I served in Army Intelligence in then West Germany during the last decade of the Cold War. Because of that, and because of my love of movies, I like to watch 60s era Cold War thrillers. Watched three of the best on DVD recently. “Fail Safe”, “The Bedford Incident”, and “Seven Days in May”. All have great scripts and excellent acting. All are true thrillers. However, all are fatally flawed because they accepted a liberal Democrat view of history and the world of their time.
The view common to the films was that nuclear war was inevitable because of technical error, human error, or superpower rivalry between the United States and the Soviets. Well, not quite. History didn’t turn out that way. But the left and the Democrats were convinced of it. That feeling on their part masked another emotion, overwhelming fear. As in their “Better Red than Dead” slogan, the Democrats and the left were so terrified for their own skin that they spent decades coddling and appeasing the Soviets. When, through the Reagan rearmament, we won the Cold War the left was noticeably upset. One, because they had predicted exactly the opposite. Two, because many of them sided with the Soviets. Three, because yet again they and their Marxist pals all over the world had been proven on the wrong side of history.
So from Berkeley to Cambridge, from New Haven to Manhattan, from the networks to Hollywood, the left sulked and brooded over their failed utopias. How dare the ignorant peons behind the Iron Curtain embarrass them like that! How could the hope of all hopes, Soviet Russia, give up the ghost so easily? Think about it. The main idea they had devoted their lives to was proved wrong. Where could they go after this massive mistake? Easy. To an even bigger mistake. They would try to resurrect the dry bones of socialism right here in America.
Here they would have one of the two main political parties as an ally. In America their authoritarian socialism could masquerade as social justice and economic equity until it was too late to stop. They could use power hungry establishment Democrats, who would ally with anybody to get into office, as a stalking horse. They could injure the country from within and reconstitute the Moscow of their dark twisted dreams on the banks of the Hudson and the Potomac.
And so they embark again on what makes them as wrong today as they were when Henry Wallace was sucking up to the Soviets in 1948. If it didn’t work in Russia, if even the Chicoms went capitalist, they would build their perverse dream here upon lie after lie, upon racial strife which they would promote, upon a corrupt political party that is only too eager to shill for Marxists. Thus this second mistake moves on, and on…