7 ms·

Briefing note: US Deputy Secretary Of State meeting with Andrei Gromyko (1985)

86 points by howsilly 6y ago

howlgarnish 6y ago
We need a contest to come up with the most plausible album for "Never Mind the Manganese Ore Export Quotas, Here’re the Enjoyable Popular Music Boys."
- ncmncm 6y ago
  For those too young to remember or were asleep in Music History, this is a play on "Never Mind the Bollocks, Here's the Sex Pistols". The Sex Pistols was a British punk band, a project of Malcolm McLaren fronted by Sid Vicious (John Ritchie) and Johnny Rotten (Johnny Lydon), who enjoyed needling then-Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, who badly deserved it.
  - brandall10 6y ago
    I’m a little stunned the reference is not obvious to a reasonably well educated person over the age of 20. I was a baby when this album came out and knew who they were by the time I was probably 10 or so, despite the fact they had been long broken up. This is one of the most influential bands in rock music history... for an adult to be unaware, would almost be like a younger version of myself to be clueless about who Buddy Holly was.
    - citizenkeen 6y ago
      I'll cop to not getting the reference. I'm 38, overly educated in the liberal arts, reasonably well read. My recent text threads include jokes about Herodotus, Bartleby, Frankie Valli, Jason Derulo, and Belle Delphine. Sometimes you're just in the tail end of the lucky 10,000.
      - brandall10 6y ago
        On an individual level, it’s hard to argue with what a person knows or doesn’t. Regarding my assertion about the band’s relevance and impact in popular culture, wikipedia says the following: On the band - “Although their initial career lasted just two and a half years, they are regarded as one of the most groundbreaking acts in the history of popular music.” On the album - “It is frequently listed as the most influential punk album, and one of the most important albums of all time... In 1987, Rolling Stone magazine named the album the second best of the previous 20 years, behind only the Beatles' Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band. The same magazine named it 41st on their list of 500 greatest albums of all time in 2003, maintaining the position in its updated 2012 list. In 2006, it was chosen by Time magazine as one of the 100 greatest albums ever.“
        citizenkeen 6y ago
        Of course! I wasn't refuting your claims either to its popularity or significance. I was only acknowledging that there is very little in this world that boggles my mind somebody doesn't know. There's a long tail on acquiring knowledge.
    - aasasd 6y ago
      It's probably one of those cases where a lot of people heard about the band, but have no idea what albums they released.
      - brandall10 6y ago
        Perhaps, but this is their only album. As noted above (ref the wiki entry), it stands on its own as one of the most influential in modern music history. I always thought the word “Bollocks” was internationally recognized slang because of it.
BruceEel 6y ago
...not The Onion.
- terramex 6y ago
  ...but it sure reads like one. > If Soviets dismantle all SS–20s, we are willing to airbrush out Gorbachev’s birthmark in US photographs
  - retSava 6y ago
    I wonder if that's some kind of cheeky remark internal between the SoS and the assistant, or if there was actually a real thought to do this. Ofc, cheap price, but seriously? Did they believe Gorbachev (spelling) was that vain? Was he? edit: also, "make the world safe for conventional warfare". Hmpf.
    - p_l 6y ago
      It reads less as humor if you learn that the only reason Intermediate Missile Ban Treaty happened was that USA was going to use its failure to damage anti-nuke protests and peace movements by proposing "unreasonable ban that Soviets will surely reject". To utter surprise, the opening argument for "total ban on IRBMs" got accepted wholesale.
    - UncleSlacky 6y ago
      I've seen Soviet-era posters with his birthmark airbrushed out, so I guess it's possible.
    - dash2 6y ago
      The whole thing is a spoof, dude. Read the footnotes.
- retSava 6y ago
  Ha. "Point to Make —We have new proposal: why don’t you send Lenin’s body to US on tour. Just like King Tut exhibit. —We are prepared to respond by sending Jane Fonda workout group on tour of Soviet cities."
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
ncmncm 6y ago
I have to guess that the extreme tongue-in-cheek quality of the whole presentation played on the expectation that the Soviets would have access to this, themselves, before the meeting, and would find it very difficult to read between the lines and know what it was really saying. More likely it was meant entirely for the Soviets' amusement/confusion, that they would have been obliged to pretend they had not seen, and some other doc still secret was actually read by (or to) the US crew. Or, it is really just an inside joke that never had any larger meaning, and got assigned a document number more or less by mistake..
- rtpg 6y ago
  The simplest explanation is that people in the US gov't act and believe this kind of stuff. It aligns with every piece of leaked private correspondence from these people, as well as public statements at the time and now. If anything the last 4 years (mostly composed of "professional politicians" despite those at the top maybe being outsiders!) should be real "mask off" to the supposed genius and amazing tradecraft of the US. Ocamm's razor here is that this was the memo.
  - angry_octet 6y ago
    It is striking how moronic and ill informed it is. When I think of all Ambassadors with grace and favour appointments it makes me grimace. The extraordinary testimony from Fiona Hill and Alex Vindman was at least reassuring that competent people were in government, even if they were being ignored.
    - commentrix 6y ago
      IC has always attracted the best and brightest gossips, deviants and liars. They love to "know more than" even if they have to make it all up. The paradox is their assessments are supposed to be reliable. How can anyone trust a word any of them ever say? That's the stupidity. They're all very "bright", they just don't have any scruples at all. It's basically a social club for sociopaths, wannabe "unlanded" social-climbers and insecure narcissists who just gotta find a way they can pretend to be better than anyone else. I don't think this unprofessionalism applies to military/signals intelligence which is too strict and results focused, only the other "human" types. But the reality is you need people like that, you need people that are easy to control. That's why so many of them have some sort of dirty secret, because the organizations can more easily rely on people they can blackmail. The obsession with secrecy is not just an occupational requirement, it's a deep seated psychology issue for many of the people, that becomes an organizational psychology issue, because of all the twisted crazies they have roaming around in their ranks.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
