Over at the Corner, Jonah Goldberg explores the question of “what the most dangerous legacy of the Cold War really was, if it wasn’t the existence of nukes”:
Some might say the military-industrial complex or the national-security state. But not me. To me, the most obvious dangerous legacy of the Cold War would have to be the damage the Soviets did to the world. I don’t mean the millions they murdered; those dead do not threaten us now, even if they should haunt us.
I mean the relentless distortion of the truth, the psychological violence they visited on the West and the World via their useful idiots and their agents. I’m thinking not merely of the intellectual corruption of the American Left (which even folks like Richard Rorty had to concede), but the corruption of reformers and their movements around the globe. Soviet propaganda still contaminates, while nuclear fallout does not. Lies about America, the West, and the nature of democratic capitalism live on throughout the third world and in radioactive pockets on American campuses.
The Soviet effort to foster wars of national liberation, to poison the minds of the “Bandung Generation,” to deracinate cultures from their own indigenous building blocks of democracy, to destroy non-Marxist competitors interested in reform, to create evil and despotic regimes that are seen as “authentic” because they represent the “true will” of their subjugated and beaten down peoples: these seem to me to amount to the most dangerous legacy of the Cold War. Not least because it was those sorts of efforts that gave birth to North Korea in the first place.
Meanwhile, another legacy of that period lives on as well: The Obama administration “has created a lexicon that masks reality through the gauzy world of euphemism”, Jonah writes in his USA Today column.
The West won the cold war, and it has the scars to prove it:
From the soviet’s angle, the question was “what can you do against an opponent who is ahead in economic dynamism, world influence, worker motivation, and citizen optimism?”
They were plenty smart enough to recognize that military confrontation under any expectation of parity was not attractive from a costs vs. benefits standpoint. So the real question was “How to obtain a “kill ratio” superior to what you can get by shooting bullets?”
How about shooting ideas? How about demoralizing the opponent?
Let’s remember how effective the soviet propaganda has been: Back in the 60s, in particular, the erosion of moral standards in the US was more than a mere reflection of the cynicism and the dark humor that prevailed in the soviet union at that time, it was the outcome of a systematic campaign of finely targeted intellectual agression.
What does “demoralizing” really mean? Could it possibly mean “removing the morality”? The soviet propagandists understood that the US youth was more vulnerable to rethorical abuse than any other demographic slice. If you take a long term view, that’s a heck of a deal: Plant the seeds of moral weakness in the heads of the young, so your opponent will be weak in due course!
The hippies of the 60s are our leading class today, particularly in the pulpits of intellectual manipulation, the tenured professors, our dear journalists, our feared school principals! Some of these influencial folks are still brimming with thoughts of moral equivalence, etc…
Talk about living in a euphemistic age: We all say “Moral equivalence” while actually talking about “moral irrelevance”!
Climbing out of that hole is going to be difficult, but it’s still possible. Voices like that of Glenn Beck are heard by today’s youth. I still have hope.