And this is too true:
As Haynes and Klehr note, the world's final redoubt of communism is not Havana or Pyongyang but American college campuses: "The nostalgic afterlife of communism in the United States has outlived most of the real Communist regimes around the world....A sizable cadre of American intellectuals now openly applaud and apologize for one of the bloodiest ideologies of human history, and instead of being treated as pariahs, they hold distinguished positions in American higher education and cultural life."
Communists were (and are) disgusting monsters, and I never understood why any Westerner would defend them. I undestood that basic truth when I was ten years old, for God's sake, yet there are many educated fools who still deny the evil in the system they love. No amount of evidence will sway them. We'll always be the bad guys in their tales of the Cold War.
And I firmly believe that it was only our military victory against the Iraqi replica of the Red Army in 1991 that prevented these apologists from portraying us as something other than the victor of the Cold War:
The Persian Gulf War was more than the liberation of Kuwait. We learned we beat a second-rate military power, but by smashing a scaled down replica of the Red Army, America really beat the USSR by proxy. The Gulf War was the military victory that confirmed the end of the Cold War as a decisive Western victory. With the obvious domination of American ground and air power culminating in the 100-hour ground war, no revivalist Russian nationalist can argue that the West did not really beat the Soviet Union.
Victory also reassured Americans that we won the Cold War--we did not merely falter last in an exhausting struggle between two teetering systems. Victory made America a "hyper power" feared or envied. Without the military victory of the Persian Gulf War, we may have viewed ourselves as lucky survivors of that struggle rather than the victors who dominate the globe. Remember that the fall of the Berlin Wall took place scant years after the argument was made by Professor Paul Kennedy that America was a declining power burdened by "imperial overstretch."
But our Leftists will still try to portray the Soviets as the good guys who lost--or at least as the misunderstood idealists who just got a little cranky.
