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On a Reagan monument

Case for: Who else did more to restore freedom?
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February 21st, 2007 issue

There is to be a sculpture of former U.S. President Ronald Reagan in Prague 6 — this is a message that has recently spread from the very heart of Prague, around the Czech Republic and practically to the whole world.
In connection with this, a debate has stirred about who Reagan really was, what he managed to achieve and how to evaluate and judge his mission as the head of the most important democratic world power — especially with regard to the Czech Republic. I was asked, as a representative of the municipality that decided to build the memorial as a tribute to this statesman, to explain why we decided to do so. “Why Reagan?” was the question asked, and not only by an opinion essayist in this paper.
Since that time I have received tens of letters, e-mails and messages that can be divided into three categories: support, rejection, doubts.
I would like to thank those who feel, as I do, a degree of surprise that someone would even ask. Just like to one of those letter writers, I feel a strong urge to answer by posing a question: “Do you know of any other person who would be more responsible for, or have more merit in, the fall of communism than Reagan?”
Those who reject him can be divided into a few groups. Obviously, no one is surprised by the fact that communists reject him. Very few of them can accept the fact that they lost. It is not surprising that the Greens are against it, even though their chairman, Martin Bursík, is trying hard to make them appear to be strictly anti-communist. While quite a lot of their followers (not all of them) are recruited from the anarchists and anti-globalization groups, with a high degree of probability one can speculate whether these people wouldn’t be burning a Pershing tank or Uncle Sam effigies some 25 or 30 years ago.
The Social Democrats’ attitude will be of interest since it is not yet known, but I suppose it will be precisely these people who would adore anyone who protested against communists and communism, bearing in mind their own history.
The third group is those (intellectuals, to characterize them aptly) who do not doubt the defeat of communism but doubt the importance of Reagan’s role. “Didn’t the regime fall on its own? Wasn’t former Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev, in fact, the real winner?” one of them asked.
“Why Reagan?” As if the above lines answered a different question: Who wants the statue and who does not? But I argue it is precisely in this debate that Reagan’s importance for the world, the United States and the Czech Republic dwells. The fact that, more than 20 years after his presidency, this person is still able to divide people and engage them in passionate debates more than any other U.S. president of the past 50 years (with the exception of the current one) is proof that he wasn’t ordinary. He wasn’t a gray mouse, or a politician without vision, faith and ideology. He wasn’t a politician who would view his every step in the light of public opinion polls.
He might not have been the greatest intellectual among the world politicians of the past century, but, unlike the overwhelming majority of those super-intellectuals, he was something different — a real leader.
He managed something that not many can do. He was able to identify evil, and, unlike all of his successors who wanted to detain it where it was, he decided to defeat it. At the beginning of the ’80s, he promised, “The West will not detain communism. The West will defeat communism. It will abolish it as a strange chapter of human history, the pages of which are still being written today.” He kept his promise.
While, in the times of his “more educated and intellectual” predecessors, communism was spreading day after day and the military power of the Soviet Union even surpassed that of the United States, during Reagan’s presidency, the situation changed: None of the countries fell into the hands of the communists — quite the contrary, the world of freedom, human rights and democracy began to spread.
While his “more educated” predecessors conceived of the fight against communism in such a way that they accepted the existence of the Iron Curtain, that they accepted (or rather sacrificed) the Baltics, Poland, Hungary and even Czechoslovakia, he decided to fight for them.
As the head of the Danish Center for Political Studies, Kasper Elbjorn, aptly wrote Feb. 6, the day Reagan would have been 96, “Reagan deserves to be celebrated, because he left a better world behind than the world that he assumed in 1981, when he became a president.” He left behind a world without communism.
—Tomáš Chalupa is the mayor of Prague 6.

