Sickening must read.
The amnesia of European protesters
Corby Pelto
[snip] I recall that the German and French media mocked President Ronald Reagan, depicting him as a cowboy in cartoons, much as they are doing today to President Bush. Then, just as today, they naively attacked America's motives while offering little condemnation of the totalitarian regimes that imprisoned their own people.
After the wall came tumbling down in Germany, I often wondered what happened to all those anti-American French and German protesters? I never heard an apology or even a mild acknowledgment from these groups suggesting that perhaps they had overstated their case and picked the wrong target for their venom.
I wonder how the hundreds of millions of people in Eastern Europe feel about the Cold War's anti-American demonstrators now that they have embraced freedom and the free enterprise system for the first time in their lives? I wonder how many of them would want to go back to the dictatorships that they lived under before the wall came down? Do Germany and France think that this freedom ever would have occurred without America's military presence and principled leadership?
The truth is, there are some people who take freedom entirely for granted, whose perspectives are so naively misguided by altruistic causes and antiestablishment tendencies that they miss the big picture entirely. Those German and French who protest war and America have forgotten the most important lesson of World War II. Had they stood with principle and courage earlier, there'd have been a possibility that Adolf Hitler could have been stopped much earlier. [snip] Full story