Reagan's War on the USSR Was Better Timed Than Hitler's

Peter Schweizer: "Reagan's War" and "Victory"

Reagan succeeded where Hitler failed in slaying the Red Beat of the East, reminding one of Woody Guthrie's verse: "As through this world you ramble, you'll see lots of funny men; some will rob you with a six-gun, some with a fountain pen."

Both of Peter Schweizer's works are typical Reaganaut triumphalism, but at least they're among the better attempts. Schweizer's central thesis, that Reagan had an agenda to "tear down that wall," is essentially correct. But missing here is a sense of what "Communism" meant in Ronald Reagan's world: not just the USSR or Marxism-Leninism, but anything to the left of the white good-old-boy cocktail and country-club crowd, from unions to feminism to affirmative action, with real Communism as the handy lever to pry at them all. "Constructive engagement" with South Africa and Nicaragua's Somoza as "friends of the Free World" says much about the limitations of his agenda, and that of his worshippers.

Also in question is the author's thesis that Reagan the warrior slew the Red dragon with his own lone sword. Communism did "work," in its sphere - despite the author's sweeping statement to the contrary - but globalization increasingly left its model in the dust. No doubt Reagan's specific policies - economic embargoes and guerrilla proxy wars - helped, but could not have without the larger systemic isolation of the USSR already underway throughout the global market. This led to privileged "second-generation Communists" - the children of the nomenklatura elite - feeling increasingly isolated and frustrated in their relative deprivation compared to the West. Unlike their elders, they had no childhood of poverty in village or factory and had not gone through cataclysmic wars to defend their "Soviet motherland." They saw only the big cars, tall glass buildings, full shopping centers, and cable-fed porn which they seethingly lacked even in the richest Soviet cities. These cravings by the aspiring Soviet bourgeoisie were the ultimate killers of Communism; without the frustrations of the Soviet baby-boomers, the USSR would have withstood American onslaughts in the 1980s as it had after WW II, and Reagan would have been no more successful than Hitler.

Schweizer offers interesting tidbits of info culled from Soviet files. But the contention that the USSR funded the Peace Movement echoes the overhype of Reagan's original accusation, while the greater dependency of Solidarity, Charter 77 and other East European dissidents on Reagan's largesse is of course seen as totally praiseworthy. The betrayal of Solidarity's working class roots after 1989, in favor of free-market neoliberalism, doubtless comes from the NED funding of the Reagan years. There is of course scant attention paid to the ugly side of Reagan's crusade: the apologetics for Israeli warmongering, the death squads that bled Central America dry, the terrorist jihadism that eruoted out of Afghanistan.

Schweitzer's books are a good attempt at lauding Reagan as the victorious cold warrior. Yet in the end Reagan still comes across as a blinkered ideologue in perfect counterpoint to nemeses like Fidel Castro or Ayatollah Khomeini.