The Left’s Cold War Amnesia

Incredibly, the word comes from the Obama administration that the United States will not attend the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall.

President Obama will of course accept his Nobel Peace Prize in Oslo.  He chaired a meeting of the U.N. Security Counsel this autumn.  He went to Denmark to plead for the Olympics.  He went to Cairo to convince the Arab world America was now on their side.  But he will not go to Germany, at the request of the German Chancellor to celebrate the greatest American victory in more than sixty years.  President Obama rejects a chance to speak on the greatest example of Hope and Change in our lifetimes.  He does this after insulting the Czechs and the Poles by withdrawing support for missile defense in their countries.  He further drew the fire of Vaclav Havel for his refusal to meet with the Dalai Lama before going to China.  Finally, one of his top communication aides, Anita Dunn, stated that one of her favorite philosophers was Mao Tse-tung. America’s victories in the cause of freedom are not to be celebrated or even mentioned, but any of her efforts that can be cast as shameful or unpopular will be highlighted and apologies made.

Matt Welch over at Reason presciently asked why we don’t have more remembrances of the fall of the Wall in 1989. Think about it, how many misty-eyed remembrances of Woodstock did we get this year? Where are the fall of the Wall movies?  The keepers of memory in America are disproportionately academia and popular culture.  Higher education got the Cold War completely wrong, as did Hollywood after 1970.  One reason so many young people became liberals in the 60’s was the civil rights movement and perceived Goldwaterite opposition.  One reason so many young people became Republicans in the 80’s (I cast my last Democratic vote for Joe Lieberman over Lowell Weicker in 1988) was the wan resistance to the communists the Democrats put up.

The statements of academics and Hollywood and the Democratic Party about communists and those opposing them between 1980 and 1990 are embarrassing.  Jon Stewart scorns today’s tea parties – but the nuclear freeze movement was bigger and compelled the endorsement of a Democratic presidential candidate in 1984. Who laughed at that? Anywhere Hollywood took a hard line on the Cold War the movies found large adoring audiences and complete elite disdain.  See Red Dawn, Rambo, Rocky IV, Heartbreak Ridge.  The disdain was not just for the kind of movies they were but the message they embodied.  The only exception I can think of is The Hunt for Red October.

The 1980’s were the anti-communist coalition’s finest hour.  Opposing the nuclear freeze, the Soviet attempt to put intermediate range missiles in Europe, backing Star Wars, freeing the economies of the West through deregulation, reasserting the importance of religious belief and freedom, pressing the integration of the West through free trade, and creating a worldwide anti-communist force – these efforts were all vital to the economic and political reverses of Soviet communism and were all opposed by the American left and unfortunately many American liberals.

Today, if you go to public school and then on to college and then graduate school you will get none of this or it will be a very brief passage about Gorbachev.  Instead, you will get a pastiche of assertions that America was racist, belligerent and wrongheaded in the Cold War, that communism was not that bad and that it was going to end anyway.

Compare this to victories the left approves of.  The New Deal is uncritically presented as a triumph on all fronts.  Roosevelt’s domestic foes are presented as cranks or crypto-fascists.  The Civil Rights movement is rightly emphasized but with the added implication that the entire United States was 1955 Mississippi save for a few hardy souls on the left.  Students are not taught that since the 1920’s every single civil rights bill had the support of a majority of Americans (and overwhelming approval by Republicans) but failed in the Senate due to Democratic filibusters.  Joe McCarthy is invoked but not Alger Hiss, and, God forbid, Whittaker Chambers.  The Hollywood blacklist, based on the simple proposition that you could work for Joe Stalin or Samuel Goldwyn, but not both, is never forgotten, but communist infiltration of unions or even Los Alamos is unknown to anyone today.  The protests against the Vietnam War are presented wholly unblemished by the predictable results.

When every institution of educational and cultural reach preaches a watered down Zinnism regarding the Cold War is it any wonder that today’s youth are liberal?  The wonder is there are any conservatives at all.

Barack Obama is a man comfortable with those who fought against every part of the agenda that hastened the Cold War’s end.  Now President Obama wants to make sure that fewer hear discussion of this grand and good triumph on the anniversary of a day most of us thought would never come.