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11/03/2005

Ronald Reagan...speech on freedom

The other day the Wall Street Journal’s Daniel Henninger
suggested that President Bush needs to go to Iraq and give an
address to the Iraqi people.

“The Bush Doctrine, presented by Mr. Bush in September 2002,
correctly defined the most pressing need of the post-Reagan era
as the democratization of nations capable of acquiring weapons
of mass destruction. Iraq is the only test of the Bush Doctrine. If
Iraq fails, the doctrine fails; that is the logic-chain of Mr. Bush’s
opponents from the Quai d’Orsay to Langley Park .

“The Iraqi people – Sunnis, Shiites and Kurds – have just voted
to approve a constitution. The making of a government lies
ahead. In his address to the parliament of Iraq, recalling the
historic 1988 Reagan speech at Moscow State University, Mr.
Bush could describe the making of our own Constitution, its
political tensions, its personal and factional animosities, the
military uncertainty of the American project described in David
McCullough’s “1776” and in time, its success. He could
describe the common terrorism that visited his own country in
September 2001 and daily visits the neighborhoods of Iraq.”

Well, I had to look up Reagan’s speech and here it is.

---

President Ronald Reagan Moscow State University

May 31, 1988

Before I left Washington, I received many heartfelt letters and
telegrams asking me to carry here a simple message, perhaps, but
also some of the most important business of this summit. It is a
message of peace and goodwill and hope for a growing
friendship and closeness between our two peoples.

First, I want to take a little time to talk to you much as I would to
any group of university students in the United States. I want to
talk not just of the realities of today, but of the possibilities of
tomorrow.

You know, one of the first contacts between your country and
mine took place between Russian and American explorers. The
Americans were members of Cook’s last voyage on an
expedition searching for an Arctic passage; on the island of
Unalaska, they came upon the Russians, who took them in, and
together, with the native inhabitants, held a prayer service on the
ice.

The explorers of the modern era are the entrepreneurs, men with
vision, with the courage to take risks and faith enough to brave
the unknown. These entrepreneurs and their small enterprises
are responsible for almost all the economic growth in the United
States. They are the prime movers of the technological
revolution. In fact, one of the largest personal computer firms in
the United States was started by two college students, no older
than you, in the garage behind their home.

Some people, even in my own country, look at the riot of
experiment that is the free market and see only waste. What of
all the entrepreneurs that fail? Well, many do, particularly the
successful ones. Often several times. And if you ask them the
secret of their success, they’ll tell you it’s all that they learned in
their struggles along the way – yes, it’s what they learned from
failing. Like an athlete in competition, or a scholar in pursuit of
the truth, experience is the greatest teacher.

We are seeing the power of economic freedom spreading around
the world – places such as the Republic of Korea, Singapore, and
Taiwan have vaulted into the technological era, barely pausing in
the industrial age along the way. Low-tax agricultural policies in
the sub-continent mean that in some years India is now a net
exporter of food. Perhaps most exciting are the winds of change
that are blowing over the People’s Republic of China, where one-
quarter of the world’s population is now getting its first taste of
economic freedom.

At the same time, the growth of democracy has become one of
the most powerful political movements of our age. In Latin
America in the 1970s, only a third of the population lived under
democratic government. Today over 90 percent does. In the
Philippines, in the Republic of Korea, free, contested, democratic
elections are the order of the day. Throughout the world, free
markets are the model for growth. Democracy is the standard by
which governments are measured.

We Americans make no secret of our belief in freedom. In fact,
it’s something of a national pastime. Every four years the
American people choose a new president, and 1988 is one of
those years. At one point there were 13 major candidates
running in the two major parties, not to mention all the others,
including the Socialist and Libertarian candidates – all trying to
get my job.

About 1,000 local television stations, 8,500 radio stations, and
1,700 daily newspapers, each one an independent, private
enterprise, fiercely independent of the government, report on the
candidates, grill them in interviews, and bring them together for
debates. In the end, the people vote – they decide who will be
the next president.

