It Was 20 Years Ago Today…
by: Mike Proto | November 09
When this…
Led to this…
It’s amazing what can happen when you have a President who actually promotes the cause of liberty, isn’t it?
Michael returned to Washington, DC to speak
at the 2009 Blogs For Life Conference on January 22nd.
When this…
Led to this…
It’s amazing what can happen when you have a President who actually promotes the cause of liberty, isn’t it?
The fact that Obama refused to attend the 20th Anniversary celebration says quite a bit about the man and his character.
November 9th, 2009 at 9:00 pmDi Marco,
Thank goodness Obama did not attend. He probably would have apologized for all of the disruption Reagan’s speech caused to the stability of Eastern Europe and to the Russian Empire.
Now we have one less thing for which to apologize when (if) Obama is ever removed from office.
November 9th, 2009 at 9:25 pm“It’s amazing what can happen when you have a President who actually promotes the cause of liberty, isn’t it?”
Oh yes.
“The fact that Obama refused to attend the 20th Anniversary celebration says quite a bit about the man and his character.”
Yes, but I don’t want him to come to my continent ever again. He’s not welcome. He sold the entire continent out to Russia on the 70th anniversary of the invasion of my country by the Red Army. He’s a pro-Russian saboteur.
And an interesting fact: did you guys know that although Reagan DID enact conservative policies which led to the collapse of the USSR and the Berlin Wall, they were opposed by a wide coalition? Not just American liberals and European pacifists, but also the American foreign policy establishment (led by George Shultz, who called Reagan a madman), NATO (yes, NATO) and many European governments. Every conservative policy he enacted – the military buildup, his anticommunist speeches, aid to Solidarity, sanctions against the USSR and Communist Poland, etc. – were opposed by this entire anti-Reagan coalition.
When Reagan delivered his “Mr Gorbachev, open this gate” speech, the only people who praised him were 1) his fellow Republicans 2) British Conservatives 3) members of his Administration (e.g. Caspar Weinberger).
So toppling the Soviet Empire was not an easy feat – NOT EVEN FOR REAGAN.
November 10th, 2009 at 2:52 amZbigniew:
The reason for the opposition to Reagan was because he denounced the Soviets in MORAL terms. Because so many people have accepted the tenets of socialism as a moral ideal, Reagan’s moral attacks were a direct attack on the self-esteem of those critics. That’s why the criticisms were not reasoned objections, but hysterical shrieks.
November 10th, 2009 at 7:43 amDuh One celebrated by laying a stack of bricks and a bag of cement at the site of the wall.
November 10th, 2009 at 8:52 amOne of the greatest things that Reagan did was to make a plan to WIN the cold war. All presidents up till that time only tried to contain the Soviets and their influence. If you are in a war, fight to WIN, not just hold the line. Reagan proved that it can be done; it is about time for the current leaders to follow the same idea.
“Politics is supposed to be the second oldest profession. I have come to realize that it bears a very close resemblance to the first.” Ronald Reagan
November 10th, 2009 at 9:28 amRichard,
We no longer fight wars. We engage in silly projectionist pipe dreams ala Woodrow Wilson where EVERYBODY can have democracy and EVERYBODY is able to live like civilized western society and oh yeah, we are going to send our people in to your country with the rules of engagement like local police officers in our towns and treat enemy soldiers like shoplifters. Then spend billions of dollars of our money to rebuild your wretched country and the thanks you will give us is elect leaders that then ally themselves with our other enemies. (best example of this is Ajad walking the red carpet to met with Malaki in Bagdad).
Wars are fought to kill people, break things, and break the will of the enemy to fight back. Last war we fought was Korea.
November 10th, 2009 at 10:38 amRichard,
The idea of “rollback” was formally abandoned by a Republican President when Ike descibed Nagy and his freedom fighters in Budapest in 1956 as “a faraway people we know little about.”
Reagan did have the vision to seek victory in the Cold War. Part of the reason for that courage was his moral certitude that not only was communism evil, but that evil cannot long triumph.
We need to remember that lesson as we are engulfed by the evils being visited upon us by today’s socialists. Man would never have gotten out of the caves if evil were truly potent. Today’s socialists may push us back into the caves in their attempt to extinguish the lights of civilization, but they only have the power to destroy, not the power to create.
The power to create is on our side. Because of that, we will prevail in the long run. Reagan knew it. And we need to remember it today in this dark hour.
November 10th, 2009 at 10:43 amFormaja:
What you are saying is mostly true. But the problem is on our side. If George W. Bush had treated the Democrats (not to mention the Islamofascists) the way Obama and Pelosi are treating us today, we would have fought a real war in Iraq and Afghanistan (and probably Iran) that would have crushed the enemy.
Of course, Bush was checkmated by two critical facts.
