Thursday, March 3, 2022

Yalta?


Stalin, Churchill and Roosevelt at Yalta (February l945)

The degree of destruction neighbors wreak on each other is one of the great contrarieties of human nature, the seeming need to destroy as well as create. "You shall not covet..." responds to a condition. But what’s also astonishing is the capacity for détente, reconciliation and reinvention. Two of America’s closest allies are Germany and Japan who constituted the Axis. Italy is so identified with culture and love that one forgets it's still a bastion of fascism. Admiration for Mussolini and fascist architecture remains. It’s hard to know in the case of Berlusconi and Trump who's the clone of whom when it comes to the mixture of defiance and grandiosity that fuels their populist base. After Gorbachev, in the period of Glasnost and Perestroika, it seemed that America and Russia might one day become allies brokering peace in their respective spheres of influence. Today they’re figuring out how to hack each other’s grids. After massive destruction and death of the kind that’s being witnessed in Kyiv and Kharkiv, it’s hard to envision the turnaround that was characteristic of the Marshall Plan--in which the US rebuilt Germany into one of the most affluent and progressive societies of the world. 

Read "The Final Solution: Why Putin Voted For Trump" by Francis Levy, HuffPost

and listen to "Only the Strong Survive"by Jerry Butler

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