Peter Brimelow writes: This is an adaptation of a talk I recently gave to a Dissident Right dinner club in New York City. Several friends of VDARE.com were in the audience.
Around Easter of 1980, I was in Paris trying to persuade my first wife, whom some of you knew, to marry me. I thought that, in the interests of full disclosure, I ought to tell her everything. So I said, look, I’m involved in an anti-Communist faction in journalism and we’re going to lose. I think there’s a real serious possibility that we’re all going to end up in a Gulag.
And, besides that, it’s crippling to our careers. I’d been approached by the CBC [Canadian Broadcasting Corporation] to do on-camera reports about business. I could have been Lou Dobbs! [Laughter] But when they heard I’d written anti-Communist stuff, they said they couldn’t possibly hire an anti-communist—even though what I would have been covering was entirely non-political.
Maggy was a Canadian and wasn’t particularly political. She listened to this and said she’d not thought about it before, but, now that I’d explained it, she could see it was true.
So, she asked with female practicality, why didn’t I change sides?
I usually tell this sort of story to illustrate that miracles do happen. Nobody—nobody—expected the Soviet Union to collapse. We, those of us that grew up in the 1950s and earlier, really did think in the 1970s that there was a very good chance the Soviet Union would prevail. Whittaker Chambers was convinced he was joining the losing side when he renounced communism in 1938.
But in fact, later in 1980, Ronald Reagan was elected president. And by 1991, the Soviet Union had collapsed.
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