Cold War

This remembrance helps develop a confident, enduring Christian hope that is more than wishful thinking and leads to real-world action.

In 1961, Lee Edwards wrote from Germany, “If the United States and its allies do not stand firm, the concentration camp will soon add another two million inmates who presently live in West Berlin.”

Shoup’s actions during Christmastime 1955 offer an un-planned, un-staged snapshot of a political system and world view strikingly different from that of Lenin, Stalin, and Xi—a system founded on the freedom to believe in God or Santa or not, to believe in the meaning of Christmas or not, to believe in Immanuel or not.

Christians should not allow themselves to be swept along on the tides of popular resentment and feeling, but should plant their feet firmly on the rock of fact and of Christian love. Only thus will the truth be discerned amidst the babels of conflicting opinions.

“We have,” said an exuberant campaign orator in the recent campaign, “the moral leadership of the world. The whole world trusts in our devotion to freedom and expects us to save mankind from totalitarianism.” That is how we see ourselves, at least in our more complacent moods. The world does not see us as we see ourselves.

We are in a battle with despair these days. One cannot but regret interpretations which weigh the struggle on the side of defeat, especially when one’s own judgment is that such interpretations leave out great areas of fact which give one the right to cherish hope.

“The resistance to Russian expansion in Europe is right. The spectacle of American progressives supporting Wallace in opposing that resistance brings dismay to most European democrats.”

Keynoting a “Beat Dewey” rally at Madison Square Garden on September 12, 1946, Secretary of Commerce Henry Wallace warned Americans against the Truman administration’s “get tough with Russia” policy. Reinhold Niebuhr responded.

This week the editors discuss Colin Powell’s legacy, what Reinhold Niebuhr said about the USSR and anti-communists in 1946, and LiVecche’s trip to speak at seminaries in Kentucky.