Thirty years ago today, on June 8, 1982, President Ronald Reagan delivered an address to the British Parliament that stands as one of the greatest of his presidency and a milestone in the final years of the Cold War. At a time when the Soviet Union seemed to be a permanent, if foreboding, presence in the world, Reagan predicted that “the march of freedom and democracy” would “leave Marxism-Leninism on the ash heap of history as it has left other tyrannies which stifle the freedom and muzzle the self-expression of the people.”
The “ash heap of history” was language Reagan personally wrote into the address, according to Robert C. Rowland and John M. Jones, who wrote a book about the making of the speech, “Reagan at Westminster: Foreshadowing the End of the Cold War.” The words reflected Reagan’s notion, not universally accepted at the time, that the West should not just criticize or contain Soviet behavior but also challenge the basic legitimacy of the Soviet system.
“I believe we now live at a turning point,” Reagan declared in the speech at Westminster Palace. “In an ironic sense, Karl Marx was right. We are witnessing today a great revolutionary crisis.” But the crisis was not in the West, Reagan asserted. Rather it was unfolding in “the home of Marxist-Leninism, the Soviet Union.
In the first years of his presidency, Reagan was brimming with this kind of ideological confrontation, which reached a peak in 1983 when he called the Soviet Union an “evil empire.” But three Soviet leaders died in succession, Reagan underwent his own metamorphosis and he eventually found in Mikhail Gorbachev someone he could do business with. In the Westminster speech, Reagan had presciently grasped the real and deepening crisis of communism. When the Soviet Union did finally implode in 1991, the fissures Reagan had described a decade before were the cause.
Recent events in China, Russia and the Arab world vividly demonstrate that democracy remains a universal aspiration — but also that the forces of repression have powerful means to resist the tide. The National Endowment for Democracy, and like-minded agencies that other democracies subsequently established, have found useful ways to aid and nurture freedom movements. Words, too, are important. Reading the Westminster speech is a good reminder of their power to inspire action, and change history.
The Washington Post (June 8)
Ronald Reagan, the Icon of the Conservative Movement, rang up more of a deficit in his years of office than all of the presidents combined from George Washington to Jimmy Carter!
The end result was the conservative Supply Side movement, and the Noquist Pledge Bent on the destruction of Taxes to pay for the insanity.
Oh! Those Evil, Democrat, Tax and Spend Monsters!
It’s all thier fault!
http://zfacts.com/p/318.html
Washington couldn’t tell a lie, Nixon couldn’t tell the truth, and Reagan couldn’t tell the difference.
When I was in my 20’s, I practically worshiped President Reagan, but later in life the scales came off my eyes. I still think he was a good and decent man who had a real knack for telling a story, but his presidency was quite flawed. His administration did ring up quite a deficit, how big depends on the source (statistics are a funny thing). Barack Obama has outdone him though (funny how you fail to mention this). There is no right, there is no left, there is only an out of control government that spends more money than they take in, craft more and more laws and programs that only further limit our freedoms. How you don’t see that is beyond me.
I can see some of that as I am Not a liberal, I don’t agree with the government regulating petty things like how big a Soda you can buy or forcing a tobacco company to put pictures of cancer victims on the cartons. These all diminish the integrity of the Democrats.
I do believe in regulating important things such as banking and commerce laws to limit the execes’s of unfettered capitalisim and it economic power and the enviroment as we all partake in it and abuses by one are put on others . Opportunities should be for everyone not those entitled by economic advantages. Monopolies should be broken up and FAIR Trade between States and Foriegn countrys should be encouraged.
You had better believe that there is a left and right, and they are both fighting over the same dollar,
the left for the average man and the right for the Rich.
I am with the average man.
“You had better believe that there is a left and right, and they are both fighting over the same dollar,”
Probably what I should have said is that in regard to whether we have a Democrat heavy administration or Republican, the course change between them is negligible. For the most part, they end up supporting most of the same things. Look at the wars. Obama was going to bring the troops home and close Gitmo, but aside from stopping the offensive in Iraq, little has changed and we will have a military presence there for who knows how long. In fact, under Obama’s watch, there have been a couple of additional forays on the African continent. Not a fan of Obama, but I’m not picking on him either. My bone is really with American interventionism. That’s what I should have emphasized.
He also raised taxes on the most wealthy solely to prop up the most socialist program in all of American history and signed off on amnesty and a path to citizenship for millions and millions of illegal aliens.
Today’s GOP would label any politician with Reagan’s views as a RINO and do their best to drum him out tof the party.
After all, he raised taxes 11 times!
Every politician must be able to keep both feet on the fence with his ear to the ground. -Gracie Allen
It is amazing how Reagan’s ghost had a more impressive presidency than the record indicates. Reagan’s fiscal policy was disastrous. He looted the treasury in his first term with tax breaks that could not be justified or sustained. In his second term, he raised taxes repeatedly. Still in the end, he presided over what was the biggest deficit in our history. As Cheney said, Reagan proved that deficits don’t matter.
There are other legacies that have endured as well. Reagan was not always well-intentioned. He fabricated from whole cloth the welfare queen from Chicago. This was our first modern foray into class warfare. It helped to cultivate what has become an epidemic of hostility towards the less fortunate. Today, that darker influence has a life of its own. The deregulation of media is another consequence of Reagan that has had a bad impact on our society.
Reagan was by modern standards, enigmatic. It is clear that fiscally, Barack Obama is more conservative than Reagan. It should also be noted that in terms of civil rights, Reagan’s positions would have alienated him from any elected position in the new GOP. Seeing Mitt Romney and others claim to emulate Reagan demonstrates the extent of the revision to the actual history Reagan presided over. In today’s climate, Reagan would have been a moderate democrat. Should he be elected, Romney will be remembered as the president who brought us into America’s second gilded age, which will bring about endless bailouts of failed banks, more erosion of public institutions and an elite class with money and power beyond anything the world has ever seen.
You forgot to mention that he was amazingly unindicted for Iran/Contra.