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the political, military, and ideological barrier erected by the Soviet Union after World War II to seal off itself and its dependent eastern European allies from open contact with the West and other noncommunist areas. The term IronCurtain had been in occasional and varied use as a metaphor since the 19th century, but it came to prominence only after it was used by the former British prime ministerWinston Churchill in a speech at Fulton, Missouri, U.S., on March 5, 1946, when he said of the communist states, “From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic, an iron curtain has descended across the Continent.”
The Berlin Wall was just a small part of the "iron curtain". It was more a propaganda symbol that could be used by the communist. I have it on DVR and have seen it three times now and plan to watch it again tonight.
Do not forget that Communism controlled large parts of the Earth and put billions of people behind the Iron Curtain because of the existence of poverty.
President John F. Kennedy
The White House
July 25, 1961
I know that sometimes we get impatient, we wish for some immediate action that would end our perils. But I must tell you that there is no quick and easy solution. The Communists control over a billion people, and they recognize that if we should falter, their success would be imminent.
We cannot buy our security, our freedom from the threat of the bomb by committing an immorality so great as saying to a billion human beings now enslaved behind the Iron Curtain, "Give up your dreams of freedom because to save our own skins, we're willing to make a deal with your slave masters." Alexander Hamilton said, "A nation which can prefer disgrace to danger is prepared for a master, and deserves one." Now let's set the record straight. There's no argument over the choice between peace and war, but there's only one guaranteed way you can have peace—and you can have it in the next second—surrender.
by LECH WALESA
Friday, June 11, 2004 12:01 A.M. EDT
GDANSK, Poland--When talking about Ronald Reagan, I have to be personal. We in Poland took him so personally. Why? Because we owe him our liberty. This can't be said often enough by people who lived under oppression for half a century, until communism fell in 1989.
The most important conclusions from the documents edited by Schäfer are:
The Western armament policies since the late Carter administration and especially during the Reagan administration genuinely surprised and puzzled Soviet leaders, leading them to believe the United States aimed at blackmailing them or else defeating the Soviet Union in a nuclear war—a mirror image of how American conservatives tended to view Soviet intentions;
Cold War International History Project : Publications : Cold War International History Project e-Dossier Series (http://www.wilsoncenter.org/index.cfm?topic_id=1409&fuseaction=topics.publicat ions&doc_id=43894&group_id=13349 - broken link)
Quote:
”(Reagan is) a firm and unbending politician for whom words and deeds are one and the same.” – East German Secret Police Dossier on Ronald Reagan, 1980 “In July 1975, I concluded my remarks in the reception room of the US Senate with these words: ‘Very soon, all too soon, your government will need not just extraordinary men—but men of greatness. Find them in your souls. Find them in your hearts. Find them within the breadth and depth of your homeland.’ Five year later, I was overjoyed when just such a man came to the White House.” – Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
With Sen. Robert F. Kennedy and Gov. Ronald Reagan
As Broadcast over the CBS Television Network and the CBS Radio Network
Monday, May 15, 1967, 10:00 - 11:00 pm. EDT
Charles Collingwood, Host
REAGAN: Well, the only objection that I've had with some of the building of bridges that has been attempted by this country, is very frankly, we haven't been hard-nosed enough in getting--now when I say concessions I don't mean that they have to buy their way but in getting concessions that would also help build the bridge from the other end.
For example, I think when we signed the Consular Treaty with the Soviet Union, I think that there were things that we could have asked in return. I think it would be very admirable, if the Berlin Wall, which was built in direct contravention to a treaty if the Berlin Wall should disappear, I think that this would be a step toward peace, and towards self-determination for all the peoples if it were.
Ronald Reagan ran against Gerald Ford for the 1976 Republican Presidential nomination, and lost a close race. At the close of the convention, President Ford asked Governor Reagan to make some impromptu remarks....
And then again there is that challenge of which he spoke that we live in a world in which the great powers have poised and aimed at each other horrible missiles of destruction, nuclear weapons that can in a matter of minutes arrive at each other's country and destroy, virtually, the civilized world we live in.
