And the tributes keep rolling in...
Juan Cole: 'Ronald Reagan, de-mythologized'
Date: Tuesday, June 08 @ 09:51:14 EDT
By Juan Cole, History News Network
I did not say anything about Ronald Reagan's death on Saturday. The day a person dies he has a right to be left alone.
But yesterday is now history, and Reagan's legacy should not pass without comment.
Reagan had an ability to project a kindly image, and was well liked personally by virtually everyone who knew him, apparently. But it always struck me that he was a mean man. I remember learning, in the late 1960s, of the impact Michael Harrington's The Other America had had on Johnson's War on Poverty. Harrington demonstrated that in the early 1960s there was still hunger in places like Appalachia, deriving from poverty. It was hard for middle class Americans to believe, and Lyndon Johnson, who represented many poor people himself, was galvanized to take action.
I remember seeing a tape of Reagan speaking in California from that era. He said that he had heard that some asserted there was hunger in America. He said it sarcastically. He said, "Sure there is; they're dieting!" or words to that effect. This handsome Hollywood millionnaire making fun of people so poor they sometimes went to bed hungry seemed to me monstrous. I remember his wealthy audience of suburbanites going wild with laughter and applause. I am still not entirely sure what was going on there. Did they think Harrington's and similar studies were lies? Did they blame the poor for being poor, and resent demands on them in the form of a few tax dollars, to address their hunger?
Then when he was president, at one point Reagan tried to cut federal funding for school lunches for the poor. He tried to have ketchup reclassified as a vegetable to save money. Senator Heinz gave a speech against this move. He said that ketchup is a condiment, not a vegetable, and that he should know.
The meanness was reflected, as many readers have noted, in Reagan's "blame the victim" approach to the AIDS crisis. His inability to come to terms with the horrible human tragedy here, or with the emerging science on it, made his health policies ineffective and even destructive.
Reagan's mania to abolish social security was of a piece with this kind of sentiment. In the early twentieth century, the old were the poorest sector of the American population. The horrors of old age--increasing sickness, loss of faculties, marginalization and ultimately death--were in that era accompanied by fear of severe poverty. Social security turned that around. The elderly are no longer generally poverty-stricken. The government can do something significant to improve people's lives. Reagan, philosophically speaking, hated the idea of state-directed redistribution of societal wealth. (His practical policies often resulted in such redistribution de facto, usually that of tossing money to the already wealthy). So he wanted to abolish social security and throw us all back into poverty in old age.
Reagan hated any social arrangement that empowered the poor and the weak. He was a hired gun for big corporations in the late 1950s, when he went around arguing against unionization. Among his achievements in office was to break the air traffic controllers' union. It was not important in and of itself, but it was a symbol of his determination that the powerless would not be allowed to organize to get a better deal. He ruined a lot of lives. I doubt he made us safer in the air.
Reagan hated environmentalism. His administration was not so mendacious as to deny the problems of increased ultraviolet radition (from a depleted ozone layer) and global warming. His government suggested people wear sunglasses and hats in response. At one point Reagan suggested that trees cause pollution. He was not completely wrong (natural processes can cause pollution), but his purpose in making the statement seems to have been that we should therefore just accept lung cancer from bad city air, which was caused by automobiles and industry, not by trees.
In foreign policy, Reagan abandoned containment of the Soviet Union as a goal and adopted a policy of active roll-back. Since the Soviet Union was already on its last legs and was not a system that could have survived long, Reagan's global aggressiveness was simply unnecessary. The argument that Reagan's increases in military funding bankrupted the Soviets by forcing them to try to keep up is simply wrong. Soviet defense spending was flat in the 1980s.
Reagan's aggression led him to shape our world in most unfortunate ways. Although it would be an exaggeration to say that Ronald Reagan created al-Qaeda, it would not be a vast exaggeration. The Carter administration began the policy of supporting the radical Muslim holy warriors in Afghanistan who were waging an insurgency against the Soviets after their invasion of that country. But Carter only threw a few tens of millions of dollars at them. By the mid-1980s, Reagan was giving the holy warriors half a billion dollars a year. His officials strong-armed the Saudis into matching the U.S. contribution, so that Saudi Intelligence chief Faisal al-Turki turned to Usamah Bin Laden to funnel the money to the Afghans. This sort of thing was certainly done in coordination with the Reagan administration. Even the Pakistanis thought that Reagan was a wild man, and balked at giving the holy warriors ever more powerful weapons. Reagan sent Orrin Hatch to Beijing to try to talk the Chinese into pressuring the Pakistanis to allow the holy warriors to receive stingers and other sophisticated ordnance. The Pakistanis ultimately relented, even though they knew there was a severe danger that the holy warriors would eventually morph into a security threat in their own right.
