Cold warriors prefer untold history remains unheard

...Schwarz’s response is a very nice read. He nails it when he says that if Cold War liberals like Wilentz were right,

"U.S. cold war policies should have ended with the cold war itself. If the leftists were right, U.S. policies would have continued almost completely unchanged – except for the pretexts provided to Americans."

A couple of billion people or so throughout the world understand how that turned out. But Schwarz hammers it home because it is apparently not so clear among some intellectuals and journalists here in the heart of the "free world."

Cold War liberalism was a curse during the Cold War, and remains so today. It is the dominant framework in discussions about Latin America today, and not just on the right – which conjures up fantasies about left-leaning Latin American countries supporting terrorist camps with Iran – but also among the liberal foreign policy establishment that occupies most of the media space. In 2009 almost all of these liberals, including journalists, editors, and prominent human rights groups, looked the other way when Washington helped the coup-installed government of Honduras legitimize itself. Most of them even pretended that the Obama administration was trying to help restore democracy, when there was a mountain of evidence to the contrary. The deposed, democratically-elected president Mel Zelaya eventually told the world that the Obama administration was actually behind the coup, and there is every reason to believe him, given all the circumstantial evidence. But don’t expect any investigations or even investigative reporting to shed more light on what the Obama administration actually did to support the coup.

(Read more: http://www.cepr.net/index.php/blogs/the-americas-blog/sean-wilentz-and-cold-war-liberals-prefer-that-untold-history-remains-unheard)