On the other hand, the cold war was, he says, "dangerous, wasteful, obsessive, and at times irrational." So take your pick.Īsk Russians who won the cold war and their replies are unequivocal. Professor Steel seems to regret the end of the cold war he writes, "In its perverted way, the cold war was a force for stability." Yes indeed-Afghanistan, Cuban missile crisis, uprisings in East Germany, Hungary, Poland, Czechoslovakia-some force for stability. Professor Ronald Steel has written this grudging verdict on the end of Soviet totalitarianism: "We have won a victory, of sorts." Of sorts! Would Professor Steel describe our triumph over fascism as "a victory, of sorts"? So didn't the democracies win the cold war? The problem with Kennan and his revisionist followers is that they never tell you how they define victory. There is no Soviet power its "bloated and unhealthy limits" have been retracted without bloodshed. George Kennan, for example, writes: "Nobody 'won' the cold war." Thirty years ago, however, he wrote, "The retraction of Soviet power from its present bloated and unhealthy limits is essential to the stability of world relationships." But when it comes to the question of who triumphed in the cold war, a great smog immediately blankets the question. Everybody agrees that the Allies beat Germany in two world wars and that the United States lost in Vietnam. The United States did not "win" the cold war, period. But there is no more Soviet Union, no Berlin Wall, no Gulag. Liberal academic opinion has created the fiction that nobody won the cold war. Why? So that when our children and their children read their history textbooks they will never know that the democracies, led by the United States and a popular two-term president, Ronald Reagan, triumphed over Soviet totalitarianism. George Orwell wrote, "He who controls the past controls the future." Some of the most distinguished American historians are working hard to "control" the past by proving, to state it simply, that the United States did not win the cold war.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |