How could this have come to pass in our America?

From Publishers Weekly:

Syndicated columnist and CNN commentator Charen offers a moral indictment of those public figures-politicians, entertainers and professors-who, she says, stubbornly refused to see communism for what it was: a brutal, dictatorial death machine. Throughout the Cold War, some public figures and activists cheered the Communist movement and berated America for its capitalist ways. Famous actors traveled to Cuba to smoke a cigar with their favorite dictator; posters of Che Guevara, Castro's military leader, adorned college dorms during the '60s; the Soviet Union was praised and defended for its social progress. Charen particularly singles out the media as having played a significant role in distributing tendentious if not false accounts of world events. One example tells of Katie Couric's visit to Cuba in 1992. Upon her return, according to Charen, Couric raved about Cuba's "terrific health-care system," but uttered not a word about the men and women detained in Cuban prisons. The author highlights the kind of historical revisionism and self-hatred that marked some of America's most noted public figures and warns that the lessons learned from communism are just as relevant today. The tragedy of September 11, Charen says, has produced a cadre of left-leaning pundits who wasted no time in blaming America for the violence perpetrated by terrorism.

Bruce Thornton, a professor of Classics at American University of Cal State Fresno wrote:

Lenin called them "useful idiots," those people living in liberal democracies who by giving moral and material support to a totalitarian ideology in effect were braiding the rope that would hang them. Why people who enjoyed freedom and prosperity worked passionately to destroy both is a fascinating question, one still with us today. Now the useful idiots can be found in the chorus of appeasement, reflexive anti-Americanism, and sentimental idealism trying to inhibit the necessary responses to another freedom-hating ideology, radical Islam.

http://www.marianland.com/marx01.html

Today, Marxism-Leninism represents a most complex and powerful doctrine developed by Communist theoreticians and practitioners in every corner of the world. 'Its universal library offers dynamic political weapons and comprehensive theories, diversified approaches and seductive slogans. On one side of the globe, there is the Yugoslav moderate theory of reformed Communism and participative economy which lures masses into socialism. On the other side of the earth there are Chinese slogans which are more productive in inflaming a Communist revolution.

Marxism-Leninism is particularly effective on the semantic level where it exhibits a devastating duality. It lulls its adversaries to sleep, while at the same time it mobilizes its followers to revolutionary action. The Communist Internationale's Seventh Congress concluded that open use of revolutionary terminology does not promote the Marxist-Leninist drive for world domination. Therefore, "revolution" has been changed into "liberation," "world conquest by the proletariat" has been changed into "peace and socialism," "armed seizure of power and liquidation of the bourgeoisie" has been rephrased to read "peaceful and gradual transition to socialism.''

Even the word "Communism," which every revolutionary is so proud of, has been changed into "progressive, "anti-Fascist" or "liberal." Further, to confuse their adversaries, the Marxist-Leninists have devised a new language which uses old words in the basic vocabulary. When they say "imperialism arouses the wrath of the people and digs its own grave," they mean "through our manipulation of the local Communist parties, and with a vast auxiliary corps of dupes ; and sympathizers, we so arrange matters that the free enterprise system and democracy are destroyed from within. All we need to do is push it into the grave."

Thus, the free, complacent, conscience-stricken, guilt-ridden, sex-sodden, drug-driven, decadent, and often antagonistic societies have been manipulated by goal-oriented, dedicated, and shrewd Marxist-Leninist dialectics into a notorious period of so-called peaceful coexistence and plain overt hostilities. "Detente" has become not the hope of free people everywhere, but rather their doom. "Detente does not necessarily spell out the end of the struggle between the two social systems," says Pravda. "The struggle will continue between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie."
In other words, the so-called detente is nothing more than a form of Marxist-Leninist art skillfully geared toward pacifying the American public by encouraging them to act ridiculously nice while the Communists kick the daylights out of them. The result is that the free world continues to shrink. Democracies cannot handle periods of low-tension confrontation. They have an almost universal desire to believe that peace is the natural condition of man, that armies are temporary nuisances, that conflicts of interest can be dissolved simply by a policy of good will. Unfortunately, nothing is further from the truth; but for some reason free people prefer to believe it.

by Prof. Libor Brom