June 8, 2004

Reagan the Revolutionary

By George Miller
HobbsOnline London Correspondent
LONDON - This article by Jim Geraghty argues that certain aspects of former President Ronald Reagan's political achievements, such as his contribution to the collapse of Soviet Communism, have attained an historical finality and are beyond dispute to all but the most willfully blind. Geraghty cites numerous examples of Western "intellectuals" who grossly exaggerated the strength of the Soviet Bloc economies and societies prior to their spectacular collapse. These examples reminded me of my university days spent in Manchester, England. I finished my degree in history and politics in 1987 after reading and regurgitating numerous essays on the strength of Communist society relative to Western democracy. I remember the German Democratic Republic, in particular, was held up as a shining example.

Of course, this is the same year Reagan went to Berlin and challenged Gorbachev to "tear down this wall!" Two years later, millions joyfully clambered over the ruined wall to breath freedom for the first time.

I was so indoctrinated about the superiority of all things Soviet and the invincibility of the Soviet Union that I remember sharing the derision of my academic colleagues that the jellybean-eating Dr. Strangelove in the White House would actually think that saying such a corny thing could have any effect. So when, in 1989, the Wall was torn down, and for several years after, I went around saying: "Communism is collapsing in Eastern Europe." I repeated this phrase like a mantra in order to get the concept to sit in a mind brainwashed by a British university.

I repeat the phrase, occasionally, even now, to remind myself of those days of breathtaking political revolution and to remember that deceit and/or willful ignorance of much of the academic establishment is a feature of the Western world.

Before the Revolutions of 1989, what looked like a distant dream or, even, an impossibility, afterwards has come to appear as somehow inevitable. Those events did not seem inevitable at the time, and the massacre in Tiananmen Square showed that there are other possible outcomes.

But the apologists for totalitarianism, the same ones who played up the supposed invincibility of Soviet Communism, now look anywhere but to the Western democracies for the agents of revolutionary ideas and inspiration. Like Time magazine, they proclaim the reformer Gorbachev "Man of the Decade" and insist that he was the catalyst for change and, somewhat haphazardly, for revolution.

This is, of course, nonsense.

The Soviet Union collapsed under the force of its own contradictions (as the Marxists would say) and this collapse was precipitated by relentless political, economic and moral pressure applied by the United States. This policy of confronting the Soviet Empire on all levels was developed and applied with boldness by the visionary President Reagan. As the humiliating August 1991 coup against Gorbachev demonstrated, the Russian President was the servant of events. By 1991, former President Reagan was kicking his heels on his California ranch, watching the sun rise to a daybreak he had predicted decades earlier.

The events leading up to the 1989 revolutions are complicated, as are all revolutionary epochs, and arguments about who did what and why will soon fill up the bookshelves of university libraries everywhere, elbowing aside the essays on 1789, 1848 and 1917.

The academics will tell a new generation a pack of lies and distortions, belittling the role of Western values and of democratic leaders and spending hours in seminars on Iran/contra while their students are forced to discover Reagan's Berlin speech on the Internet.

However, we have the evidence, on video, of the President of the American Republic standing in Berlin in 1987, appealing directly to the subjugated people of Eastern Europe to throw off their chains. Who would have thought that the most effective revolutionary visionary and strategist of the late 20th Century would be a conservative president of a democratic republic? Certainly I, indoctrinated to believe that radicalism was the preserve of the Left, did not think it remotely possible - hence the mantra and hence the realization, in his death, that Reagan, already a figure of immense importance to people who love liberty, will be regarded as one of history's great democratic leaders.

Before I die I hope, if God is willing, to be able to say something like:

"Democracy has taken root in the Muslim world."