A New Red Menace?

(Please forgive the brevity of this article, as I have been busy with other projects.)

It may come as a surprise to some people, but I started out as a Republican.

I wouldn’t say that I was a particularly fanatical right winger; compared to many on the campus at GWU conservative Republicans thought I was a “squish,” a moderate. (Today, I think RINO is much more dignified).

To tell you the truth, the primary reason, maybe the only reason, that I was a Republican was because I did believe that there existed a global communist threat. I did, really.

Mind you, I grew up in a time that the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) was the west’s primary boogeyman. I grew up with Ronald Reagan telling Americans that standing up to the “Evil Empire” was a moral imperative. And to be honest, I saw the point he was making. Between the United States and Russia there were almost 100,000 nuclear weapons all primed and ready to destroy the world many times over.

I told myself that our half of this gigantic arsenal was necessary to keep the Soviets from using their half. Ridiculous? Yes.

What was not ridiculous was the iron grip that Moscow had over its own people, as well as those in the Eastern European nations, allied as they were in the Warsaw Pact, whether they wanted to be or not.

And the blatant disregard for human and civil rights, the corruption and hypocrisy of the Soviet satellite nations, was enough to convince me that this was all part of a true “Red Menace” that simply could not be discounted or minimized.

This was my mindset when I first went to George Washington University in the fall of 1988, majoring in International Affairs.

Four years later, it was apparent that I actually was majored in history. Almost everything that I had been taught and studied about the Cold War and the strategic world order was no longer true. The USSR was gone, the Berlin Wall fell, Eastern Europe was unshackled to the Russian colossus, which itself was spiraling.

My side won, as it would seem.

I was happy about it, make no mistake, but it really caused me to change my worldview. But I had the impression that with the exit of the Red Menace the Republican Party was a bit deflated. After all, what do you do with yourself when the enemy that you had dedicated so much to defeat, is finally defeated??

It’s been thirty-five years, and it now seems that this country has come full circle. There are Americans who seem desperate to resurrect the “Red Menace,” to the point one would suspect that someone will break into Lenin’s Mausoleum and snatch his corpse and prop him up somewhere behind a desk and claim that he’s returned.

Now, this is NOT about Mamdani, Sanders, Ocasio-Cortez or any of the other leaders in the more leftist wing of the Democratic Party. Whether their economic, and social ideas are somehow in line with the Communist Party is debatable. But I do know that it has NOT been the DSA that has called for a one-party state, central-planned economies, farming collectives, and the abolishment of all civil and human rights. There are no calls for a police state, or “ministry for state security.”

No, I can’t say that I am on board with the DSA entirely, but to label them communist, to conjure up nightmare visions of reds storming Washington reminiscent of the Bolshevik storming the Winter Palace in 1917, is reckless, irresponsible and just plain stupid.

And may I make one final point. There are some people in Washington who seem to want a police state, one-party rule, authoritarianism and the elimination of Americans’ rights, and they do have fellow travelers and useful idiots helping them, but it’s NOT coming from the left. And some of them are the ones screaming the loudest about communists.