Barrel Strength

We grew up in the shadow of nuclear war, and it nearly makes me erase that sentence it sounds so dramatic, false, and trivial. The Soviet Union, a militantly hostile state, whose goal was the overthrow of the capitalist system, and which held Eastern Europe in its prison-like embrace, and which subsidized revolution the world, lasted until 1989. The communists did not lack for mouthpieces within western liberal societies, at every level, and we spent a good deal of time in university having to take Karl Marx in large doses. Marxists seized microphones at the Student Union and, with their spokesmen telling us there was no free speech in a capitalist university, their thugs prevented any further discussion. Such were the late sixties and early seventies.

President Jimmy Carter was colossally inept, and seemed to agree with our enemies that the United States was in inevitable decline. It was a very bad time for freedom, capitalism, and for liberal-democratic society. It took the election of Reagan and Thatcher, together with the Polish Pope, to reject the assumptions of decline and defeat. It was a crisis and we overcame it. The sudden collapse of the Soviet Union between 1987 and 1989 proved, more decisively than we could have imagined, that everything we had been saying about that place was true. Indeed, we had not had enough faith that the whole system of communism was built on lies at every level. I had thought that communism would decline for centuries, like the Ottoman Empire. I had heard of a Hungarian taxi-driver, when asked by a visitor about the political situation in 1985, simply say: “It’s over”, but we had no way of knowing that Communism would collapse so catastrophically. It reminded me of the fall of Sauron’s Tower, the Baradûr, in the final battle in Lord of the Rings. Everything built with the power of the One Ring (”one ring to rule them all, and in the darkness bind them”) turned to dust.

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