Vaclav Havel was a great champion of liberty whose rhetorical blows shattered the Iron Curtain and brought about the collapse of communism in Eastern and Central Europe.

As a founder of Charter 77, as the leader of Czechoslovakia’s Velvet Revolution in 1989, and as the first president of that once hard-line communist satellite, Havel demonstrated over and over again the power of words to bring down seemingly invincible foes.

Public distrust of unchecked centralized government is a very good thing.

Consider the legacy of communism, a system that uses unbridled centralized state power in order to maintain its grip. The more than 100 million victims of communism provide ample evidence of this fact.

Among communism's chief tools is a penal system for those who resist conformity with its prescription for utopia.

by The Editors of Veterans of Foreign Wars USA

The Cold War has been lost to history, only a dim memory to all but a few.

According to a citizenship test administered by Newsweek and reported in the March 28 & April 4, 2011, edition, a whopping 73% of Americans could not identify communism as the ideology America opposed during the Cold War.

As Fred Kempe recently wrote in his book, Berlin 1961, "The Cold War is still the least understood and worst reported of our three world wars." Judging from the Newsweek revelation, this is apparently so.