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A Response to Jahed on Reagan's Legacy
WRT : http://groups.yahoo.com/group/mukto-mona/message/17560
Jahed You raised a
very good point that tons of people are paying tribute to Ronald Reagan
including ex-British Prime minister Margaret Thacher. If how many people
supported or paid tribute decide the nobility of a leader or action then,
following the same logic, we should also justify Hitler�s actions as noble deeds or invasion to Iraq as a blessing to humanity, as
majority of the people of those invading countries supported the actions. It
is ok to pay tributes but we should not try to justify all wrong doings of a
person only because he died recently. It is very easy to be misled by the
popular media, I would ask you to read or listen to other liberal medias (if
possible international medias) before you make a judgment call on Reagan�s
legacy. As Alain said there is nothing wrong in calling a spade a spade,
there is no need to make a person look like a noble man only because he died
couple of days ago. Reagan
redefined conservatism in United States politics. If you claim yourself a
liberal then you might want to do some more research on his domestic and
foreign policies on different issues. He drew on the ideas of a group called
the �neoconservatives,� The conservative face of Republican party we are
experiencing today was strengthened by Reagan�s strategy. He was against
abortion rights and advocated for prayer in schools. Reagan was responsible for attacking women's rights, as he
tried to legitimate the backlash against feminism. He appointed the far
right justice Antonin Scalia to the Supreme Court, and he loaded the lower
court benches with anti-choice ideologues (Matthew Rothschild, published in
Progressive). Please read through the list below and if you still think
these were all actions with good intentions I will have no more to say�. I
have tried to refrain myself from giving any opinion, just copied and pasted
different postings and quotes from different newspapers with facts�. Reagan
on Foreign Policy: Lebanon
(collected
from AP US History News) Israel
invaded Lebanon in 1982 to destroy guerilla bases, and the next year, Reagan
sent U.S. forces as part of an international peace-keeping force, but when a
suicide bomber crashed a bomb-filled truck into U.S. army barracks on
October 23, 1983, killing over 200 marines, Reagan had to withdraw troops,
though he miraculously suffered no political damage. (APUS History News) South Africa (Published Wed, June 9,2004, by
Boston Globe, by Derrick Z. Jackson) PRESIDENT Bush proclaimed: "Ronald Reagan believed
that God takes the side of justice and that America has a special calling to
oppose tyranny and defend freedom." In the first three days of news
reports on the death of the former president, not a single major American
newspaper, television station, or politician has dared to exhume this
counterpoint to the Reagan's legacy: "Immoral, evil, and totally
un-Christian." These were the words of Bishop Desmond Tutu, spoken on
Capitol Hill at a House hearing in late 1984. It was just after Reagan's
easy reelection. Tutu had just been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for his
nonviolent struggle against apartheid in South Africa. Throughout the United
States a rising number of Americans were calling for American companies to
stop doing business there. Reagan ignored them. The president of so-called sunny
optimism attempted to blind Americans with his policy of "constructive
engagement" with the white minority regime in Pretoria. All
constructive engagement did was give the white minority more time to mow
down the black majority in the streets and keep dreamers of democracy, such
as Nelson Mandela, behind bars. In the weeks leading up to his appearance on Capitol Hill,
Tutu said in speeches that it seemed that the Reagan White House saw
"blacks as expendable" in South Africa. The white government
forced black people from prized lands and into horrid townships. Migratory
labor laws split families for 11 months at a time. Education was gutted for
black children. There was virtually no due process for black defendants.
Tutu said it was "reminiscent of Hitler's Aryan madness." Tutu
declared that "constructive engagement is an abomination, an
unmitigated disaster." Over the remainder of his presidency, at least
3,000 people would die, mostly at the hands of the South African police and
military. Another 20,000, including 6,000 children, according to one
estimate by a human rights group, would be arrested under "state of
emergency" decrees. Yet Reagan had the gall to say in 1985 that the
"reformist administration" of South Africa had "eliminated
the segregation that we once had in our own country." In 1986, Reagan
gave a speech where he said Mandela should be released but denounced
sanctions with crocodile tears, claiming that they would hurt black workers,
who were already ridiculously impoverished. Reagan's go-slow speech was
denounced by Tutu, who said: "I found it quite nauseating. I think the
West, for my part, can go to hell. . . . Your president is the pits as far
as blacks are concerned. He sits there like the great, big white chief of
old." Later in 1986, Reagan made his greatest demonstration yet
that black bodies were "expendable." Congress had finally had
enough of the carnage to vote for limited sanctions. Reagan vetoed them.
