On June 12, 1987 President Ronald Reagan, standing before the iconic Brandenburg Gate in Berlin with the Berlin Wall looming behind him, issued his famous challenge to the leader of the Soviet Union, Mikhail Gorbachev: “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall.” President Reagan’s words that day have been credited with placing considerable pressure on the Soviet…
Tag: Cold War
The Fall of Saigon 1975
It has been 40 years since the fall of Saigon to communist forces near the end of the Vietnam War. It is hard to imagine, but the Vietnam War was fought over a period of 20 years, between 1954-55 and April of 1975. The conflict pitted the communist North, backed by China and Russia, against an…
The Most Accurate Prediction in History?
Twenty years ago, on November 9, 1989, the Berlin Wall came down, and with it fell the Soviet Union and its empire of tyranny throughout Eastern Europe. In August 1977, the British journalist and broadcaster Bernard Levin had predicted what eventually happened. He was right about why it would happen, how it would happen, and…
The Hungarian Revolution of 1956: The Event that Shook the World
The events surrounding the 1956 Hungarian Revolution are closely linked to my family. My grandparents and my father fled Hungary after the revolution to settle and build a new life in Canada. The events in Hungary demonstrated to the world the true face of communist oppression in Eastern Europe, and ripped a hole in the…
Is History Really Over?
“In 1989, as the Cold War entered the bottom of the ninth inning, political scientist Francis Fukuyama wrote a memorable essay entitled “The End of History?” And despite the question mark in the article’s title, the argument resolved itself in a straightforward answer: “Yes.” It was a nifty bit of Hegelian reasoning, filtered through the…
Herbert Hoover’s Indictment of Allied Strategy
Herbert Hoover’s Indictment of Allied Strategy The great work of Herbert Hoover’s lifetime, Freedom Betrayed, is both a memoir and a diplomatic history of World War II and the beginning of the Cold War. Meticulously researched, written, and revised over a period of 20 years, Hoover’s most labor-intensive literary achievement has finally been published after nearly fifty…
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