Ronald Reagan is fondly remembered by many Eastern Europeans as the man who ensured the downfall of the communist regimes of the Soviet Union, the genocidal empire that had brutally subjugated tens of millions for decades. Why and how Reagan managed to ensure the downfall of the major totalitarian player of his era is ably told in Reagan’s War, by Peter Schweizer. The book is not only of passing interest, it remains useful as it offers many pointers that can help us address the single greatest threat to global democracy, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP).
When compared to the 1980s, our situation obviously has its differences: the Chinese economy is stronger than that of the then Soviet Union, but the US retains a greater military advantage over China than it did over Russia and its Warsaw Pact satellites. However, a good number of the principles and strategies that Reagan made use of can still be applied to our advantage. His campaign was informed by the years in which he personally faced up to communists in the Hollywood of his day, including sitting up at night with a gun in his hand to protect his family after receiving numerous death threats. The disgust he felt from such incidents motivated the detailed study he undertook of the revolutionaries’ political methods and covert machinations, confirming him in his belief that one had to stand for something, and not only against something.
Reagan had risen from a humble background to become a film star, and he had an abiding belief in freedom, developing a deep resolve to not only protect it, but to see its benefits enjoyed by all those who were not as lucky as he and his fellow Americans. He knew that communism’s bedrock was fear (cancel culture today), and this fed his contempt and bolstered his courage in his confrontation with its adherents and apologists. The firmness he displayed when facing Gorbachev and the coherent strategic vision he had fashioned over many years combined to ensure the collapse of the Soviet Union, freeing millions from its grasp. This courage and vision are needed once more, and with a tweak here, and another there, can help us slay our dragon too.
Because of its value as a culture-defining industry, Hollywood in the 1930s and 40s was the target of the Comintern’s brilliant propaganda maestro, Willi Münzenberg (also the reason for China’s investment there today). Reagan found his leading role in real life fronting the industry’s response to the infiltration of the unions and film organisations’ by committed communists. Kirk Douglas noted in his autobiography that battles raged on the streets, with some confrontations involving thousands, waving knives and swinging clubs: something very similar to the scenes America has witnessed of late in Seattle. Reagan faced down these forces, and on the back of his performance rose in the turbulent 1960s to occupy for two terms the Governor’s Mansion in California.
In the decades before winning the Presidency, Reagan had honed his simple strategy with which to defeat the Soviets. They were in the driving seat when he came to occupy the White House in 1981, with America in decline after defeat in Vietnam and the embarrassing Carter Presidency. Though hobbled by a weak economy, suffering from high inflation and declining confidence he stuck to his plans to destroy the Soviets by outspending them on defence, and curtailing the access they enjoyed to Western technology and loans. Despite advisers and allies balking at his methods and resolution, he pressed on with economic reforms and stuck to his plan to end the Soviet Union, rather than just to contain it. And this was where he differed from his predecessors.
What Reagan understood was that we had to do to them, what they had done to us. He extolled the value of freedom, massively expanding US propaganda radio services and extending their reach deep into the Soviet Union. With news beamed on powerful transmitters in many tongues, Reagan undermined the cohesiveness of the Warsaw Pact alliance, and bolstered the morale of the dissidents.
His spending on new technology and the “Star Wars” missile defence system was designed to break the Soviet economy, and in this he succeeded. His funding of the Afghan forces battling the Soviet invaders, and the supply of ground to air missiles led to Russia’s withdrawal and loss of prestige. When Solidarity in Poland survived because of covert funding from the US, the end for the demoralised and bankrupt totalitarians came swiftly. The public had lost their awe of the system and no longer feared the wavering military. Collapse soon followed.
Reagan’s strategy of offering hope, undermining the regime psychologically from within, supporting its detractors, and forging close alliances with committed anti-communists, led to victory. Reagan succeeded because he set out to do so, not just to live with the regime as his predecessors had. It is this vision of the eradication of the CCP that should now keep our leaders awake at night. How do we liberate over a billion Chinese from fear of the party, and keep the rest of the world free from its cancerous tentacles and operatives?
In recent times, we have seen many prominent Chinese entrepreneurs die, disappear and be denounced. We may not always know who is responsible, but as Arthur Koestler wrote of Willi Münzenberg: he “was murdered in the summer of 1940 under the usual lurid and mysterious circumstances; as usual in such cases, the murderers are unknown and there are only indirect clues, all pointing in one direction like magnetic needles to the pole.” Sound familiar?
We must first adopt Reagan’s uncompromising attitude with regards to the disgraceful CCP. With its tin-pot Dictator-for-Life and his cohort of crooked cronies, we should deal with the CCP for what it is: the unapologetic genocide machine that has murdered millions over the decades, and continues to exist only through the fear it induces.
Our governments should re-orient our industrial policy away from China, demand democratic reforms and beam YouTube and other propaganda materials in local languages deep into China – the Han Chinese subjugate not only Uighurs and Tibetans, but many minorities in their rancid empire. We should make very clear our support for Hong Kong and Taiwan, and press the regime’s leaders with international legal claims at every opportunity, denying family travel and investment rights. And we must invest in our allies in the region, and in new military technologies and tactics with which to negate China’s numbers and stolen-IP enhanced weaponry.
Reagan showed how to win, we just need his courage and focus to see off this hair-dyed criminal crew and its cowardly fifth column slinking around in our midst.
Photo by Thomas Hawk 
Find and face up to facts and put them in place. Strategic, temporal, spiritual and imaginary.
Good luck with that.
Of necessity it always comes down to one parson who you believe.
