"From Stettin in the
Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic, an iron curtain has descended across
the Continent. Behind that line lie all the capitals of the ancient states
of Central and Eastern Europe. Warsaw, Berlin, Prague, Vienna, Budapest,
Belgrade, Bucharest and Sofia. ...I have felt bound to portray the shadow
which, alike in the west and in the east, falls upon the world."
- Winston Churchill, 1946.
Ours is a supreme position.
The Great Republic has come into its own; it stands first among the peoples
of the earth.
- New York newspaper at the end of World War 2
"Seldom, if ever, has
a war ended leaving the victors with such a sense of uncertainty and fear,
with such a realization that the future is obscure and that survival is
not assured."
- Edward R Murrow, 1945.
"We proclaim ourselves,
as indeed we are, the defenders of freedom, wherever it continues to exist
in the world, but we cannot defend freedom abroad by deserting it at home."
- Edward R. Murrow, from a CBS broadcast about Senator Joseph McCarthy
"The Senator charged
that Professor Harold Laski a British scholar and politician, dedicated
a book to me. That's true. He is dead. He was a socialist, I am not. He
was a civilized individual who did not insist upon agreement with his political
principles as a pre-condition for conversation or friendship. I do not
agree with his political ideas, as he makes clear in the introduction dedicating
the book to me — not because of political agreement but because he held
my wartime broadcast from London in high regard. And the dedication so
reads. I believed years ago and I believe toda that mature Americans can
engage in conversation and controversy the clash of ideas, with Communists
anywhere in the world without becoming contaminated or converted. I believe
that our faith, our conviction our determination are stronger than theirs
and that we can successfully compete, not only in the area of bombs but
in the area of ideas."
- Edward R Murrow
"There is some risk
involved in action, there always is. But there is far more risk in failure
to act."
- President Harry Truman, 1948.
"The greatness of America,
in the future as in the past, is that it has never sought anything for
itself it has not sought for all mankind."
- Adlai Stevenson, Democratic Presidential Candidate (1952)
"We have won an armistice
on a single battlefield, not peace in our world. We may not now relax our
guard nor cease our quest."
- President Dwight D Eisenhower, following ending of Korean War, 1953.
"Forces of good and
evil are massed and armed and opposed as rarely before in history. Freedom
is pitted against slavery; lightness against the dark... In the final choice,
a soldier's pack is not so heavy a burden as a prisoner's chains."
- President Dwight D Eisenhower, 1954.
"If Berlin fell, the
US would lose Europe, and if Europe fell into the hands of the Soviet Union
and thus added its great industrial plant to the USSR's already great industrial
plant, the United States would be reduced to the character of a garrison
state if it were to survive at all."
- President Dwight D. Eisenhower
"History does not long entrust the care of
freedom to the weak or the timid."
- President Dwight D. Eisenhower
We in this country,
in this generation, are, by destiny rather than choice, the watchmen on
the walls of world freedom.
- President John F Kennedy, undelivered speech, 1963.
He was, albeit only
briefly, the hero of the world's hopes.
- David Cannadine, describing John F Kennedy, "History in our Time"
Ronald Reagan won the
Cold War without firing a shot.
- Margaret Thatcher, The Heritage Foundation, 1991.
The argument, now,
is about whether Bolshevik Russia was 'better' than Nazi Germany. In the
days when the New Left dawned, the argument was about whether Bolshevik
Russia was better than America.
- Martin Amis
Asked if Stalin was
an antisemite, Robert Conquest replied: "Yes, but it hardly noticed. He
was broadly and generously anti-human."
- John Derbyshire, in "National Review"
The 20th century ended
with a single surviving model of human progress.
- President George W Bush
Every generation has
its war. I have just been reminded of mine. It ended in 1989, 43 years
after it began, the longest war Britain fought and certainly the most expensive.
Its climax was total victory.
Yet there was no parade,
no medals, no colours hung in cathedrals. The Cold War saw no battles and
cost almost no blood. Where there is no blood there is no glory and hence
no history. Asked "What did you do in the war, Daddy?", I could say only
that I paid my taxes and left it at that.
- Simon Jenkins, "Cold War Relics", The Times of London
The Falklands victory
came at a time when the Soviet Union was trying to work out whether the
West had the will to resist. Although the battle in the South Atlantic
had nothing to do with the Cold War, that question was now conclusively
answered. By the end of the decade, it was the Russian will that had collapsed...
And so it came about that a fight for 1,800 people 8,000 miles away over
territory that did not matter in itself made a difference to everything...
Even at the time, the Falklands crisis seemed unbelievable, and it came
almost without warning. Its importance is that it provided Britain with
an astonishing test, which we passed.
- Charles Moore, "The Spectator"
What makes me nostalgic
is that Soviet wickedness made politics so much simpler in my youth. Either
you saw the evil empire for what it was, or you were one of the many suckers
who fell for its mendacious propaganda. Many of my contemporaries at university
in the 1980s blamed the United States for the arms race and joined the
Campaign for (Unilateral) Nuclear Disarmament. Others bought the idea of
"convergence" between the economic systems of West and East. Fools. You
only had to go to the Eastern Bloc to see what a real military-industrial
complex looked like — and what the absence of freedom actually meant. Every
time I took the S-Bahn to Friedrichstrasse, the old gateway to East Berlin,
I shuddered at the knowledge that I was entering the realm of despotism
— a place where there were no rights to privacy, to property or to political
representation. Now you need to take a trip to North Korea if you want
to get that salutary feeling, which did so much to clarify my own political
views. So a new Cold War might be good for Western Europe, just as it would
be bad for Eastern Europe, for the simple reason that we would be reminded
of the value of our hard-won freedoms, which we increasingly seem to take
for granted.
- Niall Ferguson, "I Miss The Cold War, "The Telegraph" (Jan'06)
Peter Beinart excoriates
the “doughface” liberals who during the Cold War put anti-imperialism before
anti-totalitarianism and demanded total moral purity on the part of the
United States, thus opposing any action in the real world to resist Soviet
expansionism. If the Democrats were, as he advocates, to return to the
Trumanesque anti-totalitarian liberalism that held sway in the party from
roughly 1947 to 1972, the party and the country would be better off.
