We who have CWM

CWM? I hear you ask. Just what on earth is CWM? Well, I'll tell you as I learned that acronym today from Diplomad 2. It is, dear readers, Cold War Mentality and one that we must not on any account have, because it is boring, out of date, completely wrong in the new world etc etc. Come to think of it, I have been accused of that myself at various times, including once at St Antony's College, Oxford when I expressed the view after the first Afghan revolution in 1978 that the Russians have finally made it to Kabul. You are obsessed with the Soviet Union, I was told by other members of the college, all students of political science and theory. Six weeks later the Soviet troops poured into the country. Did I get an apology? Did I, heck.

Since then this accusation has cropped up in my life as it has in Diplomad's life. As he says:

Well! What an insult! How is it bad to have a "cold war" mentality (CWM)? Would it be an insult to tell somebody, "Sorry, you can't make it here because you can't let go of your anti-fascist mentality." This CWM accusation seems to be a meme (may we still use that word?) of the left.

Indeed. Apparently, he also gets accused of watching FOX News. I am not guilty of that as I live on this side of the Pond and, anyway, I do not own a TV set (something to do with the programmes being rubbish and me not wanting to pay tax to the BBC). But I do sympathize with this outburst:

I watch FOX off and on, as I do the other TV news outlets, and have not found FOX wrong about the major events of the past few years. FOX called it right, for example, on Benghazi, Fast and Furious, Solyndra, the IRS scandals, and, of course, the horrendous disaster known as Obamacare. The FOX pundits, in other words, people who come on expressly to opine, seem to range all over the place, with, admittedly the largest bunch gathering somewhere in the range from establishment GOP to Tea Party. I, however, see lots of "progressives" on FOX who express their leftist opinions and keep coming back on. I have not heard the slime-ball language, gutter-level insults, and race-baiting on FOX that come out on MSNBC from "progressives" such as Bashir, Baldwin, Sharpton, Maddow, and Harris-Perry. I think we owe a debt of gratitude to Rupert Murdoch, who similar to another Australian, General Sir John Monash, nearly 100 years ago saved the day for the West.

Familiar, is it not? We of the CWM were right about the Soviet Union and Communism, we were right about Russia under a gang of KGB men, we were right about terrorists who were trained by the KGB and the GRU. Then, of course, there are other matters. Many of us (I have to be careful here) were right about the intentions of the European Union and about the euro both in its political and practical aspects, we were right about widening not being the opposite of deepening but actually two aspects of the same process and I together with Bill Jamieson and the gang at CRCE, who are also possessors of CWM, in particular, were right about membership of the EU being a bad idea for Eastern Europe.

Anyway, there we are. I remain a proud possessor of CWM.