by Nick Clark

Created on: August 23, 2007

The debate question makes a grand assumption: that the Cold War ended with Glasnost and the fall of the Soviet Union.

So, no, the Cold War between the East and West is not on the verge of repeating itself. It never ended. Like Germany after WW I with its economic infrastructure in tatters and a huge war debt to pay, Russia's economic infrastructure also collaspsed. As with Germany, the economic depression simply laid the ground work for more of the same: dictatorship and facisim. This is where new Russia is today. it is falling back on what it knows best, affraid to continue taking the risks and uncertainties required for the establishment of a democracy.

The hitch to Russia's democracy movement was that consumerism was mistaken for democracy. The rise of a modern middle class in the Western world with expendable income was seen as the foundation of a new and democratic Russia. The problem becomes readily apparent when one realizes that the consumer-based societies and cultures the Western industrailzed nations have were built upon democratic actions taken by generation after generation, particularly after WW II. It has never been easy to be both democratic and flush with cash. That old menace Mr. Greed comes strutting in and taking where it can what it can from whomever it can at any time. And, wealth (nothing wrong with it, I might say here) and its achievement seductively becomes the most important feature of a culture and democracy, wise and popular government, slowly, bit by bit, slips away often unnoticed. The notion of ever greater entitlements become the drop kick of each generation. And with it one more step of disconnection between the governed and the government.

This behavior is not unusual. We see it every day, among ourselves, in our selves. Not to make too fine a point on it, "Change is hard" and may not yield the reward we were hoping for or expecting. And, when this happens, what do we all too often do? Fall back on what we know best - what we have done in the past no matter how self-decieving, destructive and futile that behavior may be. There is a wee tad of solace there. At least it is familiar.

So, here is Russia and its people (certainly its government) discovering just how hard it is to change and that a federal republic based on democratic principles is not the same as a country littered with Wall Marts, big box stores and fast food chains. Ironically, such a country (US, UK, GR, FR and other Western nations) does not automatically have a federal republic based on democratic principles either.

In both cases the result is facism: Benito Mussolini said that facism should really be called corporatism since it is a merger of business and government ruling the people.

Or this from Franklin Delano Roosevelt: "The liberty of a democracy is not safe if the people tolerate the growth of private power to a point where it comes stronger than their democratic state itself. That, in its essence, is fascism - ownership of government by an individual, by a group,"

No, the Cold War is not on the verge of repeating itself. It never ended. It is the ongoing power struggle of rich and poor domestically, nationally and internationally with a deadly end game that poses a threat to everyone.

"I have named the destroyers of nations: comfort, plenty, and security - out of which grow a bored and slothful cynicism, in which rebellion against the world as it is, and myself as I am, are submerged in listless self-satisfaction" : John Steinbeck: American novelist, Nobel Prize for Literature for 1962, 1902-1968

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