- Rich Lowry, reviewing Peter Beinart in "National Review"
My parents, who were
Communists, always pretended to be American patriots. You can always convince
yourself you are: 'I love America, I just want it to be perfect, which
it will be when it becomes a Soviet Communist state'. When the left called
for 'liberation' what it really wanted was to erase the human slate and
begin again. Like everybody else, I see things that need to be improved.
I just am mindful of the fact that they can be made a lot worse.
- David Horowitz
Remind me: who was
the greater mass murderer, Stalin or Hitler? Well, Stalin is thought to
have been responsible for about 50 million deaths, and Hitler for a mere
25 million. What Hitler did in his concentration camps was equalled if
not exceeded in foulness by the Soviet gulags, forced starvation and pogroms.
What makes the achievements of communist Russia so special and different,
that you can simper around in a CCCP T-shirt, while anyone demented enough
to wear anything commemorating the Third Reich would be speedily banged
away under the 1986 Public Order Act?
- Boris Johnson, "Why do these Mass-Murdering Commies get such a Good Press?",
"Telegraph"
"Communism had failed
to retain enough true believers who would murder on its behalf."
- John O'Sullivan, on the end of Communism
"The Soviet Union was
brought down by a strange global coalition of Western European conservatives,
Eastern European nationalists, Russian liberals, Chinese communists, and
Afghan Islamic reactionaries, to name only a few. Many of these discordant
groups disliked the United States intensely. But Americans were able to
mobilize them to direct their ire at the Soviet Union first."
- David Frum, "National Review"
#
The years ahead are
great ones for this country, for the cause of freedom... 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.
- Ronald Reagan, 1981.
"It is the Soviet Union that runs against the tide of history. It is the march of freedom and democracy which will leave Marxist-Leninism on the ash heap of history as it has left other tyrannies which stifle the freedom and muzzle the self-expression of the people."
- Margaret Thatcher
"We speak of peace, yes, but whose peace? Poland's? Bulgaria's? The peace of the grave?"
- Margaret Thatcher, as the 'peaceful' Cold War raged
"Against the typhoon
winds of modern leftist ideology, President Reagan had the courage to fight
the armies of evil with the slingshot of truth. Of course, liberal politicians
in this country complained when he called the Soviet Union the 'evil empire',
and the media laughed when he challenged Gorbachev to tear down the infamous
Berlin Wall.
It is appropriate
to wonder why the crimes of communism aren't derided to the same extent
as the other tyrannies of history. The answer is simple: Liberals were
and are soft on communism. Even during the Cold War, as communism threatened
our nation with nuclear annihilation, Democrat leaders in Congress coddled
Marxist revolutionaries such as Sandinista leader Daniel Ortega. Such outrages
must never be forgotten.
Liberals in every
country still hope that various forms of socialism can be instituted in
government. The message needs to be clear: Marxism, socialism and communism,
under any name in all their forms, are intrinsically evil in any regime
at all times."
- Vaclav Havel
My dear fellow citizens: For forty years you have heard from my predecessors on this day different variations of the same theme: how our country flourished, how many millions of tons of steel we produced, how happy we all were, how we trusted our government, and what bright perspectives were unfolding in front of us. I assume you did not propose me for this office so that I, too, would lie to you.
In the polling booth
God can see you but Stalin cannot.
- Slogan of Christian Democrats in 1948 Italian election
When Chancellor Helmut
Schmidt came under fire for advocating the deployment of short-range missiles
on German soil, thus making Germany a prime target for a Soviet nuclear
attack, he was told: "But if you do this, you are certain to lose the next
election." He replied, "What makes you think I care?" The politician who
dares to say or do the unexpected deserves the respect of the people.
- Seen in "The Irish Independent"
President Gorbachev gave us freedom of worship and freedom of speech and freedom to see what was going on and freedom to vote, but that freedom won't last unless it is underpinned by economic freedom.
"It wasn't worth one
dollar or one American life," a US tourist had scribbled in a well-thumbed
visitors' book in a one-room Khe Sanh museum erected on an abandoned runway.
"Who won? Who lost? Who knows? wrote another. A veteran artillery sergeant
from Oklahoma confessed: "Am truly sorry for what we have done. Have learned
much here." Other visitors struck a more defiant note. "Ultimately the
American way is winning," wrote Gary from California. "That's true, there's
nothing like a Big Mac," responded the next visitor. "We love you America."
- Conor O'Clery, revisiting Vietnam in 2000, "May You Live in Interesting
Times"
Capitalism has created the highest standard of living ever known on earth. The evidence is incontrovertible. The contrast between West and East Berlin is the latest demonstration, like a laboratory experiment for all to see.
- Kevin Myers, "The Irish Times"
I was guilty of judging capitalism by its operations and socialism by its hopes and aspirations; capitalism by its works and socialism by its literature.
- Ron Rosenbaum, "New York Observer"
Aside from MAD (Mutually
Assured Destruction), few factors did more to keep the Cold War cold than
the erection of the Berlin Wall. After it went up, the level of East-West
tension in Europe went down.
While it was something
of an embarrassment for the West to stand idly by while the wall went up,
the thing was a much greater embarrassment for the East Germans and Soviets,
who had been forced to put a fence around their Worker's Paradise to keep
all the workers from running away. The West could not have asked for a
greater propaganda coup, a more striking symbol of the economic and moral
bankruptcy of their Communist adversaries.
- David Clay Large, in "The Cold War Turns Hot" from "What If?"
"Do not hesitate with
the use of a firearm, including when the border breakouts involve women
and children, which the traitors have already frequently taken advantage
of."
- Order given to East German border guards at the Berlin Wall
~
"What is the difference in fact between a Communist and a Fascist? Answer: none worth noticing."
- House Committee on Un-American Activities, 1947.
"In America, any man who is not a reactionary in his views is open to the charge of alliance with the Red hell."
- Arthur Miller, author of The Crucible, 1953.
"We cannot risk living all our lives under emergency measures."
- President Dwight D Eisenhower, 1954.
"In opposing Communism, we are defeating ourselves if we use methods that do not conform to the American sense of justice."
