January 29, 2011
As the United States celebrates Ronald Reagan’s centennial birthday, the defining proof of his greatness as president will be represented by two sequential film clips – Reagan in Berlin ordering Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev to “tear down this wall,” followed by scenes of the Berlin Wall coming down.
5 comments:
This may be one of the pettiest, petulant posts you've ever made, and that's quite an accomplishment.
No one --- except those erecting a straw man --- "suggest a causal relationship: tough-guy Reagan [another far-Left caricature] tells the Soviet leader to do something and, poof, it’s done."
Three lies in one sentence: a high, even for you.
What you ignore, of course, is the INSPIRATIONAL aspect of Reagan's leadership in the Cold War, to which people in Eastern Europe routinely attest.
You might want to consider the voices of those whom you would happily have left in oppression, and probably would, except for the fact that you either don't consider it to have been "oppression," or simply don't care.
EXCELLENT article Mr. Parry. It so well summarizes the US/Soviet history of that time, the destructive role that Reagan played in perpetuating a cold war, (ultimately for his own petty political purposes), and gives the reasons for the continuing mythology by Washington careerists (media and political). Naive acolytes will believe that Reagan was some kind of 'inspirational figure', but that was ONLY to themselves and a few other right-wingers. Inattentive citizens in this country often liked his simple shuck-and-jive manner... 'he's a friendly guy -- like us.. I want to have a beer with him', which interestingly always conflicted with the purported values of the conservatives (ie; hard work, morality, intelligence, etc).
The only thing I objected to in the article was the notion that no one 'won' the cold war. That is false; in the end we all won that war. Any war that doesn't become hot, that doesn't kill millions of people and destroy the lives of tens of millions more, is a glorious victory.
It's the wars that become shooting wars which has losers. There is never any glory in killing people
The only flaw that I could find in the article was that it gave Ronald Reagan far too much credit.
He was a regular in the cockpit of my husband's airliner during his days as Governor of California - gracious, always armed with a smile and a joke. My husband believed then and now that Ronald Reagan should never have been president - he was simply a script-reader, a much sunnier, well-spoken version of George W.- intellectually lazy and willing to let cynical staff do the dirty work as long as he could squire the wife to a gala.
Sadly, real journalism of this quality and depth, that explains the context of recent history without the political varnish and churning Orwellian propaganda, is today relegated to relatively obscure websites and blog posts, while the billion-dollar TV mainstream continues to communicate nothing more than well-constructed spin, propaganda and PR..."perception management" unabated.
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