The history of the 20th century largely is the history of war. If you add up the casualties of the two World Wars, Korea, Vietnam the victims of Stalin and all the other dictators and wars, the death toll exceeds 100 million people.

Even when we actively weren’t fighting a war, the United States was engaged in an ideological Cold War with the Soviet Union for nearly half a century. In many ways, we defined ourselves in opposition to the USSR; we were everything they were not.The people of Russia suffered under a series of brutal autocratic regimes; they worked dismally long hours and didn’t even own the products of their labor; they were systematically spied on by their own government and lived in fear of the authorities.

By contrast, Americans enjoyed broad freedoms and the highest standard of living in the industrialized world. We were the defenders of democracy, and they were the villains.

Unfortunately, we compromised some of our ideals in order to defeat the Soviets. Immediately after World War II, the U.S. employed a network of Nazi war criminals to spy on the Soviet Union. Among them, according to documents declassified by the Nazi War Crimes Disclosure Act of 1998, were the likes of Klaus Barbie, the Gestapo officer known as the “Butcher of Lyon.”

U.S. intelligence officials thought the Soviet Union represented a great enough threat to justify this devil’s bargain, but at the price of justice deferred. “These documents,” said Justice Department official Eli Rosenbaum, “show the real winners of the Cold War were Nazi war criminals.”

The U.S. also supported several authoritarian right-wing dictators in the name of stopping the spread of communism in South America. We also maneuvered Russia into its own version of Vietnam in Afghanistan, where our CIA armed and trained the anti-Soviet Islamist mujahideen.

In recent years, the mujahideen have been known by other names, most notably al Qaida. At home, we weathered McCarthyism and domestic spying by the FBI’s COINTELPRO. For five decades we poured the bulk of our treasury into weapons and armies.

This was not without consequence; no less a military man than Dwight D. Eisenhower acknowledged, “Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired, signifies in the final sense a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed.”

But about 15 years ago, the Soviet Union collapsed finally. Communism was discredited officially in the eyes of the world. We stood victorious as the world’s lone superpower. And then we began dismantling our freedoms, one by one.

After 9/11, we instituted a massive new bureaucracy under Homeland Security. We have a Patriot Act that allows the government to spy on American citizens who have committed no crime and detain them indefinitely, without trial, as they have done until recently to Jose Padilla. Just last week the Pentagon asked to get in on the domestic surveillance racket, too.

Other vital areas of civic life are under attack as well. Except for the very wealthy, Americans are working longer hours for less money than they were 30 years ago. In a recent Supreme Court case, Kelo vs. City of New London, the Court ruled city councils can seize private property and turn it over to developers.

The Bush administration has sought to limit Americans’ access to the courts by limiting damages in consumer and medical malpractice suits where citizens have been injured seriously by negligent doctors and corporations. Whose concept of justice does this favor?

Our war on drugs has devastated our inner cities and drained valuable law enforcement resources, and in the process has turned us into the world’s biggest jailer. Perhaps most disturbing of all, we are in the midst of discovering our government has engaged in widespread torture.

Why did we bother to fight the Cold War if we were going to become like our enemy? We’re better than this.

We need a new era of civic reform to rebuild the institutions that protect our liberties instead of treating them like inconveniences. We need leaders who will truly represent our interests, and not those of corporations. We need to reclaim our mantle as the world’s defender of democracy, and we can only do that by reversing course.

The new year is upon us. There’s never been a better time for a fresh start.

Columns reflect the opinion of the author and not necessarily that of the Northern Star staff.