© 1999 Joe Murray

November was a month for celebrations of past events and renewals of old customs. We celebrated Veterans Day and the 10^th anniversary of the collapse of the Berlin Wall. This past week, we celebrated Thanksgiving. All three of these events serve to remind us that our freedom has been bought with a great price.

Only a small handful of Americans under the age of 45 know what it is like to have faced death in defense of freedom. Anyone born after 1945 do not know what it is to have our nation attacked and to experience the sacrifice of an entire nation to come to its defense. Because of that, too many of us forget that freedom has been an anomaly in the history of the world. We take it for granted that people want freedom and forget that the enemies of freedom do not go down without a fight. Defeating King George, slave holders, The Kaiser, Hitler and the Soviet Union cost America over one million lives. Several times that many were wounded.

Whenever a nation has to go to war, it is a terrible thing. I am thankful that I never had to go through the nightmare of going to battle for my country.  It is hard to fathom the living hell they went through on the beaches of Normandy or numerous islands in the Pacific. If you need a visual representation of what it was like, watch the first 10 minutes of Saving Private Ryan. I hope that neither my sons nor I ever have to experience the nightmare of war, but I would rather go to war than give up freedom.

War should be avoided, when possible.  But, we live in a world filled with evil people who will oppress, rape, murder and steal our property, freedom and lives, if we don’t stand up to them. When it becomes necessary, we need to be ready to act with speed and full power to combat the threat to our freedom.

The world stood by as Hitler re-armed Germany and started killing his own people.  We looked the other way when he openly started expanding the borders of Germany. All they did was talk and get promises from Hitler that he would be a good boy. Diplomacy and appeasement were the words of the day to bring peace.  Instead, it brought worldwide war.

In America, President Roosevelt recognized Hitler as a threat.  But, he was unwilling to risk his political fortune to do anything significant to stop Hitler prior to the outbreak of full-scale war in Europe. The debate prior to Pearl Harbor was whether to give financial support to England or remain completely neutral. With a still vivid memory of World War I and Wilson’s utopian ideas of peace through world government, most Americans were opposed to America entering a war -- unless directly attacked.

In dealing with Japan, we simply provided them with the resources to build up the military, in the name of commerce. In 1938, the United States supplied Japan with 90% of its scrap steel, 91% of its copper and 66% of its oil. It wasn’t until July of 1941 that the United States stopped the flow of goods to Japan because their continued military expansion had been going on since 1933.

The lesson of this century has been that tyrants must be destroyed. Appeasement, talk and trade only serve to strengthen them rather than convert them. In WWII, we conquered Japan and Germany. Total victory was the goal and the result. The tyrant leaders were brought to justice. Many of them were executed. We still hunt the world for any remaining Nazi who took part in the concentration camps.

Japan and Germany were rebuilt, based on our principles.  Today, they are respectable, prosperous nations. In contrast, we spent the next 35 years dealing with the greater evil of communism through a policy of containment, compromise and appeasement. Communism continued to expand, and over 100,000 (one hundred thousand) America soldiers lost there lives in Korea and Vietnam. Fighting communism and establishing freedom were worthy causes to go to war in Korea and Vietnam. Yet, not fighting to win was a disgrace and embarrassment to the country. The goal should have been to destroy the communists in North Korea and South Vietnam rather than split up the countries.

As a result, Korea is still a ticking time bomb. The people of North Korea are oppressed.  Many starve as the thugs who run the country build up their military with nuclear capability that not only threatens South Korea, but is now thought to have the capability of striking the west coast of the United States. The response of the Clinton Administration has been to bribe them with money in exchange for a promise to stop their military buildup. Of course, they haven’t kept the promises and their military threat continues to grow.

In Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos, the people remain oppressed because America turned its back on them. Millions have been exterminated as “enemies of the state.” The goal should have been to destroy the North Vietnamese.  But, when the Peace Treaty was signed in 1973, we had essentially won the war in Korean-like terms of keeping South Vietnam a free and independent country. Two mistakes were made that made us lose the peace when we had won the war, according to Mackubin T. Owens, a professor of strategy and force planning for the Naval War College in Newport, RI.

“First, the Nixon administration, in its rush to extricate the country from Vietnam, forced the government of South Vietnam to accept a cease-fire that permitted North Vietnam forces to stay in the south. Then, in an act that still shames America to this day, Congress cut off military and economic assistance to South Vietnam. Finally, President Nixon resigned over Watergate and his successor, constrained by congressional action, defaulted on promises to respond with force to North Vietnamese violations.” The result was the communist takeover of Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos.

In Vietnam alone, conservative estimates place the number of executions at sixty thousand and 250 thousand people enslaved in Stalinist Gulag “re-education camps.” One million boat people and over 2 million total refugees now are dispersed throughout the world. Two million were murdered by Pol Pot in Cambodia. Similar atrocities are the norm in Laos. One particular target is the Hmong people, who are an ethnic minority that fought valiantly with Americans. Many of them have converted to Christianity and believe in American principles of government and economics. Their fate has been similar to others. Thousands murdered, sent to concentration camps or forced to flee the country.  Many relocated to the US and elsewhere. Many have spent years locked up in refugee camps. Today, many of those in the camps are being sent back to Laos with the blessing of the United Nations and United States State Department. For most sent back, the result will be death at the hands of the Stalinist government. 

It only took eight years for the Berlin Wall to come falling down and 10 years for the Soviet Union to fall apart after Ronald Reagan changed American policy from that of containment and appeasement to one that sought victory. Unfortunately, the 1990's have not seen great progress toward prosperity. Freedom has progressed in some areas.  But, in many areas of eastern Europe, freedom has not been the result of the collapse of the Iron Curtain.

