Many years later, when the Soviet giant had already collapsed under
the economic, military and ideological pressure from the Western bloc,
someone in the Pentagon revealed that its Star Wars project, to which
the Reagan administration had devoted enormous financial resources
and decisive strategic value, had only been a bluff. The missiles could
not have effectively protected American cities from a hypothetical
Soviet attack. But the bluff worked.
For several years, from the invasion of Afghanistan to Gorbachev’s
rise to the presidency of the USSR, it seemed as if the conditions for a
direct confrontation between the two blocs were truly in preparation.
In reality, both blocs were jointly playing their super-simulations
before humanity: by moving economic and creative energies toward
war, they blocked the process of social transformation. The Soviet bloc
tried a final defensive manoeuvre, freezing itself in an attempt to freeze
the outpouring of the different sorts of separatist, nationalist and reli-
gious tendencies that in 1989 finally aligned themselves with the
democratic movement if only to eviscerate it later.
Meanwhile the Western bloc initiated a process of redistribution of
social wealth in an anti-proletarian direction and a productive restruc-
turation based on new technologies.
Behind the screen of the simulation of a totally asymptotic war
(a war always promised and never unleashed that still produced its
effect on society and in the imaginary), what was really produced were
the effects of a frightening (perhaps irreversible) destruction in the
planetary fabric of society. Military superproduction, even if it did
not lead to a direct confrontation between the two blocs, increased
the occurrence of wars and the militarization of entire areas of the
planet.
The war that Saddam Hussein unleashed in the 1980s against the
Khomeini regime was financed and armed by Western countries. The
USSR itself waged war in Afghanistan. Everywhere in the world during
these years the ground was laid for a militarization that destroyed the
economic and environmental resources causing a feeling of terror and
aggression that poisoned inter-ethnic and international relations. Only
in the 1990s have we seen the slow dispersion of the effects produced
by this injection of aggressive adrenaline into the planetary body and
mind.
The vast majority of European intellectuals during these years con-
centrated their attention on the possibility of total war and of the
seemingly imminent danger of a confrontation between the USA and
the USSR.Integrated World Capitalism 179780230_221192_04_cha03.pdf 10/3/08 11:32 AM Page 17