perfidy

Let's talk about why that was a good thing. BFD, you say? The two stage world war defined the first half of the twentieth century, and the cold war defined the second. On that basis alone, winning that schoolyard fight must be a big fucking deal. And the people that won it should get medals - because they won it, people like us aren't in gulags. And Mike, you would probably be in their ahead of me, because the communists always purged heretics before they purged the infidel. 

The Cold War was a ideological contest between, not to put to fine a point on it, freedom / goodness / light and enslavement / evil / darkness. On any given Sunday, the Communist empire was every bit as evil as the Nazi one, but it lasted for seven times as long, and killed at least three times as many people. If we had rolled over for the Soviets, or allowed ourselves to become like them, we would not be living in our peachy keen, if imperfect, republic of liberty. Secret police, reeducation camps, show trials, total state control of every aspect of your life: this is what we avoided. And Reagan and Thatcher, by resisting it, and calling it what it was, (and by shoveling money into the fire faster than the Russkies could ever dream of hoping to do) drove the beast over the cliff. Solzhenitsyn and other dissidents, told of the way that the Evil Empire speech heartened them in their resistance to the Soviet state. 

I know you don't like Churchill, either, Mike; but Churchill and Roosevelt, Reagan and Thatcher were the four greatest defenders of liberty and the free world of the last century.