Soviet Strength and Weakness Were Objective Realities

You can normally count on Bernard Henri-Levy to say something unenlightening and today is no exception:

Let’s summarize. From these three certainties, considered together, arises a clear obligation: aiding and strengthening, with all our might, the Iranian civil society in revolt. We have done it in the past with the USSR. We eventually understood, after decades of cowardice, that totalitarianism, in its eventual state of putrefaction, was only strong from our weakness.

I’m all for supporting Iranian civil society. But let’s get real. The practical assistance that Western governments were ever able to give to anti-Communist dissidents was quite small. Overwhelmingly, the dissidents had to make their own way. And they tried, over and over again for a period of decades. But in Hungary in 1956 and Czechoslovakia in 1968 and China in 1989 they were crushed by force. In Eastern Europe in 1989, it’s not as if “we” prevented that from happening again. In most countries, the authorities relented. Mikhael Gorbachev chose not to deploy Soviet forces. In Romania, elements within the security services mounted a coup against the incumbent regime. And in all cases, the Communist economies were what they were. Compared to Western economies, they were weak. Compared to or African or Central American economies, they were strong. In no case was “our weakness” a major factor in their strength or weakness. This whole line of thinking is an enormous insult to the people who actually put themselves on the line for freedom, oddly under the guise of respect for those who are doing so now.