Ronald Reagan's death confirms the odd sense that this has been an historic weekend. There was a strange calm I noticed on Friday, and the warm mild air of June in England has made for a soporific, contemplative atmosphere this weekend. What the D-Day commemorations have been doing via the rationalised TV schedules in bringing to mind victory in the struggle against the Nazis, Reagan's death does in recalling victory in the Cold War.


The BBC's 'Have Your Say' page has produced a mix of the good, the average, and, unfortunately, the ugly:

'Yet another republican warmonger. I hope he saw the error of his ways before he died.'
Tom Amos, England'

What caught my eye though was the Beeb preamble, which said that

'He entered the White House with a reputation for having only a vague understanding of foreign affairs, and was deeply suspicious of the Soviet Union - referring to it as "the Evil Empire".'

This is a typical Beeb spin. You might suppose from this that Reagan was deeply suspicious of the Soviet Union because he had only a vague understanding of foreign affairs. You might also suppose that he made the comment about the 'evil empire' as he 'entered the Whitehouse', according with his reputation as a foreign policy novice.

In fact the speech in which Reagan branded the Soviet project 'evil' was made after more than a year in the Whitehouse, on June 8th 1982 to the British House of Commons, and thereafter followed up in other speeches where he used the term 'Evil Empire' that will always be associated with him. It contained a great deal of reflection on foreign policy, and an analysis of the trends behind history. The trouble that the BBC- with its queasy statist mentality- finds, is that Reagan's diagnosis of the troubles of modern history was, and is, unpalatable to it. The speech begins:

'We're approaching the end of a bloody century plagued by a terrible political invention -- totalitarianism.'

Recently GWB also made a dramatic speech, part of a series of speeches, one which was misrepresented by the BBC as a simple comparison between the WoT and WWII. It was in fact a similar sort of speech to the one given by Ronald Reagan- a philosophical scan of history and how the WoT fits into a continuum from the previous century with its plague of totalitarianism. As W. remarks:

'Like other totalitarian movements, the terrorists seek to impose a grim vision in which dissent is crushed, and every man and woman must think and live in colorless conformity. So to the oppressed peoples everywhere, we are offering the great alternative of human liberty.'

and as he also says (my favourite part):

'For decades, free nations tolerated oppression in the Middle East for the sake of stability. In practice, this approach brought little stability, and much oppression. So I have changed this policy.'