Anniversary

Want to show a kid today what a real leader is?  Because God knows our current President isn’t teaching them anything.

Tell them what happened in Poland in 1981.  Read this bit from a few years back, about the defection of the Polish ambassador to the US in protest against the Communist repression in his country).

(See around 4:10 as Reagan begins to speak about Poland.  Between there and the “yellow ribbon” moment, around 11:00)

Reagan did more than just have people light candles – read Jay Nordlinger’s excellent “Yellow Ribbon Culture” for all the reasons the “symbolic message” has become meaningless today – he followed up the symbolic message with a mountain of work in public and behind the scenes to undermine the Polish and Soviet regimes, and build up Solidarity and other resistance in the Eastern Bloc, work which eventually brought Communism crashing down.

This, children, is how leadership was done.

Compare that with the wan empty suit that is frittering away his last year in the White House today, and lament.

Not For Failing To Celebrate

Today, as we look at the prospect of a President whose entire portfolio as a “feminist icon” was hitching her political wagon to a lothario, enabling him in a way that’d no woman on Mad Men would have done for fear of looking contrived, and “Serving” as a hack Senator and the worst Secretary of State since Madeline Albrecht, it’s useful to remember when a real feminist held sway.

Today would be Margaret Thatcher’s 90th birthday.

And none of today’s “gender identity”-obsessed self-styled campus radicals are fit to carry her gig bag, as a human or as a feminist.

Immemorial Day

One of the most engrossing bits of reading about this time 35 years ago was the speculative fictional history, The Third World War:  August, 1985 by General Sir John Hackett.

Hackett – a British Army hero from World War II who’d gone on to command all Brit forces in Europe in the seventies – wrote an engrossing story about a Soviet invasion of Western Europe, which followed on a growing series of wars around the world, in the Middle East and east Asia.  The book took the form of a series of third-party-omniscient diary entries, not much unlike my own book, Trulbert.  A series of flashpoints led to the Soviet forces which – most kids today couldn’t tell you – were stationed all over East Germany, Poland, Czechoslovakia and the Soviet Union to launch a full assault into Western Europe, the Baltic and Scandinavia.  It ended with nuclear strikes on Manchester and Minsk, which led in turn to a coup in Moscow, ending the war in a tense stalemate.

It was intended as a cautionary tale – about the potential results of Carter-era western weakness and fecklessness, and the potential value of the investments that “hawks” in the West (including, to his credit, Carter, who had hardened up after realizing kittens and unicorns weren’t working with either the Iranians or Soviets) were asking to make in their national defense budgets.

I re-read the book a few years ago.  It’s obviously dated  – the USSR is long gone, and nobody under age 40 can tell you what the Warsaw Pact was anymore.  But it’s still a fascinating bit of history, much the same as The Great Pacific War by Hector Bywater (a book featuring Japanese attacks on Pearl Harbor, the Phillippines and Singapore, and resolved with massive American industrial, naval and air power – written in 1925).

At any rate – today, August 4, was the date of the fictional assault across the Inter-German Border, thirty years ago.

If you’ve read this blog, you know that I believe – correctly, along with most historians worthy of the term – that it was Ronald Reagan’s hard line that brought down the USSR and ended not only the threat of such an invasion, but potentially much worse).

What’s worse? A “warmonger” who scares all opponents into avoiding war, or a “peacemaker” who gets walked over with deadly force? Fortunately, the world will never need to know. Well, we didn’t until 2009…

At any rate –  I  think it’s high time we built a serious Cold War memorial.  Perhaps we need to buy an old B-52 from the “boneyard”, and install it on the Capitol Mall in Saint Paul.  Ideally, we could surround it with a model of a torn-down “Berlin” wall, and include a plaque with the names of the 6-7 million Minnesotans who weren’t killed in the Cold War.

For the naysayers?  We could include a plaque showing the economic analysis that indicates Reagan’s deficit spending on defense more than paid for itself during the ’90s, when America cashed in its “peace dividend”, putting all that military production to work building consumer goodies.  That smart phone you’re holding?  It navigates because of technology that was designed to ensure aircraft and submarines knew where they were; the internet itself started as Cold-War effort to harden the information infrastructure against a catastrophic attack.  The benefits go on and on.

Anyway, it’s time to cut the crap.  The time is right.  The price is right (old B-52s stored at Davis-Monthan Air Force Base near Tuscon are going for about a buck a pop, you haul.   I bet we can find some people to donate time and effort to haul it and build a pedestal for it.

What say?  Isn’t it time for a memorial to the war that freed more people than all other American wars put together, and did it without a shot being (directly) fired?

 

 

When Leaders Were Leaders

33 years ago today, Eastern Europe seemed to be spiraling from crisis into deep crisis.

Poland’s communist government cracked down on the “Solidarity” movement.    In response, many Poles fled across the friendliest borders they could find.

And Poland’s ambassador to the US, Romuald Spasowski defected to the US – a capital offense in that Soviet puppet state.   We told that story a few years ago.

And it was in that moment, 33 years ago tonight, that Ronald Reagan showed what real leadership was. (The beef of the speech starts around 4:00 in)

When Reagan was in office, bad behavior had consquences; the Polish (and by extension Soviet) governments suffered.

Compare this with the vapid empty suit that’s currently in office, and the response the suit has had to provocations similar to the Solidarity Christmas.  Far from Reagan’s sharp, clear, principled response, Obama has propped up dictators like Assad, Castro and Chavez while undercutting the Poles, the Kurds, the Baltic States, the Ukrainians, and other freedom-seeking people around the world.

Compare, contrast, and think for a moment for how far this nation has fallen in 33 years.