Ronald Reagan ist tot - 500 Beiträge pro Seite

[Tschakka]

im Alter von 93.

[DerIslaender]

...besser wärs Geoge W. Bush wäre tot

[Heizkessel]

hätte nicht gedacht, daß es nach ihm einen präsidenten geben könne, den ich noch mehr hassen würde.

[KurtWarner]

Unvergessen seine Rede am 12. Juni 1987 in Berlin.

[DerIslaender]

Ronald Reagan gestorben
Sportreporter, Schauspieler, Präsident der Vereinigten Staaten: Ronald Reagan ist im Alter von 93 Jahren gestorben. Er erlag in seinem Haus in Bel Air bei Los Angeles seiner langjährigen Alzheimer-Krankheit. Das bestätigten Reagans Büro in Los Angeles und das Präsidialamt in Washington.

[superguergen]

TEAR THAT WALL DOWN

[wangert]

der könig ist tot,lang lebe der könig
mfg.wangert

[WirWerdenSiegen]

Heizkessel geh lieber schlafen


Das war eine "Gänsehaut Rede"...wenige danach haben dieses Charisma...diese Ausstrahlung gehabt und so eine Rhetorik.

Reagan haben wir den Fall der Mauer und das Ende des kommunismus zu verdanken.

ER hat durch das Wettrüsten die Kommunisten in den Bakrott getrieben !

Mein Respekt vor Reagan und meine Anerkennung..EIn grosser ist gegangen !!

Nur meine Meinung....

Ansonsten nicht vergessen 622360 kommenden Freitag geht es um 300 Millionen. Ronny wäre auf der richtigen Seite..

[Birk35]

Ein neuer Feiertag für alle Kommunisten?

[Knulp]

@ WirWerdenSiegen

Hey Hey Hey, Du kannst ja auch was sehr Vernünftiges und
Richtiges von Dir geben -> Respekt und


Gruß Knulp

[Steigerwälder]

Ronald Reagan

Der Präsident, der Amerika seinen Optimismus zurückgab

" Die Regierung ist nicht die Lösung des Problems, sie ist das Problem" , so Ronald Reagan in seiner Antrittsrede 1981. Acht Jahre später konnte er verkünden: " Wir haben die erste Revolution in der Geschichte der Menschheit gemacht, die tatsächlich den Kurs der Regierung umkehrte und zwar mit drei kleinen Worten: Wir, das Volk" .

Aus der Lethargie der Post-Vietnam-Ära führte Reagan die Vereinigten Staaten zu einem neuen Selbstbewußtsein und begründete mit seinen Reaganomics den größten Aufschwung, den das Land bis dahin gesehen hatte. Als wenn das nicht schon genug wäre, besiegte er auch den Kommunismus und brachte die Wiedervereinigung Deutschlands und Europas auf den Weg. Wie es aussieht, muß mit den großen Drei - Washington, Jefferson und Lincoln - künftig auch Reagan in einem Atemzug genannt werden.

Der Mann, der den " lächelnden Konservatismus" begründete weilt noch unter uns. Doch hat ihn eine schwere Alzheimer-Erkrankung mittlerweile vergessen lassen, wer er war und was er leistete. Dies mag mit dazu beitragen, daß er bereits zu seinen Lebzeiten in den Olymp der amerikanischen Politik gehoben wird.

Das ausgerechnet " Ronnie" oder " The Gipper" - nach einem seiner berühmtesten Filmhelden - mittlerweile zum Denkmal geworden ist, dürfte nicht nur an der beispielslosen Agenda seiner Amtszeit liegen. Ronald Reagan ist ein einfacher, im Grunde unpolitischer Mensch, der nur an drei Dinge in seinem Leben glaubte. An die Erwähltheit Amerikas, die Bosheit des Kommunismus und die Gnade Gottes. Auch im höchsten politischen Amt der USA, der mächtigsten Position in unserer Welt, bewahrte Ronald Reagan stets eine gesunde Distanz zu seiner Person und vor allem zum politischen Establishment.

Sein Optimismus und sein Humor werden dazu von einer Fähigkeit ergänzt, sich Dinge zu erfinden und an ihre Wirklichkeit zu glauben. Damit verkörpert Ronald Reagan wie kein zweiter den Geist Amerikas.

[Heizkessel]

und ich dachte immer, helmut kohl hätte die mauer eigenhändig eingerissen.

[KinskiKlaus]

Die letzten Jahre seines Lebens dürfte er nicht mal mehr gewusst haben was ein Präsident überhaupt ist. Oder wer er ist.

[ConnorMcLoud]

Der letzte kalte Krieger.
Ohne ihn und seine damaligen Kraftsprüche gegen Gorbatschow
wäre die Mauer wohl eher gefallen.

[kniebeisser]

Connor Du Ar***

[Punk24]

gebt mal die Begriffe "IRAN" und "CONTRA" bei google ein

ansonsten hat Heizkessel in #3 formuliert, was auch ich denke.

[raubritterloulou]

Der Mann hatte damals als Präsident schon Alzheimer und war eine vorgeschobene Marionette seiner machthungrigen Auftraggeber!!!!!!!!!!!

[Fuller81]

Iran-Contra-Affäre
aus Wikipedia, der freien Enzyklopädie

Die Iran-Contra-Affäre, in Anlehnung an die Watergate-Affäre auch Irangate genannt, war ein politischer Skandal während der Amtszeit von US-Präsident Ronald Reagan. Er wurde aufgedeckt in den Monaten Oktober und November des Jahres 1986. Von der Reagan-Administration wurden Einnahmen aus geheimen Waffenverkäufen an den Iran an die rechtsgerichteten Contras in Nicaragua weitergeleitet, um sie bei ihrem Kampf gegen die sandinistische Regierung zu unterstützen. Zum einen war diese Unterstützung ein Verstoß gegen einen Kongressbeschluss, zum anderen waren diese Gelder zum Freikauf amerikanischer Geiseln im Libanon vorgesehen. Die USA wurden vom Internationalen Gerichtshof in Den Haag schuldig gesprochen wegen militärischer und paramilitärischer Aktivitäten in und gegen Nicaragua. Obwohl die USA Richter zu dem Gericht entsandten, erklärte die Regierung, das internationale Gericht habe keine Befugnis, über die USA zu urteilen. In einer Resolution forderte die Generalversammlung der Vereinten Nationen die USA auf, das Gerichtsurteil anzuerkennen. Nur die USA, Israel und El Salvador stimmten gegen die Resolution. Nachdem die Regierung Nicaraguas gestürzt wurde und die USA drohten, Hilfszahlungen an das Land einzustellen, gab die Nachfolgeregierung alle Ansprüche aus dem Urteil auf.

Inwieweit Präsident Reagan und Vizepräsident Bush (sen.)[/b][/b] in die Iran-Contra-Affäre verwickelt waren, konnte durch die beauftragte Untersuchungskommission nie geklärt werden. Reagan selbst machte keine Aussagen dazu und erklärt immer, er könne sich an nichts erinnern. Donald Rumsfeld war zu Zeiten der Affäre spezieller Beauftrager für den Mittleren Osten.

Andere wichtige Personen in dem Skandal: Oliver North, John Poindexter, Robert McFarlane


http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iran-Contra-Aff%E4re

[QCOM]

#16, #18 - eindimensional wie eigentlich immer.

#14, #17 - so dumm, daß es schon weh tut.

Ich vermisse Kompetentes zu den Themen Reagonomics und sowjetischer Staatsbankrott und Rüstung.

Was hier bisher zu Reagan zu lesen war, ist mit Ausnahme von #11 ziemlich dürftig. Der Mann hat wirklich mehr verdient als die Einzeiler von Einzellern.