boomboomsubban 6y ago
Amusingly, the author, or the boss of the author, got promoted to Ambassador to Germany a few months later. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Burt https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Burt
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
pjc50 6y ago
> What To Expect From Moscow Under Gorbachev: ... First moves will be to revitalize Soviet economy, end the arms race, and get Mrs. G a charge account at Neiman Marcus. Two out of three ain't bad. > Don’t blubber. You’re guilty as hell of violating whales Little joke there - but a very important issue as the USSR was a major factor in almost making whales extinct, and for very little economic gain to themselves. > Avoid strategic miscalculation: want to talk about Antarctica, Fiji, and Burkina Faso. Burkina Faso: important once, I cannot remember why, and I've not heard that name since the cold war ended.
- UncleSlacky 6y ago
  > Burkina Faso: important once, I cannot remember why Probably because at the time it was in danger of becoming a successful socialist country (under then-president Thomas Sankara), a state of affairs which obviously could not be permitted to continue (Sankara was duly assassinated in 1987 by his best friend who was much more compliant to the West): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Sankara https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Sankara
  - Loq 6y ago
    successful socialist country Does such a thing exist? What do you count as success? Just a few years earlier, and driven by the same socialist expansion strategy, another developing state turned socialist, Cambodia, with active help from Moscow. Is this what you have in mind as success? Wasn't Sankara a charismatic leader, and military man who came to power by a coup d'état? Have you looked at the track record of military coup d'états in history ...?
    - InitialLastName 6y ago
      Not to engage the broader question of whether socialism has any success stories, but I think one could more sympathetically read GP's "successful socialist country" in this context as "a country successfully converted to idealogical alignment with the Soviet Union"
MichaelMoser123 6y ago
Gromyko and Punk Rock? Sorry, that's impossible, for Gromyko "everything was going acording to the plan" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DDCDsKHCE8s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DDCDsKHCE8s
prof-dr-ir 6y ago
Dated: April 5, 1985. Maybe produced about five days earlier?
motohagiography 6y ago
The whole tone of it was corny, even for the standards of the time. But there is a subtext in it worth commenting on. Once you agree to engage on the level of a "serious" discussion in an existential power struggle with committed ideologues, like Reagan and the soviets, you've given key ground. Even (especially?) communists will tell you the soviet ideology wasn't communism. The soviet state was totalitarian, which is essentially defined by the object against which it constantly militates, which is truth in all and any form. The total war on any truth that could allow for an island of private individual identity in opposition to the movement is the sufficient and necessary condition for the totalitarian urge (Arendt, etc.). What made Reagan the oddly ideal person to respond to that movement was it was his cowboy-actor personal boundaries that were anathema to the uncertainty on which the soviet mentality depended and cultivated in people. It was a unique situation. Obama had a similar "openness," I think, which was not what most people think at all, but rather complete confidence in the boundary between himself and others that enabled him to seem open to any and all circumstances. Reality is nobody ever gets close enough to see the heat and steel behind it. Comparably, Bill Clinton even had more sharp edges than Obama. Maybe the 80's were just this corny, but the briefing note has some tells of very polished people code switching to what they understood only from the outside as Reagan's aw-shucks earnestness.
- Loq 6y ago
  communists will tell you the soviet ideology wasn't communism. This falls in no-true-Scotsman territory, and should be seen as a self-exculpatory narrative, after all, they sent millions to an early death, yet the societies they created were worse than those that they overturned, and much worse than the best functioning societies at the time. Let's also be clear that Soviets read the works by Marx and Engels in great detail, it's not like they didn't know what Marx and Engels wrote. For example, the Communist Manifesto [1, 2] outlines a few essential demands [3] for a transition that will eventually lead to communist utopia. Every single one of those was executed, and achieved by Stalin. Exactly what "communism" should mean has never really been clarified, but whatever Marx and Engels meant by it, the fact that carrying out their 10 key demands exacted an 8 digit death toll is an extremely strong indication that there is something fundamentally wrong with Marx and Engels ideas. Moreover, the world A/B tested this: two countries were split (Germany and Korea), one was ruled by a communist party (Soviet aligned) the other capitalist and within a decade the capitalist one was doing dramatically better than the other. So much so, that you Soviet aligned one had to turn itself to a prison to prevent the population from fleeing. (Yes I am aware that this is not a repeatable scientific experiment. However it is the most decisive 'experiment' you can hope for in politics and social theory. It is what we must learn from. To quote Marx: "A Nation should and can learn from other nations".) [1] K. Marx, F. Engels, Manifesto of the Communist Party. http://activistmanifesto.org/assets/original-communist-manifesto.pdf http://activistmanifesto.org/assets/original-communist-manif... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Communist_Manifesto https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Communist_Manifesto [3] Briefly (and from [2]): progressive income tax; abolition of inheritances and private property; abolition of child labour; free public education; nationalisation of the means of transport and communication; centralisation of credit via a national bank; expansion of publicly owned land, etc.—the implementation of which would result in the precursor to a stateless and classless society.
wildermuthn 6y ago
Reminds me of programmers writing hilarious docs and comments so that others will actually read them. Imagine you are a diplomat who gets these sort of documents every day all day. A little humor goes a very long way!
bmmayer1 6y ago
> First moves will be to revitalize Soviet economy, end the arms race, and get Mrs. G a charge account at Neiman Marcus

