Sarah Paine

All right, so all of these preceding explanations are naval explanations, spelled with an E, as in staring at one's own.

They're all about what the United States did or didn't do.

So let's get beyond the half-court tennis of Team America, and you need to look at the other side of the net.

And this is where the Western guru for things military comes.

Carl von Clausewitz emphasizes reciprocity in war and the interaction of both sides, that you're not going to do well unless you consider what the other side is doing.

So I have given you some external explanations, and I'm going to do the internal ones.

And here is Arnold Toynbee.

He's one of the finest historians of the 20th century.

He wrote a big

multi-multi-volume history of the West, which he argues that civilizations die from suicide, not by murder.

So I've discussed the murder, what the United States tried to do to the Soviet Union.

Now I'm going to talk about the suicide, what the Soviets did to themselves.

And here is

Counter-argument number one, which the argument is the Soviet Union was an empire, and when that collapsed, that meant they lost the Cold War.

During the Cold War, the Korean War and the Vietnam War, there was much fear in the West of this domino theory, and the idea is one country fell to communism, and then the next and next and next and next would fall to communism.

Turns out the domino theory did not apply to capitalism.

It applied to communism.

because once the democratic contagion hit one Warsaw Bloc country in Eastern Europe, it spread to the others until it was a seething mess and they fell like dominoes.

So in 1988, 89, there were all kinds of demonstrations in the Eastern Bloc, the Soviet Union.

In the Soviet Union, they're for political freedoms.