The Evil Empire was indeed evil. I didn't mean to retro-apologize. Certain aspects and policies of the Cold War did make sense.


But not all. The United States assumed that Stalin and his successors were responsible for all the trouble in the world. They were not. This caused us to spend unwisely and to make a lot of bad decisions that caused a lot of suffering. The people of Guatemala come to mind, following our overthrow of their government in 1954. Vietnam, of course, is another prime example. People we supported, in the name of anti-communism, also murdered large portions of their own country's populations.


This is not retro-criticism. George Kennan, Walter Lippman and Henry Wallace, to name 3 prominent people, foresaw all of the problems in the 1940s, including the rise of McCarthyism. These were not radicals. Kennan basically invented containment. Lippman was a mainstream political commentator, the most respected and famous in his time. Wallce moved left, but he was Secretary of Commerce in the Truman administration and Vice President before Truman. (Interesting to speculate how the world would have been different had Roosevelt died while he was VP.)


There are certainly still evil people in the world and we need a strong defense. But to blindly spend more for the sake of doing so is foolhardy, as it was during the Cold War. We were told then that we needed to spend more because the Soviets were. It never ocurred to us that they were A) woefully inefficient; B) bastards who didn't care about the welfare of their own people; and C) spending themselves into bankruptcy.


By all means let's not revise history to make the Soviets anything other than what they were. Your "rancid" seems particularly apt. But let's also not revise history to sugarcoat our own evil actions and mistakes.