Posted on 04/05/2014 8:49:56 AM PDT by Kaslin
Whether the Cold War is back, it's an apt moment to strike up a wider conversation about a couple of central questions from my book "American Betrayal." Why did the West fail to claim an ideological or moral victory at the apparent end of the Cold War? Did the West really even win the Cold War?
If we go back in time and listen, we hear no consensus click over signs that an unalloyed U.S.-led triumph over communist ideology had taken place; nor do we find a sense of national thanksgiving for the forces of good -- or, at least, for the forces of better -- in their triumph over the forces of a non-abstract evil as manifested in Gulag or KGB or famine or purge history. "Mustn't gloat" was about as joyous as the White House of Bush No. 41 ever got.
Was the official non-reaction due to that "crisis of confidence" we always hear about -- specifically, that "politically correct" failure to believe in the worth of the West? I used to think exactly that and no more. The self-loathing West, failing to see anything of value in itself, was simply unable to take satisfaction, let alone pride, in the demise of its mass-murdering nemesis. "After all," the PC catechism goes, "Who's to say the Western system is 'better' than any other?"
But there is far more to it. At a certain point, it becomes clear that what we are looking at isn't a West that fails to appreciate itself anymore, but rather a West that isn't itself anymore. Decades of subversion by communist infiltrators and American traitors, collaborators and "useful idiots" have helped make sure of that. So, even if the military enemy went away after the dissolution of the USSR on Christmas Day 1991, our ideological enemy never even had to break step. Cold Warriors might have prevailed abroad, but America lost the ideological Cold War at home.
This helps explain why our college campuses are outposts of Marx, our centralizing government is increasingly invasive and dictatorial, and our culture is one of metastasizing decadence -- the amoral conditions of "The Communist Manifesto" made manifest.
Indeed, to be "anti-Western" today, as some have noted, is to stand in opposition to the West's rampant immorality, as Russian President Vladimir Putin pointedly claims to do. This is why, as Masha Gessen recently wrote in The Washington Post, Russians look at events in Ukraine and think "the West is literally taking over, and only Russian troops can stand between the Slavic country's unsuspecting citizens and the homosexuals marching in from Brussels."
Meanwhile, the U.S. finds itself paying lip service to the Constitutional principles it is still somewhat nostalgically known for.
President Obama's recent speech in Brussels, headquarters of the European Union, reveals the chasm between what we have become and what we are supposed to be. Wearing his "Leader of the Free World" hat, Obama made the case against Russia's annexation of Crimea by conjuring a Manichaean split between free societies and dictatorships. But does it fit?
According to the president, there are free societies where "each of us has the right to live as we choose," and there are dictatorships where the rule is "ordinary men and women are too small-minded to govern their own affairs." Americans confronting government-mandated health insurance would do well to wonder exactly which society they live in.
Obama continued: "In many ways, the history of Europe in the 20th century represented the ongoing clash of these two sets of ideas." That contest, he explained, swerving wildly away from historical fact, was won "not by tanks or missiles, but because our ideals stirred the hearts" of Eastern Bloc anti-communists.
(Omitted was the fact that these revolts were mainly crushed without U.S. aid. Omitted also was the decisive role that President Reagan's "tanks and missiles" -- and missile defense -- played in the military contest.)
In this post-World War II era, Obama declared, "America joined with Europe to reject the darker forces of the past and build a new architecture of peace."
Russia's annexation of Crimea, in sum, is an attack on that "architecture," and, as such, is bad.
On closer examination, however, that same U.S.-EU "architecture" doesn't support the free-society paradigm so much as what the president calls the "more traditional view of power" -- the one that sees "ordinary men and women (as) too small-minded to govern their own affairs."
This latter view aptly describes the "soft" tyranny of the EU nanny state, whose early lights, after all, were Belgian Socialists and Nazi sympathizers with visions of a unified pan-European welfare state. In Brussels, their political progeny -- unelected bureaucrats -- increasingly dictate political and social norms across a "United States of Europe."
In the U.S., the medical totalitarianism of Obamacare -- not to mention Obama's serial usurpations of power (not enforcing legislation he doesn't like, making up and enforcing legislation he does like) -- makes it all too clear that this president has a dictatorial temperament.
This is unsurprising when you consider that his political baby, his engine of transformative change -- state-mandated health care -- happens also to have been an early program of the Bolsheviks, and had as one of its earliest U.S. boosters a noted Stalinist named Henry Sigerist. This seems like as good a moment as any to remind readers that the UN and the IMF, those leading institutions of globalist infrastructure, were fostered into post-World War II existence by a pair of notorious American Soviet agents -- Alger Hiss and Harry Dexter White. Truly, it's a Red, Red world.
Somewhere along the ride, our horse switched colors, also tracks. Until we figure out how and why and what it all means, that "free world" of ours is more or less a front.
China.
Just saying.
It’s not who wins the war that is important, it is who wins the peace...
good article, and sums up almost exactly how I presently feel.
This helps explain why our college campuses are outposts of Marx, our centralizing government is increasingly invasive and dictatorial, and our culture is one of metastasizing decadence -- the amoral conditions of "The Communist Manifesto" made manifest.
I totally agree with Diana West. Unfortunately, I am old, with a long look back at the evolution of the United States. Most people/voters are too young to recognize the transformation that has taken place. They have lived it day by day as 'normal.'
