Monday, June 11, 2007

The Imaginary Super Power

The really bad news is, most Russians are still not
aware of how screwed up their Soviet era military was. There are two reasons
for this. First, Russians take for granted how their armed forces operates.
Russians complain about the brutality and incompetence in the military, but
that's all they've ever known. Second, Russians remember fondly that their ramshackle
armed forces defeated the Germans during World War II. What the Russians play
down is how much the Germans lost World War II in Russia, rather than being
beaten. The Germans made a lot of serious mistakes during the war, while the
Russians got their act together. What Russians fail to realize is that the
Soviet Union was an accidental, and largely imaginary, superpower. Russia has
long employed large scale deception, and the Soviet Union continued this on a
sustained basis.