Forget the Cold War Victory: NPR Still Thinks U.S. Suffered from Too Much Fear of Communism

NewsBusters ^ | 23 Apr 2011 | Tim Graham

[mandaladon]

National Public Radio is celebrating its 40th anniversary this year. In 1971, it began at the height of "anti-war" fervor against the U.S. government and its immoral war-mongering. That flavor remains at NPR to this day. Last Sunday, NPR anchor Noah Adams reminded listeners of the Bay of Pigs invasion, and naturally, the theme was anti-communist paranoia:

NOAH ADAMS: Today, April 17th, marks exactly 50 years since one of the biggest disasters in American foreign policy: the Bay of Pigs Invasion of 1961.

JIM RASENBERGER (Author, "The Brilliant Disaster"): You know, I think the thing that you have to keep in mind when you ask yourself how did this ever happen is the extraordinary fear of communism in the United States in the late '50s and early '60s.

ADAMS: Historian Jim Rasenberger has written a book about that time.

Unidentified Man #1: Under communism, virtually everything belongs to the state.

ADAMS: And he says it all started when the American government began to think Fidel Castro, leader of the revolution in Cuba, was looking more and more like the communists of the Soviet Union.

RASENBERGER: It wasn't just a fear that communism was spreading, but that communists had nuclear weapons.

Adams devoted an entire second segment to promoting Rasenberger's theories of incompetent warmongering. We apparently still belong in an era of "troubled interventions" -- which implied there shouldn't be any American interventions. The Cold War isn't somehow won, but it remains a chilling episode of "inordinate fear of communism," immoral militarism, and patriotic hubris:

[mandaladon]

ADAMS: A lot of the conventional thinking, when you look back on it, about the Bay of Pigs, puts the CIA up as the aggressors who push Kennedy, the new president, to move forward with the invasion. You say that's not really quite how it happen...The truth is Kennedy betrayed the Cuban rebels by failing to support them at a critical moment.

[org.whodat]

The poor old Cubans were told they would have air support, our planes were loaded and the pilots were in them, ready to roll. When the order came to stand down. My older brother was an air traffic controller in the air force in Orlando at the time. We had air craft ready in the thousands.

[MCCC]

The Cold War isn’t somehow won, but it remains a chilling episode of “inordinate fear of communism,” immoral militarism, and patriotic hubris:

Did he ask the communists how they felt/feel about it?
I seem to remember an episode where premier kruschev slammed his shoe and told the west of their burial at the hands of the Soviet.

[Beowulf9]

Well as far as the ‘anti-war’ sentiment, Obama doesn’t seem to be suffering from that.

Come to think of it he is not suffering from fear of Communism, either.

[EQAndyBuzz]

Do they not get it? Are we watching a different movie?

100 million dead, generations of opression, people waiting on line for hours for a role of toilet paper, no food on the shelves and the worst pollution on the face of the earth.

Do these people really believe that communism didn’t exist? Do these people realize that if we were to move towards this form of government they would be the first people sent to the camps because they do not produce anything the state could use? Environmentalists, gays, criminals,and every left wing group would be persecuted as enemies of the state.

Just simply amazing.

[rlmorel]

"...You know, I think the thing that you have to keep in mind when you ask yourself how did this ever happen is the extraordinary fear of communism in the United States in the late '50s and early '60s...."

Speechless.

[rlmorel]

EQAndyBuzz: We ARE watching a different movie.

[sergeantdave]

Well, between you, me and the fencepost, there’s a whole bunch of old leftists who need to be dragged out of the nursing homes and hanged.

Those same left wing pricks supported the Cambodian butcher Pol Pot who murdered milions.

I don’t think these commies should be offered a soft American pillow to die on.

[muir_redwoods]

Kennedy was well briefed between his election and his inauguration by Dulles. Eisenhower gave Kennedy carte blanche to call it off if he wanted to. Kennedy agreed to the plan and then chickened out when came time to commit air support.

[goodnesswins]

Gee...wonder WHERE Noah Adams got HIS education???

[Politics4US]

Cuban writer and Fidel Castro critic Humberto Fontova discusses the mishandling of the Bay of Pigs Invasion with radio legend Barry Farber.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZGdFsDFp2-Y

[elcid1970]

Could not agree more. No communist in America deserves a soft, comfortable, peaceful death.

Not after decades of agreeing with horrible mass murder in the USSR Gulags, the killing fields of Kampuchea, the reeducation camps of Vietnam, and the sheer horrific slaughter of millions of fellow humans in the Chicom Cultural Revolution, not to mention the current fashionable horror in fashionable communist Cuba.

Just how to carry it out.....

“Some people are alive simply because it’s illegal to kill them.”

[Chode]

ummmmmm, no... we had/have communists in our own government!!!

[sergeantdave]

“No communist in America deserves a soft, comfortable, peaceful death.”

I agree. Let’s start with letter A - agony - apply it to communists and work our way through the alphabet.

We’ve allowed our rightful revenge against communists to slip past us. Time to catch up.