Reagan's Courage in Calling Out The Evil of The Berlin Wall

"To see what is in front of one's nose needs a constant struggle," George Orwell.

Many times in history it takes hindsight to realize that a great moment in history had occurred - a teachable moment. One of those teachable moments was the fall of the Berlin Wall - that hideous symbol and prison that entombed half of Berlin with the power-lusters of Communism. The starkness of the contrast between the moderate freedom of West Berlin and the total lack of freedom of East Berlin was too in your face even for mushy leftists to deny. Today however, in America, we have experienced slow creeping toward socialism (which is communism light) for the past 100 years. But, under Obama, we are at galloping speed. There won't be cement walls built separating Americans from Americans but there will be the stultifying drabness of existence that comes about when your options have been shorted because government rules, regulations and insane laws rule your life. Petty, small bureaucrats making decisions about how much you can earn, what taxes you will pay, where you can live, what you can eat, what you can express and how you can express it, on and on and on.

We need another revolution BACK to our Founding Principles. We need to look at our history and realize that the war fought against the British was to unshackle ourselves from excessive taxation and no representation. To do this we must see through, as the WSJ writes, the propagandists, the moral equivocators and diplomatic finessers and simply look at the Wall - the figurative wall we have today that is made up of Washington politicians. Will we have the courage to make our "wall" of political schemers and power-lusters crumble?

...There was Mikhail Gorbachev, who made it clear that the Soviet Union would not violently suppress people power in its satellite states, as it had decades earlier in Czechoslovakia and Hungary. There were the heroes of Poland's Solidarity movement, not least Pope John Paul II, who did so much to expose the moral bankruptcy of communism.

And there was Ronald Reagan, who believed the job of Western statesmanship was to muster the moral, political, economic and military wherewithal not simply to contain the Soviet bloc, but to bury it. "What I am describing now is a plan and a hope for the long term—the march of freedom and democracy which will leave Marxism-Leninism on the ash-heap of history," he said in 1982, to the astonishment and derision of his critics. Now, there was the audacity of hope.

...To know what the West stood for during most of those years, one merely had to go to Berlin, see the Wall, consider its purpose, and observe the contrasts between the vibrant prosperity on one side of the city and the oppressive monotony on the other.

Those contrasts were even more apparent to the Germans trapped on the wrong side of the Wall. Barbed wire, closed military zones and the machinery of communist propaganda could keep the prosperity of the West out of sight of most people living east of the Iron Curtain. But that wasn't true for the people of East Berlin, many of whom merely had to look out their windows to understand how empty and cynical were the promises of socialism compared to the reality of a free-market system. Read "Why The Berlin Wall Fell" at WSJ.

The Anti-American Values Candidate

At Frontiers of Freedom, Miklos K. Radvani, writes in detail of Obama and his anti-American soul by starting with a comparison to Gorbachev who totally hoodwinked the United States and Europe into believing that he was a new kind of leader for the Soviet Union. This article is long and detailed and well worth reading for it's reminder of the Gorbachev era and the comparison of this character of history to Obama today. Dr. Radvanyi's conclusion - Obama is certainly a candidate whose basic philosophy is one of anti-American values. This is a man who should be no where near the White House.

"...Ultimately, Gorbachev’s tragedy was that he was a shameless and duplicitous politician. In order to attain power, he was willing to do anything. Yet, when he had power, he refused to exercise it properly. In the end of 1991, the Soviet Union metamorphosed into Russia. As Gorbachev did not change anything, so did the Soviet Union/Russia remain the same autocratic, militaristic, fraudulent, uncivilized and corrupt political entity. As a leader and politician Gorbachev was an utter and colossal failure. Yet, ironically, his fall from political grace only enhanced his pop-culture image in the Western media as a democrat, as a man of peace and above all as an honest intellectual."

"Indeed, Gorbachev was always a lucky actor who, thanks to the mindlessly leftist Western media, became a media pop-star par excellence. He did not create himself. He was invented by the Western media. Gorbachev's only accidental accomplishment remains that the foul ideology of communism expired in the Soviet Union without much bloodshed..."

"...the Obamanian notion that mankind should not settle for the world as he describes it, is terribly dangerous and even self-destructive. Similarly, Obama's political call for ambiguous radical change to transform the world into something that meets his glittering, but unspecified vision puts at risk, and even threatens, both the economic opportunity and political freedom that have become the hallmark with America.

