|
The Michigan Socialist | News |
Features | In-Depth
 The
Gipper
meets
the reaper
The life and crimes
of Ronald Reagan
By BEN BURGIS
The Michigan Socialist
ON JUNE 5, a very old man finally passed on, not
violently and not in pain, but from the inevitable onset of age and
disease, after having spent his last years in the lap of luxury
receiving the best medical care available to any one.
The man in question was not the sort of good,
kindly old man who had made no enemies who many might be expected to
grieve for even in circumstances so fortunate.
Quite the opposite.
A former head of state, he had overseen a
particularly violent turn in the policies of the most powerful
empire in the history of the world.
A pathological liar, he broke the law to sell
weapons to sworn enemies and conceal the act from his public and
from the highest elected body in the land.
He used the funds from those sales to subsidize
the actions of vicious terrorism against a diplomatically
non-aligned, democratically elected government that displeased him,
and was condemned by the World Court for war crimes for mining the
harbors of that nation.
All in all, he ordered or had a hand in the
killings of thousands of soldiers and civilians around the world.
A life-long, notorious and unrepentant bribe-taker
who accepted all manner of expensive personal favors from those with
a stake in his political decisions, he bankrupted his country buying
worthless and redundant weapons systems and paid for it all by
cutting social services to the most desperately poor residents of
his society.
The man in question, of course, was Ronald Reagan,
and since he died a torrent of grief for him and tribute to his many
great deeds has dominated the radio and television airwaves and
filled the pages of mainstream newspapers.
The New York Times memorialized him as the
very personification of “old-time values.”
Here in Michigan, Governor Jennifer Granholm
heaped praise on Reagan’s “optimistic vision” and “ability to
inspire the people to great things.”
President Bush praised him in terms that might
sound mildly exaggerated if applied to the likes of Abraham Lincoln,
and his nominal “opposition candidate” John Kerry suspended all
campaigning for five days in mourning for, in his words, the “great
man.”
In his official statement on the matter, Kerry
gushed that Americans from “sea to shining sea” should “bow their
heads in gratitude” that the “great man” left an “indelible mark on
the nation.”
 |
 Remembering
the real Reagan: Protester in Los Angeles (right) holds a cross
inscribed with the name of someone killed by rightwing death
squads in El Salvador. Michael Hasenfus (above) was a CIA agent
who ran drugs for terrorists. |
TO BE SURE, he did leave an “indelible mark.”
One of Reagan’s many lasting contributions was the
first in a series of “free trade” agreements of the sort that have
weakened labor, health, safety and environmental standards, and
resulted in massive job loss.
Doubtless laid-off industrial workers working
non-union, service industry jobs as a result of the “Gipper’s”
advances in this area will echo Kerry’s sentiments, not to mention
the thousands of air traffic controllers he fired (in what the New
York Times memorialized as a “bold move”) for daring to go out on
strike.
Mention must also be made of his administration’s
ruthless prosecution of his “war on drugs,” a “war” that of course
has yet to lead to any decrease in actual use of banned narcotics
but that led to an explosion in the rates of imprisonment in the
1980s, mostly of the very poor and disproportionately of Blacks and
Chicanos, and mostly for non-violent crimes.
Many inmates of notoriously humane and comfortable
correctional facilities serving life sentences for “conspiracy to
deliver cocaine” may doubtless be bowing their heads in gratitude
for the indelible mark even at this very moment.
Similarly with refugees from Latin American
countries who came to the United States to escape the
“anti-communist” death squads sponsored by the U.S. government when
Reagan was at its head.
Certainly, the family members of the 241 U.S.
Marines who Reagan sent to their deaths as part of his bloody
colonialist efforts to (as he put it in the 1980 election) “make
America stand tall again” will be bowing their heads as well.
Certainly, the widows and orphans of the terrorist
atrocities of September 11, 2001, should be bowing their heads in
gratitude at the “indelible mark” left on their own lives by the
policies of the man who oversaw massive covert operations in
Afghanistan in the 1980s, arming and training Osama bin Laden and
his cohorts for the purposes of waging “holy war” against the USSR.
For some strange reason, the obituary that filled
several whole pages of the New York Times failed to touch on that
point, just as most of the testimonials of grief and tribute filling
the corporate-owned mass media to overflowing have chosen to leave
out or brush past Reagan’s own most notorious act of grieving for
the martyred dead.
