We can't really prove that MAD has worked without seeing what would have happened if we hadn't done MAD.

I'd argue that without MAD, the cold war might not have happened, which could have avoided a massive number of conflicts.

Never knew until I immigrated to the US. And even then, its merely a brief mention on it and calls it “communism” (its not lol) and then the teachers proclaim its why “communism” is bad, USA constitution rule of law blah blah.

That's when you bring up Kent State

They are winning.* It's not over yet.

It's possible English isn't your first language? No worries.

The word "vindicated" doesn't mean "won in the end," it means "they were right." As in, justified in their demands, on the right side of history. Even of the protests I listed in my first comment, half of them didn't actually win in the end (Vietnam, Occupy, Gaza, and arguably more).

From Wikipedia:

...(the Seven Demands) for the government:

1. Affirm Hu Yaobang's views on democracy and freedom as correct.
2. Admit that the campaigns against spiritual pollution and bourgeois liberalisation had been wrong.
3. Publish information on the income of state leaders and their family members.
4. Allow privately run newspapers and stop press censorship.
5. Increase funding for education and raise intellectuals' pay.
6. End restrictions on demonstrations in Beijing.
7. Provide objective coverage of students in official media.[84][83]

I hope that you'd agree that the students were in the right, and that the oppressive CCP was in the wrong?

wasn't the Red Guard also a student movement? it didn't get deleted, but it's definitely not looked back upon fondly. tbf most of what I know of it comes from Three Body Problem though, so I could be wrong.

there's also the Red Army Faction (Baader-Meinhoff gang) in Germany during the '70s which killed some people.

Thank you for bringing those up. However, unless I'm misunderstanding them, the only one of those where the protesters were in the wrong were the pro-segregation protests, correct? But weren't those protests by-and-large made up of parents? (Perhaps along with some of their children doing what they were told?) Not exactly the "rebellious youth sticking it to the man" we generally mean by the words student protest.

Cherry picking history is what US excels at. So, they're always the good guys. Always…

There'll probably be some footnotes about their heinous history just so they can point and say they're not hiding anything. But the way they control almost all major social media companies and mainstream media. They get to play god with what sticks and what doesn't.

They were about as “neutral” as they were in the Ukraine conflict under Biden.

They were selling loads of weapons at discount prices and supporting the allies in many ways.

You’re right though that the US public was generally against joining the war, and the US as a whole, tended to be quite isolationist until Pearl Harbour.