What Obama really strives for is a two fold process. First, he seeks to undermine and ultimately destroy America’s representative democracy in which politicians subordinate themselves to the will of the people. Second, he plans to install a dictatorship of mediocrity in which an idealized and fraudulent media star subordinates his or her emotionally misguided and intellectually blind followers to his own will by intimidation, blackmail, false promises and radical divisiveness. Slogans such as "Yes, We Can!" and "Change We Can Believe In," and "Change We Need" sound more like fanatic battle cries of extreme and irrational religious cult rather than the promised principles of a more dignified and higher kind of political order... "

"...Counterproductively, Obama desperately wants to repudiate and apologize for the glorious past of the United States of America in order to more effectively exploit the race issue and to sell a future that is firmly anchored in the failed communist and socialist policies and practices of the 20th Century. By doing so, Obama only proves how uninformed, incompetent and out of step he is concerning the fundamental realities of the world.

For the world, with the negligible exceptions of some misguided and narcissist tyrants, has unambiguously moved away from the destructive lure of grand ideologies preferring instead sound free market economic principles over the rigidity of centrally planned economies, fiscal prudence over extravagant government-sponsored ambitions, reforms over class-based fanaticism, tested historical experience over utopianism, and representative government over regimes that verbally usurp democracy while in practice indulge in cruel despotism... "

"...What protected and sustained the United States and its allies and defeated their enemies was the timely use of force, or the threat thereof. To counter the unfounded charge of the unloved America and to obtain popular support, the Obama/Biden ticket appears to side with the hate-filled and angry left inside and outside the United States. Bluntly stated, both of these groups advocate the radical transformation of democratic societies into an abstract earthly paradise that would turn all the nation-states of the world into a giant, happy, universal, and irresponsible despotism.

In other words, when Russia, a hopelessly backward, autocratic and militaristic state, challenges the political pluralism and ideological tolerance of the United States and its allies, when desperate despots in Burma, North Korea, Iran, Syria, Venezuela, Bolivia, Ecuador, and leaders of well-organized terrorist groups are increasingly becoming mere pawns in Putin’s quest to restore Russia’s great power status, Obama’s and Biden’s pathetic doctrine of "aggressive personal diplomacy" without the credible threat of use of force amounts to sheer appeasement... "

"...In this new world of brutal power politics, the United States and the world need a president of solid principles, rich national security experience and courage, and not a man who is the prisoner of his intensely personal doubts, theoretic dogmas and class-based socialist/communist political prejudices... "

"Since his speech in mid-February 2008, in Wisconsin, on economic strategy, Obama has preached the socialist/communist gospel about the failure of capitalist society to bring about egalitarian fairness and rapid progress toward a utopian, universal welfare for Americans and for every "citizen" of the world. Indeed, the most important element of Obama’s economic strategy is the political promise that, without exception, everybody can get something for nothing. Admittedly, the amount of this something could vary, according to how much legalized powers of redistribution the president and a like-minded Congress have to arbitrarily award unearned benefits with one hand, while taking well-earned monies with the other. Hence, Obama’s advocacy of big government endowed with ever-increasing revenues to fulfill his never-ending list of promises. His infinite list-o-meter contains, among other items, $150 billion for green energy plan, hundreds of billions of dollars for a socialized national health care plan, huge increases in existing and new taxes proposed by him almost on a monthly basis, higher and new barriers to free trade, and Social Security benefits to illegal immigrants.

"Obama's "economic plan" is a really not a plan at all, but rather a list of cynical political choices motivated by his desire to turn the free and democratic society of the United States into a socialist/communist state. To conceal his real intentions, Obama has framed his presidential campaign as a political choice among named individuals. That is why Obama has tried to portray so assiduously John McCain as nothing but a carbon copy of President Bush. The problem that Obama has with this line of argument is the need to outbid his opponent by offering more of everything, without regard to any realistic basis to deliver... "

"His hope is that the majority of the voters is not smart enough, not sufficiently well informed, and is prone to blind optimism about Obama the politician. Obama’s ballot-box logic is: Why vote for McCain who offers less?... "

"To fully understand Obama’s economic philosophy, it is essential to start with this central insight: His appeal springs from a profound sense of entitlement and a hate-based moral legitimacy. Through his perception of having been victimized by his parents to his racially inspired rage against "the white men," "capital" and "Wall Street," Obama became the embodiment of a commanding ethos of social justice..."(Frontiers of Freedom).