[The Montana Professor 14.1, Fall 2003 <http://mtprof.msun.edu>]
Mona Charen
Washington, D.C.: Regnery Publishing, Inc., 2003
308 pp., $27.95 hc
Eric E. Hastings
Colonel, U.S. Marine Corps, Retired
Bozeman, MT
Mona Charen's book is bound to irritate...if read by those she is writing about. But I doubt they will engage this pugnacious assault on their orthodox view of the Cold War. After all, who enjoys being called an "idiot," even a "useful" one? And why seek mental confrontation if one's mind is comfortably made up?
Charen's aggressive title is, of course, borrowed from Vladimir Lenin, who is said to have used this pejorative phrase to describe fellow-traveling Western intellectuals who defended and promoted, in the name of equality and justice, Lenin's totalitarian program (10). For Charen, pundits (comprising academics, journalists, politicians, etc.) who voiced either equivocal, fearful or enthusiastic support for the Soviet regime during the Cold War qualify as "idiots." Notwithstanding the demise of the Soviet Union (and subsequent wholesale revelation by Soviet satellites of the depth and breadth of communist-sponsored depravity), the idiocy and utility of certain liberal behavior that helped sustain Stalinism are currently alive, unapologetic, and remain unchanged. They are already being wrongfully applied to the next great conflict, that with totalitarian theocracy and strategies of terrorism.
For Charen, "useful idiots" additionally justify their existence by re-interpreting the Cold War to insure the U.S. is seen as no better than a moral equivalent of the Soviet Union, or to insure the Left gets as much ethical credit as the Right for ending conflict with the former Soviet Union--the most lethal tyranny ever to exist.
Charen's thesis contradicts both of these revisionist views. The Cold War, she argues, was necessary, though the outcome was never assured. It was won by the U.S. for good and morally sound reasons, with the result that the world is better off than it would have been with the triumph of the Soviet empire. The credit for this bloody victory, moreover, should properly go to the Cold Warriors, most of whom were on the Right. As she puts it, "liberals failed one of the two great moral tests [anti-fascism and anti-communism] of the twentieth century.... They still do not know they failed and have not grappled with the implications of that failure." Somewhat inconsistently, Charen also contends that "liberals" are now rewriting history to ameliorate their own role in wrongly sustaining a perfidious enemy of freedom, human rights, and self-determination.
By "liberals" Charen means those on the political left who either failed to perceive the threat to the world posed by communism in general and Soviet totalitarianism in particular, or who viewed America as morally equivalent to the Soviet Union, or even worse. While her operating definition of "liberal" is uncomfortably vague and thus expansive, Charen's brush doesn't tar everyone left of center (wherever that is): "Not all liberals were 'soft on communism'...Senator Jackson,...[Senator] Moynihan,...Lane Kirkland of the AFL-CIO, and Martin Peretz of The New Republic, among others, distinguished themselves as vigorous and impassioned anticommunists. Still, Great Liberal Cold Warriors would make a short book" (262).
Charen develops her argument by looking at what "liberals" wrote and said about several major Cold War events over the last 50 years. She musters enough evidence and recounts it with such clarity as to make even the dead squirm. The seven major case studies are: post-WWII/Korea, Vietnam, Cambodia, the arms race, arms control and SDI, Central America, post-Soviet Union, and finally, Elian Gonzalez (Cuba) and post-9/11. In an Epilogue, she concludes that the liberal view was "intellectually flabby," "morally perverse," and, especially, "dangerous."
After dealing with "The Brief Interlude of Unanimity on Communism" in Chapter One, Charen turns to the unraveling of bipartisan consensus in Chapter Two. The consensus fell apart thanks primarily to the incompetence and incoherence of the Vietnam War and (as years passed) the concomitantly broad-based anti-war movement it provoked. According to Charen, the national election of 1960 was "the last presidential race in which the Democrat would attempt to outdo the Republican in anticommunist zeal. By 1972, the Democratic Party...abandoned the fight...altogether" (23). As anyone knows who lived through these years, the Vietnam War provoked enormous disaffection with the U.S. both abroad and at home. One Congressman even compared his country's admittedly gruesome war with the "orgy of killing" enacted by Nazi Germany (43). The distinction between Anti-war and Pro-communism became badly blurred, with a fair number of "centrist Democrats affirmatively wish[ing] for a Communist victory in South East Asia" (54).