- President Dwight D Eisenhower, 1954.
"For all their faults, right-wing authoritarian regimes more easily accept democratic reforms than left-wing totalitarian states."
- Jeane J Kirkpatrick, Reagan-era US Ambassador to the UN.
~
From what I have seen
of our Russian friends and Allies during the war, I am convinced that there
is nothing they admire so much as strength, and there is nothing for which
they have less respect than for weakness, especially military weakness.
Last time I saw it
all coming and cried aloud to my own fellow-countrymen and to the world,
but no one paid any attention. Up till the year 1933 or even 1935, Germany
might have been saved from the awful fate which has overtaken her and we
might all have been spared the miseries Hitler let loose upon mankind.
There never was a war in all history easier to prevent by timely action
than the one which has just desolated such great areas of the globe.
- President Harry Truman, 1945.
"The United States should not under any circumstances throw away our gun until we are sure the rest of the world cannot arm against us."
- President Harry Truman, 1946.
"In some sense, which no vulgarity, no humor, no overstatement can quite extinguish, the physicists have known sin; and this is a knowledge which they cannot lose."
- J. Robert Oppenheimer, head of research team into atomic bomb
Wars are not caused by the buildup of weapons. They are caused when an aggressor believes he can achieve his objectives at an acceptable price.
- Margaret Thatcher, interview in Moscow on Soviet state television, 1987.
We're saying to anyone who dares to attack us, "Do not do it, you couldn't win, the result would be devastating!" I think you're saying the same.
- Margaret Thatcher, interview in Moscow on Soviet state television, 1987.
Hope is no basis for a defense policy.
- Ronald Reagan, 1986.
Of the four wars in my lifetime, none came about because the U.S. was too strong.
- Ronald Reagan
Trust, but verify.
- Ronald Reagan
Armaments do not, generally speaking, cause wars. This notion, the logical crux of all arguments in favor of disarmament, turns the causal relationship upside down. Actually, it is wars, or conflicts threatening war, that cause armaments, not the reverse.
"To this day, America
is still the abiding alternative to tyranny. This is our purpose in the
world, nothing more and nothing less."
- Ronald Reagan, 1981.
"We're here to mark
that day in history when the Allied peoples joined in battle to reclaim
this continent to liberty. For four long years, much of Europe had been
under a terrible shadow. Free nations had fallen, Jews cried out in the
camps, millions cried out for liberation. Europe was enslaved, and the
world prayed for its rescue. Here in Normandy the rescue began. Here the
Allies stood and fought against tyranny in a giant undertaking unparalleled
in human history."
- Ronald Reagan, Normandy June 6, 1984.
"Freedom is a fragile
thing and never more than one generation away from extinction."
- Ronald Reagan
"You are the light
of the world. A city set on a hill cannot be hid. Nor do men light a lamp
and put it under a bushel, but on a stand, and it gives light to all in
the house. Let your light so shine before men, that they may see your good
works and give glory to your Father who is in heaven."
- Jesus, Matthew 5:14-16.
"We will be as a city
upon a hill. The eyes of all people are upon us, so that if we deal falsely
with our God in this work we have undertaken and so cause Him to withdraw
His present help from us, we shall be made a story and a byword throughout
the world."
- John Winthrop, sermon on deck of the Arabella off Massachusetts, 1630.
"We can meet our destiny,
and that destiny to build a land here that will be, for all mankind, a
shining city on a hill."
- Ronald Reagan, 1981.
"As the greatest communicator
of our time, Sir Winston Churhcill enlisted the English language itself
in the battle against Hitler and his hateful doctrines. When the Nazi might
prevailed from Warsaw to the Channel Islands and from Egypt to the Arctic
Ocean, at a time when the whole cause of human liberty stood trembling
and imperiled, he breathed defiance in phrases that will ring down through
centuries to come.
And when the guns
at last fell silent in the Spring of 1945, no man on earth had done more
to preserve civilization during the hour of its greatest trial.
In the exhausted aftermath
of World War II, few were prepared to listen to warnings of fresh danger.
But Churchill was undaunted. Once before his had been a voice crying out
in the wilderness against the suicidal dogmas of appeasement. Once before
he had sounded an alarm against those deluded souls who thought they could
go on feeding the crocodile with bits and pieces of other countries and
somehow avoid his jaws themselves. His warnings had been ignored by a world
more in love with temporary ease than long-term security. Yet time had
proven him tragically correct. His Fulton speech was a firebell in the
night, a Paul Revere warning that tyranny was once more on the march."
- Ronald Reagan, Speech at Westminster College Cold War memorial, 1990.
"Historians looking
back at our time will note the consistent restraint and peaceful intentions
of the West. They will note that it was the democracies who refused to
use the threat of their nuclear monopoly in the forties and early fifties
for territorial or imperial gain. Had that nuclear monopoly been in the
hands of the Communist world, the map of Europe, indeed, the world, would
look very different today.
The decay of the Soviet
experiment should come as no surprise to us. Wherever the comparisons have
been made between free and closed societies - West Germany and East Germany,
Austria and Czechoslovakia, Malaysia and Vietnam - it is the democratic
countries that are prosperous and responsive to the needs of their people.
And one of the simple but overwhelming facts of our time is this: of all
the millions of refugees we've seen in the modern world, their flight is
always away from, not toward the Communist world. Today on the NATO line,
our military forces face east to prevent a possible invasion. On the other
side of the line, the Soviet forces also face east to prevent their people
from leaving.
The British people
know that, given strong leadership, time, and a little bit of hope, the
forces of good ultimately rally and triumph over evil. Here among you is
the cradle of self-government, the Mother of Parliaments. Here is the enduring
greatness of the British contribution to mankind, the great civilized ideas:
individual liberty, representative government, and the rule of law under
God."
- Ronald Reagan, Speech to the House of Commons, 1982.
"If not us, who? And
if not now, when?"
- Ronald Reagan
"Let us be aware that
while they preach the supremacy of the state, declare its omnipotence over
individual man, and predict its eventual domination of all peoples on the
earth, they are the focus of evil in the modern world."
