Talk:Bryant Grinder

Neutrality / accuracy questioned

A major source for the information (#3) is the company's own one-sided write-up, itself not actually found on the company's website but buried in the website of its hosting provider NEIS.

Any history of the BG Co. should include expanded discussion of its interesting history of trade with Bolshevik and subsequent Communist regimes in the Soviet Union from 1931 onwards, and details of the denied export license of 1961. Indeed, the machines thus barred from sale, Centalign-B, were ultimately shipped to the Soviets in 1972 following the supportive intervention of Henry Kissinger, as described, among other sources, in Antony C. Sutton's "The Best Enemy Money Can Buy" (Ch. VII). Pzzp (talk) 00:46, 22 March 2015 (UTC)

I think you've hit upon a very interesting and also very deep aspect of the topic. How it's handled is not as simple as "the info here sucks and let's delete it all"; this goes to the entire topic of how the West traded with the Soviet bloc (a long, deep history, filled with soul-searching questions) and even, right up today, how the West trades with China (ditto "soul-searching questions"—even though China now has a booming market economy, we democrats still struggle with the fact that fostering democracy is not a priority there). In fact, just today I was reading an article about business-world interaction with North Korea that touches on the same deep themes. The very crux of it, the two sides of it, is touched on, about in the middle, where interviewees named Carriere and Stanton are quoted.

I was never aware of Antony C. Sutton until I read the talk thread here. Having skimmed over his WP article and book descriptions online, I'm interested to read some of his work, when I can get time. Anyway, for the purposes of this article and for other Wikipedia articles about particular companies that had Soviet contracts (Ford in the 1920s comes to mind first, but machine tool builders such as Bryant, as well as specialty metals companies, electronics companies, and others, are also principal ones)—what we need to eventually arrive at for Wikipedia is coverage that includes both (1) what the businesspeople themselves had to say and (2) what someone like Sutton points out to the rest of us about how we should feel about the businesspeople's actions, motives, and COIs. It's important to realize that the info source numbered "1" above is a vital piece of the story, because without it the rest of society is in the dark as to 70% of what the history even is (who traded with whom, why, what the dollar values were, and so on). After all, during the Soviet era, who even knew, inside the USSR or outside it, what those facts and figures were? CIA and MI6 no doubt had a better idea than anyone else outside the Moscow Kremlin, but most of humanity was in the dark. That's one vital advantage of a democratic system—the organizations involved (the various corporations) are free to tell their story, even though they've obviously got their own biases, which is quite different from in the USSR, where, say, GAZ or Amtorg wouldn't say anything except what the Kremlin told them they were allowed to say (or ordered to say).

Anyway, the referenced content that's already here should be retained, but as anyone gets time to add other new content to it, from Sutton for example, we should develop this coverage better. I would like to see, eventually, an entire Wikipedia article on the general case, that is, "Trade between communist and anticommunist countries" or something like that. — ¾-10 18:35, 22 March 2015 (UTC)