America has become its own worst enemy
Like the Soviet Union, the US is dying from despair
BY Ed West
Ed West is the Senior Editor of UnHerd. His book Tory Boy is published by Constable
edwest
August 3, 2021
Thirty years ago this month, the Cold War ended with a failed coup in Moscow. As was remarked by many at the time, Marx’s dictum that history repeats itself as farce proved true for the Soviet Union, the state that had defined itself by his ideology.
In August 1991, while the USSR’s reforming General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev holidayed in his Ukrainian dacha, a group of hard-liners seized power. Gorbachev, under house arrest, turned to the BBC to find out what was going on, since in the Soviet Union nothing the media said was true unless the party said so. He learned that, in the centre of Moscow, Russian Federation president Boris Yeltsin courageously stood in front of the city’s White House in defiance of the plotters, surrounded by supporters brandishing the old Russian flag.
Perhaps what wasn’t clear to everyone was that Yeltsin was drunk for much of it. The true extent of his alcoholism became more apparent in the years after he dissolved the communist state a few months later and became president of an independent Russia, although he already had a colourful reputation for drink-related antics.
https://unherd.com/2021/08/america-is-turning-into-the-soviet-union/