[Punk24]

jede Diktatur braucht leute wie dich QCOM

[nichtdie]

Jedes Irrenhaus braucht leute wie dich, Punky

[QCOM]

#20
erstklassiges Niveau ... so differenziert und kenntnisreich ... und alles in einem völlig unaufgeregten und freundlichen Ton

An Dir ist wirklich ein "great communicator" verloren gegangen

[spicault]

The Great Liberator
Reagan understood why men must be free.

By Damjan de Krnjevic-Miskovic

It`s likely that, by the time Ronald Reagan passed away this Saturday, he had long forgotten what he accomplished in this world. But his was a great life, and the world will never forget his speeches and his deeds.

For the nations that lived under Communist tyranny, Ronald Reagan was great because he spoke unadorned truths. He understood what eluded the convoluted reasoning of cosmopolitan sophisticates and progressives on both sides of the Iron Curtain: that the Communist system was evil; that it was impossible to pursue happiness fully under tyranny; that the continued existence of the Soviet bloc was an existential threat to the United States and the principles for which it stands; and, most importantly, that by the time he was elected president, it was both possible and prudent to actively work toward the USSR`s destruction. "Peace through strength" was the phrase, and he knew that life in a world at peace in liberty would be better than one at peace in tyranny. And that made all the difference.

Reagan was often attacked for offering simple solutions to complex problems. Sometimes his critics were right. But on the fundamental questions, he was the correct one: His answers, and his views, were not simple in the sense of simple-minded. They were simple in the sense that they were clear. Evil was evil. Tyranny was tyranny. Freedom was freedom.

It matters little that most people in the former Soviet Union and elsewhere in the old Soviet sphere were materially, perhaps even spiritually, better off in the last decade of Communism than they are now. What matters is that Reagan believed, correctly, that we, subjects of Communist regimes, could never determine our own destiny while we lived under the hammer and the sickle. That many of us have, since the fall of Communism, chosen to live hedonistically and immoderately, is understandable — for a life dedicated to virtuous actions cannot be lived without the necessary equipment: namely, the habits we can hope to acquire in a regime where citizens can live in ordered liberty. Reagan understood that liberal democracy was such a regime — he famously termed it "the last best hope of man on earth" — in part because commerce could flourish throughout the land. With commerce comes prosperity, with prosperity comes the possibility to live leisurely, liberally, and thus acquire the security to accept the responsibility of ruling, and to be ruled in turn. And then, understanding all that, Reagan used the prosperity of America to destroy a regime dedicated to the proposition that its governing principle led to prosperity, to the "workers` paradise," to the "dictatorship of the proletariat."

Ronald Reagan, then — for us who were born in tyranny — will always be remembered as the man who gave us back our free will. When he challenged Gorbachev in 1987 to tear down the Berlin Wall, he knew that tyranny could not hold itself up without that physical symbol of the Iron Curtain. He understood that the Berlin Wall was an essential pillar of Communist tyranny in Europe.

Reagan understood — and, most importantly, acted on — this understanding: that dictatorship in the name of anything was slavery, and that freedom in the pursuit of happiness was indispensable. That the American people elected him to the only office in which he could help liberate us from tyranny is a testament to their good character as a nation, and a testament to the nobility of the regime that formed them.

We will not forget Reagan`s courage to accord his deeds as president with the principles upon which his country was founded, for he helped bring a rebirth of freedom to the world. He helped ensure that, as Lincoln said so perfectly, "government of the people, by the people, for the people shall not perish from the earth."

Goodbye, Mr. President, liberator of nations. We look up at the heavens with confidence that, as you have "slipped the surly bonds of earth," you now "touch the face of God."

— Damjan de Krnjevic-Miskovic, born in the Socialist Federative Republic of Yugoslavia, is managing editor of The National Interest and senior fellow at the Institute on Religion and Public Policy.

[spicault]

No Accidental Leader
Reagan embodied courage, prudence, justice, and wisdom.

By Lee Edwards

Ronald Reagan was not an accidental leader. He possessed certain personal characteristics that set him apart from other seemingly as talented and ambitious men and women. Physically, he had remarkable vitality and stamina. He did not need energizer batteries to keep going through crises and challenges that would have hospitalized the rest of us.

Mentally, he was able to penetrate quickly to the heart of a matter and to shift from issue to issue with little apparent effort.

Philosophically, he had a set of core beliefs from which he rarely strayed. He did not hesitate to go against the popular grain if he thought it was in the best interests of America.

And he was a leader, a historic leader, because he embodied the four essential qualities of leadership — courage, prudence, justice, and wisdom.

First, courage. Who can forget that when he was shot on March 30, 1981, President Reagan seemed to spend most of his time reassuring everyone that he was not seriously hurt (although he nearly died from a would-be assassin`s bullet)?

When Nancy first saw her wounded husband in the trauma room at George Washington University Hospital, he greeted her by saying, "Honey, I forgot to duck." As his bed was wheeled into the operating room, the president caught sight of his distraught aides Ed Meese, Jim Baker, and Mike Deaver, and asked with a wink, "Who`s minding the store?" As he was being prepared for surgery, Reagan looked up at the assembled surgeons and quipped, "I hope you`re all Republicans." "Today," responded one doctor, "everyone`s a Republican."

Reflecting on the attempted assassination, Time magazine columnist Hugh Sidey wrote that "the stuff of successful leadership is finally an accumulation of adversities bluntly confronted and firmly mastered."

President Reagan exhibited political courage when he disregarded the conventional wisdom that called for a tax increase in a time of economic downturn and instead pushed hard for tax cuts in his Economic Recovery Tax Act of 1981. Newsweek called the act a "second New Deal potentially as profound in its import as the first was a half century ago." Within a year, the president`s tax reform had ignited an unparalleled period of economic growth in the 1980s and is a major reason for the prosperity we enjoy today.

Reagan displayed courage in deciding that the policy of containment was not working and that the time had come not merely to contain Communism but to defeat it. In March 1983, he delivered a powerful one-two punch to Moscow, asserting that the Soviets were the masters "of an evil empire," and announcing the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI). More than any other single Reagan initiative, SDI signaled to the Soviets they could not win an arms race with America and persuaded them to sue for peace on the West`s terms.

With regard to the quality of prudence, consider the Reagan Doctrine. Rather than dispatch hundreds of airplanes and tens of thousands of troops around the world, President Reagan assisted pro-freedom anti-Communist forces in carefully selected key countries like Afghanistan, Nicaragua, Angola, and Cambodia.

The Reagan Doctrine was the most cost-effective of all the Cold War doctrines, costing the United States only an estimated half-billion dollars a year and yet forcing the cash-strapped Soviets to spend several times that amount to deflect the impact. The Doctrine resulted in a Soviet pullout from Afghanistan, the election of a democratic government in Nicaragua, and the removal of 40,000 Cuban troops from Angola and the holding of UN-monitored elections there.

Third, there is the quality of justice. Although it was not politically correct, President Reagan steadfastly defended the rights of every American from the moment of conception to that of natural death. He insisted that his administration did not have a separate social agenda, economic agenda, and foreign agenda. It had one agenda, based on the principles of limited government, individual freedom and responsibility, peace through strength, and Judeo-Christian values.

Fourth, there is the quality of wisdom — the ability to see and foresee what others cannot. Liberal historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr. declared after a 1982 visit to Moscow, "Those in the U.S. who think the Soviet Union is on the verge of economic and social collapse, ready with one small push to go over the brink, are ... only kidding themselves."

