He was a man with firm positions, with which he undoubtedly contributed to the fall of communism. Vaclav Havel
"When talking about Ronald Reagan, I have to be personal. We in Poland took him so personally. Why? Because we owe him our liberty. This can't be said often enough by people who lived under oppression for half a century, until communism fell in 1989."
Lech Walesa
But of course a couple of pea-brained teenyboppers know more about the fall of communism than those who lived through it.
Teenybopper? I wish!
Ironic, Reagan supported workers and unions in Poland, just not in America.
Hey, where were you when you heard the news President Kennedy was shot in a motorcade in Dallas Texas? I had my left foot on the kitchen chair tying my sneaker to go play football, I heard the CBS bulletin on the Philco TV in the living room. I lived through the cold war. It should have ended almost 30 years earlier. If you want to stop being a real meathead, educate yourself on how the treasonous CIA tried numerous times to force America into a war with the Soviet Union. Start with May Day, 1960, Francis Gary Powers, and how the treasonous CIA prompted President Eisenhower to issue a dire warning about the military industrial complex in his farewell address.
"The fall of the Berlin Wall makes for nice pictures. But it all started in the shipyards."
Lech Walesa
I was in Europe in school when I heard about Kennedy. In the morning my mother told me he'd been shot. A few hours later we were informed of his death in school.
Well, at least you didn't contest the pea-brained part. Unlike your age, it is far more apparent. So, you're not going challenge Walesa or Havel or Reagan's contributions to the ending of the Cold War? I thought you just might be that stupid.
"The great enemy of truth is very often not the lie deliberate, contrived and dishonest but the myth persistent, persuasive, and unrealistic. Too often we enjoy the comfort of opinion without the discomfort of thought."
President John F. Kennedy
Experts on the Soviet Union and the United States from inside and outside Russia not only challenge the myth Reagan contributed to ending the cold war, they make a strong case that he extended it. And he wasted BILLIONS of taxpayer dollars on Star Wars and wasteful defense spending.
Long the leading Soviet expert on the United States,
Georgi Arbatov, head of the Moscow-based Institute for the Study of the U.S.A. and Canada, wrote his memoirs in 1992. A Los Angeles Times book review by Robert Scheer summed up a portion of it:
Arbatov understood all too well the failings of Soviet totalitarianism in comparison to the economy and politics of the West. It is clear from this candid and nuanced memoir that the movement for change had been developing steadily inside the highest corridors of power ever since the death of Stalin. Arbatov not only provides considerable evidence for the controversial notion that this change would have come about without foreign pressure, he insists that the U.S. military buildup during the Reagan years actually impeded this development.
George F. Kennan agrees. The former US ambassador to the Soviet Union, and father of the theory of "containment" of the same country, asserts that "the suggestion that any United States administration had the power to influence decisively the course of a tremendous domestic political upheaval in another great country on another side of the globe is simply childish." He contends that the extreme militarization of American policy strengthened hard-liners in the Soviet Union. "Thus the general effect of Cold War extremism was to delay rather than hasten the great change that overtook the Soviet Union."
Though the arms-race spending undoubtedly damaged the fabric of the Soviet civilian economy and society even more than it did in the United States, this had been going on for 40 years by the time Mikhail Gorbachev came to power without the slightest hint of impending doom. Gorbachev's close adviser, Aleksandr Yakovlev, when asked whether the Reagan administration's higher military spending, combined with its "Evil Empire" rhetoric, forced the Soviet Union into a more conciliatory position, responded:
It played no role. None. I can tell you that with the fullest responsibility. Gorbachev and I were ready for changes in our policy regardless of whether the American president was Reagan, or Kennedy, or someone even more liberal. It was clear that our military spending was enormous and we had to reduce it.