One, he wanted to appear “compassionate,” which to a socialist means you sacrifice yourself to your enemies. Check.
And two, he also did not dare to attack Islam because he wrongly believed that Christian Conservatives would have been unable to distinguish between the murderous brutes trying to kill us and the people in America who go to church on Sunday. Check – mate.
Yes the Democrats’ opposition our military actions in the Middle East was treasonous. But that treasonous opposition could not have succeeded without the cooperation and endorsement of the Bush Administration.
It really is Bush’s fault….just not for the reasons the Left states.
November 10th, 2009 at 10:52 amEd,
WOW!! Someone else who gets it that is on my side, way cool
That is one of the main problems we have in the west. As civilized people we cannot fathom the brutality and everyday lives of
msot of the planet. Nor the fact that in most cases they live this way by choice.
So when for instance in Fallujah when the enemy killed four contractors who were there to secure a food shipment to feed them! And they proceeded to kill and dismember them and then dance in the street. The correct response is to level the entire town. Leave nothing standing! However, our response was to send our poor soldiers in there with their hand tied going “house to house” in search of “the bad guys”. THE WHOLE CITY WAS THE BAD GUYS!
We of course had to go in there I believe FOUR TIMES to “clean out insurgents”. These operations of course cost the United States over 100 more men.
We have an Air Force for what exactly? I forget, apparently so did Bush.
November 10th, 2009 at 11:03 amYes Formaja, I think we pretty much agree.
“We engage in silly projectionist pipe dreams ala Woodrow Wilson where EVERYBODY can have democracy and EVERYBODY is able to live like civilized western society…”
The key thing missing is an understanding that Western values, like anything else, have to be earned. Bush believed he could give them away in exactly the same kind of welfare payment that the Left thinks will make poor people in America rich. Welfare is no more effective on the spiritual level than the material level. Our side needs to learn that lesson, particularly the social conservatives.
You continued:
“Then spend billions of dollars of our money to rebuild your wretched country and the thanks you will give us is elect leaders that then ally themselves with our other enemies.”
More welfare, coupled with the explicit socialist idea that being compassionate means sacrificing yourself and your interests to your enemies.
Bush was as thorough a welfare statist as Obama and Pelosi. He just was able to hide it better – which is precisely why I have been arguing in other threads that Republican Soclialists are far more dangerous than Democratic Socialists. Bush’s domestic welfare statism was not an anomoly of his character – it was his deepest sense of self.
November 10th, 2009 at 11:30 amEd,
“The reason for the opposition to Reagan was because he denounced the Soviets in MORAL terms.” – it wasn’t just because of that, but also because:
1) Reagan stood for a strong defense, an America-first foreign policy and patriotic ideals;
2) Practically, his plan to topple the Soviet empire was likely to succeed (and did), and the collapse of the Soviet empire was a terrible trauma to socialists like Obama, Pelosi, Ted Kennedy, John Kerry, Harry Reid, Oprah, Jack Nicholson, Harrison Ford and Jimmy Carter.
American socialists owed their allegiance to the Soviet Union – not the US. So they would’ve never endorsed any practical policy that would be likely to topple the Soviet regime.
November 10th, 2009 at 4:06 pmZbigniew:
Far more effective than the defense buildup or any of the other practical steps Reagan took was his moral condemnation of the Soviet Union. Of course such moral condemnations would have been meaningless if not backed up with corresponding actions. But calling the Soviet Union and “Evil Empire” and telling Mr. Gorbachec that if he really sought peace to “open up this gate…and tear down this wall” were far more devasting blows than anything else that Reagan (or anyone else) did to topple the Soviet Union.
If anyone needs further evidence to support that point, just go out and find a liberal and tell him/her how evil they are for pointing guns at people who disagree with them. It has a much different effect on the liberal than if you tell him/her that their proposals will lead to poverty and misery – or that they will lead to electoral defeat (both of which are true for the health care bill). They will not care about either of the latter on anything close to the level that they will the moral condemnation.
November 10th, 2009 at 5:00 pmAnother thing about Reagan is he took the old statemment “I am a Roman Citizen”. This basically meant back then that if you killed that person the might of the Roman Empire would descend upon you and level everything in its path.
Case in point, Libya being responsible for the death of I believe one or two US soldiers in a bar in Germany. Our response, destroying most of their air force, and bombing their leaderships home, mising Quadaffi but killing members of his family. Exactly what is supposed to have happened.
Guess what, he never did anything like that again.
Fast forward to present day, Iran says they want to kill us on a daily basis. Provides material comfort to others, and oh yeah is directly responsible for the deaths of at least 500 soldiers on Iraq.
And yet Theran still stands doesn’t it.
November 10th, 2009 at 5:39 pmWell, as much as I extol Reagan’s efforts for denuouncing the evils of communism, let’s not get carried away.
