William F. Buckley’s Cold War
As conservatives mark the centenary of William F. Buckley, Jr.’s birth, one of the most-celebrated aspects of his remarkable career is the unshakeable anticommunism he made the heart of our movement. As George F. Will often remarks, the National Review founder’s decades-long struggle against the Soviet Union was so consequential that an argument could be made that “Bill Buckley won the Cold War.” Recently, The University Bookman itself published two fine essays examining Buckley’s commitment to one of the twentieth century’s great crusades, especially on its domestic front. [See here and here.]
And yet Buckley’s anticommunism was never solely about the negation of an ideology, important as such a disposition is, or even the maintenance of order in the United States alone. Without committing the neoconservative error of setting up liberalism as a counter-ideology in a futile quest for perpetual peace, he nonetheless understood the collapse of the USSR as a victory for Western civilization—even a proof of the superiority of our way of life. The West, sustained by traditions worth conserving, had triumphed over totalitarianism at long last. For Buckley, winning the Cold War was about affirming the eternal value of the ordered liberty we have inherited.
This triumphant civilizational hope suffuses Buckley’s short and oft-neglected work The Fall of the Berlin Wall. Not only laudable as an accurate and rousing history of one of the Cold War’s most vital fronts, it also stands as a powerful reflection on the nature of freedom itself. “Berlin,” Buckley put it, “always seemed a very conspicuous linchpin to that enslaved region of the postwar world.” The Wall itself represented the perennial confrontation between freedom and tyranny, and therefore images of Germans tearing down the monument to totalitarianism have become icons for the end of the Cold War. Without treating the Fall as a historical inevitability, Buckley searched out the greater meaning behind half a century’s events.
Read more at Russell Kirk Center.
