©Jeffrey S. Juel 2013
JUEL
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A number of remarkable events happened in the months just before Al Gore’s letter was published. A timeline is helpful to sort through Al’s very convoluted question: Six months prior to April 22 1990 (The date of Al’s hypothetical question to “you”.) Germans are free to cross from East to West Berlin Dictator Nicolae Ceauşescu and his wife are executed in Romania Lithuania declares independence from the USSR The date that Al Gore’s letter is published in the NY Times
Reunification of Germany Armand Hammer dies of bone cancer
“What if I had asked you six months ago to assess the possibility that people in every country in Eastern Europe would abandon Communism…” “Abandon” is a pretty innocuous word to describe what the People in Eastern Europe did to their communist dictators. The Romanians tried and executed Nicolae Ceauşescu and his wife on Christmas Day of 1989.31 It is deeply disturbing and beyond the Pale that Senator Albert Gore thought that communism collapsed simply because “people changed their way of thinking about communism”. In 1990, he couldn’t comprehend that for decades the Soviet Union’s empire in Eastern Europe was ruled by dysfunctional repressive tyrannical dictatorships that needed to be overthrown.
“We all would have called it unlikely that people in every country in Eastern Europe would abandon Communism.” I have to wonder who was the “We” that Al was referring to. If the statement above was used in a letter from the chairman of the CPUSA to the CPUSA members, it would have made complete sense.
31
Being commies, they probably didn’t have any plans for their Christmas Day anyway.