Two years later, the liberal establishment`s favorite economist, John Kenneth Galbraith, published a glowing appraisal of Soviet economics, explaining that "the Russian system succeeds because, in contrast to the Western industrial economies, it makes full use of its manpower." Was Professor Galbraith, in his praise of the Soviets` "full" use of manpower, referring to the Gulag?

While Schlesinger was pooh-poohing the possibility of a Soviet collapse and Galbraith was praising the Soviets for their "efficient" use of manpower, President Reagan gave a prophetic address to British members of Parliament at Westminster. He said that the Soviet Union was gripped by a "great revolutionary crisis" and that a "global campaign for freedom" would ultimately prevail. In one of the most memorable utterances of his presidency, Reagan predicted that "the march of freedom and democracy ... will leave Marxism-Leninism on the ash heap of history."

Ronald Reagan is already being judged as one of the great American presidents. I predict that even as the first half of the 20th century is usually described as the Age of Roosevelt, the last half of the 20th century will be called the Age of Reagan.

Just as FDR led America out a great economic depression, Reagan lifted a traumatized country out of a great psychological depression, induced by the assassinations of John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr. and sustained by the Vietnam War, Watergate, and the Carter malaise.

Reagan used the same political instruments as Roosevelt — the major address to Congress and the fireside chat with the people — and the same optimistic, uplifting rhetoric. But although Roosevelt and Reagan both appealed to the best in America, there was a major philosophical difference between the two presidents: Roosevelt turned to government to solve problems, while Reagan turned to the people.

Reagan led Americans to believe in themselves and the future again. He led them to accept that they did not need the welfare state to solve all of their economic and social problems. And he looked the Soviets in the eye and saw they were not ten feet tall.

Ronald Reagan`s trust in the people and his love of freedom were rooted in the wisdom and philosophy of the Founders. Indeed, more than once, he sounded like one of them.

President Reagan ended his farewell address to the nation in January 1989 by referring to a "shining city upon a hill," a phrase borrowed from the Pilgrim leader John Winthrop, and by asking:

"And how stands the city on this winter night? More prosperous, more secure, and happier than it was eight years ago. ... And she`s still a beacon, still a magnet for all who must have freedom, for all the pilgrims from all the lost places who are hurtling through the darkness, toward home."

And then, having started an economic expansion that continues to this day, having ended the Cold War without firing a shot, and having restored Americans` confidence in themselves, Ronald Reagan quietly went home.

— Lee Edwards, distinguished fellow in conservative thought at the Heritage Foundation, is the author of many books about American conservatism, including the first political biography of Ronald Reagan.

[spicault]

Reagan’s Leadership, America’s Recovery
One titan of history writes about another.

By Margaret Thatcher

EDITOR`S NOTE: This article, written by Margaret Thatcher, who was at the time Britian`s prime minister, ran in the Decemeber 30, 1988, issue of National Review.

There have not been many times when a British Prime Minister has been Prime Minister through two consecutive terms of office of the same President of the United States. Indeed there have been only three such cases so far. One was Pitt the Younger, who was in Number 10 Downing Street while George Washington was President. Another was Lord Liverpool, who held the prime ministership through the whole period in office of President James Monroe. And I am the third. It gives me a vantage point which, if not unique, is nonetheless historically privileged from which to survey the remarkable Presidency of Ronald Reagan.

I cannot pretend, however, to be an entirely unbiased observer. I still remember vividly the feelings with which I learned of the President`s election in 1980. We had met and discussed our political views some years before, when he was still Governor of California, and I knew that we believed in so many of the same things. I felt then that together we could tackle the formidable tasks before: to get out countries on their feet, to restore their pride and their values, and to help create a safer and better world.

On entering office, the President faced high interest rates, high inflation, sluggish growth, and a growing demand for self-destructive protectionism. These problems had created — and in turn were reinforced by — a feeling that not much could be done about them, that America faced inevitable decline in a new era of limits to growth, that the American dream was over. We in Britain had been in the grip of a similar pessimism during the Seventies, when political debate revolved around the concept of the "British disease." Indeed, during this entire period, the Western world seemed to be taking its temperature with every set of economic indices.

President Reagan saw instinctively that pessimism itself was the disease and that the cure for pessimism is optimism. He set about restoring faith in the prospects of the American dream — a dream of boundless opportunity built on enterprise, individual effort, and personal generosity. He infused his own belief in America`s economic future in the American people. That was farsighted. It carried America through the difficult early days of the 1981-82 recession, because people are prepared to put up with sacrifices if they know that those sacrifices are the foundations of future prosperity.

Having restored the faith of the American people in themselves, the President set about liberating their energies and enterprise. He reduced the excessive burden of regulation, halted inflation, and first cut and, later, radically reformed taxation. When barriers to enterprise are removed and taxes cut to sensible levels (as we have found in Britain in recent years), people have the incentive to work harder and earn more. They thereby benefit themselves, their families, and the whole community. Hence the buoyant economy of the Reagan years. It has expanded by a full 25 per cent over 72 months of continuous economic growth — the longest period of peacetime economic growth in U.S. history; it has spread prosperity widely; and it has cut unemployment to the lowest level in over a decade.

The international impact of these successes has been enormous. At a succession of Western economic summits, the President`s leadership encouraged the West to cooperate on policies of low inflation, steady growth, and open markets. These policies have kept protectionism in check and the world economy growing. They are policies which offer not just an economic message, but a political one: Freedom works. It brings growth, opportunity, and prosperity in its train. Other countries, seeing its success in the United States and Britain, have rushed to adopt the policies of freedom.

President Reagan decided what he believed in, stuck to it through thick and thin, and finally, through its success, persuaded others. But I still recall those dark early days of this decade when both our countries were grappling with the twin disasters of inflation and recession and when some people, even in our own parties, wanted to abandon our policies before they had had a proper chance to take effect. They were times for cool courage and a steady nerve. That is what they got from the President. I remember his telling me, at a meeting at the British Embassy in 1981, that for all the difficulties we then faced, we would be "home safe and soon enough."

The economic recovery was, however, but part of a wider recovery of America`s confidence and role in the world. For the malaise of the 1970s went beyond economics. The experience of Vietnam had bred an understandable but dangerous lack of national self-confidence on the U.S. side of the Atlantic. Or so it seemed to outsiders. There was a marked reluctance in American public opinion to advance American power abroad even in defense of clear American and Western interests. And politicians struggled against this national mood at their electoral peril.

President Reagan took office at a time when the Soviet Union was invading Afghanistan, placing missiles in Eastern Europe aimed at West European capitals, and assisting Community groups in the Third World to install themselves in power against the popular will, and when America`s response was hobbled by the so-called "Vietnam syndrome." And not just America`s response. The entire West, locked in a battle of wills with the Soviets, seemed to be losing confidence.

President Reagan`s first step was to change the military imbalance which underlay this loss of confidence. He built up American power in a series of defense budgets. There have been criticisms of this build-up as too expensive. Well, a sure defense is expensive, but not nearly so expensive as weakness could turn out to be.

By this military build-up, President Reagan strengthened not only American defenses, but also the will of America`s allies. It led directly to NATO`s installation of cruise and Pershing missiles in Western Europe. This took place in the teeth of Moscow`s biggest "peace offensive" since the Berlin crises of the early Sixties. That offensive included a Soviet walkout from the Geneva talks on nuclear disarmament and mass demonstrations and lobbies by "peace groups" in Western Europe. Yet these tactics failed, the missiles were installed, and the Soviets returned to the bargaining table to negotiate about withdrawing their own missiles.

President Reagan has also demonstrated that he is not afraid to put to good use the military strength he had built up. And it is noteworthy — though not often noted — that many of the decisions he has taken in the face of strong criticism have been justified by events. It was President Reagan who, amid cries that his policy lacked any rationale, stations U.S. ships alongside European naives in the Persian Gulf to protect international shipping. Not only did this policy secure its stated purpose, it also protected the Gulf states against aggression and thus hastened the end of the conflict by foreclosing any option of widening the war.

