Tag Archives: soviet union

400 Words or Less: Russiameristan…

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“American exceptionalism, the idea that we as a country are separate from the world at large, is what’s killing us right here. We don’t read the history and experiences left by others because we feel it doesn’t apply to us, and thus we are dooming ourselves to repeat it.” 

 

Everyone knew that this September brought about the tenth anniversary of the infamous 9/11 attacks. Not quite as hyped but still a critical anniversary in our lives as young Americans, this October 7th will mark ten years since the beginning of Operation Enduring Freedom and US engagement in Afghanistan.

Ten years. That’s a pretty long time to keep our troops in danger, and we’re not even close to finishing. Which leads me to wonder; if we could go back to September 12th, 2001 knowing how brutal an Afghan campaign shaped up to be, would we do it again?

As fate would have it, the United States wasn’t the first superpower who thought invading Afghanistan was doable, if not a cake walk. On Christmas Eve in 1979, the Soviet Union’s 40th Army rolled across the border in hopes of bracing the pro-communist government against the Mujahideen, jihadist rebels in favor of a more conservative rule in the land.

Now normally the United States would have had a cow at the idea of communist expansion, as was the case with Korea, Vietnam, etc. Instead of firing up the draft boards and slapping Soviet premier Leonid Brezhnev in the mouth with the Truman Doctrine, we let them have their fun.

Why? Because we saw something in Afghanistan that the Soviets didn’t, as US National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski called it the “Afghan trap”.

To make history quick, the US started heavily supplying the Mujahideen (who ended up becoming the guys we’re fighting now), the Soviets wandered around until they lost over 14,000 troops, and in 1989 Moscow decided to call it a decade and withdrew.

We knew exactly what we were getting into by invading Afghanistan. With hit-and-run guerrillas holding little to no regard for their own life popping up around massive swathes of hellish terrain, it’s every tactician’s nightmare.

We went in anyway. I mean, come on. We’ve got combat technology the Soviets couldn’t even dream of in 1979. We’re the baddest kids on the block and we were beyond vengeful in October 2001.

Our public cause at the time was noble, yes. Bringing the heat to those responsible for attacking us was on everyone’s to-do list, but we just couldn’t get the job done quickly and cheaply enough. Now we’re stuck, either waiting for the bad guys to collapse or for the plane ticket home.

I’m not saying I have the answers to why, how, or when we should be finished in Afghanistan, but there is absolutely no doubt in the fact that we’re in an enormous mess over there.

The Former Frontier

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When I was a kid, there was nothing cooler than space travel. Space camp, space shuttles, space ice cream, space screensavers… The only thing that made me more excited than actual space flight was the promise of the future – Star Wars, Star Trek, Stargate SG-1, The Martian Chronicles, and 2001: A Space Odyssey – and the hope for all humans to expand into the universe to explore, learn, and expand.

Space flight has always been a balance between the risks of the unknown against the rewards of the expansion of man’s knowledge. But since the collapse of a suitable enemy for which the United States to compete, the expansion of knowledge (and thus the space program) has become increasingly irrelevant from the government’s point of view. When President Kennedy “chose to go to the moon”, he said

Well, space is there, and we’re going to climb it, and the Moon and the planets are there, and new hopes for knowledge and peace are there.

What a great idea. Still, the knowledge and peace that space could have brought to mankind also acted as a front; in the heat of the space race, American’s landing first on the moon would have been a bad mark on the incredibly successful report card of the Soviet Union. And so it came to pass that America put several men on the moon before the end of the decade, and the Soviet Union did not.

But it wasn’t over yet. As history has shown for centuries, competition breeds success, and as long as the USSR built space craft and pushed their limits, so too did America and NASA, choosing to build more complicated crafts to push both the boundaries of space and our treasury’s wallet.

Then came the collapse of the Soviet Union and the loss of America’s lovable sparring partner. NASA found itself the lone program (at the time) capable of putting a human being into space, its long-time enemy having bowed out of the race. And that seemed to be good enough for us. Suddenly, it became less important to launch men into space and to improve our knowledge, because we had already used our program to state our superiority. After we had shown our dominance with rockets, the talking points of Kennedy’s speech became less and less important until they were a remnant of the past, to be pulled out only occasionally to remind people how awesome we used to be.

NASA and the success of our space program are a dusty trophy in America’s cabinet. It’s been sitting in the same spot for years, accumulating dust, only to blown off every year or so as a reminder that our trophy cabinet has more trophies than any other country’s. Is that what Kennedy wanted when he made his address to a crowd of bright, young Rice University students?

 

The students of 1962 are of a generation that will soon be leaving government office, that will soon be surrendering control of the space program to a younger generation. This younger generation won’t remember the triumph of landing on the moon or the fear of Soviet dominance, nor will they remember Kennedy’s dream of exploration and peace. Later, my generation will gain power, and all we’ll have to remember is a mess of a government program that still had the capacity to inspire us when we were little kids.

 

Where do we go from here? What do we do with the dusty trophy on the shelf? Do we let it sit and accumulate dust while other space programs take off (bad pun), or do we keep innovating to really help usher in a new era of exploration and peace?

I’ve been a believer in the United States my whole life. I think the way NASA is currently operated – especially with their limited funds and seemingly skewed priorities – is a slighting of American potential. We are a shell of our former selves, but this isn’t a shell that can’t be filled again. There is more we can accomplish, more we can learn, and more we can gain through the US government’s renewed interest in space exploration. As a country, space exploration is something we need. The course of man’s history has been to continually grow and change; we can’t afford to let that stop now.

Read My Lips: Some New Taxes

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Orson Welles, one of the greatest talents of the last century, was once investigated for his potential ties to communism. As with many of his peers in Hollywood, the United States government dug into his past, searching for any ties to the Soviet Union or the American Socialist Party.

According to legend, Welles was confronted with charges of communism (at the 7 minute mark):

 

Welles replied to the charge simply by asking what a communist was. In reply, the men told Welles that it was one who believes in giving one’s earnings to the government for redistribution. Welles retorted that, in that case, he was 86% communist, in reference to the income tax on his tax bracket at that time.

86%!!!

After the second World War, the tax on the wealthiest of Americans did not dip below 80% until 1964. At times the tax rate was as high as 92%!

With that money we built interstate highways, businesses, infrastructure… the best country in the world. The money our country brought in by taxing the wealthiest of Americans absurd rates kept us (mostly/relatively) out of debt and worry free, instead focusing on business, family, and staying afloat. (http://www.truthandpolitics.org/top-rates.php)

Ronald Reagan, for many the prophet of American Conservatism and of American exceptionalism as a whole, saw the fall of income tax rates from 70% to 28% during his presidency. Then the country slid into a major recession. Americans began using credit cards to afford the comfortable lifestyles they had come to enjoy as inflation crept over the country like the stench of raw sewage. And still the tax rates did not rise on the wealthiest of Americans.

This country became the greatest in the world not through rugged individualism and anarchy, but through the investment of tax dollars. I’m not talking about your average worker at McDonald’s or even your local heart surgeon, but the absolute wealthiest of Americans. There’s absolutely nothing wrong with being rich, but a position of elevation in society has to come with a cost… and it is becoming clear that the trickle down theory doesn’t work as intended.

Raise the taxes. Please.