- from Ronald Reagan's speech where he dubbed the Soviet Union an 'Evil
Empire"
I urge you to beware
the temptation ... to ignore the facts of history and the aggressive impulses
of any evil empire, to simply call the arms race a giant misunderstanding
and thereby remove yourself from the struggle between right and wrong,
good and evil.
- Ronald Reagan
The other day, someone
told me the difference between a democracy and a people's democracy. It's
the same difference between a jacket and a straitjacket.
- Ronald Reagan, 1986.
How do you tell a Communist?
Well, it's someone who reads Marx and Lenin. And how do you tell an anti-communist?
It's someone who understands Marx and Lenin.
- Ronald Reagan
If the Soviet Union
let another political party come into existence, they would still be a
one-party state, because everybody would join the other party.
- Ronald Reagan
An old Russian woman
goes into Kremlin, gets an audience with Mikhail Gorbachev and says, "In
America anyone can go to the White House, walk up to Reagan's desk and
say, 'I don't like the way you are running the country.'" Gorbachev
replied, "You can do the same thing in the Soviet Union. You can
go into the Kremlin, walk up to my desk and say 'I don't like the way Reagan
is running his country.'"
- Joke told by Ronald Reagan to Mikhail Gorbachev at Geneva Summit
We are a nation that
has a government - not the other way around.
- Ronald Reagan
"My fellow Americans,
I've signed legislation that will outlaw Russia forever. We begin bombing
in five minutes."
- Ronald Reagan, testing a microphone.
Intelligence reports
say Castro is very worried about me. I’m very worried that we can’t come
up with something to justify his worrying.
- extract from "The Reagan Diaries"
Americans are hungering
to feel proud and patriotic again.
- extract from "The Reagan Diaries"
"I didn't leave the
Democratic party; the Democratic party left me."
- Ronald Reagan, on his decision to become a Republican
"Liberals are people
who think that being tough on crime means longer suspended sentences."
- Ronald Reagan
"Reagan survived the
Iran-Contra scandal because the elements of it that were illegal (aiding
anti-communist Nicaraguans) were popular and the things that were unpopular
(arming the Iranians) were quite legal."
- David Frum, on the toughest times of the Reagan presidency, "National
Review"
Her many achievements
will be appreciated more as time goes on.
- Ronald Reagan, describing Margaret Thatcher, 1994.
When others spoke of
the fear of war, you spoke of the need for warriors and peace through strength.
When others bewailed the failure of big government to provide for the collective
good, you spoke of self-reliance, of personal responsibility, of individual
pride and integrity. When others preached compromise - when others demanded
compromise, you, Ronald Reagan, preached conviction.
- Margaret Thatcer, describing Ronald Reagan, 1994.
I think if someone
else other than Reagan, someone less of a hardliner, had been in power
then the breakthrough in ending the Cold War would not have happened.
- Eduard Shevardnadze, Soviet Union Foreign Minister under Gorbachev
All Presidents, like
all human beings, get many things wrong. Ronald Reagan's extraordinary
achievement as President of the U.S. was to succeed in getting the two
biggest challenges of his time right: defeating the Soviet Union and reviving
the American economy and spirit. Neither of those achievements was inevitable.
Both were fiercely opposed at the time. But he persisted; his visionary
focus matched only by a gentleness of character and a brilliance of rhetoric.
- Andrew Sullivan, "Time Magazine"
"Even admirers of Lady
Thatcher, among whom we count ourselves, would hardly claim that she brightened
the skies wherever she ventured. But Ronald Reagan brought his native optimism
to the job of president and fine-tuned it into a formidable political tool...
Yet Ronald Reagan’s focus on favourable rather than negative outcomes played
an important role in the West’s peaceful victory in the Cold War. Eight
years of handshakes and arms talks later, Mr Reagan left office to a mood
of unparalleled optimism so bright that the world’s doomsters were obliged
to forget briefly about nuclear war and begin to warn us of meteorological
Armageddon instead."
- Spectator Editorial, "Victory For Optimism"
Even now, the irony
that so non-intellectual a man should choose to engage the Soviet Union
on the battlefield of ideas has eluded most commentators and historians.
- Richard Perle
You can’t uninvent
things, you can only make them obsolete... Ronald Reagan understood that
the surest method of neutralising any weapon is to make it obsolete.
- Mark Steyn, on Reagan's commitment to 'Star Wars'
The 1970s was the era
of 'detente', a word barely remembered now, which is just as well, as it
reflects poorly on us: The presidents and prime ministers of the Free World
had decided 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. Millions
of Europeans across half a continent from Poland to Bulgaria, Slovenia
to Latvia live in freedom today because he acknowledged that simple truth
when the rest of the political class was tying itself in knots trying to
pretend otherwise. That's what counts. He brought down the 'evil empire',
and all the rest is fine print.
- Mark Steyn, "The Washington Times"
The arrogance of every
age is the assumption of permanence. It's unusual to find a leader who
thinks beyond that: 'smart' in media politics means someone who can recite
by heart every sub-clause of his plan on prescription-drug re-importation
from Canada, not someone who looks a decade or two down the road and figures
out the lie of the land. Ronald Reagan had a much rarer intelligence -
a strategic intelligence. In 1977, he told Richard Allen, 'Some people
think I'm simplistic, but there's a difference between being simplistic
and being simple. My theory of the Cold War is that we win and they lose.
What do you think about that?'. Cute. So few politicians talked like that
a quarter-century ago that I'd have been content if it was just a neat
line. But Reagan figured out a way to make it come true. Within 10 years.
That's strategic thinking.
- Mark Steyn, "Chicago Sun Times"
When he became president
in 1981, Reagan embarked on a policy of confrontation with the Soviet Union.
He was not content merely to contain communism. He wanted to roll it back.
Therefore, he armed anti-communist insurgents wherever he could find them
and embarked on a massive programme of military spending that the moribund
Soviet economy couldn't hope to match.
He called the Soviet
Union "the evil empire", something that also led to him being widely condemned,
even though the USSR had killed millions upon millions of its own people
since the 1917 Bolshevik putsch. If the USSR wasn't evil, then neither
was Nazi Germany.
