Historic Amnesia: Remembering Reagan

June 30 2004
Counterbias.com
Michael Haddock

Ronald Reagan once said “Facts are stupid things.”  Apparently, the majority of the American people, as well as those who comprise our mainstream news media seem to agree with this notion because during last week’s never-ending and shamelessly maudlin coverage of Ronniepalooza, one question cycled through my head: “Am I the only person who remembers the 1980’s?” 

Unfortunately, the American people have allowed their collective affection for a very likeable man to blind them to the often ruthless and unfriendly behavior of his administration. 

Consider the following stupid facts regarding President Reagan’s actions:

• Supported Bob Jones University’s tax-exempt status, which the Fundamentalist Christian school had previously lost due to its policy against interracial dating

• Fired 13,000 air traffic controllers in 1981 after its union staged a work stoppage.  The labor movement never recovered

• Blamed trees for emitting 93% of the nation's nitrogen oxide pollution during his 1980 campaign.

• Appointed Edwin Meese III to the position of Attorney General: a man who set a new record by being the first person to ever be investigated by three different special prosecutors for three separate White House scandals, as well as being investigated by his own staff, which found "conduct which should not be tolerated of any government employee". Must have been a fun office Christmas party that year.

• Produced huge budget deficits and a near-tripling of the national debt that haunted the country and policymakers for years and drained resources from social programs.

• Referred to the savage Contras as "the moral equivalent of our Founding Fathers." 

• Oversaw bloody military actions designed to suppress social and political change in El Salvador, Nicaragua, Guatemala and Afghanistan. 

• Shipped hundreds of millions of dollars in military aid to the implicated forces responsible for an estimated 70,000 or more political killings in El Salvador, possibly 20,000 from the contra war in Nicaragua, about 200 political "disappearances" in Honduras, and some 100,000 people eliminated during a resurgence of political violence in Guatemala.

• Lied to Congress about his involvement in the Iran-Contra scandal, which involved selling weapons to Iran in 1985, trading them for hostages held in Lebanon by pro-Iranian militias, and using the profits to supply right-wing Contra guerrillas in Nicaragua with arms.  (in an attempt to get around the Boland amendment, which specifically prohibited military assistance to the Contras)

• Supported Saddam Hussein with sophisticated American technology and taxpayer-subsidized grain at the very moment he was known to be using poison gas inside his own borders against the Kurdish population

• Refused to speak publicly about the AIDS epidemic until October of 1987, although it was first reported in the medical and popular press in 1981, By the end of 1989 and the Reagan years, 115,786 women and men had been diagnosed with AIDS in the United States, and more than 70,000 of them had died.

• Responsible for a U.S. military buildup that, according to former U.S. ambassador to the Soviet Union George F. Kennan, may have actually extended the Cold War.  In fact, Ronald Reagan was among the last of Western leaders to embrace Gorbachev’s effort to expedite a détente.

• Supported the Muslim mujahideen rebels in Afghanistan in their fight against the Soviet Union. Those rebels turned into the Taliban.

Perhaps concerning ourselves with such trifle as the truth does not befit the memory of our only president with a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.  As humans we tend to overlook the misdeeds of our dead. However, as divine as forgiveness may be, we as a nation should never overlook the details of our own history, especially when its consequences haven’t forgotten us.

Michael Haddock is a freelance writer and Professor of English living in Jacksonville, Florida.