A Very Bad Year: 1957

They just don’t make years like 1957 any more.

It's lodged prominently because I left the daily newspaper / wire service whirlwind and opted for magazine writing.

But some other stuff happened that year:

The Russian Soviets crushed the Hungarian Freedom Uprising, and publicly lynched the student leaders.

Israeli, French and British troops fought on the same side in the Suez War to stop the Nasser / Naguib grab by Egypt of the "international" waterway.

(The U.S.A.’s Secretary Of State, John Foster Dulles just admonished everyone for being like “naughty children”. A huge turning point squished...muffled.)

And Soviet Russia's German rocket scientists beat the U.S.A.’s German (Werner von Braun) into outer space with the “Sputnik” metal basketball.

All very exciting stuff. I am surprised no one talks about all that at all any more, because all across this Earth of ours, all the America haters of the day were celebrating the demise of the world’s oldest constitutional democracy.

And this was compoundedly strange because it was about this time that Kruschev deep-sixed the Stalin myth. And, stories were being VERIFIED about Siberian concentration camp slaughter and torture.

Pasternak and Solzhenitsyn were putting together indictments of the Gulag. Piecemeal revelation of the hitherto cemented-by-Fear Potemkin nation was in silent progress.

The international communications conspiracy of silence would not begin to crumble until after Solzhenitsyn was awarded the Nobel prize (in 1970) and all three volumes of the Gulag Archipelago were available everywhere and he was exiled by the hapless Kremlin.

It was 42 years after Sputnik, and 20 years after the World heard Solzhenitsyn’s historical account of mass murder, torture and atrocity before the Evil Ghost died at the fall of the wall at the Brandenburg gate.

In the meantime, millions of America-haters, and even one American president announced the decline and fall of the United States. Jimmy Carter bemoaned what he christened a fatal desuetude...a “malaise” dooming the nation!

How many “recessions” have we had in the United States since the Fabulous Fifties? One in Eisenhower’s last years, one hidden by Vietnam; one in Tricky Dick’s watch, all of Carters four years, early in Reagan’s time, blunted by tax cuts; another for Bush 41, and another as Clinton faded. Now we have the Bush low point.

But, the machine is still laboring away, albeit missing a beat or so.

But all those people who are applauding the trouble in the USA are echoing one another from their respective toilet bowls.

The “invisible hand” of the market is driving its dagger deep into the gross economic and totalitarian plans of Red Hugo Chavez and Iran’s I’m-a-Dinner-Jacket blowhard.

I...WE... have seen much worse. I was around and VERY alert when the whole world went to Hell and America was “through” in 1957.

Fifty two years ago.