I remember Reagan as the chief executive who informed his hapless constituents during his first State of the Union address that he intended to limit welfare to the 'truly needy,' prior to presiding over a corporate feeding frenzy that gutted the American economy. I also remember him as the delusional maniac who delivered the 'We begin bombing in five minutes' speech. Predictably, neither of these heinous soundbites are being aired during Reagan's eulogies.
I hope it's clear that I shared Reagan's loathing for the Iron Curtain totalitarians, but I realized that more than rhetoric was going to be necessary to bring down the Soviet power structure. In addition, I thought it hypocritical that Reagan railed against communist fraud, waste, and aggression when these were hallmarks of his own domestic as well as foreign policies. When the bottom fell out of the Eastern European economies and the communists fled, I was sickened to see American flag wavers acting like they had something to do with the long-overdue revolutions.
We should remember it was another Republican president, Eisenhower, who missed the chance to stand up to the Soviets when it mattered. When Imre Nagy took power in Hungary in '56 and started to pry Moscow's fingers from its throat, the Soviets retaliated with a brutality that should have spurred action from the US. Unfortunately, Western eyes pretended to be much more interested in whether the Suez Canal would remain British. Thirty thousand Hungarians died in the resulting slaughter, most convinced until the end that the US (so recently at South Korea's rescue from the communists) would not abandon them. My mother came from Scotland to America in '57, and happened to sail with many Hungarians who had probably been refugees for several months. Nearly all of them were headed for Canada, since they wouldn't be caught dead on American soil. Twelve years later the Soviet tanks rolled into Prague, well aware that the US was too busy murdering rice farmers to take issue with the brand of communists that had jets and missiles.
Ironically, President Carter was more responsible for the fall of the Soviets than Reagan, since he was the one who tooled up the mujaheedin during the USSR's protracted war in Afghanistan. This stretched the already-precarious Soviet budget to the breaking point and led to the Kremlin's financial and political bankruptcy. Try not to draw parallels to another fading superpower's crippling involvement in a war with a Central Asian country, okay?
regards,
Esteban Hambre
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