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LIBERALISM
Blame Game: How Liberals Side with America’s Enemies
CBN.com – The United States stands on the brink of war with Iraq, but years ago the U.S. was involved in another kind of war — the Cold War. Today liberals say they were just as firm in their opposition to communism as the conservatives. But is that what the record shows? And are liberals applying the same mindset to our Islamic enemies? For answers to those questions, Gordon Robertson spoke with top conservative analyst Mona Charen, author of the new book Useful Idiots: How Liberals Got It Wrong in the Cold War and Still Blame America First.
GORDON ROBERTSON: Well today the United States stands on the brink of war with Iraq. But years ago the U.S. was involved in another kind of war, the Cold War. Today liberals say they were just as firm in their opposition to communism as the conservatives. But is that what the record shows? And are liberals going to stand as firm against Islamic enemies today? One top conservative analyst has looked at those questions. Mona Charen is a syndicated columnist and the author of the new book Useful Idiots. She’s
with us from our news bureau in Washington. Mona, welcome to "The 700 Club."
MONA CHAREN: Thank you. Glad to be here.
ROBERTSON: It’s almost a rhetorical question. Did liberals stand firm against communism?
CHAREN: Well, you know, what provoked me to write this book in the first place was Bill Clinton’s State of the Union address in 1997 where he stood before the world and said, "Back during the Cold War, politics stopped at the water’s edge. We were all on the same team." And I thought, "Well that’s not the history that I lived through," and I went back to correct the record.
You know, liberals are trying to rewrite that history, because they were proved so catastrophically wrong about the Cold War. They were wrong in every sense. They
were wrong, first of all, morally, because they failed to appreciate the nature of the evil that we were up against. They tended to excuse the Soviets’ behavior, they tended to justify it, or they
tended it ignore it, whereas they were very focused on every sin that could be possibly be attributed to the United States. And in fact, as Jean Kirkpatrick so memorably put it in 1984, it became a
liberal reflex to blame America first for anything that went wrong anywhere in the world.
The reason this is relevant today is that the liberals who were so wrong about the Cold War and have not yet faced up to that fact or ever acknowledged that they
were wrong, are wrong again about the enemies that we face now, which I like to call Islamofascists. Once again, they are showing that same tendency to explain our enemies, to understand our enemies and
to call down the harshest possible criticism on the United States.
ROBERTSON: Let’s give some examples. You know, your book goes into the comparison between the rescue of Americans in Grenada and what happened when the Soviets invaded Afghanistan. Why do you think it is that they went to the lengths to compare those two and say America is just like the Soviet Union?
CHAREN: The quotes that you’re referring to were from members of Congress who took to the floor of the
House of Representatives and decried Reagan and said that the invasion of Grenada was fully equivalent in every way to the Soviet invasion in Afghanistan. It is just a remarkable moral blindness that
afflicted them, and it continues to afflict them.
ROBERTSON: You also detail some of the Soviet, Cuban, Sandinistan crimes, and it never seemed to make it into the mainstream press of America. Why?
CHAREN: And that is also evidence that liberals never really understood the moral significance of communism. They had no trouble identifying the evil of fascism; that they understood, that they were able to fight, and good for them. Any minimally decent human being would be an anti-Nazi. But the same is true with any minimally decent person about the Communists and unfortunately, the liberals flunked that test. There was very little acknowledgment of the nature of the Soviet regime and of every Communist regime that came in the wake. They were killers on a scale that has never been seen in world history before then, or since, thank God. The toll in dead is something like 100 million from the Communist governments during the 20th century, a very bloody century.
And in each case with each new Communist regime, liberals from Walter Mondale to Phil Donahue to Dan Rather, Peter Jennings, Anthony Lewis of The New York Times,
Andrew Young, Jimmy Carter, you name it, they all had the exact same response. Each new Communist regime was greeted with hope and with the belief that they were going to pluralistic and democratic. And
then the Communists would do what they always do which is begin to close down the newspapers, begin to arrest anybody who wasn’t a Communist, you know, shut down the churches. And the liberals
would say, "Well they only did this because of pressure from the United States."