283 Marines were murdered by Islamic militants in 1983, and Reagan responded by withdrawing from Lebanon.
Reagan armed the same Islamic theocrats that are today trying to kill us, just because they were fighting the (atheistic) Soviets.
Even though the theocrats in Tehran had released the hostages upon Reagan’s inauguration, it’s not like he did anything to pubish them. The fact that they humiliated Jimmy Carter did not change the fact that they also humiliated America – and they paid no price.
So Reagan got a lot right and deserves loads of credit – but the whole Roman Citizen thing is a little carried away.
November 10th, 2009 at 7:30 pmEd is wrong about 2 issues:
1) Reagan’s moral sermons. They would’ve been irrelevant if not backed by the DOD, and it’s not them that determined the fate of the Berlin Wall. It was the Reagan military buildup (and the corresponding buildup of the British military conducted by Thatcher) that caused the collapse of the Berlin Wall and the USSR, which recognized (by the 1980s) that it could not win the arms race nor the Cold War.
November 11th, 2009 at 2:20 am2) Yes, Reagan did withdraw American troops from Lebanon – but that was the RIGHT decision. Reagan made a mistake by sending them to Lebanon in the first instance. That 283 Marines were killed was not a reason to prolong the intervention, but to withdraw American troops from Lebanon. And this intervention was yet ANOTHER example of the defects of America’s foreign policy. Even during the Cold War, the USA’s foreign policy allowed most of America’s allies to free-ride on the backs of American soldiers and caused unnecessary war adventures, the most notorious of which was the Vietnamese war. The situation has become significantly worse SINCE the USSR collapsed. This issue is addressed in a book that I’m currently writing.
With respect to whether Reagan’s moral denunciations or his military buildup was more responsible for the defeat of communism, one need look only at the facts today with regard to the GWOT to see the overwhelming sway of morality.
Even with the draw down in military supplies over the past 8 years (and the 8 years of Clinton before that), no serious person can believe that any of the Middle East fascists has the military capability of defeating the United States militarily on the battlefield. The same is true with the Israelis and the Palestinians/Arabs – and the Israelis have routed their adversaries on the battlefield every time there has been a formal war.
Our adversaries know this, just as our Leftist adversaries at home know this. They seek to defeat us by means of moral corruption, just as the Palestinians and Arabs do to the Israelis. They know they cannot win a gunfight unless they create enough moral doubt as to make their superiorly armed Western enemy be unwilling to use its superior firepower.
That is why Reagan’s moral condemnations were so powerful. The Soviets knew for years that their military was inferior to America’s – and that their only hope was a combination of bluffing and sowing enough moral self-doubt that America would not exercise its full capacities and military advantage. Reagan’s moral denunciations were his way of telling them that those tactics may have worked on other American Cold War presidents, but that they would not work on him.
Moreover, communism is, in fact, evil. Communist rulers point guns at their domestic slaves and attempt to drown them in propaganda to the contrary that purports to transform that slavery into something virtuous for the society at large – in much the same way the Leftist at home are telling us today that the current health care bill’s enslavement of doctors, insurance salesmen, pharmaceutical scientists and taxpayers is somehow for some alleged greater good. Reagan’s moral condemnation and withdrawal of sanction for that evil not only had a devastating blow on the rulers, but also a correspondingly positive effect on the victims of communist slavery. Reagan’s support for Solidarity in Poland, and his insistence on funding things such as Radio Free Europe, helped create the domestic conditions in which the enslaved populations demanded freedom during the 1980s. Without that moral support, the conditions for revolution in the East might well have disspitated in the same way the ones in Iran today are being disspiated. If someone like Reagan were in the Whiote House today, moral support from America would in contrast further embolden the popular uprising in Iran today, just as it did in Eastern Europe – and strong moral support coupled with military support almost certainly would have led to the toppling of the Islamic theocracy this summer.
But Ronald Reagan is no longer in the White House, and the current occupant is doing everything he can to destroy whatever remnants of Reagan’s spirit still remain there and demoralize us, just as Jimmy Carter did before Reagan. And Obama’s attack is a unified and coordinated assault that is consistent in both its foreign and domestic policy implementations. He is seeking to morally condemn self-interest across the board, whether it’s in regard to you judging for yourself whether you want to purchase health insurance, to companies that are guilty of the sin of earning a profit for themselves, to America’s alleged “over-consumption” of the world’s resources irrespective of the fact that we are the world’s largest producers too, to his wordlwide apology tour that ignores the fact that our military has never been used for conquest but only for liberation. He seeks to morally condemn our success every time he opens his mouth – and it is having the exact opposite effect of Reagan’s moral self-confidence, even before the next terrorist attack hits us.
November 11th, 2009 at 7:10 am