the fall of the USSR caused the biggest drop in life expectancy ever recorded in history outside of war or natural disaster
yes, the study is here, from the Dialogue of Civilizations Research Institute in Berlin:
doc-research.org
doc-research.org
it wasn’t just a disaster for Eastern Europe, btw…with the USSR gone, the United States was free to enforce the Washington Consensus on the entire world. whatever you think of the USSR, it’s a fact that its absence was critical to the last few decades of global neoliberal hell.
Neocolonialism, the method by which the western empire keeps the Global South underdeveloped, had limits in a multipolar world. However imperfect, the socialist bloc’s existence ensured those limits.
(from “Neocolonialism, the Last Stage of Imperialism” by Dr. Kwame Nkrumah)
(from “Neocolonialism, the Last Stage of Imperialism” by Dr. Kwame Nkrumah)
if you take a look at the numbers, western imperial exploitation increased since the early 90s in just about every category. IMF structural adjustment lending increased by an order of magnitude. US military bases set up in twice as many countries overseas…
…more direct military interventions by the US (Yugoslavia, Libya, Iraq, etc), National Endowment for Democracy ensuring hegemony with pro-western “civil society” NGOs in nearly every country, except Western Europe and North America (I guess the “democracy” there is just fine)
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