On Reagan’s Naive War on Communism

"I believe that communism is another sad, bizarre chapter in human history whose last pages even now are being written." ~ Ronald Reagan. This is such a naive statement. 

Communism is not a sad, bizarre chapter of human history, as he asserts—it is the foundational doctrine of the Western civilization. He and Margaret Thatcher tried to make the case that communism was a Russian phenomena, and that once the Soviet Union was defeated, communism would vanish. They failed to remind their people that communism was a Western ideology—conceived and propagated between the eighteenth and twentieth centuries by white intellectuals and politicians in England, Germany, France, and America.

In the time of Reagan, communist doctrine was thriving in the American government, universities, media, entertainment industry, and big businesses. It was thriving on a much higher scale in Western Europe. There is some truth in the statement which the communist intellectuals, who feel frustrated by the fall of the Soviet Union, often make:  “The Soviet Union was not real socialism.” Western liberty and capitalism are a myth—in 1991, when the Soviet Union was dying, “real socialism” was thriving in the USA and Western Europe.  

If Reagan and Thatcher were serious about fighting communism, they would have done something to reform the intellectual, financial, and political establishments in their own nations. They did nothing of that sort. Being conservatives they found it easier to put the blame on outsiders—the Asians, in this case. It is hard for the Western conservatives to introspect and examine the flaws in their own character, history, and culture. They prefer to blame the outsiders for every woe that bedevils their society.  

To defeat the Soviet Union, Reagan’s government trained, financed, and armed the religious fundamentalist forces in the Middle East, Eastern Europe, North Africa, and South Asia. America’s flawed “war on communism” was the progenitor of America’s equally flawed “war on terror” which is still raging in several parts of Asia, Europe, and Africa. Reagan destabilized South America by authorizing the intervention in Nicaragua and other South American countries (in the name of stopping communism and the war on drugs).

The irony is that 42 years after Reagan’s presidency, communism continues to be the world’s most powerful ideology and political movement, while America is a spent force—some analysts say that the “last pages of the American Empire even now are being written.” In the twenty-first century, America represents the last stand of the Western civilization, which has dominated the world since the sixteenth century.