insert photo of Ronald Reagan here
Posted on 11/09/2009 3:13:42 AM PST by The Raven
In the debate over who deserves credit for causing the Berlin Wall to collapse on the night of November 9, 1989, many names come to mind, both great and small.
There was Günter Schabowski, the muddled East German politburo spokesman, who in a live press conference that evening accidentally announced that the country's travel restrictions were to be lifted "immediately." There was Mikhail Gorbachev, who made it clear that the Soviet Union would not violently suppress people power in its satellite states, as it had decades earlier in Czechoslovakia and Hungary. There were the heroes of Poland's Solidarity movement, not least Pope John Paul II, who did so much to expose the moral bankruptcy of communism.
And there was Ronald Reagan, who believed the job of Western statesmanship was to muster the moral, political, economic and military wherewithal not simply to contain the Soviet bloc, but to bury it. "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," he said in 1982, to the astonishment and derision of his critics. Now, there was the audacity of hope.
Then he said: "If I am elected, I shall regard my election as proof that the people of the United States have decided to set a new agenda and have recognized that the human spirit thrives best when goals are set and progress can be measured in their achievement." to make it all so.
I also remember at the time thinking 'good luck' with the communists. But he did it. He one-by-one nailed his campaign promises except one. He met hia waterloo with the domestic enemy, liberalism. The government stayed big.
According to Liberals: “It was just top-heavy.”
Right!
It’s stunning to see that since one week with a lot of programs,debates,documentaries,about the fall of Berlin wall i have never seen mentioned R.REAGAN,John-Paul 2d as prominent actors in that historical moment.
WALESA and Solidarnosc are barely reminded by liberal MSM...
BTW what was doing Barrack Hussein O. by those times?
J.F. Kennedy only made a useless show,as usual,in Berlin
insert photo of Ronald Reagan here
Reagan was far smarter than most people realize and he understood the self-destructive nature of socialism that would cause it to implode. He said as much, to great ridicule, but I believed him. However, the bloodless downfall of the Soviet bloc happened far quicker than I ever dared imagine.
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