When President of the United States, on an
official visit to Germany, Reagan chose for reasons best known to
himself (while declining to visit the sites of any death camps) to
lay a wreath of flowers at the cemetery of 49 Waffen SS
stormtroopers at Bitburg, taking the opportunity to point out that
Hitler’s most ideologically zealous inner core of killers “were
victims too.”
Perhaps the man who ordered the deaths of
thousands in order to battle the pernicious influence of “godless
Communism” felt a sense of kinship with the men interred there, who
had, after all, dedicated themselves to the same goal, inspired by
similarly rousing nationalistic appeals to make the fatherland
“stand tall again.”
Physically, he will be buried in the United
States, but spiritually he rests at Bitburg.
 |
| Joined at
the hip: In a rare photo, Reagan is seen here with a young
George W. Bush. |
THE QUESTION THAT begs asking is why the New
York Times no less than Fox News, Granholm and Kerry no less
than Michigan GOP head Betsy DeVos and Bush, feel such a profound
sense of kinship with “the great man” who laid that wreath.
Superficially, this seems odd. It would seem that
for any one concerned as such ruling-class figures are liable to be,
with the empire’s “prestige,” Reagan would be an almost uniquely
embarrassing presidential figurehead.
For one thing, he was an almost pathological liar,
practiced in the skills of deception from an early age.
Before he was ever an actor, he was a sportscaster
known for his remarkably captivating blow-by-blow accounts of
baseball games.
The little redheaded boy who managed to catch the
ball in the stands, the roar of the crowd. Audiences loved it.
The thing about it was, of course, that Reagan
never attended the games he was reporting on, but stayed far away in
the radio station the whole time, having the developments
telegraphed to him and making up most of the details.
Once, when the wire went dead, he narrated what
would have been the longest series of foul balls in history until it
came back up. This is not a personal smear from his detractors, but
a favorite story of Reagan himself, which he told and retold for its
sentimental value.
While these came in handy when he secretly sold
arms to Iran to subsidize terrorist operations against the
democratically elected government of Nicaragua, he was constantly
lying when he had little to gain from it, more or less out of habit
or desire to appeal to whomever he was talking.
In a 1983 meeting with Israeli Prime Minister
Yitzhak Shamir, Reagan (who had spent the war in Hollywood doing
training movies for the Army) claimed to have been present at the
liberation of the death camps at the end of WWII.
And, let’s not forget, this was the towering
intellect that thought that ketchup should be considered a
“vegetable” for school lunch purposes.
Reagan was, above all, the representative of a
major turn in the policies of the ruling class of corporate owners.
|
 |
 Knowing
the score: British cartoonist Art Bell, of the UK Guardian,
pens his own special sendoff to Reagan (above). At a museum in
Havana, Cuba, Reagan is enshrined in the “Cretins’ Corner,”
alongside Fulgencio Batista, the Cuban dictator overthrown by
Castro’s revolutionary guerrillas in 1959 (right). |
STARTING IN THE 1930s, they had felt the need to
make important concessions to those at the bottom of society.
The great symbol of this policy was Franklin D.
Roosevelt, just as Reagan was the great symbol of its reversal.
Roosevelt is often portrayed (both by liberal
Democrats who admire him and by Reaganites who see him as naïve) as
a man motivated by humanitarian compassion for the suffering of the
poor and downtrodden.
In point of fact, Roosevelt himself was always
quite open and public about his real motivations.
When he first achieved the presidency in 1932, his
backers were very, very worried by the shift in consciousness from
below resulting from the massive poverty, misery and unemployment
that accompanied the economic crash.
In an interview with the New York Graphic
during that campaign, Roosevelt recited a conversation with “an old
friend who runs a great western railroad. ‘Fred,’ I asked him, ‘what
are the people talking about out there? ‘Frank,’ he replied, ‘I’m
sorry to say the men out here are talking revolution.’”
Driven by that understanding, the capitalist class
as a whole, however much some of its individual members may have
grumbled about it and resented FDR, much the same way that people
resent the dentist even as they schedule appointments, was willing
to make important concessions from above to avoid having to have
their fortunes expropriated entirely from below.
This was, after all, the same period that saw some
of the fiercest episodes of class struggle in American history, like
the great Flint sit-down strike of 1936, where factories were
temporarily seized by those who worked them, it took pitched battles
to get food to the strikers inside and armed guards were stationed
at the entrances to the tunnels leading up to the plants.
