And yet if history never repeats itself exactly, it often comes pretty close. If we look at where we are today, the parallels with the 1960s, modern America’s time of troubles, are too numerous to be missed:
The return of the Cold War with Russia – The Sixties were defined in large part by the cold war, an era of anti-communist hysteria at home and endless US military interventions abroad.
The crimes of "Uncle Joe" Stalin – the mass murder of millions and the imprisonment of many more in the Soviet gulag – had been blithely ignored in the previous era, when he was our ally in the war against the Axis powers. In the postwar era, however, with President Harry Truman at the helm, Washington suddenly espied an existential threat to the West in the ramshackle Soviet empire. That empire had been greatly expanded due to the war, and Soviet control of Eastern Europe had actually been signed, sealed, and delivered into Moscow’s hands by Franklin Roosevelt at Yalta. Yet that was conveniently overlooked as the Cold War commenced with the Marshall Plan – a welfare program for devastated Europe – and this was followed by a worldwide American effort to roll back the Communist "threat." In the wake of World War II, a new enemy was needed – and, not surprisingly, one was found.
Today the Russian "threat" is being touted by our political class as the latest in foreign policy fashion: from The New Republic, where Julia Ioffe recounts the supposed horrors of life under Czar Vladimir on an almost daily basis, to Fox News, where bleach-blonde "news" anchors have been breathlessly predicting a Russian invasion of Ukraine for the past three months, left and right march arm-in-arm in a new crusade against the Kremlin. Putin, they tell us, is a new Stalin, ruthlessly suppressing all domestic opposition and posing a threat to his neighbors.
