely allow the Bush administration a continued blank-check:

Resolved by the House of Representatives (the Senate concurring), that _
(1) Congress and the American people will continue to support and protect the members of the United States Armed Forces who are serving or who have served bravely and honorably in Iraq; and (2) Congress disapproves of the decision of President George W. Bush announced on January 10, 2007, to deploy more than 20,000 additional United States combat troops to Iraq.(AP,02.13.2007)

Mainstream Democrats--reluctantly emboldened by the November midterms that gave them a congressional majority--only seem willing to support non-binding resolutions (not binding as law). Vice President Cheney has stated on CNN that "it won't stop us." This war will be four-years-old in March, and the political-cost will only continue to escalate.
The Bush administration's response to the bills (besides Cheney's): support the troops, the old broken-record we've been hearing for four-years, yet another underscoring of the Bush administration's inherent contempt for the rule of law and democracy. Some congressional GOP incumbents attempted to bring-up the ghost of Vietnam and the disdain most of the public had for returning-troops--save the crocodile tears, wimps:

It was the first debate about the war in either house of Congress since November's midterm elections, when public opposition to the conflict helped power Democrats to control of the House and Senate. Bush's decision last month to deploy an additional 21,500 troops to help stop sectarian violence has quickly become a flashpoint for critics of the war in Congress. There are currently about 141,000 American troops in Iraq and 27,000 in Afghanistan. The nonbinding measure states simply that the House "will continue to support and protect" troops serving in Iraq but that it "disapproves" of the troop buildup. (AP, 02.13.2007)

So, all it does is attempt to apply pressure to an administration that has never made any bones about kicking decorum to-the-curb. The war will continue, and thousands of Iraqis will be murdered by this ongoing-policy. This inaction makes all members of Congress who do not aggressively-oppose this administration fellow travels--war criminals. During a pause in the debate, Republican congressman Charles Norwood was eulogized.
Nobody was salivating over it since the GOP has no-chance of a majority in the House at present, and received a page-nine treatment (in stark-contrast to the stroke of Democratic Senator, Tim Johnson).The AP reports that, "Norwood was part of the Republican wave that took control of Congress in 1994." (AP, 02.13.2007) My, my, if only most Americans got the health coverage he did.

Amazingly, our own Joe Donnelly (here in the 2nd District of Indiana) was interviewed by AP, and had some disappointing things to say:

"The most important part of this to me is standing up for the troops and making sure we have full funding for them," Donnelly said Tuesday, after a weekend meeting with veterans' groups and constituents back home in his conservative north-central Indiana district. "I haven't made up my mind yet." The concerns of members like Donnelly are behind Democrats' strategy for this week's Iraq debate, which was carefully calibrated to bar votes on a GOP alternative that could expose a potentially messy divide within Democratic ranks over whether to cut off or restrict funding for troops on the ground. (AP, 02.13.2007)

A Hint to Joe: if you want to remain in Congress, you had better back defunding this war now. The majority of the public backs this measure, and yet you and the rest of the Democratic mainstream will not even pen a binding-resolution to halt any more troop-escalations.

You and I know this will mushroom into a military disaster, and that your real option is to defund the occupation, giving funds that mandate a demobilization. It doesn't bother me--or anyone except the GOP--that they've been relegated back to minority-status, and barred from watering-down an already watery-bill with their stupid amendments. They should shut up and accept their status.

The AP is siding with the GOP on this one, while they essentially ignored the shutting-out of the Democratic minority during the four-year GOP-majority. Frequently, they ignored the Democrats altogether, barely giving them the ink that the GOP-minority affords today.

This is because most of the mainstream media and the Republican Party are allied through an unconstitutional concentration of media ownership authored and engineered by the Reagan, Bush I, and Clinton administrations and Congress. A situation like this that crosses party-lines, done with premeditation over decades, can only emerge from the culture of a class of people.

That would be America's ruling-class and her functionaries in the media, academia, and the other various professions that service them. There is no GOP alternative for Iraq, it will just be more-of-the-same, which is what they're always going to be about.

AP on the Debate: http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20070213/ap_on_go_co/us_iraq_27;_ylt=AspApysA5fArp38emfb7OheGbToC

"Democrats Bar GOP Alternative on Iraq":
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20070213/ap_on_go_co/democrats_iraq;_ylt=AmIL_vNRpZiVwOAkDwTq3m2MwfIE

Text of the Resolution ("Bad boy, you stop!") :
http://www.foxnews.com/wires/2007Feb12/0,4670,USIraqResolutionText,00.html