Peace Researcher 30 – March 2005
The June 2004 death of former US President Ronald Reagan (1980-88) produced an outpouring of quite extraordinary rosetinted nostalgia for an apparent “Golden Age” (the 80s, for God’s sake), when America, and the world, were led by “The Great Communicator”. A prime example of this is the Commemorative Issue of Time (14/6/04) devoted entirely to this myth. New Zealanders have plenty of reasons to not look back fondly on Reagan – his was the intransigent US Administration that tried to bully us out of our nuclear free policy, and didn’t say a word when French State terrorists bombed the Rainbow Warrior in Auckland Harbour in 1985, killing Fernando Pereira in the process. The peoples of America and the world have also got no shortage of reasons to not mythologise this most reactionary of US Presidents. There was a flood of critical material following his death. This one (World War 3 Report; 10/6/04; WW3Report.com) was my favourite. I couldn’t have put it better myself. Ed.
What a tsunami of bullshit has
been unleashed by the demise of Ronald Wilson Reagan, architect of the
conservative revolution we still suffer under today. The media blitz occasioned
by the near-simultaneous presidential passing (June 5, 2004) and the 60th
anniversary of D-Day* (June 6) has been
a boon to the sitting President, himself the spawn of a dynasty that rode the
Reagan revolution to power. America gets a time-out from the Iraq horror show
to feel good about itself and celebrate past militaristic glories. It almost
makes you wonder if news of the death wasn't withheld awhile to coordinate the
spectacle. * June 6, 1944. The date when
the Allies landed in Normandy, starting the liberation of Western Europe from
the Nazis. Ed.
The hideous irony of the implicit
media linking of Reagan and D-Day is that Reagan's "revolution" was undoing
the legacy of President Franklin Roosevelt (1932-45) - the "Welfare
State" was dismantled in favor of "Reaganomics": radical
corporate deregulation, with the hallucinatory sugar-coating that wealth would
spontaneously "trickle down." It didn't, and as the ranks of the
urban homeless swelled dramatically under his rule, '30s-style Hoovervilles*
popped up all over the inner cities. Playing to nostalgia for an America that
never really was, Reagan plunged the country back into horrors that had been all
too real. * Hoovervilles. The ironic name
for settlements of the countless ranks of the homeless, dispossessed by the
policies of the former President Herbert Hoover, who took the US into the Great
Depression of the 1930s. Ed.
Making The World Safe For Fascism
Simultaneously, the Reagan White
House backed fascism abroad. The massively US-funded-and-directed bloodbath in
El Salvador in the Reagan years claimed some 50,000 lives by the UN Truth
Commission's estimate - and double that by many rights observers. The genocide
of Maya Indians in neighbouring Guatemala, with the US aid more covert and the
Israelis serving as proxies, claimed similar numbers - while Reagan advocated
restoring overt aid to the military dictatorship, claiming it had received a "bum
rap." Reagan called Guatemalan dictator Rios Montt, author of the
genocide, "a man of great personal integrity and commitment... I know he
wants to improve the quality of life for all Guatemalans and to promote social
justice." The (1976-80) Carter-era notion of "human rights" was
replaced by "national security" as the cornerstone of US foreign
policy. Reagan's UN Ambassador, Jeane Kirkpatrick, theorised on the distinction
between the mere "authoritarianism" of anti-Communist regimes such as
Augusto Pinochet's in Chile (at least 3,000 killed or "disappeared")
and the intolerable "totalitarianism" of those such as Cuba’s Fidel
Castro. Reagan's Victory in Europe (VE) Day 1985 visit to (the former) West
Germany's Bitburg cemetery, where officers of Hitler's SS are buried,
illustrated the historical and ideological shift.
