I often ask 'What came before that'
when 'the news' presents me with a narrative.
Naturally, the news does not give me what I ask
-that would be yesterdays news, last year's leftovers,
news from the last decade, or news from previous centuries,
all filed away in the layers and layers of digital media
that are now our shared reconstructed modern memory.
It will soon be a year since the Russian invade Ukraine,
and also a decade since several small wars
which at the time seemed like no more
than the settling of minor old scores
started and smouldered like small fires
that somehow could not be extinguished.
These wars did not look like proxy activity
by a former empire trying to regain the lands
that it had had control of, as the Soviet Empire
collapsed a mere thirty years ago.
How and why that empire collapsed
is easy to answer the collapse started in 1975,
as the ailing Brezhnev stopped leading the country
but held on to power for another seven years.
His immediate successors were no better.
By 1985 the rot that Gorbachev had to fight
had become too much part of the system
for it to be removed. To begin to understand
how the rot took over please start watching here
and let Adam Curtis show you how an empire rots from within.
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