The basic statement of American anti-Communism, as well as the basic
conception of the Cold War, is the one expressed by William Buckley,
Jr., who got it from James Burnham. I quote: "In 1917 history changed
gears." Apart from the weirdness of such a mechanical metaphor--as if
history were an automobile--the meaning of it is that the Russian
Communist revolution was the principal and decisive event of this
century, which thereafter was marked by the struggle between
International Communism and the Free World (whatever that is). There
are few statements about the history of the world of which one may
say that they are complete nonsense. This is one of them.
The principal event of the twentieth century--which was a short
century, lasting seventy-five years, from 1914 to 1989--was the
outbreak of the First World War in 1914. I need not expatiate what
this catastrophe meant for Western civilization. The First World War
led to the Second World War, and the Second World War to the Cold
War. The two world wars were the two enormous mountain ranges in the
shadows of which we lived until 1989.
