User:KWatson/sandbox: Difference between revisions
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Hubbard shortly backs away from this apparently definitive repost to the Reagan doctrine when he reflects that “Communism might well be evil. That is an awesome and terrible thesis, but then the simple can reign over the complex”( ).Even the statue of fearsome Felix Dzerzhinsky in Lyubanka Square and the Lyubanka prison itself fail to “stir adrenaline” in Hubbard, who knows he might wind up there ( ). When he walks out onto Red Square, whose ancient name means Beautiful Square in Russian, Hubbard is struck by his impression that “[e]ven the young had an air of relinquishment that speaks of middle age”( ). | Hubbard shortly backs away from this apparently definitive repost to the Reagan doctrine when he reflects that “Communism might well be evil. That is an awesome and terrible thesis, but then the simple can reign over the complex”( ).Even the statue of fearsome Felix Dzerzhinsky in Lyubanka Square and the Lyubanka prison itself fail to “stir adrenaline” in Hubbard, who knows he might wind up there ( ). When he walks out onto Red Square, whose ancient name means Beautiful Square in Russian, Hubbard is struck by his impression that “[e]ven the young had an air of relinquishment that speaks of middle age”( ). | ||
Throughout Harlot’s Ghost Mailer describes how the CIA and the KGB engaged in competition with each other in both Latin America, especially Uruguay, and in Berlin. (Mailer also describes the CIA’s and Hubbard’s activities in “Red” Cuba that led to the Bay of Pigs fiasco.) Even with the understanding that over all of this hung the possibility of some overzealous fool on either side making a fatal blunder that could have led to a nuclear exchange, I hope that we have now reached a time when we can look | |||
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back and say, as I believe Mailer shows us, that all of the hugger-mugger, derring-do, tunnel digging, and various forms of cat and mouse the CIA and KGB engaged in were just so much silliness. We do so of course in the full recognition that much of this nonsense still goes on in the post-Soviet present. | |||