WaPo praises USSR's Biden

I don't speak ill of the dead not because they cannot argue back but because they cannot hear me. Why waste my breath?

Instead, let me take on David Hoffman's fact-challenged obituary of Mikhail Gorbachev, the 8th and final thug in charge of the Soviet Union, a communist dictatorship best known for killing about 50 million people and starving Ukraine into submission in the 1930s.

Hoffman wrote, "Mikhail S. Gorbachev, the last leader of the Soviet Union, who embarked on a path of radical reform that brought about the end of the Cold War, reversed the direction of the nuclear arms race and relaxed Communist Party controls in hopes of rescuing the faltering Soviet state but instead propelled it toward collapse, died Aug. 30 in Moscow. He was 91."

Well, at least Hoffman got the name and the age right.

Gorbachev ended the Cold War like Louis XVI ended the French monarchy.

As far as reversing the direction of the nuclear arms race, the Soviets dropped out of the race because they ran out of money. Reagan realized that and stiffed Gorbachev at the Reykjavík Summit.

As for relaxing communist controls, I think East Germans walking from Hungary to freedom in Austria had a lot to do with it. The Hungarian border patrol unwillingness to kill women and children encouraged others to escape.

One thing is for sure. Gorbachev -- Mister President -- did not tear down this wall. The people did. 

Hoffman tried his best to put lipstick on this historic pig, writing, "The Soviet collapse was not Mr. Gorbachev’s goal, but it may be his greatest legacy. It brought to an end a seven-decade experiment born of Utopian idealism that led to some of the bloodiest human suffering of the century. A costly global confrontation between East and West abruptly ceased to exist. The division of Europe fell away. The tense superpower hair-trigger nuclear standoff was eased, short of Armageddon."

Communism was not an experiment born of idealism. It was a brutal seizure of the state by thugs who then seized the economy in the name of the state. Every communist regime -- Red China, Cuba, North Korea and the USSR -- is harsh, brutal and humorless. The people in the USSR used vodka to dull the pain.

Hoffman and by proxy Jeff Bezos portrayed Gorbachev as a great reformer and statesman when in fact he was a party hack who vainly tried to keep a failed state afloat.

Not until Paragraph 51 does Hoffman admit this.

He wrote, "Five weeks after Ronald Reagan was reelected to a second term, in December 1984, Mr. Gorbachev made a landmark trip to London, where he left a strong impression. He called attention to the dangers of nuclear war and emphasized Soviet fears of an arms race in space. He promised radical reductions in nuclear weapons.

"In substance, Mr. Gorbachev did not change Soviet policy, but his youthful and vigorous style spoke volumes. He seemed to promise a more flexible approach, a sharp contrast with the rigidity of the past."

It was style, not substance.

The Washington Post likes to say democracy dies in darkness. That is its motto. That is its goal. 

But darkness dies in democracy. Gorbachev could not stop the collapse of the Soviet state because the people realized those seven decades of utopia -- as Hoffman would have you believe-- were in reality hell. Eventually the Soviet leadership went from a strong man like Stalin to a weak party hack like Gorbachev. He tried open elections in 1991 and by the year's end there was no Soviet Union.

And so it is with a certain American party which has given us Biden, who paid tribute to him, saying, "Mikhail Gorbachev was a man of remarkable vision."

Fortunately, his vision of the world never came true.