But freedom doesn’t begin or end with elections. Go to any
American town, to take just an example, and you’ll see dozens of
synagogues and mosques – and you’ll see families of every
conceivable nationality, worshipping together.

Go into any schoolroom, and there you will see children being
taught the Declaration of Independence, that they are endowed
by their Creator with certain inalienable rights – among them
life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, that no government can
justly deny – the guarantees in their Constitution for freedom of
speech, freedom of assembly, and freedom of religion.

Go into any courtroom and there will preside an independent
judge, beholden to no government power. There every defendant
has the right to a trial by a jury of his peers, usually 12 men and
women – common citizens, they are the ones, the only ones, who
weigh the evidence and decide on guilt or innocence. In that
court, the accused is innocent until proven guilty, and the word
of a policeman, or any official, has no greater legal standing than
the word of the accused.

Go to any university campus, and there you’ll find an open,
sometimes heated discussion of the problems in American
society and what can be done to correct them. Turn on the
television, and you’ll see the legislature conducting the business
of government right there before the camera, debating and voting
on the legislation that will become the law of the land. March in
any demonstrations, and there are many of them – the people’s
right of assembly is guaranteed in the Constitution and protected
by the police.

But freedom is more even than this: Freedom is the right to
question, and change the established way of doing things. It is
the continuing revolution of the marketplace. It is the
understanding that allows us to recognize shortcomings and seek
solutions. It is the right to put forth an idea, scoffed at by the
experts, and watch it catch fire among the people. It is the right
to stick – to dream – to follow your dream, or stick to your
conscience, even if you’re the only one in a sea of doubters.

Freedom is the recognition that no single person, no single
authority of government has a monopoly on the truth, but that
every individual life is infinitely precious, that every one of us
put on this world has been put there for a reason and has
something to offer.

America is a nation made up of hundreds of nationalities. Our
ties to you are more than ones of good feeling; they’re ties of
kinship. In America, you’ll find Russians, Armenians,
Ukrainians, peoples from Eastern Europe and Central Asia.
They come from every part of this vast continent, from every
continent, to live in harmony, seeking a place where each
cultural heritage is respected, each is valued for its diverse
strengths and beauties and the richness it brings to our lives.

Recently, a few individuals and families have been allowed to
visit relatives in the West. We can only hope that it won’t be
long before all are allowed to do so, and Ukrainian-Americans,
Baltic-Americans, Armenian-Americans, can freely visit their
homelands, just as this Irish-American visits his.

Freedom, it has been said, makes people selfish and materialistic,
but Americans are one of the most religious peoples on Earth.
Because they know that liberty, just as life itself, is not earned,
but a gift from God, they seek to share that gift with the world.
“Reason and experience,” said George Washington in his
farewell address, “both forbid us to expect that national morality
can prevail in exclusion of religious principle. And it is
substantially true, that virtue or morality is a necessary spring of
popular government.”

Democracy is less a system of government than it is a system to
keep government limited, unintrusive: A system of constraints on
power to keep politics and government secondary to the
important things in life, the true sources of value found only in
family and faith.

I have often said, nations do not distrust each other because they
are armed; they are armed because they distrust each other. If
this globe is to live in peace and prosper, if it is to embrace all
the possibilities of the technological revolution, then nations
must renounce, once and for all, the right to an expansionist
foreign policy. Peace between nations must be an enduring goal
– not a tactical stage in a continuing conflict.

I’ve been told that there’s a popular song in your country –
perhaps you know it – whose evocative refrain asks the question,
“Do the Russians want a war?” In answer it says, “Go ask that
silence lingering in the air, above the birch and poplar there;
beneath those trees the soldiers lie. Go ask my mother, ask my
wife; then you will have to ask no more, ‘Do the Russians want a
war?”

