June 07, 2004
"a truth that burned inside the heart"
Jerusalem Post: In 1983, I was confined to an eight-by-ten-foot prison cell on the border of Siberia. My Soviet jailers gave me the privilege of reading the latest copy of Pravda. Splashed across the front page was a condemnation of President Ronald Reagan for having the temerity to call the Soviet Union an "evil empire." Tapping on walls and talking through toilets, word of Reagan's "provocation" quickly spread throughout the prison. We dissidents were ecstatic. Finally, the leader of the free world had spoken the truth – a truth that burned inside the heart of each and every one of us.Three years later! Amazing.At the time, I never imagined that three years later, I would be in the White House telling this story to the president. When he summoned some of his staff to hear what I had said, I understood that there had been much criticism of Reagan's decision to cast the struggle between the superpowers as a battle between good and evil.
Well, Reagan was right and his critics were wrong...(Thanks to Pejman)
You can bet your last dollar that, even as Copperheads heap scorn and vituperation on President Bush, and magnify any mistake made by America a hundredfold, there are poor wretches in concentration camps and prisons and refugee camps praying right now for America's help. 'Cause there ain't no other help available. And it's the job of the Democrats, and of leftists everywhere, to make sure that help doesn't come!
Posted by John Weidner at June 7, 2004 10:06 AM | TrackBackI was 8 or 9 when Reagan left office. Just old enough to have a memory of life with him as president, not old enough to know what he did, really...
So I have to take everyone else’s word for it that he was truly the first person ever to cast the struggle between capitalism and communism in moral terms friendly to capitalism.
(The communists had been casting it as morally friendly to themselves-- proof that the language of morality can be used by anyone)
If this is true (the bit about Reagan. Quite frankly I am astounded that no one did it before him. But all reports indicate it) then it is to his credit. I remain unconvinced that it could possibly have helped speed the end of communism, but the fact that he spoke clearly is certainly a positive thing...
His words probably didn't speed the end of the Soviet Union, but his actions did. It's hard to believe it now, but the general opinion of economists and government experts was that the SU (which was run by economists and government experts) worked!
Reagan knew better. He KNEW communism didn't work, and ignored the experts. (Also he pushed them to find evidence of Soviet economic breakdown, and, lo and behold, there was lots of it, but it had been ignored because it didn't fit the paradigm)
His big defense build-up, especially SDI, was deliberatly intended to stress the Soviets to the breaking point. When Gorbachaev couldn't persuade him to scrap SDI, he was pushed towards the reforms that infact started the big unravelling....
Posted by: John Weidner at June 8, 2004 06:31 AMAlso casting the struggle in moral terms wasn't new. Many had done so, especially back when the Cold War started. But our leadership had grown used to the situation, and slipped into the mindset of detente. Of "there's nothig we can do, so let's just get along."
Reagan was actually harking back to the way Truman was. With the added advantage of knowing thay our own quasi-socialist experiments of the New Deal and the Great Society (And the "Great Society-gone-to-war" that was Vietnam) didn't work.
But after Nixon and Carter, Reagan's words sounded like something new and exhilarating.
A question regarding the article. Who wrote it? (the article appears to be behind a registration thing now) Do we have any other references to Soviet prisoners' opinions of Reagan? I seem to remember something about prisoners who used to hide Reagan's speeches and read them all the time. Gave them hope or something. Do you have any references for that?
Posted by: Mark at June 9, 2004 12:49 PMSharansky wrote it himself. He's now an Israeli politician.
Jerusalem Post is worth registering for. They often have good articles...
I've heard of prisoners passing Reagan quotes around, but I have no reference for the stories. I hope they are true! I suspect they are.
Posted by: John Weidner at June 9, 2004 04:51 PMSharansky began an article for the WaPo about the Oslo accords with a nearly identical couple of paragraphs. It can be read here:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A55939-2000Oct11?language=printer
This article, by the way, written 11 months before 11 Sept 2001 is a condemnation of the West's appeasement of Arab dictatorships.
Posted by: Lance Jonn Romanoff at June 10, 2004 10:48 AM
