Ronald Reagan - The man who won the Cold War
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.
National Review
The book Reagan's War: The Epic Story of His Forty Year Struggle and Final Triumph Over Communism, Peter Schweizer, 2002.
The book Ronald Reagan: How An Ordinary Man Became An Extraordinary Leader by Dinesh D'Souza, 1999.
Extracts
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."
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."
Freedom's Team: How Reagan, Thatcher and John Paul II won the Cold War by John Fund
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.
Speech to the National Association of Evangelicals, Orlando, Florida, 1983. He describes the Soviet Union as "the focus of evil in the modern world". He talks of "the aggressive impulses of an evil empire".
Reaction to the "Evil Empire" speech
Dissidents in the gulag hear the "Evil Empire" speech.
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."
Reagan was of course ridiculed by the western left for this description. Also here.
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.
The Axis of Evil
More Soviet dissidents
In Solidarity by Lech Walesa
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.
Intelligence and politics
The Simple Truth About Ronald Reagan: It took a while, but I finally realized the Gipper was a lot smarter than the folks who derided him. Folks like me. by Roger Franklin. - The threat of global nuclear holocaust is gone - thanks to him.
Missile defence
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.
The end of the Cold War
The "anti-war" protesters of the 1980s
Useful Idiots: How Liberals Got It Wrong in the Cold War (also here) by Mona Charen.
See extract and review.
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.
The Committee for No Defense (CND) by Alexis Amory and Michael P. Tremoglie
The left hated Reagan in the 1980s - article by Phil Craig. - The left was wrong in the 1980s. And it's wrong now.
The "anti-war" marchers never complained about Soviet wars. - Throughout the Cold War, all across Europe, American embassies were besieged by "anti-war" protesters. Soviet embassies were left alone.
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 modern "anti-war" protesters
The Paradox of the Fisks: The most criticised societies in the world will be the least criminal societies
The Nobel Peace Prize
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. See articles on Gorbachev.
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.
"All we are saying .. is give jihad a chance" - Michelle Malkin and Bryan Preston on some Nobel Peace Prize winners.
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.
Pope John Paul II
Mehmet Ali Agca and the shooting of the Pope in 1981.
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.