And suddenly it dawned on me, those who would read this letter a hundred years from now will know whether those missiles were fired. They will know whether we met our challenge. Whether they have the freedoms that we have known up until now will depend on what we do here.
Will they look back with appreciation and say, "Thank God for those people in 1976 who headed off that loss of freedom, who kept us now 100 years later free, who kept our world from nuclear destruction"?
And if we failed, they probably won't get to read the letter at all because it spoke of individual freedom, and they won't be allowed to talk of that or read of it.
This is our challenge; and this is why here in this hall tonight, better than we have ever done before, we have got to quit talking to each other and about each other and go out and communicate to the world that we may be fewer in numbers than we have ever been, but we carry the message they are waiting for.
We must go forth from here united, determined that what a great general said a few years ago is true: There is no substitute for victory, Mr. President.
The Berlin Wall was just a small part of the "iron curtain". It was more a propaganda symbol that could be used by the communist. I have it on DVR and have seen it three times now and plan to watch it again tonight.
Good grief! All these posts. I know my history. I was talking about the frickin' Berlin Wall, not the "Iron Curtain".
The line was removed in several drafts, but Reagan surprised everyone when he reinserted the line while on stage. We explored this issue in several of our interviews for the Ronald Reagan Oral History Project. Below are some of the responses we received.
Quote:
Richard V. Allen, national security advisor: (in 1978) We went on to Berlin and got the consulate to provide us a little van and we went out to the Wall. The ladies got out, my wife Pat, Irene Hannaford, Nancy got out, the Governor, Peter, and I got out and we stand there and we're looking at the Wall. Of course, I'd lived in Berlin before the Wall, I'd been there many times since the Wall, and he just looked at it and after what seemed a long, long time he turned to me and said, "You know, Dick, we've got to find a way to knock this thing down." Then nine years later he would stand in front of the Wall and say, "Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall." Really important because the notion that some speechwriter, a good one, Peter Robinson, put that into his head is wrong, entirely. It was his idea. Like most of the ideas that he had, they were his. They weren't put to him by some pointy-headed guy or a speechwriter.
Quote:
Joanne Drake, Chief of Staff, post-presidency: The Berlin Wall speech is quite symbolic of that. He wanted it left in and he was advised, even at the Secretary of State level, to please take it out, that that would not be a good piece of diplomacy to leave it in there. He left it in there.
"Telling"? It was a show about the Berlin Wall. 'Scuze me for even bringing it up. I thought it was a good show, which did not, BTW, talk about the "Iron Curtain" or any other countries, save Hungary.
As early as 1981, when almost everyone considered the Soviet empire a permanent fixture of the international landscape, Reagan spoke at the University of Notre Dame, predicting that "the West won't contain communism; it will transcend communism." The next year, he told the British Parliament that freedom and democracy would "leave Marxism-Leninism on the ash heap of history." The wise men in the media and academia scoffed. Today these same pundits maintain that the Soviet Union collapsed because of economic failure, or that Mikhail Gorbachev was responsible.
This analysis makes no sense. Sure, the Soviet Union had economic problems, but it had been ailing for most of the century. Never has a great empire imploded because of poor economic performance alone.
Like many empires suffering from domestic strains, the Soviets during the 1970s compensated by pursuing an aggressive foreign policy. Between 1974 and 1980, 10 countries fell into the Soviet orbit: South Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, South Yemen, Angola, Mozambique, Ethiopia, Nicaragua, Grenada and Afghanistan. The Soviet nuclear arsenal surpassed that of the U.S., and the Soviets targeted a new generation of missiles at Western Europe. The Soviet Union in 1980 seemed to be in the vanguard of history.
It is no less problematic to attribute the Soviet collapse to Gorbachev. He was undoubtedly a reformer, but the communist bosses did not put him in power in 1985 to lead the party, and the regime, over the precipice.
Nor did Gorbachev see this as his role. He insisted throughout the second half of the 1980s that he sought to invigorate the economy in order to strengthen the military. The Politburo supported his reforms because he promised "regained confidence in the party." No one was more surprised than Gorbachev when the Soviet regime disintegrated.
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