At the time, yes, actually people did realize this and were extremely depressed about the outcome of the 20th Century. The USSR falling apart at the speed and pace it did was one of the biggest twists in the entire 20th Century as on the surface the USSR was in the process of supplanting the USA as the global superpower. And at the time the US military was incapable of beating boy scouts in a war game, much less the Soviet Armed Forces in the Big One, so the USA didn't even have its military to salve its conscience.
It's the greatest irony of the 20th Century: totalitarianism was actually winning on a global scale until its own contradictions destroyed itself, and democracy had nothing to do with it at all.
Albeit in hindsight it makes a lot of the US rhetoric of the 1980s seem extremely foolish and ridiculous which is why you never see, for instance, the original Rambo III when he fought with the proto-Taliban against the USSR. Nowadays that's a very bitter thing in hindsight, but at the time with the USSR in the process of supplanting the USA, it really didn't seem that a bunch of Muslim radicals were a worse threat than Mikhail Gorbachev.
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Date: 14/3/12 21:01 (UTC)It's the greatest irony of the 20th Century: totalitarianism was actually winning on a global scale until its own contradictions destroyed itself, and democracy had nothing to do with it at all.
Albeit in hindsight it makes a lot of the US rhetoric of the 1980s seem extremely foolish and ridiculous which is why you never see, for instance, the original Rambo III when he fought with the proto-Taliban against the USSR. Nowadays that's a very bitter thing in hindsight, but at the time with the USSR in the process of supplanting the USA, it really didn't seem that a bunch of Muslim radicals were a worse threat than Mikhail Gorbachev.