[MY
PERESTROIKA screens Monday March 25th at 5:30 pm at the Wolstein
Building Auditorium, on the CWRU campus.]
Review by Charles Cassady, Jr.
Someday
I do hope that Ken Burns or Ric Burns or someone else in the
Florentine Films stable does a massive, multi-episode Cold War
docu-history, interviewing all the major players on both sides - the
Kremlinologists, the KGB Boris Badenovs, the turncoats, the
peaceniks, the Reaganites, the proxy-war guerilla leaders in the
Third World, etc. Bet the stories they have will set your blood
boiling. I've heard some of them. CIA agents were apt to set cats on
fire and let the agonized, dying felines run through Cuban cane
fields, torching the crops to spoil Castro's harvest quotas (remember
that next time ARGO or TV's 24 glorifies the Agency).
Dick Cheney - who still defends the Iraq Invasion - allegedly ordered
a major stand-down in US war-footing against the Soviets. Supposedly,
in the mid-1990s, as the USSR fell apart, Cheney watched a Pentagon
computer-simulation of how a full nuclear-missile exchange between
the United States and the faltering Russia would play out, and he
basically said, okay, game's over, let's not waste any more time on
this.