Reagan was continually
accused of running the risk of sparking a war between East and West. He
was told that the USSR was a permanent reality and the best way to deal
with it was through negotiation, or détente as it was called. Then,
suddenly, one year after he left office, the Berlin Wall was torn down
and the Iron Curtain that had divided Europe for more than 40 years was
no more.
Just as suddenly,
those who had declared the USSR to be a permanent reality did a complete
volte face. No, no, no, they declared, communism wasn't a permanent reality.
It was as clear as the nose on your face that it was going to collapse.
It, and not capitalism, was full of internal contradictions that made its
implosion inevitable.
What else could they
say? They were hardly going to credit Reagan in any way for something so
epoch-making as the collapse of European communism; and they were hardly
going to admit that they, the intellectuals, were wrong about communism,
and Reagan, the moron, was right.
- David Quinn, "The Irish Independent"
Ronald Reagan certainly
didn't come under fire on the beaches of Normandy, but his policies had
a similar, liberating effect on Europe nonetheless. It's doubtful there
will ever be a celebration marking the Reykjavik conference or the Berlin
Wall speech. Denial of their own history will always be popular with left-wing
Europeans and their political leaders. Someday soon, no doubt, in the pages
of Le Monde or the Guardian, the American defeat of Soviet ambitions will
be seen not as an American victory, but as a victory the Russians won for
themselves. But for a day, on June 6, 2004, as the TV stations in France,
Germany, and the U.K. switched back and forth between Normandy and Paris
and Los Angeles and Washington, truth invaded Europe.
- Dennis Boyles, "National Review", as the sad news of Ronald Reagan's
death breaks
Days after being shot,
weak from wounds, he spilled water from a sink, and entering the hospital
room aides saw him on his hands and knees wiping water from the floor.
He worried that his nurse would get in trouble. The good book says humility
goes before honor, and our friend had both, and who could not cherish such
a man?
- Part of eulogy of George Bush Snr. for Ronald Reagan
Others prophesied the
decline of the West; he inspired America and its allies with renewed faith
in their mission of freedom. Others saw only limits to growth; he transformed
a stagnant economy into an engine of opportunity. Others hoped, at best,
for an uneasy cohabitation with the Soviet Union; he won the Cold War -
not only without firing a shot, but also by inviting enemies out of their
fortress and turning them into friends.
His ideas, though
clear, were never simplistic. He saw the many sides of truth. Yes, he warned
that the Soviet Union had an insatiable drive for military power and territorial
expansion; but he also sensed it was being eaten away by systemic failures
impossible to reform. Yes, he did not shrink from denouncing Moscow's 'evil
empire'. But he realised that a man of goodwill might nonetheless emerge
from within its dark corridors.
We live today in the
world that Ronald Reagan began to reshape with those words. It is a very
different world with different challenges and new dangers. All in all,
however, it is one of greater freedom and prosperity, one more hopeful
than the world he inherited on becoming president.
- from Margaret Thatcher's eulogy for Ronald Reagan
"I think Ronald Reagan
changed the trajectory of America in a way that Richard Nixon did not and
in a way that Bill Clinton did not. He put us on a fundamentally different
path because the country was ready for it."
- Barack Obama
"How does it feel to
be the president’s third choice? Humiliating?"
"You could have thrown
a dart. That’s how close they were. We had so many excellent candidates."
- Ronald Reagan, fielding a questions for his Supreme Court nominee Anthony
Kennedy
"A few months before
9/11, I went to the Summit of the Americas in Quebec City, a rather somnolent
affair aside from the anti-globalisation mobs hurling concrete across the
perimeter fence. The assembled heads of government were there to plan for
a hemispherical free trade area, and I spent a catatonic 48 hours listening
to eminently reasonable Foreign and Finance Ministers eager to explain
at length why Costa Rica and Bolivia were now open for business. The summit
was attended by every President and Prime Minister in the region except
one: Fidel Castro. Comrade Fidel had been ruled ineligible to attend because
Cuba was not a democracy. Everywhere else was. One can argue that things
have slipped a little in the last three years: fiscal woes in Argentina;
the grubby thug Chavez in Venezuela. But still, even by the most pessimistic
reading, an area that 30 years ago was wall-to-wall dictatorships is now
overwhelmingly democratic... What changed the dynamic in the region? Two
things: Mrs Thatcher's Falklands War, which was a decisive defeat for Latin-American
macho militarism; and Ronald Reagan's determination to roll back Communist
expansion, at a time of Castro-friendly coups in Grenada and elsewhere."
- Mark Steyn, analysing
the effect of Reagan's Americas policy
~
We who live in free
market societies believe that growth, prosperity and ultimately human fulfillment,
are created from the bottom up, not the government down. Only when the
human spirit is allowed to invent and create, only when individuals are
given a personal stake in deciding economic policies and benefitting from
their success - only then can societies remain economically alive, dynamic,
progressive, and free. Trust the people. This is the one irrefutable lesson
of the entire postwar period contradicting the notion that rigid government
controls are essential to economic development.
- Ronald Reagan, 1981.
By 1980, we knew it
was time to renew our faith, to strive with all our strength toward the
ultimate in individual freedom consistent with an orderly society. We believed
then and now there are no limits to growth and human progress when men
and women are free to follow their dreams.
- Ronald Reagan, 2nd Inaugural Address, 1985
The fundamental error
of socialism is anthropological in nature. Socialism considers the individual
person simply as an element, a molecule within the social organism, so
that the good of the individual is completely subordinated to the functioning
of the socio-economic mechanism. Socialism likewise maintains that the
good of the individual can be realized without reference to his free choice,
to the unique and exclusive responsibility which he exercises in the face
of good or evil. Man is reduced to a series of social relationships, and
the concept of the person as the autonomous subject of moral decisions
disappears.
The modern business
economy has positive aspects. Its basis is human freedom exercised in the
economic field. There exists another form of ownership which is becoming
no less important than land: the possession of know-how, technology and
skill. The wealth of the industrialized nations is based much more on this
kind of ownership than on natural resources. Besides the earth, man's principal
resource is man himself. Where self-interest is suppressed, it is replaced
by a burdensome system of bureaucratic control that dries up the wellsprings
of initiative and creativity.
