This is a time of vindication and rejoicing for all longtime anti-Communists. In their hearts, they always knew they were right, but now they can see the proof every night on their television screens. The happenings of the last year give the longtime anti-Communists the right to say “I told you so.”
Nikita Khrushchev used to taunt us in the 1950s and 1960s with the boast, “History is on our side; we will bury you.” The Communists’ dogma that they would “inevitably” triumph over capitalism became the engine of their motivation and perseverance.
It is surely easier to work for a cause when you are confident of certain victory, even if that faith is misplaced. Our problem was that the alleged “inevitability of Communist victory” became “conventional wisdom” in the West, too, and it frustrated effective American counteraction.
During the last year, this Communist myth was finally exposed for the lie it always was. It became obvious to all that Communism and socialism are bankrupt; they have failed politically and economically. History is now clearly on the side of freedom from government, and the aging commissars of Communism are being relegated to the dustbins of history.
Events have proved Ronald Reagan right in labeling the Soviet Union the “evil empire.” Communis is, indeed, the most evil force in the 20th century: reliable estimates of its victims are 20 million in the Soviet Union (now admitted by the New York Times), as well as 50 million in China.
Several weeks ago, CBS 60 Minutes took us on a trip to Moscow, and Mike Wallace and CBS’s Russian expert grimly described the enormity of Stalin’s crimes. CBS has finally discovered the facts that were known to all those who attended anti-Communist seminars held in the late 1950s and early 1960s.
Remember all those Captive Nations Week observances in which anti-Communist Americans participated in July every year since 1959? Parades and church services and public meetings kept alive hope for the captive peoples, not only in Eastern Europe but even among the Soviet “republics” such as Lithuania and Latvia, Armenia and Azerbaijan.
The liberals smirked at the anti-Communists’ dream of liberation for the Captive Nations, and the media treated the observances like non-events. But those daring hopes are coming true now, and anti-Communist Americans can be proud of their part in keeping the torch of freedom held high.
The people behind the Iron Curtain didn’t just discover in the summer of 1989 that Communism is a giant gulag and that they want either to flee to the West or overturn the entire rotten system. They’ve known that all those years while U.S. liberals were telling us that Communism was irreversible and that socialism was “the wave of the future.” What was different in 1989 was that the captive peoples found a crack in the Wall, they took their chance for freedom, and the rising demand for freedom took on a life of its own.
Anti-Communists can rejoice that they stoutly opposed the nuclear freezeniks and instead joined Ronald Reagan’s pursuit of the promise of a Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI). The ones who look foolish now are the liberals who indulged in fearmongering, warning that our support of SDI would “provoke” World War III.
They told us we must abandon SDI in order to bring Gorbachev to the peace table. In fact, what brought him to the peace table was Reagan and Bush standing firm on SDI, and now Gorbachev has given up his demands that we trash SDI.
The election of Violeta Chamorro in Nicaragua is a stunning vindication of the help which anti-Communists and conservatives gave to the little band of freedom fighters called the Contras. The American Anti-Communists can take pride that they kept them armed and at the ready, despite the cutoff of aid by Congress.
The military threat from the Contras was the only reason Nicaragua had an election at all. The reason why Castro isn’t calling any elections in Cuba is because there are no Cuban “contras” to threaten his Communist dictatorship.
It isn’t just Communism’s repressive political system that’s a horror. The entire economic system called socialism is a total failure, too. Just like Stalinism, “democratic socialism” produces poverty, not prosperity, because it is built on a massive, unaccountable bureaucracy instead of on a free market.
The media liberals have been putting out the line that conservatives have lost control on the issues because their bogeyman of Communism isn’t a threat any more. The fact is that events have proved the anti-Communists right on all their positions, and we’re just waiting for the liberals to admit it.
