Tuesday, October 27, 2009

The Daily Flashback

The Cold War Never Ended - Reason Magazine: "...Although uniformly anti-Soviet, some conservatives too were guilty of a Cold War–induced moral blindness, defending authoritarian governments in Africa, Latin America, Asia, and Iberia as bulwarks against communist expansion. Columnist Pat Buchanan celebrated the authoritarian leaders Augusto Pinochet of Chile and Francisco Franco of Spain as “soldier-patriots” and referred quaintly to the racist regime in South Africa as the “Boer Republic.” Others accused America’s most anti-Soviet president of impuissance. As early as 1983, neoconservative writer Norman Podhoretz proclaimed that Reagan’s policies toward the Soviet Union amounted to “appeasement by any other name.”

When the whole rotten experiment suddenly failed, eventually bringing to an end not just Moscow’s Warsaw Pact client governments but the proxy civil wars it fought in the Third World, instead of engaging in overdue self-criticism many commentators clung to shopworn shibboleths..."

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