The Break-Up of Britain / The US today resembles the Soviet Union just before it fell

By Dilip -

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/


A Conservative party corrupted by Boris Johnson and Brexit / Rory Stewart: Britain needs a new era of serious leaders


America isn't breaking. It was already broken. By Andrew Gawthorpe // Why This Time Is Different. By Dahlia Lithwick


TOM ENGELHARDT: A World at the Edge


Alfred McCoy: The crumbling delusion of Washington's endless world dominion


In 1953, the Republican Party overthrew the Iranian Government; in 2021 it used the same techniques against the elected US President


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