The Great Liberator

One of the great errors - or depending on the agent, slanders - against the memory of Ronald Reagan was that he wasn't responsible for the fall of the USSR.

But the fact is, while allowing that every administration from Truman through Johnson played a significant role, it's impossible to state witih a straight face that communism was receding in the seventies, that the policy of containment was working as of 1979.

I've debated this with countless liberals. Their arguments all, inevitably, without exception, fall into dogma (easily skewered dogma at that) when we get to the inconvenient facts of the era and, indeed, the beliefs of their own fellow travellers of the era.

Even the Russians of the era, the ones that held power - Gorbachev, Dobrynin - admit the role Reagan had.

You have to wonder - why would Reagan be so revered by so many Eastern Europeans?

Powerline refers us to an excellent Weekly standard piece, Tom Rose interviewing Natan Scharansky, a long-time zek in the Gulag. It's a wonderful read.

Asked why Reagan was such a major figure:

I have to laugh. People who take freedom for granted, Ronald Reagan for granted, always ask such questions. Of course! It was the great brilliant moment when we learned that Ronald Reagan had proclaimed the Soviet Union an Evil Empire before the entire world. There was a long list of all the Western leaders who had lined up to condemn the evil Reagan for daring to call the great Soviet Union an evil empire right next to the front-page story about this dangerous, terrible man who wanted to take the world back to the dark days of the Cold War. This was the moment. It was the brightest, most glorious day. Finally a spade had been called a spade. Finally, Orwell's Newspeak was dead. President Reagan had from that moment made it impossible for anyone in the West to continue closing their eyes to the real nature of the Soviet Union.

It's the clarity, stupid!

Of course, like all of us, Sharansky knows Reagan didn't do the job alone:

If I would be permitted to widen the credit a little more, I would say the collapse of the Soviet Union is attributable to three men. Andrei Sakharov, Scoop Jackson, and Ronald Reagan. These were the people who brought moral clarity to the conflict and started the chain of events which led to the end of Soviet communism. Sakharov to the Russian people, Senator Jackson to the American government, and Ronald Reagan on behalf of the American people to the world and thus back to the Soviet Union. They created the policy of linkage: That international relations and human rights must be linked. That how a government treats its own people cannot be separated from how that government could be expected to treat other countries. That how governments honor commitments they make at home will show the world how they will honor their commitments abroad.

Read the whole thing.

Posted by Mitch at June 15, 2004 05:03 AM