86 points by howsilly 6y ago

We need a contest to come up with the most plausible album for "Never Mind the Manganese Ore Export Quotas, Here’re the Enjoyable Popular Music Boys."

ncmncm 6y ago
For those too young to remember or were asleep in Music History, this is a play on "Never Mind the Bollocks, Here's the Sex Pistols". The Sex Pistols was a British punk band, a project of Malcolm McLaren fronted by Sid Vicious (John Ritchie) and Johnny Rotten (Johnny Lydon), who enjoyed needling then-Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, who badly deserved it.
- brandall10 6y ago
  I’m a little stunned the reference is not obvious to a reasonably well educated person over the age of 20. I was a baby when this album came out and knew who they were by the time I was probably 10 or so, despite the fact they had been long broken up. This is one of the most influential bands in rock music history... for an adult to be unaware, would almost be like a younger version of myself to be clueless about who Buddy Holly was.
  - citizenkeen 6y ago
    I'll cop to not getting the reference. I'm 38, overly educated in the liberal arts, reasonably well read. My recent text threads include jokes about Herodotus, Bartleby, Frankie Valli, Jason Derulo, and Belle Delphine. Sometimes you're just in the tail end of the lucky 10,000.
    - brandall10 6y ago
      On an individual level, it’s hard to argue with what a person knows or doesn’t. Regarding my assertion about the band’s relevance and impact in popular culture, wikipedia says the following: On the band - “Although their initial career lasted just two and a half years, they are regarded as one of the most groundbreaking acts in the history of popular music.” On the album - “It is frequently listed as the most influential punk album, and one of the most important albums of all time... In 1987, Rolling Stone magazine named the album the second best of the previous 20 years, behind only the Beatles' Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band. The same magazine named it 41st on their list of 500 greatest albums of all time in 2003, maintaining the position in its updated 2012 list. In 2006, it was chosen by Time magazine as one of the 100 greatest albums ever.“
      - citizenkeen 6y ago
        Of course! I wasn't refuting your claims either to its popularity or significance. I was only acknowledging that there is very little in this world that boggles my mind somebody doesn't know. There's a long tail on acquiring knowledge.
  - aasasd 6y ago
    It's probably one of those cases where a lot of people heard about the band, but have no idea what albums they released.
    - brandall10 6y ago
      Perhaps, but this is their only album. As noted above (ref the wiki entry), it stands on its own as one of the most influential in modern music history. I always thought the word “Bollocks” was internationally recognized slang because of it.