- Pope John Paul II, "Centesimus Annus"
I will never oppose
the Vietnam War. I thought that the Americans were right to do it. I think
it was a responsible effort by the United States. I think they fought it
in the wrong way, it wasn't run as a proper war. It was run with one eye
on public opinion the whole time. But I think that they were right to oppose
the attempts by Ho Chi Minh and Giap to make the whole of Vietnam into
a Marxist society. And looking to what's happened to the country since,
I still believe that it was right to try and stop them.
I wouldn't have felt
it was the end of the world if the Vietnam War hadn't been fought. It's
not that kind of war. I don't think it's a war like fighting Hitler, but
I think it was a correct war, a right war, and it had indirect effects
of the greatest importance as well. I think it demonstrated to the Russians
of the Russian leadership of the last years of communism that the Americans
were serious when they said that they opposed communism. And I think it,
therefore, eventually contributed to the end of the Cold War and the fall
of Communist regimes all over central and eastern Europe.
- Sir John Keegan, Military Historian
As the CIA and KGB,
like God and Satan, fight Miltonic battles across five continents...
- Paul Johnson, writing during the Cold War, "The Offshore Islanders"
"The superpowers often
behave like two heavily armed blind men feeling their way around a room,
each believing himself in mortal peril from the other, whom he assumes
to have perfect vision."
- Henry Kissinger
Fronting an excellent
TV Eye documentary on the subject of Islam, the redoubtable Vanya Kewley
once again demonstrated that it is possible to be passionate in the cause
of decency. Her Everyman programmes for the BBC were copybook examples
of how right-wing nightmare nations like the Philippines and Paraguay can
be discredited without any implication that left-wing nightmare nations
are somehow not so bad after all. Kewley elegantly embodies the principle
that the truth is absolute, even if our grasp of it is relative. Q. Baebius
Herennius believes that the truth is relative and his grasp of it absolute.
She can understand him, but he will never be able to understand her.
- Clive James, from his "The Crystal Bucket" (1981)
For many in many countries,
the heroic myth of the Spanish Republic is closely linked to the International
Brigades. Nobody can doubt the idealism and self-sacrifice of the volunteers
from 52 nations who went in the belief that they could defeat fascism in
Spain, yet recent discoveries in Russian archives cast a chilling light
on the Comintern organisers who threw away their lives so callously in
futile attacks. Even before most volunteers reached Spain, Soviet advisers
were planning to destroy their left-wing allies. The greatest shock for
these “volunteers for freedom”, as the International Brigaders were called,
came with the Soviet style of discipline, selecting men at random and shooting
them through the back of the head.
- Anthony Beevor, author of "The Battle for Spain"
The Soviets supplied
the Republicans with tanks and planes, together with the services of some
800 pilots and military advisers of lamentable competence, in exchange
for most of Spain’s gold reserves. The preposterous coalition of leftists
and anarchists of every hue that sought to deny power to Franco’s Nationalists
was endowed with courage and ideals, but bereft of everything else: cash,
military ability, discipline, diplomatic guile and, above all, willingness
effectively to collaborate with each other. When Stalin determined that
Spain’s communists must secure a monopoly of power, the Republicans conducted
a bloody power struggle in their ranks. It was executions, executions all
the way: of alleged deserters, traitors, cowards, rivals in scores and
even hundreds — most innocent, of course. Non-communist Republican units
were often denied ammunition and medical care by communist ones. Who can
wonder that they lost? The civil war will never be studied with admiration
by strategists. Both sides were pitifully incompetent. General Franco possessed
political cunning, but his limitations as a commander drove his German
and Italian mentors to despair. Only the support of Hitler’s Condor Legion,
together with the follies of his enemies, enabled the nationalists to prevail.
Franco and the Nationalists
sought to overthrow the legitimate government of Spain by force of arms.
Beevor notes the significant point that had the Republicans lost the prewar
election they, too, would almost certainly have resorted to arms to contest
the democratic verdict, and that had they won the war, the communists would
probably have seized monopoly power with their usual ruthlessness. Stalin,
incidentally, afterwards executed most of the Soviet advisers who had served
in Spain.
Franco continued to
kill his defeated foes even after 1945, when any political necessity was
gone. Some 200,000 Spaniards are estimated to have died in prison or by
execution during Franco’s decades of vengeance. Both sides deserved to
lose, but Franco proved an especially repulsive victor.
- Max Hastings, from his review of "The Battle for Spain", "The Times"
The more active Boris
Yeltsin was on the Politburo, the more he aroused suspicion in the mind
of his one superior, Mikhail Gorbachev, the general secretary of the Party.
A test of strength developed between the two men. Nothing quite like it
had ever been seen in the history of Communism. The stakes were enormous.
Gorbachev appeared to win when he fired Yeltsin. Yeltsin used the novelty
of elections to fight back. Elected president of Russia, he played the
nationalist card, and it proved stronger than Communism. Civil war might
well have erupted between die-hard defenders of Communism and Russian nationalists.
Standing on a tank in August 1991, Yeltsin successfully appealed to nationalism.
It was a brave moment, and will always mark his place in history. At the
same time, he fulfilled his ambition of achieving supreme power. Nobody,
certainly not Yeltsin himself, realised that breaking Gorbachev necessarily
entailed breaking Communism too. The Party could not survive factionalism,
Lenin had always warned, and so it proved.
- David Pryce Jones, assessing the late Boris Yeltsin, "National Review"
(Apr'07)
Italian intellectuals,
Cambodian peasants, Hungarian workers, Russian colonels, Angolan insurgents,
French philosophes, American actors, British miners, Chinese craftsmen,
Nicaraguan labourers: over the years, the adherents of the international
communist movement have been so geographically and socially diverse as
to defy classification. During the 100-odd years of the movement’s existence,
nations as different as Czarist Russia, semi-feudal China and post- colonial
Cuba subsequently developed into communist states...