One of the reasons for this failure is that everyone on the winning side did everything they could to make the Russians look less like the losers they were. The murderous dogs of the Soviet regime were not made to pay for their crimes against humanity. Today, these same thugs are still in charge of many of the Governments in Eastern Europe. Caspar Weinberger, who served as U.S. Secretary of Defense from 1981-1987, says, “After Russia lost the Cold War, no one was really willing to acknowledge its defeat. That was the real problem. Everyone went out of his way not to wound Russian pride. The U.S. recognized, of course, what a traumatic experience it is for a nation to lose a war. But, we operated on the theory that Russia had to be given anything it wanted.”

Yeltsin initially did repudiate communism -- unlike Gorbachev, who the Bush administration tried to keep in power. Yeltsin also tried, at first, to bring real reform, but he was undermined by his own personal weakness for the bottle and the overall declining health of an old man. He has given control of Russia to the communists who continue to build weapons rather than provide food and clothing for the people. The West’s response is to loan them more money. The money usually ends up in the pockets or Swiss bank accounts of the thugs, either in government or the mafia. In truth, the mafia kingpin and the government official are often the same person.

The idiocy of allowing the defeated communist thugs to retain power is best illustrated by current Russian Prime Minister, Serge Primakov, who just happens to be a former director of the KGB. That is right; the KGB was the communist secret police whose mission was to rule by terror. It is the equivalent to Gestapo Head Himmler or one of his deputies having been allowed to run the government of Germany after World War II. The Soviets probably murdered at least 10 times as many people in their Gulag “re-education camps” as the Nazis killed in their concentration camps. We vowed not to let one of the guilty parties get away with it in the latter situation. But, as far as I know, not one of the Soviets have ever paid for the atrocities except those who fell out of favor with the communist government and were subjected to the same fate.

As a reminder of the Soviet brutality, contemplate the words of Alexander Solzhenitsyn, who spent a good share of his life in the Gulags. His epic account of the atrocities, The Gulag Archipelago, forever documents the evil -- no matter how much everyone tries to forget.

If the intellectuals in the plays of Chekhov who spent all their time guessing what would happen in twenty, thirty, or forty years had been told that in forty years interrogation by torture would be practiced in Russia; that a human being would be lowered into an acid bath; that they would be trussed up naked to be bitten by ants and bedbugs; that a ramrod heated over a primus stove would be thrust up their anal canal (the “secret brand”); that a man’s genitals would be slowly crushed beneath the toe of a jackboot; and that, in the luckiest possible circumstances, prisoners would be tortured by being kept from sleeping for a week, by thirst, and by being beaten to a bloody pulp, not one of Chekhov’s plays would have gotten to its end because all the heroes would have gone off to insane asylums.

 Yes, not only Chekhov’s heroes, but what normal Russian at the beginning of the century, including any member of the Russian Social Democratic Workers’ party, could have believed, what had been acceptable under Tsar Aleksei Mikhailovich in the seventeenth century, what had already been regarded as barbarism under Peter the Great, what might have been used against ten or twenty people in all during the time of Biron in the mid-eighteenth century, what had already become totally impossible under Catherine the Great, was all being practiced during the flowering of the glorious twentieth century — in a society based on socialist principles, and at a time when airplanes were flying and the radio and talking films had already appeared — not by one scoundrel alone in a secret place only, but by tens of thousands of specially trained human beasts standing over millions of defenseless victims.

 I doubt if you asked the people of Chechnya many of them would say Primakov and the Russians have changed much. Just as we did with Germany and Japan after World War II, we should have actively sought to help the Russians, but we should have made it clear that the minimum level for any help and reform would have been to ban communists from holding political office. KGB thugs like Pirmakov should have experienced being on the receiving end of the long arm of the law. Caspar Weinberger clearly outlines what should have been done on the part of America and the rest of the Western world in response to the losers of the Cold War.

 Japan and Germany did not use urgently needed Western aid to build weapons, Nor did they waste their time throwing tantrums when NATO was formed. Instead, both countries attempted a major effort to rebuild their governments and their economies, and to turn toward the West in foreign policy and in a number of other areas. As a result, we have two very strong allies. We may differ with them from time to time on individual matters, but both allies have moved completely away from the dictatorial, aggressive types of governments that took them to war. Strong ties with these countries is an extraordinarily important achievement and one that did not come about by accident. Rather defeat was recognized as defeat. The policies that we wanted were imposed or at least brought to bear in such a way that the leaders of the democratic movements in those countries took charge and changed their course and their direction ultimately on their own. We provided assistance, guidance, leadership, and financial aid that was closely monitored to ensure it was used to help rebuild their economies into a democratic form. That was not done in Russia and it is one of the great unfortunate factors of history.

One of the greatest dangers we face today is that many of our countries’ leaders seem to think that tyrants can be appeased or converted into lovers and defenders of freedom. They haven’t learned the lessons of history. This is especially true in China, where the Clinton administration has not only made mistakes, but they are also openly turning China into a huge threat to peace and freedom. The list of wrong decisions is so large that it needs treated as a separate subject.

Freedom has been bought with a great cost.  Maintaining and expanding freedom requires a strong military and aggressive principle-based foreign policy. This has not been done in the Clinton/Gore administration, and we now have ticking time bombs all over the world that threaten our freedom and peace.

We have heard a lot of talk and seen a lot of grand ceremonies declaring peace in our time, but it has been based on appeasement and symbolism rather on something that can bring long-term peace and stability to the world. It has been done without regard to promoting, protecting and expanding freedom. True peace comes when we are strong. 

It is less than a year until we choose a new president. It is vital that we choose a President who will restore our military strength and develop a comprehensive, consistent and ethical policy to deal with the rest of the world. If change isn’t made, we may be headed for another rude wake-up like we had in Pearl Harbor 58 years ago.

 To Joe's previous article