But what of your one-time allies? What of those who embraced
you on the Elbe? What if we were to ask the watery graves of
the Pacific, or the European battlefields where America’s fallen
were buried far from home? What if we were to ask their
mothers, sisters, and sons, do Americans want war? Ask us, too,
and you’ll find the same answer, the same longing in every heart.
People do not make wars, governments do – and no mother
would ever willingly sacrifice her sons for territorial gain, for
economic advantage, for ideology. A people free to choose will
always choose peace.

Americans seek always to make friends of old antagonists. After
a colonial revolution with Britain we have cemented for all ages
the ties of kinship between our nations. After a terrible civil war
between North and South, we healed our wounds and found true
unity as a nation. We fought two world wars in my lifetime
against Germany and one with Japan, but now the Federal
Republic of Germany and Japan are two of our closest allies and
friends.

Some people point to the trade disputes between us as a sign of
strain, but they’re the frictions of all families, and the family of
free nations is a big and vital and sometimes boisterous one. I
can tell you that nothing would please my heart more than in my
lifetime to see American and Soviet diplomats grappling with the
problem of trade disputes between America and a growing,
exuberant, exporting Soviet Union that had opened up to
economic freedom and growth.

Is this just a dream? Perhaps. But it is a dream that is our
responsibility to have come true.

Your generation is living in one of the most exciting, hopeful
times in Soviet history. It is a time when the first breath of
freedom stirs the air and the heart beats to the accelerated rhythm
of hope, when the accumulated spiritual energies of a long
silence yearn to break free.

We do not know what the conclusion of this journey will be, but
we’re hopeful that the promise of reform will be fulfilled. In this
Moscow spring, this May 1988, we may be allowed that hope –
that freedom, like the fresh green sapling planted over Tolstoy’s
grave, will blossom forth at least in the rich fertile soil of your
people and culture. We may be allowed to hope that the
marvelous sound of a new openness will keep rising through,
ringing through, leading to a new world of reconciliation,
friendship, and peace.

Thank you all very much and da blagoslovit vas gospod! God
bless you.

---

Hott Spotts will return next week.

Brian Trumbore


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-11/03/2005-      
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Hot Spots

11/03/2005

Ronald Reagan...speech on freedom

The other day the Wall Street Journal’s Daniel Henninger
suggested that President Bush needs to go to Iraq and give an
address to the Iraqi people.

“The Bush Doctrine, presented by Mr. Bush in September 2002,
correctly defined the most pressing need of the post-Reagan era
as the democratization of nations capable of acquiring weapons
of mass destruction. Iraq is the only test of the Bush Doctrine. If
Iraq fails, the doctrine fails; that is the logic-chain of Mr. Bush’s
opponents from the Quai d’Orsay to Langley Park .

“The Iraqi people – Sunnis, Shiites and Kurds – have just voted
to approve a constitution. The making of a government lies
ahead. In his address to the parliament of Iraq, recalling the
historic 1988 Reagan speech at Moscow State University, Mr.
Bush could describe the making of our own Constitution, its
political tensions, its personal and factional animosities, the
military uncertainty of the American project described in David
McCullough’s “1776” and in time, its success. He could
describe the common terrorism that visited his own country in
September 2001 and daily visits the neighborhoods of Iraq.”

Well, I had to look up Reagan’s speech and here it is.

---

President Ronald Reagan Moscow State University

May 31, 1988

Before I left Washington, I received many heartfelt letters and
telegrams asking me to carry here a simple message, perhaps, but
also some of the most important business of this summit. It is a
message of peace and goodwill and hope for a growing
friendship and closeness between our two peoples.

First, I want to take a little time to talk to you much as I would to
any group of university students in the United States. I want to
talk not just of the realities of today, but of the possibilities of
tomorrow.

You know, one of the first contacts between your country and
mine took place between Russian and American explorers. The
Americans were members of Cook’s last voyage on an
expedition searching for an Arctic passage; on the island of
Unalaska, they came upon the Russians, who took them in, and
together, with the native inhabitants, held a prayer service on the
ice.

