The Break-Up of Britain / The US today resembles the Soviet Union just before it fell
Because of the impact it has already had and because its influence continues to grow, Tom Nairn’s The Break-Up of Britain, first published in 1977, is the most significant book on British politics of the past half-century, even though it is not a famous best-seller. Today, its republication by Verso signals the post-Brexit renewal of a call to arms initially issued in the maelstrom of the 1970s..
https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/opendemocracyuk/scottish-independence-tom-nairn-gordon-brown/
The US today resembles the Soviet Union just before it fell
I’m a Russia expert
who spent several years living in post-Soviet Russia. I’ve talked to people who
were young adults during the détente period of the Cold War (c. 1969 through
the 1970s), when Leonid Brezhnev was in charge of the USSR. They remember those
times with nostalgia and a certain wistfulness for the loss of their country’s
status as a ‘great power’ – something the current Russian president, Vladimir
Putin, has sought
to restore through revanchism and Russia’s own version of a Christian
imperial ideology.
The early 1990s was a
period of major trauma for the country. The USSR ceased to exist amid economic
privation, rising ethnonationalism and social discontent fuelled in part by the
Gorbachev regime’s unprecedented openness about past Soviet atrocities (which
was in itself, of course, a good thing).
Could the same thing
happen to the United States? …
https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/5050/is-american-democracy-on-the-brink-of-collapse/
TOM
ENGELHARDT: A World at the Edge
Alfred McCoy: The
crumbling delusion of Washington's endless world dominion
