The
40 page section covering the Reagan Years in Oliver Stone and
Peter Kuznick's book provides enough documentation of chicanery,
hypocrisy, doublespeak and sociopathy to confirm in spades those of
us who were appalled at the time and to turn around all but the most
dedicated Reaganites. These will flee into ever deeper depths of
denial in order to keep mythology intact. So, while they stop
reading, let us consider some of the disgraceful aspects and
consequences of that time.
There is little exaggeration to the claim that Reagan was hired to be president by very wealthy and very ignorant conservative ideologues. And it would be difficult to exaggerate the damage done to that aspect of our nation that is serious about the “freedom and democracy” that for Reagan were meaningless and sentimental rhetorical devices for manipulating public opinion, perhaps even himself.
Jimmy Carter was astonished at Reagan's lack of interest when he attempted to brief him on things nuclear. His aids and administrators squirmed while he napped during cabinet meetings and stood open-mouthed as he told world leaders blatantly untrue anecdotes such as when he told Israeli Prime Minister Rabin that he had been present at the liberation of death camps in World War II. His belief that “Americans are a moral people who... have always used our power only as a force for good in the world” stood in sharp contrast to the series of brutal dictators and murderous “freedom fighters” he supported. The Right took it on as a project to instill Reagan in the public mind as a great and popular president and they certainly succeeded, at least among the gullible, or those who chose not to look beyond the right wing thinktank spin.
Some
of his falsehoods were aimed to exploit and advance prejudice as when
he repeatedly cited the invented “Welfare Queen” with many social
security cards, hundreds of IDs and an income of over $150,000 a
year. Reagan became so famous for misquotes that even his press
secretary began to invent quotes to attribute to his boss. He
utilized stacks of 3 x 5” cards to guide him through meetings and
embarrassed his aids sometimes by reading from the wrong cards. In a
meeting with Russian leader Mikhail Gorbachev his response to an
unexpected proposal was to fumble through the cards looking for an
appropriate answer, which he couldn't find.
Central
America
The
Reagan Administration funded death squads in El Salvador, Nicaragua
and other Central American countries and described these forces as
equivalent to our founding fathers. Inviting citizens into his
paranoia he pointed out that Texas is only a couple days drive from
Nicaragua, a small nation which had recently freed itself from a
U.S.-supported dictatorship but which Reagan saw as a bastion of
communism, you know, the Axis of Evil. Our dedicated and tame
media rarely acknowledged that Nicaragua was a democracy and
consistently portrayed any resistance to U.S.-backed repressive
regimes as “leftist”.
The
tiny island of Grenada was invaded as part of the hysterical
anti-communism permeating Reagan and his advisors, with fanciful
justifications and absurd claims that America is “standing tall”
again, afterwards. Part of the motivation was to distract from the
disastrous suicide bombing of U.S. Marines sent to Lebanon, to
bolster one faction or another. A CIA car bombing, seeking revenge
for the Marine deaths by assassinating a Hezbollah leader, instead
killed over 80 innocent bystanders. When “they” do this it's
called terrorism. When “we” do it, it's glorified or goes
unreported. Many of these same actors were recast during the W Bush
administration, to add another layer of damage to the damage,
protecting oligarchy from democracy.
Some
segments of sanity in the congress attempted to limit Reagan's
violence on Nicaragua with the Boland Amendment. The administration's
circumventing of that law led to the Iran-Contra scandal. The
administration escaped serious scrutiny, and impeachment, by tepid
congressional hearings, resulting in a few lower echelon wrist slaps
and a few high-level pardons.
The
mainstream media also saved us the embarrassment of hearing about the
World Court judgement against the U.S. for mining Nicaraguan ports.
The New York Times also saved us from accurate reporting on
right-wing death squad activities and military massacres of civilians
by pulling their correspondent, Raymond Bonner, out of El Salvador.
The
Military-Industrial Budget
Reagan
lowered tax rates for the wealthy from 70% to 28%. He increased
military spending by 51% and substantially cut spending on programs
aimed at ordinary or disadvantaged citizens. Increases in spending
for an already bloated nuclear war-making program fueled Soviet fears
of a first strike and U.S. suicidal fantasies of a “winnable”
nuclear war. Added to this was the Strategic Defense Initiative
(SDI), Star Wars, another preposterously expensive Reagan fantasy of
protection against nuclear-tipped missiles - if not fantasy then
either part of a first strike strategy or a camouflaged space weapons
program, or both, yet another means to domination, safety for the
never-safe-enough cold warriors.
Perhaps
his greatest crime, was SDI, this same fantasy project, that
scuttled nuclear arms talks with the Soviets. We came very close to
ridding the planet of the scourge of nuclear weapons, a continuing
threat to our survival. This result can be traced to cold-warrior
fear and the dreams of conquest and domination they utilize to
comfort themselves.
A
few more markers in disgrace:
The
Iran-Iraq War:
The
U.S. duplicitously, in a macabre maneuver, armed both sides, in the
Iran-Iraq War and helped Saadam Huessein avoid sanctions for use of
biological weapons, even in the case of the “ gassing of his own
people”, the Kurds, that was used later to demonize him when that
became useful, by many of the same people who covered for him
earlier..
The
Afghan-Russian War:
*Over
one million Afghans were killed, a third of the population fled to
Pakistan.
*The
Pakistani dictatorship funneled arms, with U.S. knowledge, to the
most fanatically fundamentalist Afghan rebels, after taking their
“cut”. .
*U.S. ignored Pakistani development of nuclear
weapons.
*Afghan Women were better off, by far, under the
Soviet-supported regimes.
*Once Russia withdrew from Afghanistan
the U.S. washed its hands of the mess created, leaving the most
extreme factions well-armed and in power, including Osama Bin Laden,
the loathsome Taliban and Al Gaeda, eventually turning these lethal
and foolish gifts of weaponry back on the givers.
Lessons
learned from this debacle of an administration? Numero one, nothing
new, you look at what they do, not what they say. Failure to hold
them accountable means that so long as they serve their wealthy
benefactors, they can pretty much act out their sociopathology
unhindered. The Stone/Kuznick collaboration is chuck full of disturbing bullet points, mostly ignored by mainstream media in its service to power. As the pollution, population and nuclear (or other WMD)
threats mount, we are quickly running out of time to redress the discouraging
array of issues coming down on our poor heads.