Congress overrode the veto. Reagan proceeded to put no muscle behind the
sanctions. Mandela remained in jail and at least 2,000 political prisoners
remained detained without trial. In 1987 Reagan published a report that said additional
sanctions "would not be helpful." The gleeful South African
foreign minister, Roelof Botha, said that Reagan "and his
administration have an understanding of the reality of South
Africa." Iran
Contra Scandal The
president's closest aides maintain that Reagan did not fully know, and only
reluctantly came to accept, the circumstances in what became known as the
Iran-Contra affair. (CNN) I
also came across this interesting piece in http://www.inthe80s.com/scandal.shtml,
while I was searching on this Iran-Contra scandal�.
Policies
on Other countries: (Published on Wednesday,
June 9, 2004 by the Progressive by Matthew
Rothschild ) Reagan was responsible for killing tens of thousands of
innocent people in El Salvador, Nicaragua, Guatemala, and Honduras as he
waged illegal wars and funded brutal militaries. The truth commission of El
Salvador investigated the murders of 75,000 people during the civil war in
the 1980s, and it found that the Salvadoran military, or death squads
connected to the military, had committed the bulk of those crimes. At the
time, Bush was lavishing hundreds of millions of dollars on the Salvadoran
government, and his CIA was working with the death squads. Reagan was responsible, as Christopher Hitchens has noted,
for approving Israel's invasion of Lebanon, which killed about 18,000
civilians. Reagan was responsible for his own unilateral invasion of
that huge threat to the United States called Grenada. (Oh, the great
liberator!) As Joanna Kirkpatrick has mentioned in response to
Jahed�s post Reagan has supported all dictators not only because they
supported US policy. She wrote, �During the Reaganocracy, he supported
dictators around the world, including first of all Saddam, but also Marcos
of the Philippines, Duvalier of Haiti,and worst of all Mobutu of Zaire.
Because of Reagans knee-jerk cold warpolicies the US sent billions to Mobutu
just because he kept on saying he Social
issues (Published on �On the Issues�) The president
was so cut off from the counsel of black Americans that he sometimes did not
even realize when he was offending them. One example occurred when Reagan
sided with Bob Jones University in a lawsuit to obtain federal tax
exemptions that had been denied by the IRS. The IRS denied tax exemptions to
segregated private schools. Many of them were schools such as Bob Jones
University, which enrolled a handful of minority students but prohibited
interracial dating and marriage. It was the basis of this discrimination
that the IRS denied the tax exemption. Reagan would later say that the case
had never been presented to him as a civil rights issue. More astonishingly,
he did not even know that many Christian schools practiced segregation Reagan never supported the use of federal power to provide
blacks with civil rights. He opposed the landmark Voting Rights Act of 1965.
Reagan said in 1980 that the Voting Rights Act had been �humiliating to
the South.� While he made political points with white southerners on this
issue, he was sensitive to any suggestion that his stands on civil rights
issues were politically or racially motivated, and he typically reacted to
such criticisms as attacks on his personal integrity Reagan
proposed constitutional amendment to allow prayers at school. He said in his
speech in Orlando Florida, Mar, 8, 1983, �When our Founding Fathers passed
the First Amendment, they never intended to construct a wall between
government and religious belief. The Supreme Court opens its proceedings
with a religious invocation. Congress opens sessions with a prayer. I
believe the schoolchildren of the United States are entitled to the same
privileges. I sent the Congress a constitutional amendment to restore prayer
to public schools. I am calling on the Congress to act speedily and to let
our children pray.� Budget
and
social Welfare issues: For
over two decades, the government budget had slowly and steadily risen, much
to the disturbance of the tax-paying public, and by the 80s, the public was
tired of the New Deal and the Great Society and ready to slash bills, just
as Reagan proposed. Reagan�s budget cost $695 million, and the vast
majority of budget cuts fell upon social programs, not on defense, but there
were also sweeping tax cuts of 25% over three years. During the
1980s, income gaps widened between the rich and poor for the first time in
the 20th century (this was mirrored by the emergence of
�yuppies�), and it was massive military spending (a $100 billion annual
deficit in 1982 and nearly $200 million annual deficits in the later years)
that upped the American dollar (as well as the trade deficit, which reached
a record $152 billion in 1987) and made America the world�s biggest
borrowers. Supply-side economics claimed that cutting taxes would actually
increase government revenue, but instead, during his eight years in office,
Reagan accumulated a $2 trillion debt�more than all his presidential
predecessors combined. (Collected from AP US history notes) During the same period, the average family income of the
poorest fifth of the American population dropped by 6.1 percent, and rose
11.1 percent for the top fifth, according to "Sleepwalking Through
History," the best-selling assessment of the Reagan years by Haynes
Johnson. The number of people living beneath the federal poverty line rose
from 24.5 million in 1978 to 32.5 million in 1988. And the number of
homeless people went from something so little it wasn't even written about
widely in the late 1970s to more than 2 million when Reagan left office.
(Published on Thursday, June 10, 2004 by the San Francisco Chronicle by Kavin Fagan)
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