The explorers of the modern era are the entrepreneurs, men with
vision, with the courage to take risks and faith enough to brave
the unknown. These entrepreneurs and their small enterprises
are responsible for almost all the economic growth in the United
States. They are the prime movers of the technological
revolution. In fact, one of the largest personal computer firms in
the United States was started by two college students, no older
than you, in the garage behind their home.

Some people, even in my own country, look at the riot of
experiment that is the free market and see only waste. What of
all the entrepreneurs that fail? Well, many do, particularly the
successful ones. Often several times. And if you ask them the
secret of their success, they’ll tell you it’s all that they learned in
their struggles along the way – yes, it’s what they learned from
failing. Like an athlete in competition, or a scholar in pursuit of
the truth, experience is the greatest teacher.

We are seeing the power of economic freedom spreading around
the world – places such as the Republic of Korea, Singapore, and
Taiwan have vaulted into the technological era, barely pausing in
the industrial age along the way. Low-tax agricultural policies in
the sub-continent mean that in some years India is now a net
exporter of food. Perhaps most exciting are the winds of change
that are blowing over the People’s Republic of China, where one-
quarter of the world’s population is now getting its first taste of
economic freedom.

At the same time, the growth of democracy has become one of
the most powerful political movements of our age. In Latin
America in the 1970s, only a third of the population lived under
democratic government. Today over 90 percent does. In the
Philippines, in the Republic of Korea, free, contested, democratic
elections are the order of the day. Throughout the world, free
markets are the model for growth. Democracy is the standard by
which governments are measured.

We Americans make no secret of our belief in freedom. In fact,
it’s something of a national pastime. Every four years the
American people choose a new president, and 1988 is one of
those years. At one point there were 13 major candidates
running in the two major parties, not to mention all the others,
including the Socialist and Libertarian candidates – all trying to
get my job.

About 1,000 local television stations, 8,500 radio stations, and
1,700 daily newspapers, each one an independent, private
enterprise, fiercely independent of the government, report on the
candidates, grill them in interviews, and bring them together for
debates. In the end, the people vote – they decide who will be
the next president.

But freedom doesn’t begin or end with elections. Go to any
American town, to take just an example, and you’ll see dozens of
synagogues and mosques – and you’ll see families of every
conceivable nationality, worshipping together.

Go into any schoolroom, and there you will see children being
taught the Declaration of Independence, that they are endowed
by their Creator with certain inalienable rights – among them
life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, that no government can
justly deny – the guarantees in their Constitution for freedom of
speech, freedom of assembly, and freedom of religion.

Go into any courtroom and there will preside an independent
judge, beholden to no government power. There every defendant
has the right to a trial by a jury of his peers, usually 12 men and
women – common citizens, they are the ones, the only ones, who
weigh the evidence and decide on guilt or innocence. In that
court, the accused is innocent until proven guilty, and the word
of a policeman, or any official, has no greater legal standing than
the word of the accused.

Go to any university campus, and there you’ll find an open,
sometimes heated discussion of the problems in American
society and what can be done to correct them. Turn on the
television, and you’ll see the legislature conducting the business
of government right there before the camera, debating and voting
on the legislation that will become the law of the land. March in
any demonstrations, and there are many of them – the people’s
right of assembly is guaranteed in the Constitution and protected
by the police.

But freedom is more even than this: Freedom is the right to
question, and change the established way of doing things. It is
the continuing revolution of the marketplace. It is the
understanding that allows us to recognize shortcomings and seek
solutions. It is the right to put forth an idea, scoffed at by the
experts, and watch it catch fire among the people. It is the right
to stick – to dream – to follow your dream, or stick to your
conscience, even if you’re the only one in a sea of doubters.

Freedom is the recognition that no single person, no single
authority of government has a monopoly on the truth, but that
every individual life is infinitely precious, that every one of us
put on this world has been put there for a reason and has
something to offer.

