Useful Fools

Recently I encountered a comment on Roger Simon’s excellent blog by a former leftist vaguely moving to support America’s defense in the war on terror. The following old-left views and language, coinciding with the celebration of Ronald Reagan’s life, led me to offer a strong response.

For much of our lives the U. S. has been a pretty reactionary country and supported some pretty unsavory individuals to oppose Communism.

I opposed Gulf War I and Kosovo for pretty much the same reasons. First, we really had no dog in those hunts. Second, who do you root for? It was like vampires vs. werewolves—no good guys there…

I dedicate this to all leftists and former leftists who hold to their erroneous views of American history - who would still use the tired word “reactionary:”

Response

If you don’t think the oil supplies of the middle east are part of our national interest, I can’t imagine what you think is! If you think that the control of large amounts of middle eastern oil by a Stalinist dictator who had a history of using weapons of mass destruction, and who was seeking nuclear weapons and long range missiles (ultimately ICBMs) was not a threat, what was?

There is no doubt whatsoever that the western world had a big “dog in that hunt”. If you measure our national interest by where the good guys are, I hope that you never vote, because that is remarkably naïve. And the Kuwaitis, while not Democratic, were saints compared to the Baathists.

But more important, having labeled the US “reactionary,” and hence by implication, labeling those of us who supported and participated in that policy with the same communist pejorative, which label you prefer for yourself and those who think like you: “Useful Idiot” (from Lenin) or “fellow traveler?”

I have to strongly disagree with all of your positions (except Kosovo). “reactionary?” What do you mean by that? (yeah, I know the traditional muddle-headed leftist meaning). And why is it okay to support unsavory individuals now (and if you approve of our current policy, you have to know that we are doing that because we have to - such as Abduallah, the more moderate Saudi heir to the throne to the dicator of Uzbekistan) when it wasn’t in fighting the communists, who had the greatest number of “unsavory individuals” in history in their midst?

Your writing strongly implies that you don’t consider past Communist subversion outside of our borders to have been a matter of out national interest, much less a threat. It would indicate that you approved of Russian imperialism.
I want to make this clear: Communist Russia was an imperialist power, and communist China was and is an imperialist power.

I say Russia because even within the Soviet Union, Russia was imperialist. Great Russians held the levers of power in most cases (Stalin was an exception – he was a Georgian, but he got into the game at the revolution, where exiles Lenin and Stalin seized the reins), and non-Russians had a secondary status – a lot better than Jews and Muslims and Christians, but not equal to Russians. Russia sought to enslave the world, and to suck the economies it enslaved dry, as it did Eastern Europe. This is not the fevered imagination of conservatives, but cold, hard facts.

That was a direct threat to freedom throughout the world, and it was a very grave threat to the United States. Maybe you should go to the Vietnam Memorial and apologize to those who gave their all as part of our great anti-Imperialist war of self defense – what you call “reactionary!” Then find the survivors of the Vietnamese boat people and apologize to them, and ask yourself how it is reactionary to fight off an invasion – one which ultimately resulted in a government so unpopular that millions of people put their lives and those of their families at great risk just to escape it. Go down to Miami and talk about “reactionary America.” Go to Cambodia and ask the few survivors who were not Khmer Rouge. Then wander over to Eastern Europe and tell them that we should have left them enslaved. Go to Cuba and talk to the many political prisoners of your views (if you can find a way to get into the hell-holes where they barely surviv). Have a fun time in North Korea – they need the tourist dollars to feed their military and rulers while their people starve – nobody has been “reactionary” enough to help them.

Ask the Ukrainians about the great famine, where Stalin took the food from the most prosperous food producing colony to starve the Kulaks (farmers that owned land). Suggest that they go back to Russian domination; after all, your fellow traveler Duranty at the New York Times won a Pulitzer for covering up that famine. I could go on, but hopefully you get the point.