"No Pasaran!" – “they
shall not pass!” - the slogan of the Spanish Loyalists who resisted the
Nazi-backed fascist forces of Generalissimo Francisco Franco in the (1930s’)
Spanish Civil War prelude to World War 2, was resurrected by Nicaraguan
loyalists who similarly defended an elected government against the
Reagan-backed "contra" guerillas. In 1984, the World Court ruled in
favour of little Nicaragua, finding US support for the contras - "terrorists"
by any single-standard definition, openly seeking to destabilise Nicaragua's
first freely elected government by attacking its civilian supporters - was
illegal. Reagan refused to recognise the Court's ruling. And when Congress cut
off funds to the contras following reports of rights abuses, Reagan turned to a
private spy network and kickbacks from secret arms deals with Iran to keep the
insurgency alive. In an October 25, 1984, Scripps-Howard interview, Reagan
justified US mercenaries fighting for the contras by pointing out that
"nothing was done legally about the formation of a brigade of Americans in
the Spanish Civil War" - a reference to the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, that
fought against Franco - and added that they had been "in the opinions of
most Americans, fighting on the wrong side." If anyone doubts that Reagan
was really pro-fascist, the Great Communicator's own words speak eloquently for
themselves.
Of course Reagan did all this in
the name of "protecting democracy," and few today seem to grasp the
irony, as he is now portrayed as the saviour of the Free World. The vastly
cynical Reagan slogan "Government off the backs of the American
people" - really a euphemism for unleashing corporate power from public
oversight - has similarly been accepted uncritically. Even the New York Times headline on his death
hailed him as an icon of "limited government." This of the man who
oversaw a hypertrophy of the prison system, the federal-led expansion and
militarisation of police forces, the reign of urine-tests in the workplace,
saturation propaganda against illegal drugs, a thrust to put prayer in public
schools and to ban abortion. The mind boggles! A further irony is that the
slashing of social programmes was carried out in the name of "fiscal responsibility,"
while Reaganomics combined with the unprecedented post-Vietnam War bloating of
Pentagon budgets opened huge deficits. And the man who made much of his support
for the Solidarity union in Communist Poland was a union-buster at home: when
11,000 air-traffic controllers went on strike for a better contract in 1981,
Reagan fired every last one of them. Wrote Juan Gonzalez in the June 8, 2004,
New York Daily News (one of the few
commentators out there who doesn't have his head down an Orwellian Memory Hole):
"It was the signal to every corporate chief in America that it was open
season on unions".
Insane Nuclear Arms Race
The saviour-of-the-Free-World
jazz is based in the notion that Reagan precipitated the Soviet collapse, and
there is some truth to that - but the way the grim, amoral struggle of
contending military-industrial empires is being glorified now is sickening. In
the current atmosphere of official amnesia I guess we aren't supposed to talk
about how everybody was scared shitless of nuclear holocaust back in the early
'80s. At an August 11, 1984, press conference, Reagan quipped during the
microphone check: "My fellow Americans, I'm pleased to tell you today that
I've signed legislation that will outlaw Russia forever. We begin bombing in
five minutes". It wasn't just a joke. The hypertrophy of nuclear weapons
production reached such a breakneck pace that safety corner-cutting resulted in
a wave of cancers near the Energy Department's plutonium plant at Hanford,
Washington. Despite massive protests, the Cruise and Pershing missiles were
installed in Europe, as the Soviets placed their own SS-20 missiles in the
former East Germany and Czechoslovakia - bringing the interval between launch
time and Einstein's feared "unparalleled catastrophe" to a mere ten
minutes. The "Star Wars" programme was launched, with the US
abandoning its’ commitment to the 1967 Outer Space Treaty and 1972
Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty--although sheer technical hubris has kept the
scheme an empty dream, even in its current down-sized version. Nobody has even
pointed out how the title of the recent Hollywood climate-destabilisation
thriller "The Day After Tomorrow" recalls that of the 1983 TV movie
"The Day After," depicting nuclear war. The pic was sanitised and
mediocre, but the fact that it was made (and received much hoopla) indicates
the apocalyptic zeitgeist of the Reagan era. In 1984, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists moved the hands of its symbolic
"Doomsday Clock" to three minutes of midnight - the closest since 1953,
when the Soviets developed the hydrogen bomb.
