Talk:Raymond Aron
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[edit] Re: Category:Organizations and people who predicted the collapse of the USSR
"Only a handful of thinkers, ranging from Charles de Gaulle to the Soviet dissident Andrei Amalrik, foretold the eventual dissolution of the Soviet Union itself, and even they saw it as likely to happen as a result of disastrous wars with China or pressures from the Muslim Soviet states of Central Asia."
"I know of only one person who came close to getting it right: Raymond Aron, the French philosopher and liberal anti-Communist. In a talk on the Soviet threat that I heard him give in the 1980s at the International Institute for Strategic Studies in London, he reminded the audience of Machiavelli's observation in "The Prince" that "all armed prophets have conquered and all unarmed ones failed.
"But what happens, Aron asked, if the prophet, having conquered and then ruled by force of arms, loses faith in his own prophecy? In the answer to that question, Aron suggested, lay the key to understanding the future of the Soviet Union." From:[1]