Observations on the Passing of Mikhail Gorbachev

He was a courageous and creative humanitarian, ironically the product of a justifiably paranoid regime, a man whose vision for a just world, where individual and collective interests might be reconciled, was thwarted by the power mad egoists who rule us in the so-called West.

As Yeshua ben Miriam is reported to have observed, “a prophet has no honor in his own home”, and so, he is all too frequently blamed in Russia for the misery occasioned by his successor, Boris Yeltsin, who virtually sold Russia to Western backed gangsters, a prelude to our modern, post-truth world. But some of us who were both alive and alert at the time know the truth: he almost singlehandedly ended the age of the Iron Curtain and the first Cold War.

Unfortunately, he naively felt that leaders in the United States, Germany and NATO shared his vision, and he and Russia were promptly betrayed. Something from which the Chinese and the current Russian leadership appear to have learned.

It may be a long time before a conciliator of his stature appears on the world stage at an opportune moment, a long time we perhaps no longer have.
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© Guillermo Calvo Mahé; Manizales, 2022; all rights reserved. Please feel free to share with appropriate attribution.

Guillermo (“Bill”) Calvo Mahé (a sometime poet) is a writer, political commentator and academic currently residing in the Republic of Colombia (although he has primarily lived in the United States of America of which he is also a citizen). Until 2017 he chaired the political science, government and international relations programs at the Universidad Autónoma de Manizales. He has academic degrees in political science (the Citadel), law (St. John’s University), international legal studies (New York University) and translation and linguistic studies (the University of Florida’s Center for Latin American Studies). He can be contacted at guillermo.calvo.mahe@gmail.com and much of his writing is available through his blog at https://guillermocalvo.com/.