Case against: This president was no one to honor

Imagine my shock on reading that Prague 6 wants a memorial for former U.S. President Ronald Reagan. How absurd. If this man is the man to be honored by the Czech Republic, the Czech Republic is in deep moral and spiritual trouble.
Let me refresh everyone’s memory about Reagan’s legacy.
Domestic policy
■ He was the first president to turn the United States into a debtor nation and triple the debt.
■ Reagan increased the massive federal budget deficit to $1.5 trillion, three times the debt accumulated by all 39 of his predecessors. This created a windfall of profits for the privately owned Federal Reserve Central Bank. His Reaganomics plan was a scam to create massive debt and put the ownership of America into the hands of the Federal Reserve.
■ He achieved the highest unemployment in recent U.S. history, hitting 10 percent in the early ’80s.
■ He doubled the defense budget to more than $330 billion by 1987.
■ He promised a smaller federal government before increasing the number of federal employees 7 percent.
■ He stopped the cleanup of federal nuclear weapons facilities.
■ He gave birth to the savings and loan scandal, the largest theft in the history of the world, robbing U.S. taxpayers of $1.4 trillion. Jeb Bush, George Herbert Walker Bush and his son, Neil Bush, have all been implicated in the mess, which cost U.S. citizens about one-quarter of the national debt.
■ The Reagan/Bush administration worked to cover up savings and loan problems by reducing the number and depth of examinations required as well as attacking political opponents who were sounding early alarms about the industry. As early as 1986, insiders were aware of significant S&L problems that they felt would require a bailout. This information was kept from the media until after Bush won the 1988 elections.
■ In Reagan’s eight years, the gap between rich and poor Americans increased to a size it had not been for half a century.
■ Reagan cut aid for families with dependent children, food stamps, child nutrition, job training for young people, programs to prevent child abuse and mental health services.
■ He eliminated welfare assistance for the working poor and reduced federal subsidies for childcare services for low-income families.
■ He made millions of Americans living on the financial edge homeless; many died of starvation and froze to death in the streets of Detroit.
■ He cut back on healthy food programs for school children. This included the infamous attempt by Reagan’s Department of Agriculture in 1981 to allow ketchup to be counted as a vegetable in school lunches.
■ Reagan devastated organized labor when he fired 15,000 striking air-traffic controllers in 1981 — the only labor union that endorsed him as president
■ He ordered the Environmental Protection Agency to relax its interpretation of the Clean Air Act, which increased pollution twofold.
■ He changed FCC regulations that allowed a single corporation to own more than one media outlet in a market, eliminating the opportunity for a fair and balanced media.
Foreign policy
■ Reagan provided hundreds of millions of dollars to Saddam Hussein during the Iran-Iraq war in the 1980s, building the power that gave the regime of George W. Bush the pretext for invading Iraq March 19, 2003. The most recent effects of Reagan’s foreign policy can be seen in the deaths of tens of thousands of civilians and over 1,000 U.S. soldiers in Iraq in the past year.
■ The Iran-Iraq war lasted for eight years. Reagan contributed heavily in this war and should be held responsible for his part in the mayhem by media and historians. Both sides accepted a ceasefire sponsored by the United Nations in 1988.
■ In 1986, the Reagan administration admitted it had been secretly selling arms to Iran, with some of the profits going to guerrillas in Nicaragua. Reagan’s defense was that he hadn’t been informed of the Iran-Contra link. But Reagan’s CIA facilitation of drug traffic through established relationships with South American drug lords was made clear.
■ His sale of arms to Iran in exchange for hostages and sending arms to Nicaragua resulted in multiple investigations. The United States funded the Contras by funneling drugs into the black community.
■ He withdrew from UNESCO and cut off U.S. contributions to the UN Fund for Population Activities, cast the single vote against a World Health Organization law on infant formula, and did not oppose the Kassebaum amendment, which would limit funding to the UN unless it granted the United States more voting power; Reagan threatened to reduce the United States’ contribution to the General Assembly 25 percent unless the UN agreed to amend its charter.
■ He supported the “white only” government of South Africa.
■ He invaded the tiny, predominantly black island of Grenada.
This is the man that Prague wants to honor?
A memorial to Lincoln or Jefferson would be more appropriate and in line with the values of the Czech citizenry — but certainly not Reagan, the frontman for the behind-the-scenes men who really run the U.S. government.
— Marshall Cupp is a former Czech business owner, writer, history buff and part-time Prague resident since 1991. He lived in Northern California during the Reagan years and was an active member of the Republican Party until 1986. He is now retired.


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