Yesterday, a statue of America's 40th president, Ronald Wilson Reagan was unveiled in the garden of the US Embassy at Grosvenor Square, London. "He won the Cold War without firing a shot" runs the slogan at the bottom. My reply to this claim is: BALONEY. Not since Joseph Stalin not only had his enemies shot or sent to Siberian Gulags by the million but also airbrushed out of official Soviet photos( like Trotsky and Yezhov), have we witnessed such a brazen rewriting of history. Whether Reagan ever admitted or not, he could scarcely have "won the Cold War without firing a shot" without the help of his predecessors( which of course included Democrats like Jimmy Carter, LBJ, JFK and of course the man who devised the "containment strategy" which allowed the West to" win the Cold War without firing a single shot"- Harry S. Truman, as well as Republicans like Ford, Nixon and Eisenhower).
"He stood up to the Russians"- more BALONEY(enough to open a chain of good sized delicatessens if you ask me). Truman called Stalin's bluffs over Berlin and Korea, (1948-49 and 1950)Kennedy pressured Nikita Khrushchev into withdrawing missiles from Cuba in 1962, even the far from hawkish Jimmy Carter called out Leonid Brezhnev over human rights violations. Small wonder that the late George F.Kennan( who formulated the idea of containment in Foreign Affairs" The Sources of Soviet Conduct" as "Mr X") called the idea that not the demise of the Soviet Union was some kind of victory for Western liberty and freedom but specifically the right wing of the Republican Party "fundamentally arrogant and childish in the extreme".
The Reagan centenary and statue
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