to ban communism from itself?

Prior to this class I had always though of Gorbachev as Russian who finally realized that communism doesn’t work. I don’t’ believe this to be the case any more, though considering his predecessors, his liberal demeanor still astonished me for the better. In the Transcript of Russian Federation Duma Session with USSR President Gorbachev, Gorbachev mentions that he was asked “whether socialism should be banned from the USSR and the Communist Party disbanded as a criminal organization.” I was rather shocked to read this. That socialism and the Communist party can be outlawed in Russia perplexes me since less than half a century before socialism and the Communist party were considered more important than the state itself. Gorbachev plainly states that he cannot dissolve the communist party, because he “will never agree to qualify millions of workers and peasants as criminals” and not for the glory and survival of communism. If such a thing had been even referenced to Stalin, it would have been a very different situation for the person who asked the question.

What comes to mind when one thinks of democracy?

When I think of democracy the first things that come to mind are universal suffrage and civil liberties. These were, as the socialist T.H. Marshall pointed out, influenced by enlightenment thinkers in the 17th and 18th centuries, such as John Locke. However, when I think about the bureaucracy enveloped in our own democracy, I can’t help but notice socialist elements that would perhaps dilute the true definition of a democratic republic. Marshall argues that the 20th century would bring a much larger range of social rights, including rights to provide protection of economic interests, and welfare and security for its citizens. Though he is a socialist, the compilation of his ideas are what I define as democracy, the modern democratic state is a welfare state.

Why didn’t we blow ourselves up?

We didn’t blow ourselves up because nobody wanted to make a first strike. Neither side knew the full extent of its enemy’s military power…the Russians could always have a bigger bomb, or simply more of them. The USSR and US were immobilized by fear associated with the assumption that the world is ending, an outcome that neither state wanted to be responsible for.
As fun as I found the simulation, there is a flaw to it. We all wanted to blow each other up, because it would be silly and fun…not in real life. In real life, it seems to me, some of the things that we did would have been absurd, but perhaps it just seems that way to me because I know how the Cold War ended. For example, I am fairly certain that Russia would not tolerate nukes in Japan, as the US wouldn’t approve of nukes in Mexico. I know as an example from the other class that the USSR took over Ireland, simply to mess with Declan. Would the Russians have expressed any interest in Ireland in the real world? I highly doubt it, but the Russians in the other class decided it would be fun.
Now, I know that it is a simulation, and that nothing can be perfect, but the game is set up so that each team wants to nuke each other, because total victory on both sides sounds lame and boring—but that’s what happened, and I’m glad of it.

Should we have used the bomb?

I am certainly not suggesting that thousands of Japanese civilians deserved to die, but I believe that in the long run the use of the atomic bomb was not a mistake. I think the use of the bomb was justified—it ended the war. It has been criticized because the bomb was dropped on civilians without warning. Some argue that the bomb should have been shown to the Japanese, that they simply needed to understand the power of the bomb, and they would surrender. These people are wrong. The Japanese hung in, even when being firebombed by the US (which killed more Japanese than the two bombs combined), and attacked by Britain, and China, there is no way that the Japanese would have surrendered after a simple demonstration—they didn’t surrender after it was used! We mention the firebombing today, but it doesn’t have nearly the same weight as the nukes. This is of course because a nuke is one bomb, as opposed to many. Either way though, the end is the same, people become obliterated on a large scale—if those attacks are justifiable, in my opinion, so was the use of the bomb.