I go through the detail of the examples in Nicaragua, because that was probably the most telling example where, you know, when the Sandinista Communists first took
over, Jimmy Carter was President of the United States. Jimmy Carter welcomed the Sandinista government, brought Daniel Ortega to the White House, gave them aid. Nevertheless, when they turned to the
Soviet Union, which they did immediately, there were many, many liberals in America who urged that it was only because of U.S. hostility that the Communists in Nicaragua were behaving like Communists.
ROBERTSON: Is there also an attempt to rewrite the history? I remember going to college, and I had the fortune of being taught by a former professor at Moscow University who managed to escape, and he had a very pro-American view of communism. And then I walked across the street to a more liberal professor who was trying to blame the United States for the Cold War, and he was going back and looking at some of the things that Truman did in the early 1950’s. Is there an attempt to rewrite history here, to blame America for the Cold War?
CHAREN: Oh, that project has been ongoing for 30 years. In the academy, the fashionable view for quite some time now has been — and it’s changed recently, but only very, very slowly as it yielded to reality — but the view was that the Cold War was really two scorpions in a bottle, as J. Robert Oppenheimer put it, that the arms race was the fault of both sides, that we were just as guilty as Stalin for increasing world tension.
I remember that when George Schultz was Secretary of State during the Reagan Administration, he was cross-examined by members of the Senate Foreign Relations
Committee including Allan Cranston and Charles Percy. And they were asking him, "What has the United States done to exacerbate tensions between us and the Soviet Union?" And Schultz said,
"Nothing," which was the correct answer.
What you saw was an attempt to rewrite history and to show somehow that we were the responsible party for tensions. And I think with the collapse of the Cold War,
with the victory in the Cold War and with the opening of Soviet archives, any doubts on that score have been laid to rest forever. I mean, the documents abundantly show many, many interesting things.
First of all, that everything we believed about the Soviets intentions were true, they were aggressive, they were despotic. Well, we knew that, and further that some of the great heroes of the Left in
the United States like Alger Hiss and the Rosenbergs, well they were guilty, very, very clearly. Some of us never had any doubt about that in the first place but now even for doubters, that’s been
laid to rest.
ROBERTSON: The archives clearly show it.
CHAREN: Yes.
ROBERTSON: One last question. Are we seeing the same thing in 2003? I’ve been tracking what the Muslim clerics are saying in Saudi Arabia, and the mufti of the mosque in Jerusalem, and it is so anti-American that it kind of boggles your imagination. And we’re trying to help the Palestinians. Saudi Arabia’s supposedly our close ally. Are we seeing the same thing now on fundamental Islamic rhetoric that they’re just not reporting it?
CHAREN: Absolutely. And in fact the last couple chapters of my book bring us up to the present and talk about the response of the Left to September 11th.
Again, their knee-jerk reaction is, "We must have brought this on ourselves. What have our policies been? It’s world poverty," we’ve been told, "that causes Islamic extremism,
and therefore, you know who’s responsible for world poverty, right? It’s the United States," the most generous nation on the globe.
No, I do see incredible parallels. And what I see is that the tendency among members of the Left, a mindset that was born in the 1960’s during the Vietnam
conflict but has persisted, is a belief that the locus of evil in the modern world is the United States, and that we are the force for instability, poverty, repression, bad things around the world, that
if we can change the policies of the United States, all will be well. And so you do see people like Katha Pollitt, an editor of The Nation magazine, after September 11th her teenage daughter wanted to hang the American flag out of their window and Pollitt said, "No, the flag stands for fascism." So, there you have it. That’s their view, it has not changed, it’s persisted.
ROBERTSON: Well, there you have it. Thank you so much, Mona, for being with us. If you’d like to get a copy of her book Useful Idiots,
I don’t know how useful they are, but I agree with the second part…
CHAREN: They were useful to the Stalinists...
ROBERTSON: They were useful to the Stalinists, alright. Thank you so much for being with us. If you’d like to get a copy, it’s available on CBN.com, and it’s also available in bookstores around America.
Useful Idiots: How Liberals Got It Wrong in the Cold War and Still Blame America First
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