We are also apparently not supposed to talk about what an objective disaster the restoration of capitalism in the post-Communist world has been in simple human terms. The bloodlettings in the Balkans and the Caucasus lend credence to Cornelius Castoriadis' juxtaposition of "socialism or barbarism." Even where ethnic warfare and neo-fascism have not followed the Communist collapse, the results have been horrific--the plummeting of Russian life expectancy, the implosion of agriculture, the virtual abandonment of controls on toxic industries, the plunder of Siberia's forests, the sinister black market in Soviet nuclear materials. And the pro-democracy dissidents aided by Reagan's Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) in the Communist world (along with unsavoury fascism-nostalgists) would be radically sidelined by Bush pere in favor of Western-trained technocrats once the collapse arrived and they had outlived their usefulness--assuring that the vision of socialism with a human face (long opposed by both superpowers) would not be realised. Today it has been nearly erased from historical memory. If the Stalin-nostalgia now inevitably emerging in Russia is perverse, equally so is the American consensus that celebrates the Soviet collapse as an unequivocal victory for human freedom.
The Reagan-era nuclear arms race
was one leg of a strategic gambit to force the Soviet Union into collapse -
through morally and even legally criminal methods. The other leg was the Mujahedeen
insurgency against the Soviet Army in Afghanistan. The Reagan era was the high
noon of covert proxy wars. Nicaragua and Afghanistan were the most celebrated
cases, but there was also CIA aid and direction of the brutal Jonas Savimbi
insurgency in Angola, and (via South African proxies) the even more brutal
Renamo guerillas in Mozambique (again in the name of the anti-Communist
crusade, Reagan helped shore up white supremacy in South Africa, opposing
sanctions against the apartheid state in favour of "constructive
engagement").
US streets were flooded with
crack cocaine and heroin as a direct "blowback" from the secret wars
in Central America and Afghanistan; the contras merged the CIA arms pipeline
with cocaine smuggling networks to augment their war chest, and the Mujahedeen
similarly turned to the "Golden Crescent" heroin trade. Paradoxically
(and not coincidentally) this CIA-greased profusion in the availability of
deadly street drugs came just as the Drug War orthodoxy was reaching a fever
pitch.
Reagan’s Pals: Bin Laden, Saddam Hussein
But the even more disastrous
blowback became dramatically evident on the morning of September 11, 2001. It
was under Reagan's watch that the US began training, arming and funding Osama
bin Laden. In Reagan's Cold War end-game, Islamist extremism was cultivated as
a pawn against the rival superpower-- despite the obvious reality that the
jihadis saw in godless Communism an enemy second only to godless capitalism,
and would inevitably turn their new-found prowess against their erstwhile
underwriters. So the end of the Cold War only presaged a new, in many ways even
more terrifying dualistic global conflict - this time, the West against
"Islamic terrorism". And while the Soviet "Evil Empire" (as
Reagan dubbed it, characteristically taking a cue from Hollywood) was at least
a centralised monolith, the new enemy is hydra-headed, molecularised,
everywhere and nowhere. The stage is set for a war that could last generations,
centuries. This is Reagan's grimmest legacy.
For good measure, it was also
under Reagan that the US began supporting Saddam Hussein with military sales
and intelligence in his 1980-88 war with Iran. In March 1988, Reagan's final
year in office, Saddam Hussein used chemical weapons against his own populace,
instantly killing 5,000 in the gassing of the Kurdish city of Halabja. A Bill
to impose sanctions against Iraq in response to the attack was opposed by the
White House and never got out of Congress.
Then there were Reagan's actual
direct military interventions - most notably the 1983 expedition to Lebanon and
invasion of Grenada - which tested public tolerance for post-Vietnam Syndrome
adventures, again paving the way for the current paroxysm of ultra-imperialism.
Libya's Colonel Moammar Qaddafi reacted to Reagan's passing by expressing his
"deep regret" that Ronnie had died before being brought to a war
crimes tribunal for the 1986 US airstrikes on Tripoli that killed Qaddafi's
adopted daughter and 36 others (in retaliation for an anonymous Berlin disco
bombing that killed three, including two US soldiers. Associated Press,
7/6/04). One hates to agree with so unsavoury a character, but I am with the
colonel on this one.
Ronald Reagan did more to move America
and the world in the wrong direction than just about anyone else in the second
half of the 20th Century. The current official hagiography is
historical revisionism of the lowest order. Do not eat this vomit. Fuck Ronald
Reagan.
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