The President enjoyed a similar success in the continuing battle against terrorism. He took action against one of the states most active in giving aid and comfort to terrorist organizations: Colonel Qaddafi`s Libya. We in Britain had experiences Qaddafi`s murderous methods at first hand when a member of the Libyan Embassy shot down a young policewoman in cold blood in a London square. We had no doubts about the reality of Libyan involvement. I therefore had no hesitation in supporting the American air strike, which has resulted in a marked reduction of Libyan-sponsored terrorism.

And thirdly, President Reagan has given America`s support to nations which are still struggling to keep their independence in the face of Soviet-backed aggression. The policy has had major successes:

- the withdrawal of Soviet forces from Afghanistan, due to be completed next February;
- the real prospect of Cuban withdrawal from Angola, encouraged by patient and constructive American diplomacy;
- and even the prospect of Vietnamese withdrawal from Cambodia.

These are all remarkable achievements, which very few observers predicted even three years ago.

Indeed, when we compare the mood of confidence and optimism in the West today with the mood when President Reagan took office eight years ago, we know that a greater change has taken place than could ever have been imagined. America has regained its confidence and is no longer afraid of the legitimate uses of its power. It has discussed those uses with its allies in the NATO alliance at all stages and with great frankness. Today our joint resolve is stronger than ever. And, finally, the recovery of American strength and confidence has led, as President Reagan always argued it would, to more peaceful and stable relations with the Soviet Union.

For strength, not weakness, leads to peace. It was only after the Soviet threat of SS-20s had been faced down and cruise and Pershing missiles installed that the Soviets were prepared to embark on genuine arms-control negotiations and wider peace negotiations. It therefore fell to the President, less than four years after the Soviet walkout at Geneva, to negotiate the first arms-control agreement that actually reduced the nuclear stockpiles. And when he visited Moscow for the third Summit of his Presidency, he took the first for human rights into the very hear of Moscow, where his words shone like a beacon of hope for all those who are denied their basic freedoms. Indeed the very recovery of American strength during his Presidency has been a major factor prompting and evoking the reform program under Mr. Gorbachev in the Soviet Union. The Soviet authorities would have had much less incentive for reform if they had been faced by a weak and declining United States.

The legacy of President Reagan in East-West relations is the realistic appreciation that maintaining sure defenses, bridging the East-West divide, and reducing weapons and forces on both sides are not contradictory but policies that go comfortably together. Nothing could be more short-sighted for the West today than to run down its defenses unilaterally at the first sign of more peaceful and stable relations between East and West. Nothing would be more likely to convince those with whom we negotiate that they would not need to make any concessions because we would cut our defenses anyway. Britain will not do that. We will maintain and update our defenses. And our example is one which I hope our partners and allies will follow, because Europe must show that she is willing to bear a reasonable share of the burden of defending herself. That would be the best way for the NATO allies to repay America`s farsighted foreign and defense policies of the Reagan years.

When we attempt an overall survey of President Reagan`s term of office, covering events both foreign and domestic, one thing stands out. It is that he has achieved the most difficult of all political tasks: changing attitudes and perceptions about what is possible. From the strong fortress of his convictions, he set out to enlarge freedom the world over at a time when freedom was in retreat — and he succeeded. It is not merely that freedom now advances while collectivism is in retreat — important though that is. It is that freedom is the idea that everywhere captures men`s minds while collectivism can do no more than enslave their bodies. That is the measure of the change that President Reagan has wrought.

How is it that some political leaders make the world a different place while others, equally able, equally public-spirited, leave things much as they found them? Some years ago, Professor Hayek pointed out that the social sciences often neglected the most important aspects of their subjects because they were not capable of being examined and explained in quantitative terms. One such quality which resists quantitative analysis is political leadership. Which also happens to be the occupational requirement of a statesman.

No one can doubt that President Reagan possesses the ability to lead to an unusual degree. Some of the constituent qualities of that leadership I have referred to in passing — his firm convictions, his steadfastness in difficult times, his capacity to infuse his own optimism into the American people so that he restored their belief in America`s destiny. But I would add three more qualities that, together with those above, enabled him to transform the political landscape.

The first is courage. The whole world remembers the wit and grave which the President displayed at the time of the attempt on his life. It was one of those occasions when people saw the real character of a man when he had none of the assistances which power and office provide. And they admired what they saw — cheerful bravery in the face of personal danger, no thought for himself but instead a desire to reassure his family and the nation by jokes and good humor.

The second is that he holds opinions which strike a chord in the heart of the average American. The great English journalist Walter Bagehot once defined a constitutional statesman as a man of common opinion and uncommon abilities. That is true of President Reagan and one of his greatest political strengths. He can appeal for support to the American people because they sense rightly that he shares their dreams, hopes, and aspirations; and he pursues them by the same route of plain American horse-sense.

Finally, President Reagan speaks with the authority of a man who knows what he believes and who has shown that he will stand by his beliefs in good times and bad. He is no summer soldier of conservatism, but one who fought in the ranks when the going wasn`t good. Again, that reassured even those who do not share those beliefs. For authority is the respect won from others by the calm exercise of deep conviction.

The results of that leadership are all around us. President Reagan departs the political scene leaving America stronger and more confident, and the West more united than ever before. I believe that President-elect Bush, a man of unrivaled experience in government and international affairs, will be a worthy successor, providing the forthright leadership which the world has come to expect from the U.S. President. We wish him well.

[kniebeisser]

[kniebeisser]

http://www.disorganisedcrime.com/reagandance/

[Lifetrader]

US-Börsen bleiben am Freitag wegen Reagan-Beerdigung geschlossen

New York (ddp.vwd). Wegen der Trauerfeierlichkeiten für den verstorbenen früheren US-Präsidenten Ronald Reagan bleiben die US-Börsen am kommenden Freitag geschlossen. Das teilten die New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) und die Technologiebörse Nasdaq am Montag mit. NYSE-Chef John Thain sagte, Reagan habe fest an die Fähigkeit des Kapitalismus geglaubt, Chancen für den Einzelnen und Wohlstand zu fördern. «Es ist angemessen, dass die nationalen Märkte am Freitag seinen Beitrag zu Freiheit und Demokratie ehren», fügte er hinzu.

Reagan war am Samstag im Alter von 93 Jahren gestorben. Zuletzt waren die US-Börsen aus ähnlichem Anlass zur Beisetzung von Ex-Präsident Richard Nixon am 27. April 1994 für einen Tag geschlossen geblieben. ddp.vwd/pon/sie

http://de.news.yahoo.com/040607/336/42eml.html

[Punk24]

#26

[cyberwilly]

titanic als Leichenschänder.

Das Blättchen ist selbst schon lange tot.

[bares@nobles]

Die Mär, dass Reagan den eisernen Vorhang niedergerissen habe, ist auch in den USA weitverbreitet.

Ich war zu diesem Zeitpunkt schon im fortgeschrittenen Alter und kann mich noch gut erinnern, dass es da einen Russen namens Gorbatschov gab, der den ganzen Apparat im Osten umgekrempelt hat. Perestrojika und Glasnost waren damals die Stichworte.
Und Reagan war eben damals gerade Präsident und oberster kalter Krieger auf der anderen Seite des Atlantiks. An starken Worten hat er es nie fehlen lassen, aber damit konnte man die UdssR nicht umkrempeln.

