Charen gives an impassioned defense of Cold Warriors by pointing out the lingering blindness of most liberals to the evils of Communism. Quick. How many movies can you name that portray the horrors of Stalinism? As Charen says, this is not a failure of imagination, but a moral meltdown. There are hundreds of movies of varying quality that demonize Hitler and Nazism. Yet, Communism, a wholly comparable evil, gets a pass from Hollywood.
As I perused the customer reviews here, I was not surprised to see the invective hurled at Mona and her work by people who have either not bothered to read the book, or decided not to comment on its substance. Can there be a better indirect proof of Charen's thesis?
She does differentiate among liberals, citing and quoting a number of anti-communist liberals. She points out some startling and heartbreaking word pictures of suffering and death taken from the recently opened Soviet archives. She does criticize the elder Bush. So this is not just one-sided hate mongering as the other reviewers may have you believe. In fact, it is clearly on a more serious and sensitive level than the Ann Coulter book.
From Moscow to Havanna to Cambodia to North Korea, liberals just don't get it. And, unlike people whose reputations were ruined for their lack of judgement about the Nazis (Chamberlain and Lindbergh for example), liberals have just gone merrily on their way without suffering a loss of credibility. Hmmm, could it be that they largely control the media? Ah, but that's another book review!
