Revisionist history on a grand scale...the Soviets saved democracy...unbelievable

November 13, 2019

Left’s new spin: The Soviet Communists ‘saved democracy as much as Gen. Patton and Iwo Jima’

By Peter Barry Chowka

The title of a feature article Tuesday in The Daily Beast by the author of a new book is bad enough: “9 Reasons to Thank the USSR: How We Got the Cold War Wrong.” As anti-Communist historian and author Diana West tweeted about it, “Can't recall reading anything more appalling on more levels.” The Beast is appalling enough on a daily basis, alright, but this article and the book it summarizes should scare the living daylights out of every patriot out there.

The 800-word article, and the 512-page book it is drawn from, Someone Is Out to Get Us: A Not So Brief History of Cold War Paranoia and Madness, are by Brian T. Brown. At his Twitter, Brown – big surprise: he’s not a friend of President Trump or conservatives – describes himself as a “Bumbling but devoted adventurer in dark alleys of American paranoia.” 

In the Daily Beast, Brown (hold on to your hat) offers an entirely new radical left revisionist reboot on the West’s Cold War with the Soviet Union on the 30thanniversary this month of the fall of the Berlin Wall:

It was a conflict suffused with fear, paranoia, and a whole lot of lies. This means much of what many of us learned in school about the struggle between the U.S. and USSR was very, very wrong.

Here’s the first buried truth. We fired the first shot. Harry Truman rushed to drop the atom bomb to end the war in Japan to prevent the Soviets from joining the battle in the Pacific. Joseph Stalin got the message. The nuclear arms race was underway.

But our enemy, the so-called evil empire, was really a figment of our fevered imaginations.

Flag of the Soviet Union 1980 Public Domain

Brown’s article, let us say, goes further downhill from there, as he asks:

What would the Cold War have been like if, during history class, American kids learned that the world forever owed a debt of gratitude to Soviet forces and Soviet citizens? Their remarkable resilience saved democracy as much as did George Patton and Iwo Jima.

He then cites “nine reasons why we should’ve thanked the Russians after World War II instead of engaging them in a decades-long Cold War.” Reason #5:

THE REAL MENACE: Joseph McCarthy barely believed a word he said and found zero communists in government roles.

In response, Diana West tweeted a link to M. Stanton Evans’ 2014 article at Breitbart, “McCarthyism By the Numbers.” West’s tweet included a screen shot of a list of fifty names of Americans who, Evans wrote, included:

Suspects named by McCarthy, his aides, or before his committee; identified in sworn testimony, FBI archives, or other official security records as Communists or Soviet agents; or took the Fifth Amendment when asked about such matters.

Rather than quote any more of Brian T. Brown’s “reasons,” interested readers are directed to his article.

Brian T. Brown: The enemy is us

Leaving no doubt about the essence of Brown’s revisionist spin, a summary of his book at Amazon explains:

Someone Is Out to Get Us is the true and complete account of a long-misunderstood period of history during which lies, conspiracies, and paranoia led Americans into a state of madness and misunderstanding, too distracted by fictions to realize that the real enemy was looking back at them in the mirror the whole time.

The revisionist history represented by Brown’s article, and presumably at much greater length in his book which was published in hardcover on November 5, seems absurd. However, one needs to keep in mind that this kind of “history” is now the status quo party line being taught at a majority of American colleges and universities. It’s this fact that helps to explain why recent surveys, like this annual poll in 2019 by YouGov/Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation, have found that “Young Americans continue to lose faith in capitalism and embrace socialism.” Summarizing the survey, Axios reported on Oct. 28:

19% of millennials and 12% of Gen Z said they thought the Communist Manifesto “better guarantees freedom and equality for all” than the Declaration of Independence.

The title of the Axios article, “70% of millennials say they'd vote for a socialist,” seems ripped from the headlines as we see many if not most of the Democrat Party’s leading 2020 presidential wannabes lurch increasingly to the radical left in order to satisfy their party’s socialist/communist-loving base.

The “bottom line” conclusion of the Axios article seems like an understatement: “Young people's political views often change as they grow older, but their support for socialist ideas and leaders is a sign that the old rules of politics are changing fast.”

Correction: An article at Breitbart originally attributed to Diana West was in fact written by M. Stanton Evans (1934-2015).

Peter Barry Chowka writes about politics, media, popular culture, and health care for American Thinker and other publications.  Peter's website is http://peter.media.  His new YouTube channel is here. Follow Peter on Twitter at @pchowka.