Seit seinem Tod vor ca. 2,5 Tagen bringen die US-Nachrichtenkanäle 24h nur Reagan Dauerberieselung. Jeden Furz, den er mal gelassen hat wird zigmal wiederholt und kommentiert und so wie es ausschaut ist Ronnie dirkt in den Olymp aufgestiegen.

Reagans Humor hat mir gut gefallen.
Als er schon unter Alzheimer litt, hat ihn mal ein guter Bekannter gefragt, wie es ihm so ginge. Darauf hat Ronnie geantwortet:" Sehr gut, ich lerne jeden Tag viele neue Leute kennen."

[spicault]

Tear Down This Wall
Reagan at the Brandenburg Gate.

EDITOR`S NOTE: This is the text of Ronald Reagan`s remarks at the Brandenburg Gate, delivered on June 12, 1987, to the people of West Berlin. The speech was also audible on the east side of the Berlin wall.

Chancellor Kohl, Governing Mayor Diepgen, ladies and gentlemen: 24 years ago, President John F. Kennedy visited Berlin, speaking to the people of this city and the world at the City Hall. Well, since then two other presidents have come, each in his turn, to Berlin. And today I, myself, make my second visit to your city.


We come to Berlin, we American presidents, because it`s our duty to speak, in this place, of freedom. But I must confess, we`re drawn here by other things as well: by the feeling of history in this city, more than 500 years older than our own nation; by the beauty of the Grunewald and the Tiergarten; most of all, by your courage and determination. Perhaps the composer Paul Lincke understood something about American presidents. You see, like so many presidents before me, I come here today because wherever I go, whatever I do: Ich hab noch einen Koffer in Berlin. [I still have a suitcase in Berlin.]

Our gathering today is being broadcast throughout Western Europe and North America. I understand that it is being seen and heard as well in the East. To those listening throughout Eastern Europe, a special word: Although I cannot be with you, I address my remarks to you just as surely as to those standing here before me. For I join you, as I join your fellow countrymen in the West, in this firm, this unalterable belief: Es gibt nur ein Berlin. [There is only one Berlin.]

Behind me stands a wall that encircles the free sectors of this city, part of a vast system of barriers that divides the entire continent of Europe. From the Baltic, south, those barriers cut across Germany in a gash of barbed wire, concrete, dog runs, and guard towers. Farther south, there may be no visible, no obvious wall. But there remain armed guards and checkpoints all the same — still a restriction on the right to travel, still an instrument to impose upon ordinary men and women the will of a totalitarian state. Yet it is here in Berlin where the wall emerges most clearly; here, cutting across your city, where the news photo and the television screen have imprinted this brutal division of a continent upon the mind of the world. Standing before the Brandenburg Gate, every man is a German, separated from his fellow men. Every man is a Berliner, forced to look upon a scar.

President von Weizsacker has said, "The German question is open as long as the Brandenburg Gate is closed." Today I say: As long as the gate is closed, as long as this scar of a wall is permitted to stand, it is not the German question alone that remains open, but the question of freedom for all mankind. Yet I do not come here to lament. For I find in Berlin a message of hope, even in the shadow of this wall, a message of triumph.

In this season of spring in 1945, the people of Berlin emerged from their air-raid shelters to find devastation. Thousands of miles away, the people of the United States reached out to help. And in 1947 Secretary of State — as you`ve been told — George Marshall announced the creation of what would become known as the Marshall Plan. Speaking precisely 40 years ago this month, he said: "Our policy is directed not against any country or doctrine, but against hunger, poverty, desperation, and chaos."

In the Reichstag a few moments ago, I saw a display commemorating this 40th anniversary of the Marshall Plan. I was struck by the sign on a burnt-out, gutted structure that was being rebuilt. I understand that Berliners of my own generation can remember seeing signs like it dotted throughout the western sectors of the city. The sign read simply: "The Marshall Plan is helping here to strengthen the free world." A strong, free world in the West, that dream became real. Japan rose from ruin to become an economic giant. Italy, France, Belgium — virtually every nation in Western Europe saw political and economic rebirth; the European Community was founded.

In West Germany and here in Berlin, there took place an economic miracle, the Wirtschaftswunder. Adenauer, Erhard, Reuter, and other leaders understood the practical importance of liberty — that just as truth can flourish only when the journalist is given freedom of speech, so prosperity can come about only when the farmer and businessman enjoy economic freedom. The German leaders reduced tariffs, expanded free trade, lowered taxes. From 1950 to 1960 alone, the standard of living in West Germany and Berlin doubled.

Where four decades ago there was rubble, today in West Berlin there is the greatest industrial output of any city in Germany — busy office blocks, fine homes and apartments, proud avenues, and the spreading lawns of parkland. Where a city`s culture seemed to have been destroyed, today there are two great universities, orchestras and an opera, countless theaters, and museums. Where there was want, today there`s abundance — food, clothing, automobiles — the wonderful goods of the Kudamm. From devastation, from utter ruin, you Berliners have, in freedom, rebuilt a city that once again ranks as one of the greatest on earth. The Soviets may have had other plans. But my friends, there were a few things the Soviets didn`t count on — Berliner Herz, Berliner Humor, ja, und Berliner Schnauze. [Berliner heart, Berliner humor, yes, and a Berliner Schnauze.]

In the 1950s, Khrushchev predicted: "We will bury you." But in the West today, we see a free world that has achieved a level of prosperity and well-being unprecedented in all human history. In the Communist world, we see failure, technological backwardness, declining standards of health, even want of the most basic kind — too little food. Even today, the Soviet Union still cannot feed itself. After these four decades, then, there stands before the entire world one great and inescapable conclusion: Freedom leads to prosperity. Freedom replaces the ancient hatreds among the nations with comity and peace. Freedom is the victor.

And now the Soviets themselves may, in a limited way, be coming to understand the importance of freedom. We hear much from Moscow about a new policy of reform and openness. Some political prisoners have been released. Certain foreign news broadcasts are no longer being jammed. Some economic enterprises have been permitted to operate with greater freedom from state control.

Are these the beginnings of profound changes in the Soviet state? Or are they token gestures, intended to raise false hopes in the West, or to strengthen the Soviet system without changing it? We welcome change and openness; for we believe that freedom and security go together, that the advance of human liberty can only strengthen the cause of world peace. There is one sign the Soviets can make that would be unmistakable, that would advance dramatically the cause of freedom and peace.

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!

I understand the fear of war and the pain of division that afflict this continent — and I pledge to you my country`s efforts to help overcome these burdens. To be sure, we in the West must resist Soviet expansion. So we must maintain defenses of unassailable strength. Yet we seek peace; so we must strive to reduce arms on both sides.

Beginning ten years ago, the Soviets challenged the Western alliance with a grave new threat, hundreds of new and more deadly SS-20 nuclear missiles, capable of striking every capital in Europe. The Western alliance responded by committing itself to a counter-deployment unless the Soviets agreed to negotiate a better solution; namely, the elimination of such weapons on both sides. For many months, the Soviets refused to bargain in earnestness. As the alliance, in turn, prepared to go forward with its counter-deployment, there were difficult days — days of protests like those during my 1982 visit to this city — and the Soviets later walked away from the table.

But through it all, the alliance held firm. And I invite those who protested then — I invite those who protest today — to mark this fact: Because we remained strong, the Soviets came back to the table. And because we remained strong, today we have within reach the possibility, not merely of limiting the growth of arms, but of eliminating, for the first time, an entire class of nuclear weapons from the face of the earth.

As I speak, NATO ministers are meeting in Iceland to review the progress of our proposals for eliminating these weapons. At the talks in Geneva, we have also proposed deep cuts in strategic offensive weapons. And the Western allies have likewise made far-reaching proposals to reduce the danger of conventional war and to place a total ban on chemical weapons.