BruceEel 6y ago

...not The Onion.

terramex 6y ago
...but it sure reads like one. > If Soviets dismantle all SS–20s, we are willing to airbrush out Gorbachev’s birthmark in US photographs
- retSava 6y ago
  I wonder if that's some kind of cheeky remark internal between the SoS and the assistant, or if there was actually a real thought to do this. Ofc, cheap price, but seriously? Did they believe Gorbachev (spelling) was that vain? Was he? edit: also, "make the world safe for conventional warfare". Hmpf.
  - p_l 6y ago
    It reads less as humor if you learn that the only reason Intermediate Missile Ban Treaty happened was that USA was going to use its failure to damage anti-nuke protests and peace movements by proposing "unreasonable ban that Soviets will surely reject". To utter surprise, the opening argument for "total ban on IRBMs" got accepted wholesale.
  - UncleSlacky 6y ago
    I've seen Soviet-era posters with his birthmark airbrushed out, so I guess it's possible.
  - dash2 6y ago
    The whole thing is a spoof, dude. Read the footnotes.
retSava 6y ago
Ha. "Point to Make —We have new proposal: why don’t you send Lenin’s body to US on tour. Just like King Tut exhibit. —We are prepared to respond by sending Jane Fonda workout group on tour of Soviet cities."

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

ncmncm 6y ago

I have to guess that the extreme tongue-in-cheek quality of the whole presentation played on the expectation that the Soviets would have access to this, themselves, before the meeting, and would find it very difficult to read between the lines and know what it was really saying. More likely it was meant entirely for the Soviets' amusement/confusion, that they would have been obliged to pretend they had not seen, and some other doc still secret was actually read by (or to) the US crew. Or, it is really just an inside joke that never had any larger meaning, and got assigned a document number more or less by mistake..

rtpg 6y ago
The simplest explanation is that people in the US gov't act and believe this kind of stuff. It aligns with every piece of leaked private correspondence from these people, as well as public statements at the time and now. If anything the last 4 years (mostly composed of "professional politicians" despite those at the top maybe being outsiders!) should be real "mask off" to the supposed genius and amazing tradecraft of the US. Ocamm's razor here is that this was the memo.
- angry_octet 6y ago
  It is striking how moronic and ill informed it is. When I think of all Ambassadors with grace and favour appointments it makes me grimace. The extraordinary testimony from Fiona Hill and Alex Vindman was at least reassuring that competent people were in government, even if they were being ignored.
  - commentrix 6y ago
    IC has always attracted the best and brightest gossips, deviants and liars. They love to "know more than" even if they have to make it all up. The paradox is their assessments are supposed to be reliable. How can anyone trust a word any of them ever say? That's the stupidity. They're all very "bright", they just don't have any scruples at all. It's basically a social club for sociopaths, wannabe "unlanded" social-climbers and insecure narcissists who just gotta find a way they can pretend to be better than anyone else. I don't think this unprofessionalism applies to military/signals intelligence which is too strict and results focused, only the other "human" types. But the reality is you need people like that, you need people that are easy to control. That's why so many of them have some sort of dirty secret, because the organizations can more easily rely on people they can blackmail. The obsession with secrecy is not just an occupational requirement, it's a deep seated psychology issue for many of the people, that becomes an organizational psychology issue, because of all the twisted crazies they have roaming around in their ranks.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

boomboomsubban 6y ago

Amusingly, the author, or the boss of the author, got promoted to Ambassador to Germany a few months later. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Burt https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Burt

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]

pjc50 6y ago

> What To Expect From Moscow Under Gorbachev: ... First moves will be to revitalize Soviet economy, end the arms race, and get Mrs. G a charge account at Neiman Marcus. Two out of three ain't bad. > Don’t blubber. You’re guilty as hell of violating whales Little joke there - but a very important issue as the USSR was a major factor in almost making whales extinct, and for very little economic gain to themselves. > Avoid strategic miscalculation: want to talk about Antarctica, Fiji, and Burkina Faso. Burkina Faso: important once, I cannot remember why, and I've not heard that name since the cold war ended.

