This is now recognised as World War 3.
And the West were the good guys again
- the defenders of freedom against tyranny again.
And the West won again.
And tyranny was defeated again.
Clip from Miracle Mile.
What would you do if you were told in the middle of the night
that nuclear missiles were on their way?
See how to buy it.
Anti-communism
McCarthy
is absurdly demonised.
McCarthy's vision was that American leftists were
working for the evil Soviets
to overthrow America,
that they were funded by Moscow,
spied for Moscow,
and tried to infiltrate all walks of American life
with the aim of destroying American democracy
and freedom and liberty,
and replacing it with brutal totalitarianism.
We laugh at this today,
but it was, of course, true.
The VENONA project
has since revealed that much of what McCarthy said was true.
"'I'm an old-time liberal and I don't apologize for it,' Clooney told Newsweek.
Good for him. And certainly, regardless of how liberal he is, he's 'old-time'.
I don't mean in the sense that he has the gloss of an old-time movie star, ...
but that his politics is blessedly undisturbed by any developments
on the global scene since circa 1974."
"To take one example that could stand for Clooney's entire approach to the subject,
Good Night includes shocking scenes of Senator McCarthy accusing
Annie Moss,
who worked in a highly sensitive decoding job in the Pentagon, of being a Communist,
and the heroic Edward R Murrow then denouncing McCarthy's behavior.
But we now know, from the party's own files, that Miss Moss was, indeed, a Communist.
What should we conclude from the absence of this detail in the picture?
That Clooney ... simply doesn't know she's a Commie?
Or that he does know but that he thinks it's harmless?"
Iowahawk, 14 Jan 2009, slags off Hollywood's obsession with McCarthy.
In a fictional list of upcoming movies he includes:
"Silenced 1984: Acclaimed documentary filmmaker Errol Morris interviews the survivors of Hollywood's notorious Reagan-era 'Year of Fear,' when only three McCarthy-themed movies were released."
McCarthy spent 1950 to his death in 1957 furiously warning Americans of the dangers of
Communist subversion.
He was disgraced in 1954, and few listened to him after that.
In 1963, a Communist subversive assassinated the American President.
Aldrich Ames
betrayed America's agents in the Soviet Union,
and they were executed in 1985-88
under the dictator Gorbachev.
Gorbachev won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1990.
Gerald Bull
worked for Saddam's Iraq until his assassination.
Jimmy Carter
- The high water mark of Soviet expansion and western retreat
Jimmy Carter,
US President 1977-81,
a weak president under whom communism achieved its maximum strength.
A dark, bleak time for American power
and human freedom.
Young, an African-American, called Ian Smith, leader of white Rhodesia,
a "monster"
for not allowing blacks to vote. (*)
And yet the trick, as always, is to replace the Tsar with someone better,
not someone 100 times worse.
About the Communist butcher Mugabe, Young said:
"I find that I am fascinated by his intelligence, by his dedication. The only thing that frustrates me about Robert Mugabe is that he is so damned incorruptible."
He called Mugabe
"a very gentle man"
and helped him come to power.
A Russian refugee
arrives in Carter's America
- "When we arrived in Jimmy Carter's America in June of 1977,
we wondered if we hadn't made a terrible, terrible mistake.
Worse than the crime and the unemployment and the inflation
.. was the nearly tangible malaise and sense of hopelessness.
We arrived in a country that clearly felt that it was losing the Cold War.
We were in a nation whose spirit was breaking."
But the American voters, in
one of the greatest decisions ever,
threw out Carter in a 44 state landslide,
and hope came back again:
"It was Ronald Reagan, above all others, who restored our hope and refreshed our spirit,
as he did for millions of other Americans looking for a reason to believe in their country again.
Through his words, his palpable confidence, his obvious and infectious love for this nation
and its people, Reagan lifted us from our knees and onto our feet.
The great American experiment rested on a knife's edge in 1980 and Ronald Reagan,
largely by sheer force of will, called upon the nation to work with him to assure
that it did not fail. And the nation rallied to his call him as it has rarely done
for any leader before or since."
Jeane Kirkpatrick's famous speech in 1984:
"Jimmy Carter looked for an explanation for all these problems and thought he found it
in the American people.
But the people knew better.
It wasn't malaise we suffered from; it was Jimmy Carter - and Walter Mondale.
And so, in 1980, the American people elected a very different president.
The election of Ronald Reagan marked an end to the dismal period of retreat and decline."
Ted Kennedy's Soviet Gambit, 28 Aug 2009.
"When President Reagan chose to confront the Soviet Union, calling it the evil empire that it was, Sen. Edward Kennedy chose to offer aid and comfort to General Secretary Andropov."
Ted Kennedy and the KGB, Jamie Glazov interviews Paul Kengor, May 15, 2008, on Kennedy's offer.