While we pursue these arms reductions, I pledge to you that we will maintain the capacity to deter Soviet aggression at any level at which it might occur. And in cooperation with many of our allies, the United States is pursuing the Strategic Defense Initiative — research to base deterrence not on the threat of offensive retaliation, but on defenses that truly defend; on systems, in short, that will not target populations, but shield them. By these means we seek to increase the safety of Europe and all the world. But we must remember a crucial fact: East and West do not mistrust each other because we are armed; we are armed because we mistrust each other. And our differences are not about weapons but about liberty. When President Kennedy spoke at the City Hall those 24 years ago, freedom was encircled, Berlin was under siege. And today, despite all the pressures upon this city, Berlin stands secure in its liberty. And freedom itself is transforming the globe.

In the Philippines, in South and Central America, democracy has been given a rebirth. Throughout the Pacific, free markets are working miracle after miracle of economic growth. In the industrialized nations, a technological revolution is taking place — a revolution marked by rapid, dramatic advances in computers and telecommunications.

In Europe, only one nation and those it controls refuse to join the community of freedom. Yet in this age of redoubled economic growth, of information and innovation, the Soviet Union faces a choice: It must make fundamental changes, or it will become obsolete.

Today thus represents a moment of hope. We in the West stand ready to cooperate with the East to promote true openness, to break down barriers that separate people, to create a safe, freer world. And surely there is no better place than Berlin, the meeting place of East and West, to make a start. Free people of Berlin: Today, as in the past, the United States stands for the strict observance and full implementation of all parts of the Four Power Agreement of 1971. Let us use this occasion, the 750th anniversary of this city, to usher in a new era, to seek a still fuller, richer life for the Berlin of the future. Together, let us maintain and develop the ties between the Federal Republic and the Western sectors of Berlin, which is permitted by the 1971 agreement.

And I invite Mr. Gorbachev: Let us work to bring the Eastern and Western parts of the city closer together, so that all the inhabitants of all Berlin can enjoy the benefits that come with life in one of the great cities of the world.

To open Berlin still further to all Europe, East and West, let us expand the vital air access to this city, finding ways of making commercial air service to Berlin more convenient, more comfortable, and more economical. We look to the day when West Berlin can become one of the chief aviation hubs in all central Europe.

With our French and British partners, the United States is prepared to help bring international meetings to Berlin. It would be only fitting for Berlin to serve as the site of United Nations meetings, or world conferences on human rights and arms control or other issues that call for international cooperation.

There is no better way to establish hope for the future than to enlighten young minds, and we would be honored to sponsor summer youth exchanges, cultural events, and other programs for young Berliners from the East. Our French and British friends, I`m certain, will do the same. And it`s my hope that an authority can be found in East Berlin to sponsor visits from young people of the Western sectors.

One final proposal, one close to my heart: Sport represents a source of enjoyment and ennoblement, and you may have noted that the Republic of Korea — South Korea — has offered to permit certain events of the 1988 Olympics to take place in the North. International sports competitions of all kinds could take place in both parts of this city. And what better way to demonstrate to the world the openness of this city than to offer in some future year to hold the Olympic games here in Berlin, East and West? In these four decades, as I have said, you Berliners have built a great city. You`ve done so in spite of threats — the Soviet attempts to impose the East-mark, the blockade. Today the city thrives in spite of the challenges implicit in the very presence of this wall. What keeps you here? Certainly there`s a great deal to be said for your fortitude, for your defiant courage. But I believe there`s something deeper, something that involves Berlin`s whole look and feel and way of life — not mere sentiment. No one could live long in Berlin without being completely disabused of illusions. Something instead, that has seen the difficulties of life in Berlin but chose to accept them, that continues to build this good and proud city in contrast to a surrounding totalitarian presence that refuses to release human energies or aspirations. Something that speaks with a powerful voice of affirmation, that says yes to this city, yes to the future, yes to freedom. In a word, I would submit that what keeps you in Berlin is love — love both profound and abiding.

Perhaps this gets to the root of the matter, to the most fundamental distinction of all between East and West. The totalitarian world produces backwardness because it does such violence to the spirit, thwarting the human impulse to create, to enjoy, to worship. The totalitarian world finds even symbols of love and of worship an affront. Years ago, before the East Germans began rebuilding their churches, they erected a secular structure: the television tower at Alexander Platz. Virtually ever since, the authorities have been working to correct what they view as the tower`s one major flaw, treating the glass sphere at the top with paints and chemicals of every kind. Yet even today when the sun strikes that sphere — that sphere that towers over all Berlin — the light makes the sign of the cross. There in Berlin, like the city itself, symbols of love, symbols of worship, cannot be suppressed.

As I looked out a moment ago from the Reichstag, that embodiment of German unity, I noticed words crudely spray-painted upon the wall, perhaps by a young Berliner: "This wall will fall. Beliefs become reality." Yes, across Europe, this wall will fall. For it cannot withstand faith; it cannot withstand truth. The wall cannot withstand freedom.

And I would like, before I close, to say one word. I have read, and I have been questioned since I`ve been here about certain demonstrations against my coming. And I would like to say just one thing, and to those who demonstrate so. I wonder if they have ever asked themselves that if they should have the kind of government they apparently seek, no one would ever be able to do what they`re doing again.

Thank you and God bless you all.

[helmut_kohl]

http://biz.yahoo.com/bizwk/040608/nf20040681992_db045_1.html

BusinessWeek Online
The Simple Truth About Ronald Reagan
Tuesday June 8, 10:52 am ET


It was Christmas six years ago when Ronald Reagan, who died on Saturday at the age of 93, became an unexpected addition to our family, thanks to my son, who was then 11. As every parent knows, kids that age can have strange ideas about what the well-equipped adult really needs, so when Squirt handed me a little box with a mysterious present clunking heavily inside, I expected a clock or cast-iron sock rack or some such equally useless thing. What emerged instead was a small bust of the 40th President of the U.S., whose forever-frozen smile gazed up from the wreckage of ribbon and gift wrap with more than a dash of mockery.
A statue of Reagan! A joke, right? His mother must have put the boy up to it. But no, she was just as genuinely bemused. What could he have been thinking to mark Christmas with this grinning, empty-headed lump, seven inches of cast-bronze conservative kitsch?

NO TREE HUGGER. Now, Reagan and I went back quite a ways, that much was true, and Squirt had heard his name many times. It was Reagan who first drew me to the States, when he was running against Jimmy Carter in 1980, and the Australian paper I worked for at the time wanted news stories and features on the conventions and political carnivals of an American election year. They were duly sent back to Sydney, none very flattering.

That Reagan was a twit went without saying, but I said it anyway, and with some vitriol. For example, there was the moron`s blunder at the Detroit convention, where he said trees were worse polluters than cars. What a dolt not to know the difference between carbon monoxide and carbon dioxide. How stupid would Americans be to elect him? But of course they did, and for the next eight years, most of what I wrote, including a whole book on corruption and fraud in the Reagan-era Pentagon, chronicled how the sunny fool in the White House was getting it all wrong.

Nuclear missiles in Europe, that warmonger! Homeless armies on the streets -- didn`t he care? And what about this racist imperialism he was unleashing on Central America? Charismatic Sandinistas savaged by Gringo spooks and mercenaries. El Salvador a killing field. Little Grenada ground under a cowboy heel.

And Star Wars -- how sad was that? It couldn`t work, it wouldn`t work, and yet Reagan was determined to build the bloody thing. The only unknown, or so it seemed, was whether the U.S. would go broke before mushroom clouds replaced cities with pools of black glass, which is what Reagan and his nuke-slinging buddies evidently wanted.

