LATimes: Superpowers That Turn Bully Risk Self-destruction

[protect freedom impeach bush now]

This is what an illegal election has done to America.
This is what happens when a right-wing coup controls
the news media, the courts, the Congress -

A country widely admired had become, simply, a bully that crushed small countries.



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http://www.commondreams.org/views03/0818-03.htm

Published on Monday, August 18, 2003 by the Los Angeles Times
Thunder of '68 Rumbles Onward
Soviet Invasion of Czechoslovakia Bears a Warning: Superpowers That Turn Bully Risk Self-destruction.
by Mark Kurlansky

Thirty-five years ago, on Aug. 20, 1968, Anton Tazky — a secretary of the Slovak Party Central Committee and a personal friend of Czechoslovakian Communist Party chief Alexander Dubcek — was driving back to Bratislava from an outlying district. He noticed odd, bright lights in the distance, and as he drove closer, he realized he had been seeing the headlights of tanks and military trucks with soldiers in foreign uniforms at the wheels. A movie shoot, Tazky decided. He went to bed as his country was being invaded, courtesy of Leonid Brezhnev and the Soviet Union.

It was the midpoint of a year unparalleled for wars, uprisings, revolutions and upheavals. And yet, with hindsight, it's clear that no single event of that eventful year had a greater effect — or holds a stronger message for us today — than the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia.

Mikhail Gorbachev, the Soviet Union's last leader, recently said the 1968 invasion "had an effect on all domestic and foreign policy and the entire development of Soviet society, which entered a stage of profound stagnation."

It took only a day of world outrage for Brezhnev to realize he had made a terrible blunder, and he tried to backtrack. What he couldn't know was that it was the first crack in the post-World War II geopolitical structure; the Cold War, which was at the root of so much unrest in 1968, had begun to disintegrate.


more....................

[Cascadian]

1. Look at history!

If you look into history, you will see that this is very true. Throughout history, nations that have been superpowers have always faultered. The Romans, Mayans, Mongols, Ottomans, Austro-Hungarians, British, Germans, and Soviets. All of them. They're empires collapsed in one form or another.

I regret that America is walking down the same path. All because of arrogance and greed.


John

[maggrwaggr]

2. Invading Iraq was the beginning of the end for the US

I knew it in my gut as soon as I heard Cheney give a speech a year ago and realized they were gonna do it no matter what anybody thought.

Some things you just know.

[Cascadian]

3. Martin Luther King had made a great speech about American arrogance.

Here's a snipet of that...

"Don't let anybody make you think that God chose America as His divine messianic force to be -- a sort of policeman of the whole world. God has a way of standing before the nations with judgment, and it seems that I can hear God saying to America: “You are too arrogant! If you don't change your ways, I will rise up and break the backbone of your power......"

More of it on this link!

http://www.accuracy.org/press_releases/PR011603.htm


John