Ronald Reagan: The Vanquisher of Communism.

I hear all the screaming and squawking from the left today about George Bush and how he is evil incarnate, and I am reminded of another American president who was criticized and ridiculed just as much. Ronald Reagan, along with Margaret Thatcher, Pope John Paul II, Andrei Sakharov, Helmut Kohl, Mikhail Gorbachev, Boris Yeltsin, Anatoly Chubais, Lech Walesa, Vaclav Havel, and many, many others brought an end to the nightmare called communism. Reagan was vilified for building up our military and placing the nuclear Pershing and Cruise missiles in Europe. The left, both here in America and in Europe, were constantly predicting that Reagan would start a nuclear war. The left, many of whom openly admired communism/socialsm and said that it was good for the people of Russia, China, Poland, Vietnam, Cuba etc. The left, many of whom wanted America to adopt the policies of the communist regimes including government control of business and suppression of civil liberties. They hated Reagan back then just as they hate Bush today.

There is an excellent quote of Reagan that he made about communism in 1982, that I saw in Powerline today:

While we must be cautious about forcing the pace of change, we must not hesitate to declare our ultimate objectives and to take concrete actions to move toward them. We must be staunch in our conviction that freedom is not the sole prerogative of a lucky few, but the inalienable and universal right of all human beings... What I am describing now is a plan and a hope for the long term -- the march of freedom and democracy which will leave Marxism-Leninism on the ash-heap of history as it has left other tyrannies which stifle the freedom and muzzle the self-expression of the people. ... Let us be shy no longer. Let us go to our strength. Let us offer hope. Let us tell the world that a new age is not only possible but probable… [T]he task I've set forth will long outlive our own generation. But together, we too have come through the worst. Let us now begin a major effort to secure the best -- a crusade for freedom that will engage the faith and fortitude of the next generation. For the sake of peace and justice, let us move toward a world in which all people are at last free to determine their own destiny. -- Address to Members of the British Parliament, Palace of Westminster, June 8, 1982.

I often wonder about the innermost thoughts of Lenin, Stalin, Trotsky, Zinoviev, Kamenev, Bukharin, and the other founders of the Soviet Union, during those heady days in 1917 when they were so eager to kill and otherwise disrupt the lives of millions of innocent people. Did they ever in their wildest dreams imagine that there was a six year-old boy in Illinois who would one day lay their grandiose plans to waste?