America is a nation made up of hundreds of nationalities. Our
ties to you are more than ones of good feeling; they’re ties of
kinship. In America, you’ll find Russians, Armenians,
Ukrainians, peoples from Eastern Europe and Central Asia.
They come from every part of this vast continent, from every
continent, to live in harmony, seeking a place where each
cultural heritage is respected, each is valued for its diverse
strengths and beauties and the richness it brings to our lives.

Recently, a few individuals and families have been allowed to
visit relatives in the West. We can only hope that it won’t be
long before all are allowed to do so, and Ukrainian-Americans,
Baltic-Americans, Armenian-Americans, can freely visit their
homelands, just as this Irish-American visits his.

Freedom, it has been said, makes people selfish and materialistic,
but Americans are one of the most religious peoples on Earth.
Because they know that liberty, just as life itself, is not earned,
but a gift from God, they seek to share that gift with the world.
“Reason and experience,” said George Washington in his
farewell address, “both forbid us to expect that national morality
can prevail in exclusion of religious principle. And it is
substantially true, that virtue or morality is a necessary spring of
popular government.”

Democracy is less a system of government than it is a system to
keep government limited, unintrusive: A system of constraints on
power to keep politics and government secondary to the
important things in life, the true sources of value found only in
family and faith.

I have often said, nations do not distrust each other because they
are armed; they are armed because they distrust each other. If
this globe is to live in peace and prosper, if it is to embrace all
the possibilities of the technological revolution, then nations
must renounce, once and for all, the right to an expansionist
foreign policy. Peace between nations must be an enduring goal
– not a tactical stage in a continuing conflict.

I’ve been told that there’s a popular song in your country –
perhaps you know it – whose evocative refrain asks the question,
“Do the Russians want a war?” In answer it says, “Go ask that
silence lingering in the air, above the birch and poplar there;
beneath those trees the soldiers lie. Go ask my mother, ask my
wife; then you will have to ask no more, ‘Do the Russians want a
war?”

But what of your one-time allies? What of those who embraced
you on the Elbe? What if we were to ask the watery graves of
the Pacific, or the European battlefields where America’s fallen
were buried far from home? What if we were to ask their
mothers, sisters, and sons, do Americans want war? Ask us, too,
and you’ll find the same answer, the same longing in every heart.
People do not make wars, governments do – and no mother
would ever willingly sacrifice her sons for territorial gain, for
economic advantage, for ideology. A people free to choose will
always choose peace.

Americans seek always to make friends of old antagonists. After
a colonial revolution with Britain we have cemented for all ages
the ties of kinship between our nations. After a terrible civil war
between North and South, we healed our wounds and found true
unity as a nation. We fought two world wars in my lifetime
against Germany and one with Japan, but now the Federal
Republic of Germany and Japan are two of our closest allies and
friends.

Some people point to the trade disputes between us as a sign of
strain, but they’re the frictions of all families, and the family of
free nations is a big and vital and sometimes boisterous one. I
can tell you that nothing would please my heart more than in my
lifetime to see American and Soviet diplomats grappling with the
problem of trade disputes between America and a growing,
exuberant, exporting Soviet Union that had opened up to
economic freedom and growth.

Is this just a dream? Perhaps. But it is a dream that is our
responsibility to have come true.

Your generation is living in one of the most exciting, hopeful
times in Soviet history. It is a time when the first breath of
freedom stirs the air and the heart beats to the accelerated rhythm
of hope, when the accumulated spiritual energies of a long
silence yearn to break free.

We do not know what the conclusion of this journey will be, but
we’re hopeful that the promise of reform will be fulfilled. In this
Moscow spring, this May 1988, we may be allowed that hope –
that freedom, like the fresh green sapling planted over Tolstoy’s
grave, will blossom forth at least in the rich fertile soil of your
people and culture. We may be allowed to hope that the
marvelous sound of a new openness will keep rising through,
ringing through, leading to a new world of reconciliation,
friendship, and peace.

Thank you all very much and da blagoslovit vas gospod! God
bless you.

---

Hott Spotts will return next week.

Brian Trumbore