Reagan's officials so hated the Sandinista populists in Nicaragua that they shredded the Constitution. Congress cut off money for the rightwing death squads fighting the Sandinistas. Reagan's people therefore needed funds to continue to run the rightwing insurgency. They came up with a complicated plan of stealing Pentagon equipment, shipping it to Khomeini in Iran, illegally taking payment from Iran for the weaponry, and then giving the money to the rightwing guerrillas in Central America. At the same time, they pressured Khomeini to get US hostages in Lebanon, taken by radical Shiites there, released. It was a criminal cartel inside the US government, and Reagan allowed it, either through collusion or inattention. It is not a shining legacy, to have helped Khomeini and then used the money he gave them to support highly unsavory forces in Central America. (Some of those forces were involved after all in killing leftwing nuns.)
Although Reagan's people were willing to shore up Iranian defenses during the Iran-Iraq War, so as to prevent a total Iraqi victory, they also wanted to stop Iran from taking over Iraq. They therefore winked at Saddam's use of chemical weapons. Reagan's secretary of state, George Schultz, sent Donald Rumsfeld to Baghdad twice, the second time with an explicit secret message that the U.S. did not really mind if Saddam gassed the Iranian troops, whatever it said publicly.
I only saw Reagan once in person. I was invited to a State Department conference on religious freedom, I think in 1986. It was presided over by Elliot Abrams, whom I met then for the first time. We were taken to hear Reagan speak on religious freedom. It was a cause I could support, but I came away strangely dissatisfied. I had a sense that "religious freedom" was being used as a stick to beat those regimes the Reagan administration did not like. It wasn't as though the plight of the Moro Muslims in the Philippines was foremost on the agenda (come to think of it, perhaps no Muslims or Muslim groups were involved in the conference).
Reagan's policies thus bequeathed to us the major problems we now have in the world, including a militant Islamist International whose skills were honed in Afghanistan with Reagan's blessing and monetary support; and a proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, which the Reagan administration in some cases actually encouraged behind the scenes for short-term policy reasons. His aggressive foreign policy orientation has been revived and expanded, making the U.S. into a neocolonial power in the Middle East. Reagan's gutting of the unions and attempt to remove social supports for the poor and the middle class contributed to the creation of an America where most people barely get by while government programs that could help create wealth are destroyed.
Reagan's later life was debilitated by Alzheimer's. I suppose he may already have had some symptoms while president, which might explain some of his memory lapses and odd statements, and occasional public lapses into woolly-mindedness. Ironically, Alzheimer's could be cured potentially by stem cell research. In the United States, where superstition reigns over reason, the religious Right that Reagan cultivated has put severe limits on such research. His best legacy may be Nancy Reagan's argument that those limitations should be removed in his memory. There are 4 million Alzheimers sufferers in the U.S., and 50 percent of persons living beyond the age of 85 develop it. There are going to be a lot of such persons among the Baby Boomers. By reversing Reaganism, we may be able to avoid his fate.
Reprinted from History News Network:
http://hnn.us/articles/5544.html
Colin Shea: 'He was a madman'
Date: Tuesday, June 08 @ 09:57:10 EDT
By Colin Shea, The Prague TV Zine
Ronald Reagan is dead, and the world is no worse off for it. At the best of times, he was an ineffectual dunce. At the worst, he was a dangerous madman who threatened humanity's very survival. He destroyed any residual respect for the presidency left over from Nixon, his moral predecessor. He created unprecedented deficits while simultaneously gutting the principles of the New Deal and the Great Society. He presided over a White House famously unable to govern properly because of his abysmal ignorance and tolerance of a Byzantine mess of corrupt internal fiefdoms.
His endless rotation of advisers was a contemptible assortment of thieves, quacks, hypocrites and imbeciles who regularly broke the law of the land, lied shamelessly to Congress and the American people, and hopelessly ensnared themselves in ugly webs of shady and illicit dealings. Reagan claimed to be leading a conservative revolution, but he left the presidency with America mired in debt, more authoritarian, militarized and centralized than ever before, and with a foreign policy that was the laughing-stock of the civilized world.
It was morning in America, but the dawn was black indeed. A black dawn where Christian greed was celebrated over Commie compassion, where a family man could now walk out of church and taunt a homeless family, secure in the knowledge that their poverty was their own fault.