"Kennedy was deeply troubled by the deteriorating relationship between the United States and the Soviet Union ... Kennedy .. blamed this situation not on the Soviet leadership but on the American president - Ronald Reagan. Not only was the USSR not to blame, but, said Chebrikov, Kennedy was, quite the contrary, "very impressed" with Andropov."
As Jamie Glazov says, no one is interested:
"One can just imagine finding a document like this on an American Republican senator having made a similar offer to the Nazis. Kennedy has gotten away with this. What do you think this says about our culture, the parameters of debate and who controls the boundaries of discourse?"
"General Secretary Gorbachev,
if you seek peace, if you seek prosperity
for the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, if you seek liberalization:
Come here to this gate! Mr. Gorbachev, open this gate! Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!"
- Ronald Reagan
at the Berlin Wall, 1987.
He was ridiculed for this speech, too.
Two years later, the wall was down.
Ronald Reagan,
the Soviet Union's most deadly enemy.
The man who won the Cold War for the free world.
The man who destroyed communism.
Russian Revolution:
How Reagan won the cold war
by Dinesh D'Souza
- Reagan, not Gorbachev, won the cold war.
"In the Cold War, Reagan turned out to be our Churchill: it was his vision and leadership that led us to victory."
The film
In the Face of Evil: Reagan's War in Word and Deed.
"He freed a billion slaves from their Communist masters... This is the story of that achievement: of one man's triumph during the bloodiest and most barbaric century in mankind's history: the 20th century."
Dutch Courage
- Mark Steyn's obituary of Reagan.
How Reagan ended the appalling idea of "detente".
"the Presidents and Prime Ministers of the free world had decided that the unfree world
was not a prison ruled by a murderous ideology that had to be defeated
but merely an alternative lifestyle that had to be accommodated.
...
Unlike these men, unlike most other senior Republicans, Ronald Reagan saw Soviet Communism
for what it was: a great evil.
...
That's what counts. He brought down the "evil empire", and all the rest is fine print."
Reagan predicts the end of the Soviet Union
and describes it as "The Evil Empire":
Reagan in 1977
- "My theory of the Cold War is that we win and they lose."
Speech at University of Notre Dame, 1981.
He predicts - as no one
else did at the time - that the Soviet Union would end:
"The West won't contain communism, it will transcend communism.
..
it will dismiss it as some bizarre chapter in human history
whose last pages are even now being written."
Speech to the House of Commons, 1982
(and short version).
He predicts - again, as no one else did - that the Soviet Union would end:
"In an ironic sense Karl Marx was right. We are witnessing today a great revolutionary crisis
... But the crisis is happening not in the free, non-Marxist West,
but in the home of Marxist-Leninism, the Soviet Union.
It is the Soviet Union that runs against the tide of history
by denying human freedom and human dignity to its citizens.
...
What I am describing now is a plan and a hope for the long term
- the march of freedom and democracy which will leave Marxism-Leninism on the ash-heap of history"
Within a decade, the Soviet world collapsed
and Marxism-Leninism was on the ash-heap of history.
The prisoners' conscience
by Natan Sharansky
- "We dissidents were ecstatic. Finally, the leader of the free world had spoken the truth
- a truth that burned inside the heart of each and every one of us."
Interview
with Natan Sharansky
- ".. the great brilliant moment when we learned that Ronald Reagan had proclaimed
the Soviet Union an Evil Empire before the entire world. There was a long list of
all the Western leaders who had lined up to condemn the evil Reagan for daring
to call the great Soviet Union an evil empire ...
This was the moment. It was the brightest, most glorious day.
Finally a spade had been called a spade. Finally, Orwell's Newspeak was dead.
...
For us, that was the moment that really marked the end for them, and the beginning for us.
The lie had been exposed and could never, ever be untold now.
This was the end of Lenin's "Great October Bolshevik Revolution"
and the beginning of a new revolution, a freedom revolution
- Reagan's Revolution."
What the left said about Reagan in the 1980s
- "Primitive: that is the only word for it.
... What is the world to think when the greatest of powers is led by a man who applies
to the most difficult human problem a simplistic theology
- one in fact rejected by most theologians?"
There They Go Again
- Dinesh D'Souza on Reagan's critics - proved wrong by history.
Damjan de Krnjevic-Miskovic
- "Ronald Reagan, then -
for us who were born in tyranny -
will always be remembered
as the man who gave us back our free will."
Reagan, religion and "intelligence"
Reagan (like all the American religious conservatives) is a flawed hero.
The opposition to communism -
like the opposition to Nazi fascism and Islamic fascism -
is a coalition of
all lovers of freedom, of all faiths and none.
But Reagan does not see this,
and excludes people of no faith.