The fears that Fred confessed to Frank were hardly
delusions.
In this context, “short-term demands” were quite
literally lifted from the campaign platform of Socialist Party
presidential candidate Norman Thomas and incorporated (in a
watered-down form) into the legislative agenda of Roosevelt, as the
latter established a social safety net against the worst ravages of
poverty and opened the purse strings to public works programs to
provide work and income to otherwise angry and restless unemployed
workers.
Of course, for Thomas, these were steps in the
direction of the qualitative transformation of American society, not
sops to help co-opt resistance to the status quo.
While later in life he capitulated to important
parts of Roosevelt’s politics, at the time he understood this.
When a friend remarked that at least Roosevelt was
carrying out his platform, Thomas replied bitterly that it was being
“carried out on a stretcher.”
Even after the immediate danger Fred and Frank had
conferred about had largely passed, the bipartisan consensus for
decades was that, to one extent or another, it would be wise to keep
everyone happy by maintaining important aspects of the Rooseveltian
“welfare state.”
Indeed, when conservative ideologue Barry
Goldwater managed to win the Republican nomination in 1964 on a
platform of prematurely Reaganite opposition to all of this, the
Republican establishment largely abandoned him.
 |
 |
 |
| ... By
the friends they keep: Reagan with former Philippine President
Ferdinand Marcos (top), who starved the people of his country in
order to feed his wife’s shoe fetish; Reagan with former British
Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher (middle), who did everything
she could to break the trade unions; Reagan’s Undersecretary of
State, Donald Rumsfeld, with Reagan’s friend, former Iraqi
President Saddam Hussein (bottom), who acquired all of his
weapons of mass destruction from his American pals. |
THE SOCIAL TURMOIL of the 1960s, as the inner
cities exploded in long-suppressed rage against racism, poverty and
oppression, social change movements grew seemingly out of thin air
and resistance to the draft and internal resistance by GIs played a
critical role in ending the U.S. intervention in Vietnam, all at
least temporarily cemented this consensus.
By the time the Reagan presidency rolled around,
however, all of this had long since passed.
The militant unions of the 1930s and been turned
into neutered, bureaucratized shadows of their former selves that
could be counted on to mount no serious resistance to the reversal
of earlier concessions and the export of American jobs to areas of
the “Third World,” free from inconveniences like elections, unions
and the minimum wage.
The radical movements of the 1960s and early-1970s
had largely been destroyed by a combination of cooptation into the
Democratic Party, concessions such as the end of the military draft,
and outright government repression such as the FBI’s notorious
COINTELPRO program and the assassinations of prominent Black
Panthers.
The left was mostly weakened, disoriented and
incapable of causing any problems that the establishment couldn’t
handle.
There was little reason to maintain large scale
concessions to those at the bottom, and the Empire’s effectiveness
was still hampered by what Norman Podhoretz calls the “sickly
inhibitions against the use of military force” accrued in the
Vietnam era.
In this dramatically changed context, Reagan was
the man of the hour.
With whatever charm and charisma he had developed
in his career as a second-rate actor, he was fit to be something
like a spokesman for an ideology of renewed zeal in the Cold War
“struggle of good against evil,” and a pseudo-individualistic
“anti-government” stance that justified redistribution of wealth
from the bottom up.
With his expertise at lying and his soothing,
grandfatherly persona, he was the ideal front man for attacks on the
economic interests of most of the population and for crimes against
humanity abroad, such as his brutal “preemptive” invasion of the
tiny and defenseless nation of Grenada for the crime of (horror upon
horrors) building an airport.
After all, one can’t rule out the possibility that
the Soviet Union could have used that airport to launch air strikes
against the United States!
THE CAPITALIST MEDIA mourns Ronald Reagan because
he is the hero of the segment of society that owns the media.
He made their empire “stand tall again,” with
mountains of corpses abroad and vast reserves of poverty and misery
at home to show for it.
His administration’s economic and military
policies setting the bipartisan agenda the has been followed by the
representatives of both corporate-funded parties for the last twenty
four years.
One can put it like this: Reagan is not so much
dead as undead, like a vampire who walks at night after ceasing to
draw breath.
His body may be dead, but his policies continue to
terrorize the world.
The greatest political imperative at this point
history is to build a democratic socialist alternative to the
bipartisan Reaganite consensus, capable of collectively organizing
his victims to drive a stake through the old bastard’s heart. |