Our actions were against direct threats. For example, the communist takeover of Nicaragua was a temporarily successful part of a broad and decades long Cuban based Russian campaign to take over Mexico (and used the normal communist tactic of hijacking a popular revolution once it succeeded). Would you prefer to have a Cubanized Mexico on our border? Reagan, through his aid to the Contras and his diplomacy, forced for the first time a free election in a communist country. Your fellow travelers in the American press were seen to cry at the announcement that Violetta Chamorro, a fighter for freedom, had defeated the handsome Daniel Ortega.

By the way, John Kerry and his ilk traveled to Nicaragua to help them defeat the Contras”

Kerry, in office only a few months and with no consultation with the administration or the State Department, decided to negotiate with Ortega. He and Harkin walked away from Nicaragua with an agreement for direct talks with Washington. President Reagan flatly rejected it

Cuba has been a dangerous enemy of the United States since Castro revealed his true nature (after fooling the US for a little while). As a youngster, I watched horrified the televised firing squads of Castro. In one letter, Fidel Castro begged Khruschev to launch a first strike nuclear attack against the United States (Khruschev’s reply is amusing – if you search you can find both letters). Do you think we should have allowed all of Latin America to be taken over by communist dictators like Castro?

The left loves to bash our involvement with Pinoche, but they ignore the fact that Allende was about to implant a Cuban allied communist regime. They also ignore the fact that Pinoche, after uprighting the Chilean economy, voluntarily allowed himself to be replaced by a democratic government. Do you know of any communist dictators who did so?

The left loved to bash the US for aiding the El Salvador government in its fight with communist insurgents (whose tactics were just as bad), and yet fail to appreciate that our intervention ultimately led to a less repressive government and the end of the communist terrorism. They love to bash our war college for Latin American soldiers, not realizing that the college, in addition to teaching military tactics and strategies, also taught democratic principles (which sometimes took, and sometimes was ignored).

100,000 thousand of our servicemen died to contain communism in Korea and Southeast Asia, where the USSR sought to add the Philippines, all of Korea, and Southeast Asia to its empire, and China hoped to add Cambodia and the Philippines. Get the real story from Vietnamese refugees about what happened there. I have a friend whose family escaped the North in the 1956 “free exchange of peoples” by paying a bribe to a communist functionary, and who then fought the communists as a helicopter pilot, before fleeing to the United States. Ask the remaining Christian Hmong people, against whom the Vietnamese, today as I write this, are waging a genocidal campaign.

As one who volunteered for and participated in that war, I don’t accept the “reactionary” tag. In fact, I find it to be pathetically ill informed, and frankly, old fashioned.

After all this time, with the Soviet archives opened and many Soviets having written books, there is no excuse not to recognize who and what we were fighting, what their goals were, what methods they used, and why it was necessary to sometimes ally ourselves with people who were not the paragon of democratic behavior.
I suggest you get and read The Black Book of Communism to get an idea of the universal butchery by communists. You might be shocked to realize that it was not authored by such long ignored American historians of communism such as Robert Conquest (who detailed Russian goals and methods throughout the cold war), but by (gasp) French intellectuals who sought to document the history of communism.

By the way, for those who sought it, the information about how the Russians operated was easy to find. You merely needed to read the books written by defectors, and the books by some American experts such as Robert Conquest. Of course, if you used “Soviet experts” like Brooking’s Institute and later Clinton’s Strobe Talbot, you would have learned in the ’80s that by 1990 the Soviet Union’s GDP would have surpassed that of the US. Talbot was certainly a Useful Idiot.

We were reactionary in the sense that we embraced Kennan’s containment doctrine. Do you think that doctrine was wrong? I do – Reagan’s doctrine of counter-revolution was bastly superior to the Keenan doctrine of simply holding our losses – a ratchet strategy that ultimately favored the communists.

You may not appreciate this, but modern revolutionary America started with Ronald Reagan, who I doubt is one of your heroes. Reagan freed more people than any person in history, while fighting a vicious home front battle against those, including no doubt yourself, who would have left them in bondage.