I personally do not believe a single person or organisation.. Others might.
But I do believe one or two are quite good and truthfull, and give hope.
Other than that, this is where most get sidelined by their god.and mystics or committee.
TG Spokes……..or believe one single parson. I see the old chestnut, namely committees has resurfaced yet again. I think I will hunt down your parson to get him to have a word with you in your shell like…..
Colin Hussey. Poor TGS.
Surely the parson mistake was due to the dreaded predictive text.
Moving from one pArson to committees, might be a leap of faith.
Is the Trinity a committee of three?
Very interesting read thankyou. Some years ago one commentator on the same subject considered that the final, most effective action Reagan took was targeting the price of oil. Russia depended on foreign oil revenues hugely to both fund the state and its overseas communist activism thus Reagan drove down the price of oil so far that foreign revenue dropped and in effected bankrupted the USSR. Clever.
JB – In doing so Reagan used up the the uS Oil Reserve (not its proper name).
Yes, he bankrupted Russia. Then he had to replenish the Reserve. Because of their now huge oil reqmt they had to buy it at much higher price than before their game started – nearly bankrpting themselves. Very clever.
Good point. But was there a better way of successfully dismantling the USSR? All out war would have cost far more in money and life and potential civil breakdown? On balance maybe the financial cost wasn’t too high a price to pay.
As Reagan said ‘I am not worried about the national debt, its big enough to take care of itself’
We can be carbon neutral and totally green if everything is made for us in China where they assure us they solved all such concerns long ago and only do genocide now.
The parallels are disturbing: an industrialising power which dreams of its past and believes that it has a right to be the dominant world power; A West which lacks statesmen and which is divided in its approach to strategic threats; a major Western bloc which considers armed forces an unnecessary and old-fashioned concept; small nations with inadequate defences but with resources needed by the ambitious Eastern dictatorship… Etc…
Have Johnson, Biden, Macron, any of them the guts to face down China?
Remember Pearl Harbour. Pass the ammunition.
JF
Have Johnson, Biden, Macron, any of them the guts to face down China? Absolutely not. Aside from a revolution our only hope is that Trump succeeds in his mission to “drain the swamp”. Bear in mind that the three mentioned are only too willing to submit to globalist control.
China a many headed Hydra
Chop one off there’s dozens more – they are into virtually EVERYTHING
We can only beat them by employing the tactics by which we acquired Empire a mixture of piracy, diplomacy and example (I.e. Some colonies voluntarily put themselves under our protection.
What I am trying to say is we must to hide our light under a bushel, we must be “out there” mixing it with the other would be players who have no wish to know-tow to the yellow peril, unfortunately we are going to have some strange bed fellows
I can see a major problem with the new US President i.e. J. Biden and his son Hunter having become buddy buddy with China, what are their future plans, surely wont be anything to do with assisting the US and the current China problems in the South China Sea, seems like the Biden’s are just out to make money and are not prepared to help the rest of the world in their efforts against China, the Biden’s indicated how they operate in Ukraine “as an example” I would not want any members of that family negotiating on my behalf, I would have absolutely no trust in them.
Hmmm . . . . Very thought provoking.
Does ‘China’ include many disparate groups or nations as the USSR did? Do these groups have different languages for instance?
I do not doubt that the Chinese people are living in fear of their Government. (Like the people of the U.S.S.R.)
Nor do I doubt that we could massively expand our propaganda reach into China. Yes, let’s do that.
Definitely we should strengthen our own economy while doing what we can to weaken theirs.
My doubt is whether it will work. That depends on whether China’s structure is like the USSR was.
Keeping China OUT of Western Democracies is clearly essential. That is part of living with the dragon.
Peter Schweizer has written a number of books on corruption in the States. Includes (9 dollar note) Clintons, (bombing + defence contracts) Bushes, (thanks Son) Bygone and take a look at who is shown on the front of many of his books. Yes one of whom is always there – Clues American, black, expresident (shock horror).
So far as I know PS has not had his pants sued off him so deduce what you may.
He PS, never asks this question which sums up uSA politics – why would anyone pay millions and millions to get a job paying 175,000 dollars a year?
Same sort of question question for British politicians.
Excellent article. We can start by scrutinising everything we buy for signs of its being made in China and, if so, find an alternative. Difficult I know but we should expect government to ensure clear labelling, suitable import duties and the rebuilding of our own industries to provide the necessary products where necessary. Also all and any aid to China must be stopped.
About a hundred years ago it was the Yellow Peril. In the last fifty or so it was Rusha wot dun it. Now we are back to China.
Eurasia and Eastasia, Which of the two is Oceana at war with today?
Us in ‘Runway One’ will have to cultivate a new ally I think. How about the Commonwealth?
I mean, we don’t want to be part of Biden’s Oceana do we? And presumably Eurasia is the Bloc we’ve just escaped. Eastasia, is clearly China now. (Was Japan.)
So we will have to build a new (or re build an old), bastion of Western Democracy.
I completely agree Jack Thomas and have been doing this since the beginning of the pandemic. Every little helps.
Fat chance of that as the propaganda ramps up with the object of so-called “net zero carbon” which will basically put our manufacturing into shackles – made in China of course!
The Green Blob is of course the other front that we must fight on. All based on flawed “science”, discredited by many, but a useful tool to fulfil the globalist agenda of a much reduced population and a truly Orwellian future for us.
Doesn’t look at all hopeful does it Jack Thomas.
We have Boris and Biden being great Buddies, over Green nonsense and Covid nonsense. ‘All based on flawed science etc.’