[Edited Message Follows] [Reason: typos--unfinished draft sent prematurely]
On Thu, Nov 12, 2020 at 08:35 PM, Louis Proyect wrote: > > [This] documentary invites a reappraisal. It is a harsh portrait of Reagan > as a politician and as a president, and it seems likely to reignite old > arguments. Tyrnauer argues that Reagan has been protected by historians, > Republicans and journalists because of his political success and > likability. No portrait of Reagan can be too harsh. A 2019 New Yorker piece contains the following gem, first reported by Reagan's daughter Patti Davis, describing a call between Ronald Reagan and Richard Nixon from October, 1971: 'Reagan, who was then the governor of California, gave his opinion of the African 'to the United Nations who voted against the United States’ position that Taiwan, rather than the People’s Republic of China, should receive U.N. recognition. 'To see those, those monkeys from those African countries—damn them, they’re still uncomfortable wearing shoes!' Reagan exclaimed. Nixon laughed heartily and went on to tell the Secretary of State, William Rogers, about Reagan’s outburst." Of course the New York Times editorial board recently, in denouncing Trump's Republican Party, expressed a yearning for the good old Republican Party of Reagan's day--opponents to be respected, with whom men and women of goodwill must always engage in the sort of robust "conversation" that strengthens "our democracy," instead of this childish left-wing stuff. When it comes to corruption and subverting the rule of law, Iran-Contra is a shining example of a good old robust way of doing that. Like Trump, Reagan flirted with Nazism both in the person of Oliver North, as much a cryptofascist as anyone around Trump, and when in going out of his way to give an address over SS graves at Bitburg, Germany, he alleged that the poor, dead SS heroes were ''victims, just as surely as the victims in the concentration camps.'' "Good people on both sides," after all. Like most reactionaries of his generation, Reagan felt obliged to denounce fascism from time to time as a pretext for anticommunism, but there is no reason to believe that he possessed sufficient intellect or character to appreciate the contradictions in his own position. Like the justly infamous and now mercifully forgotten Westbrook Pegler, Reagan began his descent into right-wing populism, by no means original with Trump, as an enthusiast for the New Deal, which he sloughed off almost entirely. Even Nixon did not go so far. IMO, the most destructive legacy of Reaganism is his unprecedented buildup of the US military and the psychotic, fallacious, and destructive myth of victory in the Cold War, which has led to the policy of the US necessarily being the world's sole superpower--a policy that Biden and his beloved friends in the Republican Party are certain to prioritize ahead of every other consideration as Biden prostrates himself like a true penitent before Reagan's heirs in the manner made familiar by the Clintons and Obama. The reality is that all forms of conservatism converge on the need to commit murder in the interests of ruling-class privilege. This is the thing that unites the "classic liberal" conservatives of the United States with European conservatives who pointedly reject liberalism in all its forms. There are no good conservatives--none with whom "dialogue" is in any way constructive or necessary--and the worthless Reagan is a prime illustration of that basic fact. -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- Groups.io Links: You receive all messages sent to this group. View/Reply Online (#3455): https://groups.io/g/marxmail/message/3455 Mute This Topic: https://groups.io/mt/78221256/21656 -=-=- POSTING RULES & NOTES #1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. #2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly & permanently archived. #3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern. -=-=- Group Owner: [email protected] Unsubscribe: https://groups.io/g/marxmail/leave/8674936/1316126222/xyzzy [[email protected]] -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
