Posted on 06/02/2015 10:18:59 PM PDT by Ray76
Soviet Communism, the dark tyranny that controlled nearly 40 nations and was responsible for the deaths of an estimated 100 million victims during the 20th century, suddenly collapsed 20 years ago without a shot being fired.
In just two years--from 1989 to 1991--the Berlin Wall fell, the Soviet Union disintegrated, and Marxism- Leninism was dumped unceremoniously on the ash heap of history. There was dancing in the street and champagne toasts on top of the Brandenburg Gate.
For 40 years, the United States and the West had been following a policy of containment, détente, accommodation. Ronald Reagan decided it was time to stop playing for a tie and seek victory in the Cold War.
From his first week in office, President Reagan went on the offensive against the Soviet Union. In his first presidential news conference, Reagan denounced the Soviet leadership as still dedicated to "world revolution and a one-world Socialist-Communist state."
The establishment was appalled at what it called saber-rattling and uninformed analysis. Harvard intellectuals like Arthur Schlesinger Jr. and John Kenneth Galbraith insisted that the Soviet Union was economically strong and militarily powerful-- the only responsible policy was a continuation of détente leading at some future time to convergence between Communism and democracy.
Reagan did not agree. Based on intelligence reports and his own analysis, the President concluded that Communism was cracking and ready to crumble. He took personal control of the new victory strategy, chairing 57 meetings of the National Security Council in his first year in the White House.
The President was determined to reassure those who had lived behind the Iron Curtain for nearly 40 years that they had not been forgotten and that a new day of freedom would soon dawn for them.
(Excerpt) Read more at heritage.org ...
I consider Ronald Reagan our greatest war time president, and that he won one of, if not the, greatest military victory in history.
He won WWIII.
He stopped WWIII. Clintoon revived it.
The Cold War is over, there is no such threat today, and there never has been before it, the stand off between the free world and the communists, was unique.
Awesome read!
Remember my earlier days of service under our greatest President...Ronald Reagan, being excited, scared, charged, having a new pride and owning a renewed sense of country. He forever changed my life!
Lived and served through the two Bush Clowns and Slick WIlly’s “do more with less” dark days. Bailed before the “Big Joke”!
A strong conservative will breath life back into the lost masses!
Moral, economic, and political pressure is how Reagan, Walesa, and Pope John Paul II accomplished the destruction of the Eastern Bloc.
The world now faces a virulent and savage ideology that subjugates the people of many countries and is aggressively expanding into others by brutality and by clever insinuations. They too must must be destroyed militarily, politically, and ideologically - just as communism was. That threat calls itself “islam”, an ideology and system of government that has since its inception been at war with all other peoples and nations. It is not only the danger they pose to the world that necessitates their destruction, but the brutality and oppression the exert on their own people.
we badly need a strong president. one that understands the use of force . what it can do and what it cant do. also not scared to use it. and trusting the military enough not to micro manage a crisis or try to turn that crises into his own personnel advantage. we also need him to concentrate on the realities of what is happening not on creating a legacy....I hate it when I hear the media and the people working for the president talk about creating a legacy. A legacy just happens if you are to worried about how you are going to look after you are dead and gone you will do nothing with substance and you will look to be that fool when historians look at what you did.
The threat is even larger now. Were you an adult during the Reagan years?
Reagan was what made the 1980s different, without Reagan, and his aggressive and threatening use of the economic and military might of the United States, and the Soviets would have survived the 1980s.
We are a long way from facing a daily threat of the world's annihilation, like we did facing the Soviet Empire.
I was serving in NATO under President Reagan. I was well out of the Army by almost a decade, but Reagan was so incredibly aggressive, that I just had to do some more military service.
It looked like Reagan was either going to break them, or fight them in total war, and I wanted to be a part of it.
If you think that we are in a more dangerous daily situation today than when we literally didn't know if each day was going to be our last, then you are nuts.
I think today is much more dangerous.
Reagan was a blessing. IRAN capitulated on day one.
I don’t see it now.
Arthur Schlesinger Jr. and John Kenneth Galbraith were two that insisted after the fall that USSR collapsed under its own weight, and would have fallen without Reagan - which is now the liberal mantra about Reagan and Russia.
There’s a great book on the subject:
THE PRESIDENT, THE POPE, AND THE PRIME MINISTER
It tells all about how the actions of each one helped to bring down that system.
Today isn’t more dangerous, the world is not going to end tonight.
For decades, we couldn’t say that. I don’t know if you spent much time thinking what WWIII and the end of Europe was going to look like, and what it would mean as the navies were sunk, millions of troops dying in Europe, our transport ships and troop carrying aircraft going down in the Atlantic as we tried to get men to them, and in the end, perhaps nothing left but a bad horror movie.
Even the bloody wars of Korea and Vietnam were a part of that Cold war, as were the 2200 peacetime military deaths we averaged per year under Reagan, and because of the horrors that hung over our heads every second, we considered those part of what seemed to us then, acceptable losses as long as we could avoid the big war.
Right now the average American cannot even imagine us ever fighting a war like Vietnam again, where we measure our dead by the many tens of thousands.
The left started that, as soon as they thought of it.
I don’t remember those predictions, and can’t find the articles claiming it, instead the USSR seemed to be winning, and they made huge gains under Carter and after we pulled out of Vietnam.
i also recall that angry leftists gave Gorbachev full credit for the dismantling of the USSR. no mention was ever made of Thatcher, Reagan, or Pope John Paul II when they droned on and on about how terrific “old spotty head” was.
i do regret that i was too young (d’oh! by 1 year) to have voted for Reagan in 1984. in my lifetime, i’ve only ever been able to vote for RINOs and squishes... G.H.W. Bush (twice), Dole, G.W. Bush (twice), McCain, and Romney. not a single small government conservative in that bunch. blech.
I have met the enemy (communism), and the enemy is us!
Galbraith would, up until the Soviet Union died, tell people about how that country and the East Bloc were more efficient at using resources and that their people were not at all interested in Western capitalism and freedoms. In reality though, that country was basically a Third World one with a large army and good hockey team.
If I may split hairs here, Reagan won the cold military war.
Our very own left kept communism alive via global warming, feminism, supporting muslim extremists, making homos normal, etc, etc, etc.
In other words, doing everything they can to tear down our culture to a socialist level.
The big difference is our own left is not pointing a gun at our heads like the Russians - YET!!
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