The End Of An Era

By CHRISTOPHER MANION

Mikhail Gorbachev died this week, and the usual suspects led the chorus: “He ended the Cold War” (Reuters, Yahoo, Al Jazeera). He “took down the Iron Curtain” (CNN, The New York Times).
And of course he won the Nobel Peace Prize.
But it was Ronald Reagan, not Mikhail Gorbachev, who ended the Cold War. It was Reagan who took down the Iron Curtain. And it was Reagan’s policy of “Peace through Strength” that made it all happen without firing a shot.
Ronald Reagan entered the White House with the firm intention of winning. At the time, “peaceful coexistence” was in vogue, and the Brezhnev Doctrine taught that “what’s ours is ours, what’s yours is negotiable” — Communist countries were there to stay, but the rest of the world was fair game.
In 1981, the American intelligence community believed that the Soviet Union was growing in strength and prosperity, and would continue to do so. The conclusion?
Americans should be afraid, very afraid.
Conservative foreign policy strategists at the time formed an informal “Team B” to conduct an independent analysis that reached far different conclusions. If the United States vigorously invested in a strong military, they predicted, the Soviet Union would collapse trying to match it.
Such a policy would require a significant rise in military spending after the dismal Carter years, and President Reagan wanted to pay for it by reducing or eliminating thousands of wasteful and unnecessary federal government programs. However, he had an adversary in Tip O’Neill, the Democrat Speaker of the House, and the big-spending Democrat Party which would dominate the majority in the House of Representatives until 1995.
O’Neill agreed to go along with Reagan’s ambitious military spending budget, but demanded a matching hike in the Democrats’ domestic programs as well. Without it, he threatened to tank Reagan’s master plan for defeating the Soviet Union.
The result? In 1981, the Senate Steering Committee — a group of identifiably conservative Republicans — had only six members. They met with staff every Wednesday morning, and I distinctly recall the gloom that prevailed in the room on the day we got the word that on October first, the president would sign legislation authorizing a hike in the national debt ceiling to over $1 trillion for the first time in history.
It was a heavy price, but Democrats demanded it, or else.
Democrats didn’t learn to hate for the first time when Donald Trump came along. Their party and the elites of that generation detested Ronald Reagan — envied him, in fact, because of his popularity. I recall how they made fun of his age (he was 76 when he took office). It is one of the humors of history that he not only survived being shot in 1981, he also outlasted three General Secretaries of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union — Leonid Brezhnev (died 1982), Yuri Andropov (died 1984), and Konstantin Chernenko (died 1985).

“Nyet!”

Mikhail Gorbachev was the last to assume that office in 1985. And just a year later he learned that Ronald Reagan had something more than perestroika (“restructuring”) and glasnost (“openness”) in mind.
In October 1986, Reagan met Gorbachev in Reykjavík, Iceland. There, Gorbachev insisted that the United States curb its development of the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI), the hallmark of Reagan’s space-based missile defense system.
It was Ronald Reagan’s “nyet” at Reykjavik that sent the wrecking ball rolling toward the Iron Curtain. When the president spoke in Berlin in June 1987 and demanded, “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall,” few believed that it would fall just two years later, but Reagan did. His foresight proved to be correct: the Soviet Union could not match America’s massive military spending. Indeed, it was beginning to collapse already, and Gorbachev knew it.

An Unsung Catholic Hero

There is a Catholic side to this story as well. In 1981, President Reagan chose Lieutenant General Vernon Walters to be his “Ambassador at Large,” a roving emissary who in the next four years would travel to over 100 countries. As Walters put it, the State Department would send him to various capitals when their efforts had failed.
His job was to “resuscitate the cadaver.”
As part of this mission, Ambassador Walters and his aide de camp, a young Naval officer who had been teaching history at the Naval Academy, secretly visited Pope John Paul II countless times to advance the cause of freedom for those Christians whom Franklin D Roosevelt had consigned to the loving care of “Uncle Joe” Stalin at Yalta forty years before.
Ambassador Walters went on to serve as U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, succeeding Jeane Kirkpatrick, and then as ambassador to Germany, where he was in office during the reunification of the Bundesrepublik Deutschland (West Germany) and the Deutsche Demokratische Republik (East Germany).
Ambassador Walters was a daily communicant. When he left his post in Berlin, his aide de camp entered the Dominican House of Studies in Washington, D.C., and he is now a parish priest in Kentucky.

Catholic Joe Joins Antifa

On August 27, Joe Biden posted a curious statement on Twitter:
“In this moment, those who love this country — Democrats, Independents and mainstream Republicans — must be stronger, more determined, and more committed to saving America than MAGA Republicans are committed to destroying America.”
Now most Americans know that Joe’s got advanced dementia, so we shrug when he sounds like Adolf Hitler.
We’re very forgiving that way.
But the Biden Junta is running the show, and they are fully trained in disinformation and deflection. They know full well that the Cadaver-in-Chief’s hateful slogans have a subconscious impact that serves the Revolution.
They’re right. Words matter. In seizing “MAGA,” they mimic Lenin’s 1917 tactics. They hijack symbols and slogans that are too powerful to destroy and do their best to reverse-engineer them: with Joe’s handlers, “Make America Great Again” becomes a weapon to destroy America.
Expect the Democrat Party and its media mouthpieces to sustain this chorus through the election. Already, The New York Times condemns the “violent rhetoric from the right” More will follow.
So we should pay attention to the words that their mouthpieces are saying. Consider Attorney General Merrick Garland’s invocation of “white supremacism.” Eighteen months ago he said it was “the top domestic violent extremist threat.”
Well, there hasn’t been any “white supremacist violence” since — so the Biden Junta has to create it. The FBI and the Department of Homeland Security join in, goaded on by Joe Biden, whose top priority is to “defeat Trumpism” — targeting some one hundred million Americans for “defeat.”
They want violence. They’re doing their best to stoke it. But when they do, like Hitler 83 years ago this week, they’re going to blame us.

Two Important Wins For
Religious Freedom In Indiana

In July, the U.S. Seventh Circuit Federal Court of Appeals found that the Archdiocese of Indianapolis had acted within its rights under the First Amendment when it required that an employee at Roncalli High School be dismissed because that employee had engaged in a relationship “contrary to a valid marriage public as seen through the eyes of the Catholic Church.”
This past week the Supreme Court of the State of Indiana found that the Catholic Archdiocese of Indianapolis has church autonomy protection under the First Amendment, allowing churches to decide matters of faith and doctrine without government interference. The ruling rejected the complaint of a former employee of Cathedral High School who was dismissed because he was “legally married to his same-sex spouse.” (See accompanying report elsewhere on this page.)
These two significant victories have not been given the attention they deserve. While they affirm our religious freedom rights guaranteed by the First Amendment, we should pray that they will inspire more Catholic institutions, including religious orders like the Jesuits and institutions like the University of Notre Dame, to do their job.