A black dawn where a lie, repeated five times, could become a simple truth. A black dawn where the Attorney General could commit crime after crime without consequence, where the National Security Advisor could sell weapons to terrorists in order to finance more terrorists, where B-grade science fiction movies served as policy papers and C-grade farce served as the script for governance in the halls of power of the mightiest nation the world has ever known.
As I write, the man is being canonized as a saint by the press and the political establishment. The bright moments are being recalled: the fall of the Soviet Union, the monumental arms reduction treaties, the resurgence of conservatism as a credible political philosophy. The stupendously dangerous "evil empire" days of the early 1980s, when as a child I lay in quivering fear of imminent nuclear immolation, are conveniently forgotten. The astonishing case of White House amnesia seen during the Iran-Contra hearings is mostly topic non grata. That's a pity, since I would enjoy seeing rerun footage of a smoke-wreathed, imperturbable Poindexter murmuring cryptic non-responses like some sort of Delphic oracle, and Ed Meese, hissing and spitting and snarling like a disemboweled jackal. Together they managed to say "I don't know" 524 times in seven days of collective testimony in a reprise of every college student's worst classroom humiliation nightmares.
Mining Nicaraguan harbors, a violation of federal law and an act of war, is nowhere mentioned. Micheal Deaver's indictment on multiple counts of perjury is just a dull footnote, as are Paul Thayer's years in the pen for obstruction of justice. I doubt there will be speculation as to whether William Casey was fortunate to croak when he did, thus being spared the ignominy of being frog-marched out of CIA headquarters in handcuffs. Elliot Abrams, one of the darlings of the current Administration, will probably not be seen "acknowledging" that "misleading Congress may have been a mistake", not to mention 'misplacing' ten million dollars which mysteriously ended up in a Swiss bank account instead of financing Central American death squads like it was supposed to.
I doubt we'll see Ed Meese, putative Attorney General, claiming that "the Supreme Court does not set the supreme law of the land", or James Watt stating blithely during his confirmation hearings that conservation ought not be a priority since he didn't know "how many generations we can count on before the Lord returns." Not to mention Alexander Haig, gripping the podium like an amphetamine-crazed baboon, screaming at reporters that he was "in charge" after the assassination attempt on Reagan.
Then there's George Senior. Toasting Ferdinand Marcos for his "adherence of democratic principle... and processes". When he wasn't being forced to fire practically his entire campaign staff amid allegations of anti-Semitism, he was dishing it out himself. "I hope I stand for anti-bigotry, anti-Semitism, antiracism". He also wanted to be remembered for "a complete and total ban on chemical weapons. Their destruction forever," though it is more likely he will be remembered for casting several tie-breaking Senate votes to resume production of nerve agents. After the USS Vincennes blew an Iranian airliner out of the sky, killing nearly 300 people, he set the standard for accepting responsibility in that and future Republican Administrations with his memorable howl "I will never apologize for the United States! I don't care what the facts are!"
The Reagan Revolution looked as though it was on its way to becoming a Nixon-esque fiasco by 1986. Countless members of the Administration were languishing in prison, fleeing to Paraguay, or being consumed in the toxic flames of Iran-Contra. Even the chittering rats of the Republican-owned Senate had to abandon Old Dutch's leaking ship of state over South Africa when he started yammering about how "they have eliminated the segregation we once had in our own country". They say a person's character is defined by the company he keeps, and Reagan's gamut of buddies from Ed Meese to Ferdinand Marcos to the savage apartheid enforcers of South Africa did the man no favors.
There are those who say that the end justifies the means, that these criticisms pale into insignificance next to the achievement of winning the Cold War and toppling the Berlin Wall. Like Ahmed Chalabi, he is one of the great "heroes in error". But touch the excuse, and it rings equally hollow as Chalabi's. Like Hussein's Iraq, the fearsome Soviet behemoth was a crippled husk by the 1980s, already in its death throes. The best that can be said for Reagan is that he may have slightly accelerated its demise: at worst, he may have veered crazily close to nuclear holocaust and wrecked the American economy for no reason at all. It was not Reagan who won the Cold War for America, but Stalin. As with so much of his career, Reagan was just an empty vessel acting out a script written long before.
