Dinesh D'Souza on Ronald Reagan & Cold War on National Review Online
With the loss of Renauldus Magnus, Ronald the Great to us Anglophones, we have a mixed bag of commentary on his successes. The best analysis of how powerful was Reagan's legacy is the great Indian turned Reagan staffer turned US citizen, Dineash D'Souza.
Mr. D'Souza has inherited the literary greatness of de Tocqueville but taken it one step further -- he has choosen to become a part of the Great American Experiment. Mr. D'Souza came to America from India for college and quickly thereafter joined the Reagan White House. Only then did he become a U.S. citizen.
Based on Mr. D'Souza's different life experience in India, he is more easily struck to comment about what we natural-born U.S. citizens take as a given proposition. Mr. D'Souza then applies his impressive intellect to take these small observations and make enormously insightful yet simple comments. This is the hallmark of true intellect -- reducing insights into simple, understandable statements.
On Reagan, Mr. D'Souza points out the truly bizarre appointment of Mr. Gorbachev was done for a reason. Why would a octogenarian-ocracy appoint a fifty-year-old minister of agriculture? Because they faced a U.S. president that knew how to strike to the Soviet quick. They needed a new way of thinking that the quick-to-die octagenarians were not able to do in their 15 month "terms" as general secretary. They needed a new way of thinking that the defense establishment and KGB directorates could not offer. They needed someone that was already trying to change the creaky system.
Ironically, this move to Perestroika and Gorbachev violated a key tenet of the Soviet system's long-lasting power -- terror. Since Lenin and Stalin had killed off free-thinkers aka counter-revolutionaries, the Soviet population had tolerated the Politburo's stupidities because to do otherwise meant certain death. Perestroika failed the Soviet system by removing what the republican Nicolo Machiavelli had noted in the Prince as the most important component of tyranny -- fear of certain death. Once that fear was removed by Perestroika, it only took a quick four years for the Soviet Union to disappear from the face of the earth.
Can we or should we attribute the fall of the Soviet Union to Mr. Reagan? If the Politburo's choice of Gorbachev can be attributed to a reaction to Mr. Reagan and the implmentation of his policies, the answer is an unequivocal "yes." This seems the inevitable conclusion were we to rely on Mr. D'Souza's highlighted statements from Izvestia - the official voice of the Politburo through its Party apparatus --from the era surrounding the rise of Mr. Gorbachev.