"EVIL EMPIRE." So why had my son bought me this bust? His explanation surprised me, and the gist of it went like this: "Gee, I thought you liked him. You like everything he did."

Turns out, the kid was smarter than his old man, and he really had been paying attention when I`d answered those questions about why Russia wasn`t the Soviet Union anymore, and what about this vanished Berlin Wall that they were talking about on TV? My son must have been listening, too, when his American mother reminisced about how, when she was his age, her family stocked the basement with tinned goods and a chamber pot to see them through the storm of nuclear fallout.

Those threats were gone because the Soviet Union was gone -- and it was Ronald Reagan who made it so. My son will never have to master the duck-and-cover, and for that his mother and I are grateful.

Who can doubt that it was Reagan`s final push that toppled the Soviet Union onto history`s scrapheap? He might not have known clean air from car exhaust, but he knew evil when he saw it -- and that was what he called it: The Evil Empire. Yes, all the Noam Chomsky quoters scoffed at the First Simpleton`s ignorance of the need for nuance, but the Soviet system was evil.

TAKEN BY SURPRISE. It robbed its people of their right to be heard and to object -- and it would still be doing so today if Reagan had not underlined for Gorbachev what the Soviet leader already knew: That in the face of implacable resolve, resistance was futile. Whatever resources the Soviets put into the arms race, the U.S. was going to match, and then some.

It was a contest the commissars couldn`t win, nor even contemplate prolonging. So faced with a rumored simpleton`s resolve, the Soviets closed up shop, and for the Evil Empire`s hundreds of millions of former subjects, democracy arrived. Simple as Reagan, simple as that. Armageddon`s clock retreated several minutes from thermonuclear midnight, and every backward click was the Gipper`s doing.

And Squirt probably was thinking also of a family vacation we had taken in Grenada. Bored with the beach and curious to learn how the war there had unfolded, I hired a cab driver to tour the tiny island`s battle sites and taken my son along for the ride. The driver had shown us where the Cuban engineers held out, where the bleached carcass of a shot-to-pieces Soviet transport plane still sat by a tropical clearing, the beach where SEALS slipped ashore.

"A SAINT." A glorious victory of America arms? No, in military terms, a pathetic joke, and I had written with no small joy for foreign audiences about the invasion`s snafus and murderous incompetence, and of the red faces it prompted at the Pentagon. Marine choppers mistook the lunatic asylum for military headquarters and repeatedly rocketed the howling unfortunates. What should have been a couple of hours of easy work for the U.S. turned into days of chaos, collateral damage, and friendly-fire casualties.

"So you must really dislike the Yanks," I said to the cabbie.

The look he shot me said that I was mad.

"Please, don`t call it an invasion," he began. "It was a rescue mission. Mr. Reagan saved us." For the rest of the tour, he recounted horror stories of life and death under the Marxist academics and petty thugs whose best efforts had produced a bloody coup. He told of terror and mutilations, the rule of the machete, hunger, shots and screams, neighbors disappearing in the night.

Every other Grenadan echoed the same thoughts. "Ronald Reagan," said a service manager at our hotel, "bless him for a saint." Even the tourist-trap touts at the waterfront had only good words to say. "Reagan, bless the man," was the common refrain. Somewhere on Grenada there may have been someone on Grenada who didn`t like Reagan, but I couldn`t find him.

SIMPLE TRUTHS. So now, years later, I`ve dragged out the little bronze Gipper, and he`s sitting here beside the keyboard, that optimistic smile as big as ever. He might not have been a genius, and he wasn`t without his faults -- the Iran-Contra debacle tells you that. But an inability to know right from wrong, good from evil? Well, that wasn`t one of the Reagan`s faults. Simple as he was painted by those who speak of hegemons and post-colonial oppression, he knew enough to understand that evil has to be opposed because to accommodate it contaminates all who try.

In his innocence, my son was right. I did like Ronald Reagan, even if I didn`t know it at the time. So here`s a toast to a simple man who had the wit to ignore his betters and leave the world, all things considered, a finer, safer place than he found it.

[spicault]

They Said It Couldn’t Be Done
The evil empire and the axis of evil.

He`s alienating Europe! He is too bellicose! He speaks in undiplomatic language! He is motivated by an unrealistic vision of international change!

These charges have been hurled at: (a) Ronald Reagan, (b) George W. Bush or (c) both? The answer, of course, is "c." That tells us something about both "cowboy" presidents and their critics, including Reagan and Bush scourge John Kerry. To change the world requires angering the defenders of the status quo, enunciating a clear vision and taking risks. Doubters will therefore always be able to point to diplomatic upset, to a lack of "nuance" and to the possibility of failure, respectively, when criticizing a transformational foreign policy.

An appropriate epitaph for Reagan`s historic accomplishment of winning the Cold War would be: "They said it couldn`t be done." If Bush manages to effect his vision in the war on terror, his success will deserve to be similarly memorialized.

Reagan`s grand strategy — spending so much on defense that the Soviets couldn`t keep up — was considered literally crazy by critics at the time. It would only backfire and embolden our enemies. Opposition to Reagan`s policy was especially fierce in Europe, where millions protested his decision to place intermediate-range nuclear missiles there. Sound familiar?

There are two basic attitudes toward American foreign policy: the Reagan Way and the Vietnam Syndrome. Adherents to the Reagan Way believe in the efficacy and goodness of American power. Sufferers of the Vietnam Syndrome believe American power is tainted with corruption and arrogance and is doomed to failure. These two broad visions have informed the U.S. foreign policy debate, from Vietnam to the war on terror today.

It is no accident that Kerry opposed Reagan`s policies in terms he uses to criticize Bush now. Reagan was altogether too focused on military solutions. Kerry said the defense buildup was "without any relevancy to the threat this nation is currently facing," and declared, "We don`t need expensive and exotic weapons systems." He considered Reagan`s foreign policy "arrogant," that of a "bully."

Kerry especially fought Reagan`s Latin America policy. Reagan supported muscular U.S. assertion in the region to create a democratic revolution. Kerry counseled timidity. He denounced a U.S. embargo on Nicaragua, meant to pressure the Marxist Sandinista regime there: "This unilateral display of arrogance is unpardonable. We are treating nations of Latin America as our Eastern Europe," then held captive by a totalitarian Soviet empire. Kerry wanted to trust the word of the Sandinistas to reform themselves, while Reagan instead pressured them militarily through the Contras.

Reagan`s vision was starkly vindicated. At the beginning of his term, Argentina, Brazil, Chile and Uruguay were military dictatorships. Nicaragua had just fallen to a Communist insurrection, and El Salvador seemed set to be next. By the end or shortly after Reagan`s term, Argentina, Brazil, Chile and Uruguay had democratized. Nicaragua held elections won by the opposition, and El Salvador became a model in the region.

The Latin American experience is instructive, because it is roughly analogous to what Bush hopes to accomplish over the long-term in the Middle East — taking a region beset by tyranny and violence (and inherently distrustful of the United States), and putting it on a better path, through military means, forceful diplomacy and a rhetoric of morality and freedom. As Reagan had his "evil empire," Bush has his "axis of evil." Kerry has dutifully rehearsed his old lines, denouncing the arrogance, the jingoism, the unilateralism and the implausibility of the Bush project.

It is easy to assume that the status quo will always be with us and so must be accommodated. But if prudence is a virtue in international relations, it shouldn`t be an excuse for sheer lack of imagination. The world is not infinitely plastic, as we have learned during our difficult year in Iraq. But history does move, especially when determined men give it a push, despite the carping of critics insisting that it just can`t be done.

— Rich Lowry is author of Legacy: Paying the Price for the Clinton Years.

[ConnorMcLoud]

Ein kalter Krieger weniger.

