With the dismantling of the Eastern bloc, conditional at first, then with fewer and fewer strings, many had predicted a defiant break with the grim, iron-fisted oppressor—-a label which unfortunately contained a good deal of truth—-and a wild swing back to the West.
But in large part it had not occurred. Possible explanations for this 'non-schism' ranged from political and cultural isolation during the Cold War, to the eventual success of numbing Marxist propaganda. Even East Germany, which reunified with the West, had since divided into two groups, its easternmost peoples falling back on the old alliances.
For if there was a common thread in the weave of East Europeans, it was a quiet dedication to hard work, and a genuine, even natural unselfishness—-a combination of qualities not highly valued in the Americanized west. And though to brand one half of a continent more concerned with the common good than the other is preposterous, there could be no denying that the two sides of the now extinct Iron Curtain remained stiffly uncomfortable with one another's professed doctrines and system of values. Fifty years under vastly divergent philosophies and spheres of influence could not be broken down in the years immediately following. And with the subsequent exodus into Space, learning to live with and understand each other had become largely unnecessary. In the purest sense of the analogy, Eastern Europe had taken one road, and the West another. The distances that separated their lives were now literal.
The nations and alliances resulting from the East-West split remained estranged, if no longer sharply opposed. And in a war that like so many others seemed to be drawing boundaries along lines of ideology, the possibility loomed of their coming together again not with overtures of peace and understanding, but on the battlefield.
AND FINALLY, THE WATCHERS ON THE MARGINS.
7) B-K3
The two major superpowers, still militarily head and shoulders above the rest, hardly added to the stability of the situation.
The politics of the United Commonwealth, formerly the United States of America, remained the politics of a child. The 'new Americans' continued to claim God, family, and self-righteous free enterprise (to their Republicans a god in itself) as the sole and irreproachable motive for all their actions. Thus everything they did in the realm of foreign affairs, usually only half understanding it themselves, must (in their eyes) inevitably be right, and for the good of all who followed the true path of capitalism and democracy—-in that order.
Soviet Space, meanwhile, had become equally intransigent. The Soviets, in their turn, hailed as their banner the liberation, equality, and self-rule of the working classes. These, so the Party line claimed, had built civilization, but been denied the fruits of their achievement by the corrupt upper classes, who, like Narcissus, were blind and self-serving, inherently evil and doomed to fail, but not before sucking the blood of true humanity and preventing the dreams of Marx and Trotsky….. And so on, disturbingly similar to the old communist propaganda. And of course they made no mention of Stalin, the purges, and the brutal repression of the KGB.