All of which is a
roundabout way of saying that Robert Service’s Comrades is a deceptively
ambitious book. Neither unreasonably long nor overwhelmingly theoretical,
it swiftly chronicles the movement from its philosophical origins to the
collapse of the Soviet Union and the economic transformation of China,
along the way touching on Albania, North Korea and Cuba, among many other
countries. In mercifully clear prose, Service explains how the Bolsheviks
divided from the Mensheviks, why Tito veered away from Stalin, what caused
the great rift between the Soviet Union and China...
This is not the book
to read if you want neat conclusions, because there aren’t any. As Service
points out at the very end of the book, communist ideology is in fact part
of a larger story. After all, Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy, as well as
Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, shared the same ‘totalising impulse’ and dedication
to ‘unrestrained state power penetrating all aspects of life — political,
economic, social, cultural and spiritual’. More to the point, the attraction
of communism, or of regimes that echo communist rhetoric, still appears
strong in places as varied as Venezuela, Vietnam and Russia itself. Whatever
it is that persuaded people to cheer for Stalin hasn’t yet disappeared
from human nature, and it doesn’t seem it will any time soon either.
- Anne Applebaum, reviewing "Comrades: A World History of Communism" "The
Spectator"
Bill Buckley is an
heroic figure to many because he was right about the great question of
the second half of the 20th century at a time when far too many in the
west thought it boorish and vulgar to be: As a character in one of his
last novels tells a self-regarding liberal, "The kind of people who have
offended you since you were at college are the people who won the Cold
War."
Bill was not a shrill
man about politics, but he had a consistent moral clarity. Not long ago,
we had a lunch a deux and spent most of it chatting about spy fiction.
His Blackford Oakes novels had just been reissued, and Bill was talking
of how he'd created Blackie as an antidote to the John Le Carre ethos,
in which there's no good, there's no bad, there's just shades of gray and
total moral equivalence between east and west, and thus between their respective
warriors at the KGB and in the western intelligence agencies. And once
you accept this view the conflict is necessarily trivial: it's just a game
between opposing bureaucracies whose machinations and manoeuvres are their
own justification. Le Carre was profoundly wrong but a good enough writer
that his became the default template of spy fiction, and, because life
imitates art, of far too many real intelligence types at the CIA and MI6
toward the end of the Cold War.
- Mark Steyn, on the life of Bill Buckley (1925-2008)
Russia in the late
1930s was not a good place to be. People really did sleep in their outdoor
clothes, with a ready-packed suitcase at their bedside, waiting for the
NKVD (the secret police) to knock on the door. You could be arrested and
killed for a joke, for a factual remark about a food shortage, or for failing
to denounce other people, including your immediate family. And you could
also be arrested and killed for nothing at all, since the NKVD, like other
elements of the Soviet economy, had productivity targets to meet. Anyone
who was different was suspect. In 1937, 53 members of a deaf-mutes' association
were arrested in Leningrad, and 33 were sentenced to death for conducting
'conspiracies' in sign-language. Stamp-collectors, who had shown an unhealthy
interest in letters from foreign countries, were hunted down, and so too
were people who had learnt Esperanto. If life was as bad as this for Russians,
just think how bad it must have been for people who were trying to live
like Russians, but were in fact Americans.
Not tourists, businessmen,
or diplomats; no, these were just ordinary working people, who had moved
to the Soviet Union. Their total number is unknown, but it must have run
to several thousands, and their story - the subject of Tim Tzouliadis's
gripping and important book - has never been fully told before.
Why had they come?
Some were idealistic Communists, or left-wingers whose trade-union activism
had cost them their jobs in the US. But most were just looking for work,
having lost their jobs in the way that millions of other Americans lost
theirs, in the Great Depression. While American industry contracted, Russia
had been recruiting skilled technicians, not least to run the giant car
factory which was purchased - en bloc - from Henry Ford and plonked down
on the banks of the Volga.
At first, life was
good for most of these immigrants - better, certainly, than the life of
the unemployed in the US. They were fêted by the Russian media, and
the authorities allowed major stadiums to be used for their baseball matches.
The workers of the world were able to unite at last, it seemed, losing
their chains but not their bats and gloves.
True, there were a
few little warning signs. Many of the immigrants were relieved of their
American passports on arrival, never to see them again. (Suitably doctored,
some of the passports were used for sending Soviet agents to America.)
Wages which the Russian authorities had promised to deposit in US bank
accounts mysteriously failed to appear there. Pressure was put on some
of the Americans to take up Soviet citizenship, thereby losing the protection
of international law; and some found that they had taken it up unknowingly,
having been made to sign forms in Russian which they could not read. But
with the onset of the Terror, it hardly mattered what anyone had signed.
To visit the American Embassy in Moscow, in order to register US citizenship,
was in many cases to write one's own death sentence: NKVD men waited on
the other side of the street, seized people as they emerged, and bundled
them into vans... this book is also about all the ways in which America
managed to ignore, or misrepresent, what was happening to thousands of
its citizens. There is a roll-call of shame here which runs from the privileged
Moscow press corps (led by the sycophantic Walter Duranty, who had published
articles urging Americans to move to Russia in the first place), to visiting
celebrities such as Paul Robeson (who dismissed all stories of mass-arrests
as anti-Soviet propaganda), to a whole string of prominent officials in
the Moscow Embassy, the State Department and the White House... This
is a writer who, though he does not preach to the reader, clearly possesses
a 'moral compass'. Some of the American officials he describes had lost
theirs altogether; and, as Tzouliadis shows, it was partly as a result
of this that so many American citizens lost their lives.
- Noel Malcolm reviews "The Forsaken", "The Telegraph"
# JFK
From an interview with James Piereson, author of "How the Assassination of John F. Kennedy Shattered American Liberalism", with National Review in June 2007.
Q: You write of JFK’s
assassination that “no other event in the postwar era, not even the terrorist
attacks of September 11, 2001, has cast such a long shadow over our national
life.” How did JFK’s murder change American politics and culture?
A: Kennedy’s assassination,
happening the way it did, compromised the central assumptions of American
liberalism that had been the governing philosophy of the nation since the
time of the New Deal. It did this in two decisive ways: first, by compromising
the faith of liberals in the future; second, by undermining their confidence
in the nation. Kennedy’s assassination suggested that history is not in
fact a benign process of progress and advancement, but perhaps something
quite different. The thought that the nation itself was responsible for
Kennedy’s death suggested that the United States, far from being a “city
on a hill” and an example for mankind, as Kennedy had described it (quoting
John Winthrop), was in fact something darker and more sinister in its deepest
nature.
