I noticed this week that Marshall’s Adult Community Center sponsored a presentation about the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962.

It involved a tense two weeks when the world came close to nuclear war. The missile crisis was a major event in a much longer situation known as the Cold War, which lasted for more than 40 years.

It began in the late 1940s, when the Soviet Union had developed the atomic bomb and when it prevented Eastern Europeans from moving to the West. It was still in full swing when I was a child in the 1970s.

I remember being part of civil defense drills at Holy Redeemer School, when we took shelter underneath our desks and put our arms over our heads. We thought of Soviets as enemies. We considered Communism something that was evil.

In high school I took Mr. Sletten’s Russian history class. One of the assigned readings was Hedrick Smith’s book called The Russians, an account of Russian society in the 1980s. I still have it on a bookshelf in my apartment.

Smith’s book elaborated on how Soviet society functioned under Communism. It provided extensive details about daily life. I understood Russia much better after reading it.

It was only three years later that the Berlin Wall was torn down by German citizens. It was a situation that was even more festive than New Year’s Eve.

The tearing down of the wall came to symbolize the end of the Cold War. The world had so much hope that finally after many years the entire planet would be free.

Suddenly families from Europe who were divided by the Iron Curtain could reunite. My dad’s Polish and German heritage became better known to us. We learned about relatives in Europe that we didn’t know existed.

Russia, the largest of the former Soviet Union’s 15 republics, turned to capitalism and democracy in the Boris Yeltsin era. In recent years they’ve kept much of capitalism but again face dictatorship under Vladimir Putin.

The war in Ukraine has fueled a modern day Cold War. We don’t know how long it will last. Russia shows no signs of a regime change. Neither does China or North Korea.

I’m concerned that many people in 2025 don’t see the same kind of threat that almost everyone saw in the 40-year Cold War. It’s important that we don’t take democracy for granted.

We need to actively oppose dictators of all sorts. We shouldn’t align ourselves with some of them on the idea that they’re better than Marxists.

A diehard Marxist in 2025 could make a claim that Marx wasn’t mistaken with his theories. They could claim that leaders of most Communist nations didn’t follow his principles. Instead they became a ruling elite.

In my high school British Literature class taught by Mr. Conyers we learned about Lord Acton’s famous phrase “power corrupts absolute power corrupts absolutely”. It’s true in Shakespeare. It remains true in the 21st century.

The Cuban Missile Crisis and the Cold War deserve to be remembered. There are lessons we can learn from it. We can refer to history as our leaders work toward the best possible foreign policy.

Maybe someday the entire world will be free. The United Nations was created to provide a peaceful avenue for resolving international disputes. It was supposed to bring an end to war.

Instead we’ve had Korea, Vietnam, the early 1990s Gulf War, the post-911 war on terror and now war between Russia and Ukraine. We still haven’t reached the goal of a totally peaceful world. It’s a good goal to keep in mind for the future.

— Jim Muchlinski is a longtime reporter and contributor to the Marshall Independent