Editor’s Note: Syndicated columnist Mona Charen’s explosive book Useful Idiots: How Liberals Got It Wrong in the Cold War and Still Blame America First (Regnery) has been sitting at or close to the top of non-fiction bestseller lists for weeks. Ms. Charen was interviewed recently by John Hawkins publisher of RightWingNews.com.
John Hawkins: Let’s say Jimmy Carter had somehow been reelected in 1980. Do you think the Soviet Union would still exist today?
Mona Charen: Without any question. Jimmy Carter came into office decrying our ‘inordinate fear of Communism.’ He spoke about human rights which is a fine thing to emphasize for an American president. Unfortunately the only human rights violators he could find were those who were our allies. He couldn’t find any human rights violations among our enemies in the Soviet Union and the entire Communist nightmare that enslaved and killed so many millions of people around the world. Not until the Soviets rolled their tanks into Afghanistan and then only belatedly did Carter announce that his view of Soviet intentions had been affected. He was really the perfect embodiment of the syndrome I’m describing in the book.
By the way the term ‘useful idiots’ was not my wording it was Lenin who predicted that liberals would prove to be useful idiots for the Soviet cause.
Being so completely utterly and entirely wrong about the effects of Reagan’s decision to abandon detente and challenge the Soviet Union?
Yes that’s one of the reasons I wrote the book. Not only have they never paid a price or acknowledged that they were so badly wrong in all of their dire predictions of World War Three and all of the other consequences of Reagan’s policies but furthermore they are now attempting to rewrite history and suggest that they were all ‘cold warriors’ when of course the opposite was the case.
As one traverses the Internet these days it’s not unusual to hear people claiming that George Bush is a fascist a Nazi that he wants to create a police state etc. Obviously that’s ridiculous but you almost never hear these same people denouncing left-wing thugs like Castro and Kim Jung-Il who actually are what the Left tries to portray Bush as.
Well to the contrary when it comes to people like that as I point out in the book they tend to justify them to whitewash them. I give many examples in the book of the gentle treatment that has been afforded to for example Fidel Castro by our media. This is a monster who has thought nothing of killing and torturing thousands upon thousands of people yet they portray him as some sort of benevolent hero. It’s revolting.
Speaking of Castro we often hear Castro apologists talking about Cuba’s model health care system. You researched that in the book — what did you find?
The Today Show and various newspapers have gone down to Cuba and they report — supposedly report but simply repeat the government propaganda about the wonderful health care system and the universal literacy. They don’t have any idea they haven’t done any actual reporting. People who have looked into it have found that Cuba has a two-tiered system. There’s one health care system for the party elite and for so-called ‘health tourists’ from Western Europe. There’s a completely different system for the ordinary person. When the Cold War ended in Europe for example we found out that half of the hospitals in the Soviet Union didn’t even have running water…
I’m sure it’s about the same in Cuba.
