Opinion: Our world's chilling return to authoritarianism

https://www.npr.org/2022/02/26/ [login to see] /opinion-our-worlds-chilling-return-to-authoritarianism
I doubt any of us who lived through the Cold War want those times to return.

Schoolchildren scrunched below desks in fear of a nuclear attack. Riches were spent on weapons, instead of people. "Every rocket fired," said President Dwight Eisenhower, "signifies ... a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed."

A cold concrete wall divided Berlin, and more than 100 people died trying to scale it — always, by the way, from the communist East, into the freedom of the West.

There were proxy wars, missile rattling and nightmares about mushroom clouds and global devastation in which, as President John F. Kennedy phrased it, "the fruits of victory would be ashes in our mouth."

I remember the Captive Nations Day Parade each summer in Chicago. Bands, floats and dancers in national costumes celebrated Poland, Lithuania, Estonia, Romania, Albania, Ukraine, Czechoslovakia and other countries caught by Russian tanks behind what Winston Churchill had called "an Iron Curtain ... descended across the continent."