LIVING IN THE TWILIGHT ZONE # 2

LIVING IN THE TWILIGHT ZONE # 2

IN PURSUIT OF THE TRUTH - HTTP://.WWW.CINOPSBEGONE.BLOGSPOT.COM - MAR. 25/19

 

EXCERPTS FROM MONA CHAREN BOOK, "USEFUL IDIOTS: HOW LIBERALS GOT IT WRONG IN THE COLD WAR AND STILL BLAME AMERICA FIRST" REGNERY PUBLISHING, 2003

Introduction: None Dare Call It Victory -  p. 1 -8

    "Some on the Left are now attempting to obscure the history of the period - to say that all of us were united in our opposition to Communism. That is false.... The West won the Cold War. The free nations defeated the totalitarian ones. The capitalists outperformed the statists. The believers outlasted the atheists. The U.S.A., flawed and divided as we were, persevered to see the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics and nearly all of us satellites implode. ... the world stood stunned as the Communist empire ended "not with a bang but a whimper."....

 

    "The Cold War which began in the weary years after the Second World War, when, in the words of Winston Churchill "the whole world [was] divided intellectually and to a large extent geographically between the creeds of Communist discipline and individual freedom." .... the elder President Bush never offered public words to mark the momentous and longed for demise of the Communist colossus. ...

 

    "Almost no one - neither the most ferocious anticommunist nor the most appeasing fellow traveler - imagined that the Soviet Union would simply fold up their tents and declare bankruptcy. But that is exactly what happened. [It was a miracle.] ... It was Gorbachev's hope to reform Communism and thereby save it, not to slay the monster from within....

 

    "As they had done in East Berlin in 1953, in Budapest in 1956, and in Prague in 1968, the people of Eastern Europe saw the light glinting through the unlocked door and rushed to pry it open further. Thye held candlelight vigils in churches and poured into streets to demand free elections and other liberties. But this time the Soviet tanks did not roll in to crush them. .... In Poland, the government restored to the Catholic Church property that had been confiscated decades earlier... Vaclav Havel was released from prison. The regime in Budapest began to dismantle the 218 mile security fence that had kept Hungarians and other Eastern Europeans from escaping to Austria.... As recently as Feb. 5, 1989, East German border guards had shot and killed a man attempting to escape to the West....

 

    "Liberal opinion makers in America were not overjoyed by the Cold War's close.... Gorbachev further argued that the cause of the Cold War to be found in the West's misinterpretation of Stalin. Stalin, Gorbachev insisted, had neither the intent nor the capacity to expand communist hegemony beyond Eastern Europe.... President Bush was a great believer in personal relationships among leaders. He had grown somewhat fond of Gorbachev, and felt strongly that it would have been bad form to, in his words, "gloat" that "we had won, and they had lost."....

 

    "Instead, it was a moment that ought to have been marked by prayerful celebration and thanksgiving. For millions of people worldwide (though over a billion in China, North Korea, and Cuba remain unfree), the end of communism means the end of profound physical and spiritual suffering. For millions more it means release from the fear of nuclear war. For the entire world, it means the possibility of peaceful progress on all fronts. It would've been possible to capture this in words, if  Mr. Bush had simply tried.

 

    "Most American liberals had long since ceased to believe that we were engaged in a "Cold War" over questions of liberty versus tyranny, or good versus evil, and had instead adopted the view that the Cold War was simply a kind of superarmed madness, in which two "scorpions in a bottle" threatened to destroy each other (and all of humanity with them) for no discernible reason.... Robert Heilbroner, a liberal academic, .... "the collapse of the Soviet system, hailed as a victory for human freedom, was also a defeat for human aspirations." ...Frances Fitzgerald, .... "I don't any American Soviet scholar who believes that the United States ended the Cold War."

 

    Those who spent their adult lifetimes denying that the Cold War was worth fighting, those who could never see the point in defense spending... are now attempting to rewrite history..

 

George H. Kubeck