Catching up after returning to town, I want to commend Eugene for his moving post yesterday on American supporters of the Soviet Union: A little bit of embarrassment seems to be in order. I would add that this support was widely advocated by some American liberals throughout my childhood and continuing up through college and law school in the 1970’s. I was regularly told by classmates that the Soviet Union was a morally better place than the US. Although perhaps a bit behind in material things at present, it was a more fair and just society reflecting a value judgment by its people that placed equality above consumerism and the accumulation of needless riches. Who was to say that its people were not happier than ours (implying without actually asserting that they were)? When it came to the USSR were these sympathizing liberals knaves or fools? For all their intelligence, sophistication and learning, clearly they were self-deluded fools, from whom a little embarrassment was always in order, but it was not to be.
My son recently told me about how one of his good friends, a really sweet, smart, artistic, and athletic college student who my wife and I have known since grade school and of whom are very fond, was saying that it was a pity that, when Castro died, it would be the end of socialism in Cuba. My son was aghast. I took the opportunity to tell him that, despite what may be said today, this was what many American liberals had said about the USSR right up to 1989, after which history was immediately rewritten as the Berlin wall was being dismantled and dictators like Ceausescu were being deposed or executed, to assert that we all stood shoulder to shoulder in opposing the tyranny that was the USSR, that they had always opposed communism, and that anticommunism was never a partisan matter. Oh, but it was…and to a lesser extent still is. Just ask them now about Cuba.
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