[spicault]

Growing Up With Ronald Reagan

By Frederick Turner Published 06/09/2004




When I was a young professor at the University of California in the late sixties I despised Governor Reagan, the more fool I. His whispery voice and downhome manner struck me as both cornpone and phony, and his occasional use of a more intellectually sophisticated vocabulary annoyed me, because it felt as if he was assuming scholarship he did not have in order to appear respectable. He was like Robert Stack using his magisterial manner to shill for some crackpot ghost or flying saucer show, or, later, Pat Robertson in a coat and tie interviewing a creationist with a PhD from Podunk Christian University. I was embarrassed whenever I saw him on TV; he was so uncool, he was the Frank Burns of politics.


I was, as I say, a fool. The fog began to clear from my eyes when the Iranians released the hostages on the eve of his inauguration, obviously terrified of what Reagan would do if they didn`t. They believed in him, so to speak, and maybe they had seen something that I had missed. Still, he was just an actor, I thought. How could they take an actor seriously? But I was saying this to myself at the very time that I was writing about how Hamlet grows up into a man who can truly act, by "playing the part" of someone who can actually do something. I had failed to apply my own knowledge to the world.



Later I read the Austrian free market economists, and realized two things: one, that they had essentially won the argument with the socialists, both on the theoretical level and on the level of practical results; and two, that Reagan had realized this twenty or thirty years earlier, and it was I, the socialist, who had been the pseudo-intellectual, and not he. Later still, after I had been practicing the martial arts for a few years and had been in enough championship bouts to validate the ancient teachings about clarity of spirit and trained instinctiveness of decision, I came to another realization. The enemy can only be defeated through his own feelings; he can only be defeated if you recognize him as your enemy; and he will only concede when he realizes that you are crazier -- more committed to victory -- than he is.



And there were indeed enemies in this world. As Yitzhak Rabin said, "You make peace with your enemies, not with your friends." Ronald Reagan could well have coined the same words. If we pretend that our enemies are really our friends, and that if we make nice with them they will do what we want, then we will never be able to make peace with them. Why should they make peace -- looking at it from their point of view -- when we do not even respect them enough to recognize them fair and square as our enemy? Christ said "love your enemy," but he did not say "don`t have enemies," because that is not in our power. We love our enemies by respecting them, and we are able to make peace with them if we respect them enough to take them seriously, and put them in a position where it is in their interest to make peace with us. We make peace with them, but peace comes through strength, and trust must be verified. When I became a father and a man, and I actually encountered situations in the world where I was asked to do things and say things I did not agree with, and had to refuse those in authority and those who had power to harm me, I changed. I had to fight. I had to grow up.



It is a weak child`s way to blame his parents when someone bullies him, to run to them tearfully and rage against them when they tell him to fight his own battles. The rage should rightly be directed against the injurer, but the weak child respects only the one he fears. And since he dare not rage against the injurer, he rages against his authority figures, whom he does not fear because he knows they love him, and whom he does not respect because they will not harm him. This is the pathology of our "baby boomers" -- or that part of them who yearn for and can never grow out of the Summer of Love, the happy time when the parents were indulgent enough to give them everything they wanted, but fuddy-duddy enough to be dismissed as competitors. Those who never grow up in our society always blame our own responsible officials when something goes wrong. Reagan taught us to place the blame where it belonged, on the enemy, and to make peace with them as our enemies -- without firing a shot, as Margaret Thatcher put it. Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall.



The intellectuals and the Europeans persistently "misunderestimated" Reagan (in George Bush`s splendid phrase). Part of being an adult is that one realizes that one makes a better fighter if one does not give away one`s "strategery," and a better trader if one does not make a big show of one`s intelligence. One knows that one is going to win, and one knows that the trade will be made on terms that are at least as profitable to oneself as to one`s bargaining partner -- but one does not parade one`s degrees and one`s medals. Intellectuals in America believe that complication in expression is the great sign of intelligence; adults know that the acme of intelligence is to express something simply. The intellectuals despised Reagan for his simplicity, and set out to create the most obfuscatory language ever devised by human beings: deconstructionism. Safe in their cocoon of verbiage they might be safe from the world and never die. Europeans always saw war and bargaining as ways to get territory, to expand the motherland, and have enough money to look after all the "enfants de la patrie" from cradle to grave. They could not understand a grownup American president who bargained for the opportunity to compete, fair and square, whose ambition was not to dominate other peoples but to free them from tyrants and make them stronger, better trading partners. The Europeans and intellectuals thought Reagan was brain dead; but he was Old Possum: he was only playing brain dead. Don`t throw me in the briar patch, Br`er Rabbit always said; and they threw him in every time. "Possum," the American icon of the advantages of being underestimated, means "I have the power" in Latin. Reports of the death of American power are now as then, in Mark Twain`s word, exaggerated.



So who was the fool? Rudyard Kipling had the answer:



As it will be in the future, it was at the birth of Man-

There are only four things certain since Social Progress began:-

That the Dog returns to his Vomit and the Sow returns to her Mire,

And the burnt Fool`s bandaged finger goes wobbling back to the Fire;



And that after this is accomplished, and the brave new world begins

When all men are paid for existing and no man must pay for his sins,

As surely as Water will wet us, as surely as Fire will burn,

The Gods of the Copybook Headings with terror and slaughter return!



Reaganomics were likewise just a matter of being adult. The child lives in a world of gift, and rightly so. The world owes children a living. But to remain in a world of gift alone is to never grow up, to fail to gain the resources needed to have children of one`s own and care for them responsibly. To move from being a receiver of gifts to a giver of them we must pass through the vale of earning and trading and selling. The child sees this as a wicked and cruel and unnecessary journey, and never realizes that trade and earning and selling have their own mysterious sociality, their own form of love. Two trading partners can both profit by the deal, and the harder the bargain is driven, the better the bargain. But to bargain, as to fight, one must take the position of being somebody, with all the risks of being somebody and all the sacrifice of all the other things one might have been. To bargain and to fight one must "put away childish things."



Indeed, there is a stage in real grownups` lives when they become more givers than earners or fighters or sellers. We all do when we die, at least. The grownups among us can become net givers before we die. But the only way to get there is through the work of life. I realized this at the death of my own father -- a great giver if ever there was one -- and I now feel an echo of that death as we prepare for the funeral of Ronald Reagan. The work of life is only possible if we accept that we are going to die. But the eternal children in our society refused, and still refuse, to accept that they will die. Their anguish at the cost of the Iraq war is the great symptom of that refusal, of the inability to grow up. There should be no costs, they feel; when we were children there were no costs, in a socialist society there would be no costs.



George W. Bush all too obviously, all too embarrassingly, had to grow up, and he did it before us, in public, for all to see. He went through that terrible moment when he had to give up alcohol, his refuge and solace, if he was to hang on to his wife and his potential as a father. He had to give his life over to a higher authority, one to whom he would be responsible when he died. He thus implicitly accepted death at that moment, accepted costs and tradeoffs. He stands as an example to his generation of how to begin to follow in the path of a Reagan, how to grow up. Thus the current hatred of the President is, strangely, at bottom a fear of death.



The cruelty of Alzheimer`s is that it separates the soul from the body in a terrible unnatural way. The body still lives, but the soul is away or asleep. When friends of mine died after a period of dementia I felt an enormous relief -- it was as if their souls, in all their vitality and intelligence and humor, had woken up, released from the clogged brain that had trapped them. I say this as one who does not philosophically separate body from soul. We, his friends, his world, his posterity, had become the new body of the dead one`s spirit. I feel that now. We need Ronald Reagan`s great spirit among us, as the last stage of the growing-up of the world begins.