UncleSlacky 6y ago
> Burkina Faso: important once, I cannot remember why Probably because at the time it was in danger of becoming a successful socialist country (under then-president Thomas Sankara), a state of affairs which obviously could not be permitted to continue (Sankara was duly assassinated in 1987 by his best friend who was much more compliant to the West): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Sankara https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Sankara
- Loq 6y ago
  successful socialist country Does such a thing exist? What do you count as success? Just a few years earlier, and driven by the same socialist expansion strategy, another developing state turned socialist, Cambodia, with active help from Moscow. Is this what you have in mind as success? Wasn't Sankara a charismatic leader, and military man who came to power by a coup d'état? Have you looked at the track record of military coup d'états in history ...?
  - InitialLastName 6y ago
    Not to engage the broader question of whether socialism has any success stories, but I think one could more sympathetically read GP's "successful socialist country" in this context as "a country successfully converted to idealogical alignment with the Soviet Union"

MichaelMoser123 6y ago

Gromyko and Punk Rock? Sorry, that's impossible, for Gromyko "everything was going acording to the plan" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DDCDsKHCE8s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DDCDsKHCE8s

prof-dr-ir 6y ago

Dated: April 5, 1985. Maybe produced about five days earlier?

motohagiography 6y ago

The whole tone of it was corny, even for the standards of the time. But there is a subtext in it worth commenting on. Once you agree to engage on the level of a "serious" discussion in an existential power struggle with committed ideologues, like Reagan and the soviets, you've given key ground. Even (especially?) communists will tell you the soviet ideology wasn't communism. The soviet state was totalitarian, which is essentially defined by the object against which it constantly militates, which is truth in all and any form. The total war on any truth that could allow for an island of private individual identity in opposition to the movement is the sufficient and necessary condition for the totalitarian urge (Arendt, etc.). What made Reagan the oddly ideal person to respond to that movement was it was his cowboy-actor personal boundaries that were anathema to the uncertainty on which the soviet mentality depended and cultivated in people. It was a unique situation. Obama had a similar "openness," I think, which was not what most people think at all, but rather complete confidence in the boundary between himself and others that enabled him to seem open to any and all circumstances. Reality is nobody ever gets close enough to see the heat and steel behind it. Comparably, Bill Clinton even had more sharp edges than Obama. Maybe the 80's were just this corny, but the briefing note has some tells of very polished people code switching to what they understood only from the outside as Reagan's aw-shucks earnestness.

Loq 6y ago
communists will tell you the soviet ideology wasn't communism. This falls in no-true-Scotsman territory, and should be seen as a self-exculpatory narrative, after all, they sent millions to an early death, yet the societies they created were worse than those that they overturned, and much worse than the best functioning societies at the time. Let's also be clear that Soviets read the works by Marx and Engels in great detail, it's not like they didn't know what Marx and Engels wrote. For example, the Communist Manifesto [1, 2] outlines a few essential demands [3] for a transition that will eventually lead to communist utopia. Every single one of those was executed, and achieved by Stalin. Exactly what "communism" should mean has never really been clarified, but whatever Marx and Engels meant by it, the fact that carrying out their 10 key demands exacted an 8 digit death toll is an extremely strong indication that there is something fundamentally wrong with Marx and Engels ideas. Moreover, the world A/B tested this: two countries were split (Germany and Korea), one was ruled by a communist party (Soviet aligned) the other capitalist and within a decade the capitalist one was doing dramatically better than the other. So much so, that you Soviet aligned one had to turn itself to a prison to prevent the population from fleeing. (Yes I am aware that this is not a repeatable scientific experiment. However it is the most decisive 'experiment' you can hope for in politics and social theory. It is what we must learn from. To quote Marx: "A Nation should and can learn from other nations".) [1] K. Marx, F. Engels, Manifesto of the Communist Party. http://activistmanifesto.org/assets/original-communist-manifesto.pdf http://activistmanifesto.org/assets/original-communist-manif... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Communist_Manifesto https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Communist_Manifesto [3] Briefly (and from [2]): progressive income tax; abolition of inheritances and private property; abolition of child labour; free public education; nationalisation of the means of transport and communication; centralisation of credit via a national bank; expansion of publicly owned land, etc.—the implementation of which would result in the precursor to a stateless and classless society.

wildermuthn 6y ago

Reminds me of programmers writing hilarious docs and comments so that others will actually read them. Imagine you are a diplomat who gets these sort of documents every day all day. A little humor goes a very long way!

bmmayer1 6y ago

> First moves will be to revitalize Soviet economy, end the arms race, and get Mrs. G a charge account at Neiman Marcus