See again his
speech to the National Association of Evangelicals,
Orlando, 1983.
Maybe we can forgive the American religious conservatives, though,
because if judged by results at least,
they did not actually establish a religious tyranny in the US,
while they did defeat the communist tyranny.
Reagan's visionary "Star Wars" technology has continued to advance,
and pretty soon it may become impossible to attack the US with missiles
(it is already impossible to attack it with an air force, navy
or ground army).
Soon it may
only be possible to attack the US through stealth
- an attack like 9/11 delivered by apparent civilians already in the US.
The ultimate nightmare is
a nuke smuggled in on truck or ship
and detonated.
This remains a very real threat.
I am old enough to remember the left's hatred of Reagan in the 1980s.
And now I realise they were wrong.
If we had followed the advice of the liberal left in the Cold War,
the Soviets would still be in power today.
How can anyone doubt that this would be the case.
An interesting claim that Charen makes
is that in all of world history,
communists have never won a single election.
Every single communist government ever was imposed by force.
No people ever
freely chose a communist government in open elections.
Today, American and Israeli embassies are besieged
by the same sort of moral cripple.
Chinese, Cuban,
Iranian and North Korean embassies are left alone.
Ch.19 of [Schweizer, 2002]
is a long list of the Soviet support and funding
that we now know was
given to Western European "anti-war" groups in the 1980s.
Without the knowledge of most of the marchers, yes.
But it is disturbing that the democidal Soviet tyranny
wanted to see the "anti-war" movement succeed.
That alone should make one think there is something wrong with the movement.
The unelected communist dictator
Gorbachev
won the Nobel Peace Prize
in 1990
for letting some of his slaves go.
Reagan, who forced him to, got nothing.
The West German leader
Willy Brandt
won the Nobel Peace Prize
in 1971
for his appeasement of the Soviet Union.
Reagan, who actually liberated Eastern Europe, got nothing.
US President
Jimmy Carter,
under whom world socialism achieved its maximum strength,
won the Nobel Peace Prize
in 2002.
Reagan, who reversed Carter's policies
and led the free world to victory, got nothing.
The Gipper and the Hedgehog:
How an "amiable dunce" outsmarted the world
by Glenn Garvin.
Genrikh Grofimenko, former adviser to Brezhnev,
says clearly that it was Reagan who defeated the Soviets.
"Grofimenko marvels that the Nobel Peace Prize went to "the greatest flimflam man of all time,"
Mikhail Gorbachev, while Western intellectuals ignore Reagan
- who, he says, "was tackling world gangsters of the first order of magnitude.""
Lucky Dimwit?
by John O'Sullivan
- I remember well how, as he describes,
the fashionable circles
"seized on Gorbachev as a way of denying Reagan or the West any credit for the
liberation of half a continent".
I fell for this line myself.
We all worshipped Gorbachev
- the unelected communist dictator.
It took me years to realise that it was Reagan
who ended the Cold War
and saved the world.
The Stalin Peace Prize,
later re-named the Lenin Peace Prize.
That's right, a "peace" prize named after two genocidal butchers.
Recipients of this disgusting award include:
Picasso, Hewlett Johnson, Pablo Neruda,
Paul Robeson, Bertolt Brecht, W.E.B. DuBois, Fidel Castro,
Nelson Mandela, Linus Pauling and Angela Davis.
The Al-Gaddafi International Prize for Human Rights
continues a similar shameful tradition.
Recipients of this disgusting award include:
Nelson Mandela, Louis Farrakhan, Fidel Castro, Evo Morales, Roger Garaudy,
Hugo Chavez and Mahathir bin Mohamad.
Apparently,
Brezhnev
and
Andropov
were behind
the shooting of the Pope,
because they were afraid of the threat he posed
to their tyrannical rule in Europe.
Reagan had descended into Alzheimer's by the time of 9/11,
so we never got to hear what he thought of George W. Bush,
and the War against Islamic Fascism.
But I think he would have seen that at last -
after George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton -
he now had a true heir.
I am old enough to remember how the left - and much of the world -
hated Reagan in the 1980s.
It was just like Bush today.
Both were demonised, hated, and ridiculed as stupid and ignorant
in all fashionable circles.
Why were they hated?
Because they stood up to tyranny, and tried to destroy it,
instead of accepting it.
Bush, 2004,
asked about anti-American jerks protesting against him in France,
the country America liberated.
He is wonderfully blunt.
At a time when Reagan, the winner of the Cold War, has just died,
and people in Europe are pretending that they never hated him,
Bush remembers how it really was:
"I remember my predecessor, whose life we mourn, Ronald Reagan.
They felt the same way about him."
And Bush's place in history will be similar to Reagan's.
