August 19, 1989 . Hungary opens Border to Austria!

[Lovebug]

It is one of the main things that drove him into politics in the first place. He wrote about in one of his books and he has mentioned it from time to time in some of his speeches. It wasn't so much the fall of the Communist apparatus in the USSR that fueled his white hot anger as much as it was the collapse of what he viewed as a society that operated under what he viewed as the permanent rules of order in his part of the world.

How the Kremlin viewed economics wasn't what was important to him, the USSR's standing as a world power is what was important to him.
He was a KGB station chief in Berlin when the Wall fell, he felt personally humiliated by that event.

When someone mentions how orderly everything is in a country, we should ask "why". Why is no trash in the streets, why don't we see homeless people or drug addicts?
Rules and enforcements, power, esp power

 

[Checkerboard Strangler]

When someone mentions how orderly everything is in a country, we should ask "why". Why is no trash in the streets, why don't we see homeless people or drug addicts?
Rules and enforcements, power, esp power

From personal experience, such "displays of order" are always Potemkin setups.
Move a few blocks over and the trash and poor folks are still living on the streets.

Funny thing, when my Dad attended the very first SALT Talks in Moscow the minders couldn't wait to show off how clean, pretty and orderly everything was in selected parts of Moscow.
Dad's grumbly stomach demanded that he visit the toilet while the entourage was in a somewhat offbeat location later that morning and the minders were visibly nervous about his request. When he insisted, they finally led him to a lavatory and, no surprise, it was a fetid stinkhole with old copies of Pravda instead of toilet paper and the plumbing did not seem very functional.

When my Mom was growing up during Mussolini's regime folk always talked about how "the trains finally ran on time" but my mother told us that when the afternoon grew late and the letter carriers still had mail to deliver, they just threw the remaining mail in the river.

Extreme left or extreme right, authoritarianism seems to feel much the same and the packaging is always nice and shiny to belie the rot underneath.