Some say it is cruel and needless to assault the legacy of a crippled old man who ultimately wanted the best for his nation. But to spare him this would be to show compassion he never demonstrated himself. Time and again, he insisted the homeless somehow wanted to sleep on sidewalk grates; that the poor, the hungry, the indigent were there because of their own laziness. In the strange, refracted light of Reagan's black dawn, soup kitchens were full because eating food there is "easier than paying for it"; his 155 billion dollar deficit was the result of some demonic collusion between Congress and the press; a gaggle of drug-smugglers and assassins in the Nicaraguan jungle were the moral equivalent of the Founding Fathers; and trading arms for hostages to the same people who had just killed hundreds of marines in Beirut was somehow, inexplicably, something completely other. No one, including the Vice President and the presidential spokesman could say exactly what it was, but it sure wasn't that.
Truth be told, I could forgive the old man all of this. But what I will never forgive him is that, in spite of all this, in the face of overwhelming evidence that he should have been run out of town like a syphilitic dentist, he left office with the highest approval ratings of any president, ever. (Leaving aside Roosevelt croaking in the arms of his mistress in a hot tub, god bless the old man's lecherous soul).
The true crime ensconced within this astonishing bit of black magic was the genesis of the monstrous creature that is the modern Republican Party. It has been "morning in America" ever since Reagan's genial smile flooded our living rooms with warmth twenty five years ago, and our minds have steadily softened in tandem with his. Joe Six Pack fervently believes that if he just lands that third job or gets the right break, that Hummer will soon be his. The blacks have all conveniently been turned into felons and thrown off the voter rolls. Hundreds of billions wash through the Pentagon in a grotesque charade of crony capitalism, and whenever the ammo surplus builds up too high we go out and find some pathetic, wretched excuse for a country to bomb to smithereens so we can plant the flag in the smoldering ruins and congratulate ourselves on transplanting democracy.
Bush II is Reagan redux in its most awful sense. The bald-faced lies without any hope or even attempt for justification, a servile and simpering press, a public which forgives and forgets and yes, even loves while their leaders deliver powerful kicks to their genitals again and again and again. Cross-eyed apocalyptic madmen once again roam the halls of power while slimy political hacks sharpen hooked knives in back rooms. Both had to make obligatory pilgrimages to Bob Jones University to kneel at the altar of Nixon's 'Southern Strategy' and claim, oh no, it's not about racism at all, it's about state's rights and religious freedom. Nudge nudge, wink wink. Katherine dear, did you finish scrubbing the Florida voter rolls yet?
The same well-honed policy apparatus is in place once more: Bush's "blind man in the room full of deaf people" is today's equivalent of Reagan generating policy ideas from trashy sci-fi novels. Don Quixote tilting at windmills had nothing on these guys. Just as Reagan was prepared to throw away a decade of arms control for the sake of his non-existent space lasers, Bush insists on implementing a non-functioning missile shield to defend against a non-existent missile threat. Reagan's doomed American medical students and Cuban military airfields on Granada set the stage for the desert mirage of Iraqi WMD. And whether it's Iran-Contra or Abu Ghraib that's the cause of enraged Congressional scrutiny, both Reagan and Bush have the sense to hunker down in the undisclosed location and shrug. "Hey, don't look at me! I'm just the President - these guys don't tell me anything!"
But for all that, even Reagan had some limits. He funded nun-killing death squads from El Salvador to South Africa, but even he couldn't stomach Ariel Sharon tearing through Lebanon and engineering made-for-TV massacres of women and children. But he set the stage for those who could, and now the 'hard boys' are back in the saddle, calling all the shots. Sharon can wade in blood if he wants, while the American people sit back and write checks to pay for the bulldozers squashing peace activists and razing refugee camps.
Ronald Reagan was not a great man. He was a dangerous and incompetent president who brought dishonor and disgrace to his office and to his country. The adulation and reverence being heaped on him today is an obscene affront to truth, history, and the millions who are worse off today because of him. The modern Republican Party's new "muscular conservatism" - with its nutty imperial dreams, voodoo economics, a worldwide gulag archipelago, contempt for the Constitution and the rule of law, and blind and bumbling ignorance of fact and history - is his creation. And so in this time of crisis, we must not let our memory of Reagan be shrouded in sentimentalism and glory. He takes with him to his grave ineluctable responsibilities he would never accept during his tenure, or indeed his life. The seeds he sowed so long ago have come to monstrous fruition. Let us use this poignant moment not to create a false and unworthy idol in the pantheon of American democracy, but to carefully consider how we have come to this dreadful pass, and whether and how we may yet turn back.
Copyright 2004 Prague TV and Colin Shea
Reprinted from Prague TV:
http://prague.tv/zine/article.php?name=he-was-madman
