Now...the 'wisdom' of Jimmy Carter:
Jimmy Carter began his presidency at Notre Dame with a speech that included “
…We are now free of that inordinate fear of Communism which once led us to embrace any dictator who joined us in our fear.”
1. Under the auspices of Franklin Roosevelt, the United States drew closer, and embraced, the Communist regime of Joseph Stalin. FDR Democrats covered for, ignored, and made excuses for massacres, genocide, government instituted famines and lies of every variety.
The same view of communism has persisted 'til this very day.
2. Jimmy Carter, midway between Roosevelt and Obama, continued that thinking. Unlike the hard Left, Liberals did come out and actually support or defend the Soviet Union, rather they soft-pedaled communism by showing contempt and scorn for anticommunists as “primitive” or “knee-jerk” or just plain “nuts” and “warmongers.”
a. The problem, as the Carter left saw it, was the right’s paranoia, its ‘inordinate’ fear of communism, as the Soviet Union and other communist states were neither particularly threatening nor particularly evil.
b. These folks found understandable the Soviet Union’s fear of ‘encirclement’....they sympathized.
4. Poor Soviet Union..... fear of ‘encirclement’... “Between 1974 and 1980, while the United States wallowed in post-Vietnam angst,
10 countries had fallen into the Soviet orbit: South Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, South Yemen, Angola, Mozambique, Ethiopia, Nicaragua, Grenada and Afghanistan. Never had the Soviets lost an inch of real estate to the West. The Brezhnev Doctrine stated simply that once a country went Communist, it would stay Communist. In other words, the Soviet empire would continue to advance and gain territory…”
http://eightiesclub.tripod.com/id382.htm