The Last Laugh? Wait for the History Books
by Max Boot
- "Listening to the endless encomiums to Ronald Reagan, many from people who once derided him,
I couldn't help wonder whether some day George W. Bush would receive similar tributes
from his current enemies.
...
The similarities with George W. Bush are uncanny."
Let Bush Be Reagan
by Frank J. Gaffney Jr
- "President Bush today confronts in Europe much the same hostility that
President Reagan experienced from the very peoples who had, only a generation or two before,
been saved by American-led armies
- and, in a sense, for much the same reason."
"When Reagan stood before the Brandenburg Gate
- and the Berlin Wall
- and demanded that Gorbachev "tear down this Wall," he was lampooned the next day
on the editorial pages. He is a dreamer, wrote commentators. Realpolitik looks different.
But history has shown that it wasn't Reagan who was the dreamer as he voiced his demand.
Rather, it was German politicians who were lacking in imagination
- a group who in 1987 couldn't imagine that there might be an alternative to a divided Germany."
Europeans just don't believe in the project of
bringing democracy to the whole world:
"Even German conservatives find the idea that Arabic countries could transform themselves
into enlightened democracies somewhat absurd.
This, in fact, is likely the largest point of disagreement between Europe and the United States
...
Europeans today - just like the Europeans of 1987 -
cannot imagine that the world might change."
"When analysts are confronted by real people, amazing things can happen.
... Maybe the people of Syria, Iran or Jordan will get the idea in their heads to free
themselves from their oppressive regimes just as the East Germans did.
When the voter turnout in Iraq recently exceeded that of many Western nations,
the chorus of critique from Iraq alarmists was, at least for a couple of days, quieted.
Just as quiet as the chorus of Germany experts on the night of Nov. 9, 1989 when the Wall fell.
Just a thought for Old Europe to chew on: Bush might be right, just like Reagan was then."
Obama says:
"Few people would have predicted that an American President would one day be permitted to speak to an audience like this in Prague. And few would have imagined that the Czech Republic would become a free nation, a member of NATO, and a leader of a united Europe. Those ideas would have been dismissed as dreams."
As Iain Martin
says:
"Not by Ronald Reagan they wouldn't have been, when most of Obama's Democrat friends thought the then US President's robust approach to the Cold War made him a loony on the loose."
Obama says:
"We are here today because enough people ignored the voices who told them that the world could not change. We are here today because of the courage of those who stood up - and took risks - to say that freedom is a right for all people".
Would he even name-check Reagan at this point?
No, of course not.
Because that would make him a different person.
They called Reagan an idiot too, in the 1980s, just like W.
And yet Reagan brought down the Soviet Union.
Who looks stupid now,
Spitting Image?
And here
and search:
1989, when the Russian Empire fell in Europe,
was the greatest year for human liberty and human rights since
the fall of the German and Japanese Empires in 1945.
1989 - The greatest year in my lifetime.
The fall of the vile Russian Empire in Europe.
Thank you, Ronald Reagan! Thank you!
From here.
The song
Wind of Change (1990)
by Scorpions.
From here.
Lyrics:
"Take me to the magic of the moment
on a glory night ..."
I suspect Scorpions' politics are poorly thought-out,
and they are unlikely to give credit to Reagan and the U.S. for these events,
and the video has some dodgy parts,
but never mind.
It was such a happy year.
A year when the
Putins
of this world got put in their place.
1989 - A happy, happy year.
From here.
The song is "Wunder geschehen"
("Miracles happen")
by Nena
(1989).
"How many divisions has the Pope?"
- Stalin's mocking dismissal of Papal influence in Europe.
You know
what I think of the intellectual content of the Papacy,
but it still gives me great pleasure to
note that Stalin and his fascist works
are gone, and the Pope is still here.
Even more amusing, the key figures that brought about
this victory
were Reagan, Thatcher and
Pope John Paul II.
So Stalin could not have been more wrong.
The Pope destroyed Stalin's entire world,
and ended the communist experiment,
without a shot being fired.
Pope John Paul II has been hopeless on the Islamic threat,
but give him credit for this:
He stood up to the Evil Empire.
"millions of men and women ..
live in freedom today because of the policies he pursued.
Ronald Reagan had a higher claim than any other leader to have won the cold war for liberty"
- Thatcher
on the death of Reagan.
"Went to East Berlin. What a shithole.
...
What a load of fucking bollocks communism is.
...
Got the hell out of there.
Back home in the West.
My God we are so free.
I pity the poor bastards who have to live in that hole."
- My diary from a visit on my own
to communist East Berlin, 28 Sept 1986, when I was 18.
I was no neo-con back then.
Far from it.
I was typical liberal-left.
But it only took a few hours for me to see what living in East Berlin was like.
I have always felt privileged and grateful that I live in the West,
and I never felt it more than on that day.
Since 1995.
