And incidentally, good and evil as descriptions can only apply to individuals with any honesty in defining the terms. At the societal level or the level of the state/corporation, most bureaucratic mechanisms wind up working much more identically than they do distinctly. At the highest levels, humans are all shades of grey. It's when we discuss individuals that we differentiate into black and white, as individuals really can be thus.
Thus bureaucratically there was more similar than there was different in the USA and USSR of the Cold War: both were militarized bureaucratic military-industrial complexes that were content to view the world in an apocalyptic fashion that handicapped their ability to do more regular geopolitics. The individuals that rose to lead the USA and USSR, however, could be and were very different people, reflecting the USA's beginning an evolution to truly be a society where government of the people, by the people, and for the people would not perish from the Earth, a triumph of Lincoln's ideal. The Soviet Union, by contrast, gradually slid into self-parody and ultimately a collapse because the kind of people that rose to command the CPSU were not the kind of people who frankly had business being dog-catcher of Bumfuck, Kamchatka.
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Date: 6/3/12 14:42 (UTC)Thus bureaucratically there was more similar than there was different in the USA and USSR of the Cold War: both were militarized bureaucratic military-industrial complexes that were content to view the world in an apocalyptic fashion that handicapped their ability to do more regular geopolitics. The individuals that rose to lead the USA and USSR, however, could be and were very different people, reflecting the USA's beginning an evolution to truly be a society where government of the people, by the people, and for the people would not perish from the Earth, a triumph of Lincoln's ideal. The Soviet Union, by contrast, gradually slid into self-parody and ultimately a collapse because the kind of people that rose to command the CPSU were not the kind of people who frankly had business being dog-catcher of Bumfuck, Kamchatka.