Cold War Legacy

Jeff Goldberg has written a new op-ed on what he sees as Obama squandering of the 'legacy of the Cold War.' Ah, what exactly is that legacy as Mr. Jonah sees it?

In Prague, Obama declared that "the most dangerous legacy of the Cold War" is the large stockpile of nuclear weapons left behind after the war, sounding as if he might have been one of those teenagers who translated SANE/Freeze brochures into high school term papers. The truth is that the Cold War’s most dangerous legacy remains the bundle of radioactive lies that poisoned so many lands and deformed so many minds. The Soviets fueled national-socialist movements around the globe, telling the poor that if they embraced violent revolution and systematically purged capitalism, tradition and religion from their societies, they would hasten their ascent to the sunny uplands of history. The reverse was true: Whole generations were either slaughtered or left to live as dehumanized industrial cogs, or to labor as serfs tending crops amid the bleached bones of their countrymen. The Soviets spread lies about the nature of democracy and destroyed indigenous democratic movements, lest they leech off the revolutionary ardor of groups both more murderous and more loyal to the Kremlin. In the West, they employed useful idiots in academia and the press to foment self-hatred and eat away at civilizational self-confidence with cancerously idiotic arguments about the "moral equivalence" between West and East. They funded antiwar movements, peace congresses and supposedly crusading "independent" journalists. For example, they spread the lie around the globe that America invented AIDS to kill blacks.

Umm, actually I think the legacy of the Cold War is: McCarthyism. The CIA overthrowing the democratically elected governments of Iran and Guatemala. The US Army machine gunning tens of thousands of fleeing Korean refugees. Korean War POW collaborators & worries about 'brainwashing.' The death of Patrice Lumumba. Mutual Assured Destruction & First Strike. Almost starting a nuclear war with Russia over nuclear missiles in Cuba when the US has nuclear missiles in Turkey. US support of dictatorships all over the world. FBI spying & dirty tricks on civil rights leaders. The assassination of JFK, RFK, & Dr. King. The CIA flying opiates out of Laos to fund a secret army. Vietnam. My Lai. The invasion of Cambodia. FBI dirty tricks on the Black Panthers. The US supporting apartheid in South Africa. The US supporting rightist guerrillas in Angola in a civil war against leftist guerrillas. The US supporting the Israeli army while it invaded Lebanon.. The US supporting Saddam Hussein. The US supporting death squads in El Salvador. The US setting up & funding the contras in Nicaragua. The NSC supporting the contras in Nicaragua by flying cocaine into the US. Spying on the Central American Solidarity movement. Iran Contra. Star Wars. Pushing a winnable nuclear war as the peace movement finds out about nuclear winter. Funding Osama Bin Laden to fight against the Russians in Afghanistan.