Dead-Red

Not the least idiocies of the Cold War were interminable debates of the question, better red than dead?

The appalling stupidity of the question threatens dumb paralysis, but let us reply, "of course!" - if only to get it on the record.

Such, at any rate, has been the view, literally, of billions of humans from 1917 to our own time.

All the same, many notable and widely respected authorities during the later years of the Cold War, the years of nuclear stalemate, insisted resistance, even at the price of human extinction or vast devastation frightfully close to that, was better than surrender to World Communism.

Thus did Western leaders defend repeated walks to the brink, consciously risking the destruction of civilization, possibly for centuries or millennia, if not the annihilation of humanity, over historically routine political crises.

Forays that did not at all amuse people who were not part of the Eastern or Western Blocs.

In any event, "Live free or die!" and "Better die on your feet than live on your knees!" are follies for bumper stickers, license-plates, and propaganda to be shouted at troops.

Humans by more than overwhelming majorities have never believed them.

Fortunately, neither side, throughout those decades, was really interested in such apocalyptic conflict.

The official doctrine of the East was that the world would go their way, anyway, without them needing to risk much for it.

And the official doctrine of the West was that the official doctrine of the East was silly.

And so we all survived.

The Russians never confronted us, the world, or anyone with an ultimatum, "Surender now to World Communism or we will destroy all human civilization and with it, possibly, all humanity."

Nor did anyone else.

They never even threatened to merely destroy us - a threat they could not credibly have made, in any case, in the face of massive retaliation.

Buckley, of course, harangued the troops, and the entire population of the western world, so far as he could.

The right wanted us to be terrified of living under communism.

Not to be terrified of paying an insane price to avoid it.

Buckley, Athwart History, Dead-Red, November, 1962, National Review.