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> French President Georges Pompidou, foregoing nationalism, called it "a beautiful plane." For a brief moment I imagined a different world to the one I experie
by wombatmobile 5y ago
> French President Georges Pompidou, foregoing nationalism, called it "a beautiful plane."
For a brief moment I imagined a different world to the one I experienced in my youth, in which the Cold War, with all its cliched animos stereotyped rivalrous ranting that filled every newspaper and news bulletin for three decades, was replaced by a good faith chivalrous respect.
It felt good. The world was a better, more interesting, more productive place.
- sgt101 5y agoAnd yet one half of it lived under a dark tyranny.
- kgeist 5y agoUSSR officially congratulated USA on the moon landings, for example. People rarely talk about things like that, sadly.
- 908B64B197 5y agoIt was also one of the only country with the ability to confirm that the USA did go to the moon, and had every reason (politically) to call it a hoax and didn't. That's why I still don't get moon landing conspiracy theories.
- wolfgang42 5y agoI accidentally got into a debate with a moon landing conspiracy theorist about this once. Their claim was that both space agencies were tacitly colluding to sponge budgets off of their respective governments. I dug into this further and after a couple of rounds of back-and-forth the answers they presented effectively required the entire Soviet political and ideological system to be a sham. I pointed this out and commented that, if true, this would be a conspiracy theory that makes a bit of NASA trickery pale to insignificance in comparison, and never heard from them again. I’d like to think they changed their mind, but I don’t think it's likely. My (uncharitable) explanation is that it gives a comforting sense of control and understanding of the world to be part of an in-group that has simple explanations for every outsider’s (potentially complicated and technical) objections.