The 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall has come and gone, and the mainstream media have got it wrong again. In the headline AP story, Ronald Reagan is not even mentioned! Who receives most of the credit? Mikhail Gorbachev, the former leader of the “Evil Empire” – the Soviet Union.
“Gorby! Gorby!” shout the Germans. To pay attention to the article, one would think that Gorbachev single-handedly arrived in the Kremlin in 1985 with the holy task of dismantling the Soviet Union.
Its time to set the record strait once again.
The truth is that from 1980 forward, the USSR was crumbling. A quagmire in Afghanistan and a world-wide economic slowdown was bringing Mother Russia to its knees.
If you were to watch “Charlie Wilson’s War”, you’d probably think that this is how we won the Cold War. Its naive to think that half a century of being on the brink was all brought to an end by a few fighters in the mountains of Afghanistan.
The lion’s share of credit goes to one man: Reagan.
In 1980, Reagan became President and did more than simply restore America’s morale. Implementing an old economic theory on a scale never-before attempted, Ronald Reagan pulled the US out of an economic downward spiral. Against the protest of his critics, he attempted to roll back the socialist welfare-state programs of the previous fifty years and poured a fraction of that amount into the Defense budget…
…and he preceded to scare the shit out of the Soviet Union.
Unlike the previous attempts at defusing the time bomb that was the Cold War, Reagan ramped up R&D programs at a pace never seen before or since. Imagine it from the Soviet perspective for a moment:
The Americans are developing:
- Super tanks
- Supersonic heavy bombers
- Record-breaking fighters
- Smart-weapons
- Supercomputers
- Microcomputers
- Survivable communication networks
- Invisible planes
- “Star Wars”
- Space planes
On every front, the Soviets were losing any military advantage they ever had. All the nukes in the world were worthless if they could be effortlessly burnt up by lasers from space. Under Gorbachev, the Soviet Union scrambled to catch up, but it was hopeless.
The United States and western capitalism were too much. Soon, the Soviet economy was in shambles and the damage had been done. ”Gorby” gave in to reform not because of his desire to bring freedom to the people under communist oppression… he did it because Reagan left him no other choice.