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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 4709238" data-attributes="member: 4937">I'm afraid it is.  I can't construct a counter-narrative to what you describe without broaching alot of topics which will be political.It's not that I have different data than you have.  It's not like I've never seen or didn't experience any of these things that you are linking to.  It's that my experience of them, and my interpretation of them both at the time and in hindsight (especially in hindsight) is very different than how you interpret them.I'm aware that Watchman is a novel of its time.  I'm aware that it was percieved as being highly relevant by probably the majority of people.  I also believe that especially hindsight, that you ought to be able to look back and see that it wasn't nearly as relevant as people thought it was.  In particular, I believe Moore was wrong about virtually everything, and that he'd totally misread the time that he was in.  He got it all wrong.It's one thing to say that we came closer to nuclear crisis in 1983 than we did in the Cuban Missile crisis, because now that we have access to the decision making process of both sides, their diaries, and records and we can see that we didn't come very close to nuclear war in the Cuban Missile crisis at all.  The Soviets didn't even put their forces on alert.  For all their brinkmanship, the Soviets were terrified of the possibility of nuclear war, even to the point of rescinding standing orders that commanders in Cuba had the descrestion to use tactical nuclear weapons if attacked.  There are a few stories circulating about how close we got with this or that submarine, but if you investigate them you find that the are stories that grow larger in the telling and have grown larger because sensationalizing them is more interesting (and maybe more useful) than the naked facts. I interpretted the presence of Reagan in the U.S.A. (and Thatcher) as a very positive sign for peace, that it would force the Soviets to come to the table seeking peace where they'd felt no previous compunction, and that it would mean an American administration that actually had the political clout and trust of the American people to make peace.  And that's why I wasn't terrified during the '80's, and that's what actually happened.  And you know, I was pretty far from the only person in the 80's that held similar opinions.</blockquote>

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