Yes, we did win, thanks to Reagan and Thatcher. I don't get her assertion. It was highly publicized, even in the liberal media. I watched the Berlin Wall fall live on TV. I watched the Soviet Union fall apart. The enemy that were chasing us on my Navy ships, just waiting for an excuse to sink us.
However, her other assertions are obviously true. I also believe we are entering into a new cold war, thanks to the weak, globalist, communist Obama. Yes, I say communist, because he is going past socialism. Google the difference.
America “won” the cold war.
We do not look to the liberal press for any such assessment, as they are both unwilling and incapable.
As Reagan noted, we must fight every day to retain our Freedoms, our Peace, and our Prosperity, as they do not naturally persist, unchallenged.
We won but we’re still paying for that victory.
Disagree. Tell that to our Founding Fathers, World Wars I&II, Korea, Viet Nam, Kuwait, Iraq, Aftganiscrap, Israel, and every other Veteran who has fought for the righteous side of freedom. Winning wars IS what makes "peace" against the bad guys of the world. We killed Germany, Italy, and Japan. That's how we won "peace", although some were lost or a stalemate because of Rules of Engagement by policians.
Neville Chamberlain won a peace without war and we all know how that turned out. Now, America has it's own Chamberlain.
Also, I don't want to see one more of our children die or injured for nation building, but wars happen because of leaders of some countries, whatever their motives. Although I'm ready to pull up the drawbridge as libertarians prefer, if we want our American lifestyle to continue, we must remain military strong. The world used to fear and respect us; now they laugh at us.
For a brief few years, most of which benefited the Bill Clinton tenure in the White House, the Cold War was won, and the Islamic threat was at least in abeyance. Then a convergence of events led to an open confrontation with the Islamic threat. The mistake there was to try to somehow isolate the Islamic threat from the whole range of ambitions of the Islamic regimes around the world.
Not to fault George W. Bush excessively on this oversight, but trying to “nation-build” was very much mission creep, after Saddam Hussein and the majority of the Taliban were overthrown. Occupancy of the territory for the purpose of maintaining military air strikes at Tehran or other targets of opportunity, to the east and west of Iran should have been enough to keep them bottled up for years, while allowing the Iraqis and Afghanis free reign to set up whatever governments they desired, with or without “elections”, so long as the successor regimes were not turning into implacable enemies of the US presence.
The United States prior to 2008 had no idea how to run an empire of reluctant subjects, and since 2009 the regime has been trying very hard to become subject to somebody else’s empire. Apparently it does not matter if the new empire to which the territory once known as “the United States of America” shall become subject to is the Russian Federation, the Worldwide Islamic Caliphate, or the People’s Republic of China.
All three hold mortgages of various size on the real estate of that tormented territory, and there have even been some instances of claiming the property already.
If this is a new cold war, it feels more and more like we’re the other side now.
we hear no consensus click over signs that an unalloyed U.S.-led triumph over communist ideology had taken place
June 1, 1988: The joint statement between Reagan and Gorbachev at the ratification of the INF Treaty contained the key line that both countries were determined "to prevent any war between the United States and Soviet Union, whether nuclear or conventional," and disavowed "any intention to achieve military superiority." This statement ended the Cold War.
"The Cold War is already at an end."
Margaret Thatcher, November 28,1988
Why did the West fail to claim an ideological or moral victory at the apparent end of the Cold War?
If we go back in time and listen, we hear no consensus click over signs that an unalloyed U.S.-led triumph over communist ideology had taken place; nor do we find a sense of national thanksgiving for the forces of good -- or, at least, for the forces of better -- in their triumph over the forces of a non-abstract evil as manifested in Gulag or KGB or famine or purge history.
Reagan' s Address at Moscow State University (May 31, 1988)
"We meant to change a nation, and instead, we changed a world,"
Ronald Reagan, Jan. 11, 1989
" It is true that the Cold War is over. Greedom won, as we always knew it would."
Ronald Reagan, May 4, 1992
I think you miss my point. We LOST in Vietnam, yet we won the peace, many Vietnamese became fiercely loyal, productive and patriotic Americans. Today America is Vietnam’s most treasured trading partner.
Winning the war is indeed what makes the peace. But then what? A just peace is the gift that keeps on giving generations of peace and prosperity.
Compare the end of WWI with its punitive terms, pretty much all it did was set the stage for WWII, to the end of WWII, which set the stage for a prosperous and peaceful Europe (well, the western half of Europe, anyway!) and a Japan with an utter horror of war and a passion for industry and commerce.
We need both a military victory and a cultural victory for sustained vitality. One is a war, the other, to paraphrase von Clausewitz, is to continue war by diplomatic (cultural and economic) means...
According to Putin, the cold war isn’t over yet, we’re just waiting for a weak US president to take office.
eh? If the one we have now isn’t weak enough, who would be???
I agree, If you are older than say fifty, you can feel daily the reality that the tides and the winds have shifted in an ugly, diseased direction the last twenty years. And the shift has accelerated dangerously the last five. As the tool of a malignant evil, Obama has succeeded in his cancerous promise to "Transform" America.
WW2: A war to protect western freedom from national socialism.
Cold War: A war to protect western freedom from soviet socialism.
November 4, 2008: The election day on which the United States voluntarily surrendered to socialism, squandering the gains made in WW2 and in the Cold War.
Obama wants a Socialist citizenry and a communist government.
“good article, and sums up almost exactly how I presently feel.”
Indeed it does. Any time I hear someone talk about the Constitution, I feel the nostalgia.
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