Chapter Three, "The Bloodbath," examines the murderous hell of the Khmer Rouge regime in Cambodia. This atrocity, hatched by Left-wing graduates of the Sorbonne, should have provoked many on the anti-war Left to acknowledge the horror of what they helped achieve; but hard evidence is rarely as persuasive as blind commitment to ideology: "To keep hope alive one must, in spite of all mistakes, horrors, and crimes, recognize the obvious superiority of the socialist camps" (Jean Paul Sartre, 55). Of course this atrocity was blamed on the U.S. (Sydney Schanberg and Anthony Lewis, of the New York Times). What Charen does is accurately sequence historical events and explain that it was North Vietnam that first involved Laos and Cambodia, with the encouragement of both China and the Soviet Union. William Shawcross, a former True Believer of Cold War orthodoxy, is quoted as saying, "those of us who opposed the American war in Indochina should be extremely humble in the face of the appalling aftermath: a form of genocide in Cambodia and horrific tyranny in both Vietnam and Laos. Looking back on my own coverage...I think I concentrated too easily on the corruption and incompetence of the South Vietnamese and...Americans,...was too ignorant of the inhuman Hanoi regime, and far too willing to believe that a victory by the communists would provide a better future" (76).
Chapter Four, "The Mother of All Communists," summarizes American liberals' view of the Soviet Union, from its inception through the '80s. (Much of this material has already been covered by Paul Hollander in Political Pilgrims, 1981.) Chapter Five, "Fear and Trembling," discusses the arms race and arms control, and the impact of the SDI program on detent with the Soviet Union. Chapter Six, "Each New Communist is Different," examines liberal commentary on North Korea, Grenada, El Salvador, and Cuba, with a focus on how liberation theology has influenced the debate. While the chapters are not equally effective, this one is certainly the weakest because Charen seems unwilling to countenance honestly held religious convictions as a justification for a less than avid commitment to anti-communism. She also fails to enlist just war theory to strengthen her case.
In the last chapter, "Post Communist Blues," Charen dissects the liberal bias in media reporting about everything from Russia and communist regimes to the terrorist attack on September 11, 2001, for which many liberals are "Still Blaming America First" (245).
Over a 30-year career and 25+ assignments as a fighter/attack pilot and officer in the Marines, I personally and professionally matured through participation in or the influence of numerous Cold War events and crises (e.g., Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, Korea, the Soviet Union, NATO/Warsaw Pact, Afghanistan, the Middle East, Iran, Iraq, Kuwait, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Panama, SALT I, SALT II, START, SDI, and on and on). I know as well as any disaffected academic, writer, or journalist that this country has made plenty of mistakes, some of which were more egregiously willful or excessive or unnecessary than Charen is willing to admit. And the Pentagon, service bureaucracies, and defense contractors certainly wasted scarce resources (even while effectively applying other resources) in a variety of unproductive hi-tech pursuits that arguably reduced defense rather than enhanced it. But I agree with her basic conclusion: without American leadership and strength of mind during the 20th century, the world--always a roiling, vital, corrupt, unstable, vicious, unpredictable place--would have been much worse. It certainly is a much better place, physically and morally, with all its lingering misery and violence, than it would have been under the Stalinism practiced by the Soviet Union. I understand that this will cause many fundamentalists of the Left to gag; but it's better to gag on the truth than on propaganda with a half-life beyond relevance. As Vaclav Havel, another eye-witness to events for many decades, said before the U.S. Congress, "The communist type of totalitarian system has left both our nations, Czechs and Slovaks--as it has all the nations of the Soviet Union and the other countries the Soviet Union subjugated in its time--a legacy of countless dead, an infinite spectrum of human suffering, profound economic decline, and above all enormous human humiliation. It has brought us horrors that fortunately you have not known" (9).
As a participant, guest-lecturer, writer, occasional academic, and life-long student, I found Charen's book exceptionally well researched and well written. Documentation and support are generous. I found her historical and political analyses strong, if not uniformly effective. Trust me, I was evaluating. But the book does have some flaws. The title alone is, on balance, unproductively "in-your-face"--perhaps discouraging some readers on the Left who would otherwise be persuaded to a new viewpoint by her singularly effective dialectic. Occasionally, a piece of evidence is superficial, petty, or the tone unnecessarily sarcastic. Charen also seems unaware of the tension that perforce exists in trying both to export freedom abroad and maintain or expand freedom at home. Do we open ourselves to the charge of "double standards" if the two "freedoms" are not perfectly congruent? (See Samuel Huntington in this regard.) And she also fails to incorporate into her discussions the primacy of the constant cold, hard struggle for domestic political power that certainly affected foreign affairs.
Certainly many liberals never compromised their stalwart opposition to Soviet behavior and objectives, and harbored few illusions as to what was taking place on the world's stage. Nevertheless, Charen's marshaling of the written record powerfully supports her conclusion that many on the Left got the Cold War very wrong, are trying to reshape its history, and worst, in knee-jerk fashion are transferring old attitudes and errors to new threats.
[The Montana Professor 14.1, Fall 2003 <http://mtprof.msun.edu>]