« Pink Bluebonnet. | WILLisms.com | Trivia Tidbit Of The Day: Part 433 -- JCT & CBO Projections. »

Quotational Therapy: Part 132 -- Ronald Reagan.

Message To British Parliament, June 8, 1982-

In light of the British hostage situation in Iran, let's turn to Ronald Wilson Reagan for a little perspective. Twenty-five years ago, President Reagan addressed Margaret Thatcher's British Parliament.

This is precisely our mission today: to preserve freedom as well as peace. It may not be easy to see, but I believe we live now at a turning point. In an ironic sense, Karl Marx was right. We are witnessing today a great revolutionary crisis -- a crisis where the demands of the economic order are conflicting directly with those of the political order.

But the crisis is happening not in the free, non-Marxist west but in the home of Marxism-Leninism, the Soviet Union. It is the Soviet Union that runs against the tide of history by denying human freedom and human dignity to its citizens. It also is in deep economic difficulty. The rate of growth in the national product has been steadily declining since the 1950's and is less than half of what it was then. The dimensions of this failure are astounding; a country which employs one-fifth of its population in agriculture is unable to feed its own people. Were it not for the tiny private sector tolerated in Soviet agriculture, the country might be on the brink of famine. These private plots occupy a bare 3 percent of the arable land but account for nearly one-quarter of Soviet farm output and nearly one-third of meat products and vegetables.

Over centralized, with little or no incentives, year after year the Soviet system pours its best resources into the making of instruments of destruction. The constant shrinkage of economic growth combined with the growth of military production is putting a heavy strain on the Soviet people.

What we see here is a political structure that no longer corresponds to its economic base, a society where productive forces are hampered by political ones. The decay of the Soviet experiment should come as no surprise to us. Wherever the comparisons have been made between free and closed societies -- West Germany and East Germany, Austria and Czechoslovakia, Malaysia and Vietnam -- it is the democratic countries that are prosperous and responsive to the need of their people. And one of the simple but overwhelming facts of our time is this: of all the millions of refugees we've seen in the modern world, their flight is always away from, not toward, the Communist world. Today, on the NATO line, our military forces face east to prevent a possible invasion. On the other side of the line, the Soviet forces also face east -- to prevent their people from leaving.

Read the entire speech here.

You can also watch a portion of the speech on YouTube (hat tip to RedState).

One wonders how Reagan and Thatcher would have handled the recent provocation from the Iranian theocracy.

Previous Quotational Therapy Session:

Mike Pence Takes On Pork.

The right quote can be therapeutic, so tune in to WILLisms.com for quotational therapy on Monday and Friday.

Posted by Will Franklin · 2 April 2007 04:43 PM

Comments

Posted by: zsa zsa at April 2, 2007 06:48 PM

Posted by: Bigfoot at April 2, 2007 06:49 PM

Posted by: Terry_Jim at April 2, 2007 11:47 PM