Q: How did this play
out politically in the 1960s and beyond?
A: The conspiracy
theories that developed afterwards reflected this thought. The Camelot
legend further suggested that that the Kennedy years represented something
unique that was now forever lost. Liberalism was thereafter overtaken by
a sense of pessimism about the future, cynicism about the United States,
and nostalgia for the Kennedy years. This was something entirely new in
the United States. It was evident in the culture during the 1960s. George
Wallace tried to confront it in the electoral arena in 1968, as did Richard
Nixon — though it was somewhat difficult to do so because neither Lyndon
Johnson nor Hubert Humphrey represented this new orientation. It was not
until this mood of pessimism was brought into the government during the
Carter administration that it could be directly confronted in the political
arena, which is what Ronald Reagan in fact did.
Q: Isn’t it a little
early to say that 11/22/63 mattered more than 9/11/01?
A: No. We know from
looking back over the decades that Kennedy’s sudden death cast a long shadow
over American life, which I have tried to describe. Many of us thought
that the terrorist attacks of 9/11 would also have great consequences for
the way Americans looked at politics, the parties, and national security.
In particular, some felt that the attacks might drive out of our politics
the tone of anti-Americanism that had been a key feature of the American
Left from the 1960s forward. That did not really happen. The liberal movement
today remains far more the product of the 1960s than of the terrorist attacks
and their aftermath. Indeed, the terrorist attacks now seem to have had
very little effect on the thinking of American liberals who view the war
on terror and the war in Iraq through the lenses of the Vietnam War. That
is not true of conservatives. In that sense, the terrorist attacks have
simply deepened the divide between liberals and conservatives. What is
surprising, then, is what little enduring effect the terrorist attacks
have had, particularly for liberals.
Q: Would liberalism
have unraveled even if JFK had lived?
A: It is hard to say
what would have happened if Kennedy had lived. He may have lost his popularity
in a second term. He may have avoided the dead end in Vietnam. It’s hard
to say. Kennedy was in the process of renewing liberalism when he was killed,
expanding it into cultural areas beyond issues of economic security and
national security. I am certain that liberalism would not have unraveled
when it did and in the way that it did if Kennedy had lived. The assassination
shattered its core assumptions.
Q: Lee Harvey Oswald
was a Communist. Have liberals been reluctant to accept this fact? And
is their reluctance at the heart of all the conspiracy theories surrounding
the assassination?
A: Liberals who were
rational and realistic accepted the fact that Oswald killed JFK but at
the same time they were unable to ascribe a motive for his actions. They
tended to look for sociological explanations for the event and found one
in the idea that JFK was brought down by a “climate of hate” that had overtaken
the nation. Thus they placed Kennedy’s assassination within a context of
violence against civil rights activists. They had great difficulty accepting
the fact that Kennedy’s death was linked to the Cold War, not to civil
rights. Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., in his 1,000-page history of the Kennedy
administration, published in 1965, could not bring himself to mention Oswald’s
name in connection with Kennedy’s death, though he spent several paragraphs
describing the hate-filled atmosphere of Dallas at the time — suggesting
thereby that Kennedy was a victim of the far right. The inability to come
to grips with the facts of Kennedy’s death pointed to a deeper fault in
American liberalism which was connected to its decline... The loss of faith
among liberals in the years after JFK’s death opened a path for conservatives
to come to power. It might be said that Ronald Reagan picked up the torch
of national optimism that was dropped by the liberals when Kennedy was
killed. Kennedy’s death, as its implications were worked out, destroyed
the capacity of liberals to govern the country.
Q: Was JFK’s assassination
more consequential than Abraham Lincoln’s?
A: ...In contrast
to Lincoln, Kennedy was killed before he could achieve any great success.
Kennedy was thus viewed in terms of dashed hopes and unfulfilled promise.
Lincoln was viewed in terms of what he had achieved, Kennedy in terms of
what might have been. Liberals at the time were convinced that the nation
was threatened more by right-wing radicals like Sen. McCarthy or fundamentalist
preachers than by Communists. Given their assumptions, they had great difficulty
assimilating the fact that JFK was shot by a Communist — for this was exactly
the kind of thing that the hated Sen. McCarthy had been warning against.
Instead of seeing Kennedy as a casualty of the Cold War — which he was
— they saw him as a martyr for civil rights. They saw his assassination
as a sign of the nation’s guilt. Thus, Lincoln’s assassination reinforced
the legitimacy of the nation while Kennedy’s undermined it, at least in
the eyes of liberals.
Q: What did you think
of JFK, the Oliver Stone conspiracy movie?
A: The Oliver Stone
movie was foolish to the extent it was held up as an account of the Kennedy
assassination. Using Jim Garrison as a credible authority on the Kennedy
assassination is akin to citing Rosie O’Donnell as an authority on the
collapse of the Twin Towers. It is not possible to claim that Kennedy was
shot from the grassy knoll without at the same time claiming that the autopsy
(which said he was shot from the rear) was wrong or fabricated. The conspiracy
theories do not arise from any evidence but from a need to believe that
Kennedy was shot by someone other than Oswald... There is as much evidence
to prove that Oswald killed Kennedy as that Booth shot Lincoln.
Q: Would liberals have
had an easier time of it if Jack Ruby hadn’t killed Oswald?
A: If Ruby had not
intervened, Oswald probably would have tried to stage some kind of “show”
trial in which Kennedy’s policies in Cuba would have been raised as a central
issue. Oswald proudly acknowledged that he was a Communist. If the case
had been brought to trial, Oswald would have certainly been convicted.
In that case, it would have been far more difficult for liberals and the
Kennedy family to maintain that JFK was killed because of his support for
civil rights. There would have been less talk of conspiracies; less anti-Americanism
from the left; perhaps it would have further reinforced the anti-communism
of post-war liberalism. There is no question that Ruby changed the equation
a great deal.
#