The Crusader: Ronald Reagan and the Fall of Communism

A few years back, I was having an argument with a (rather liberal) friend of mine about the collapse of European communism. We are both from Europe, but we grew up on different sides of the East-West divide. His was what I came to understand the conventional view of people on the left: the communism collapsed due to its internal contradictions, because it was not the "real" communism, and a string of similar sorts of nonsense. As with many other issues that we argued about, I could not have disagreed more. Indeed, communism had enough of the internal problems that its eventual demise was inevitable, however left to its own devices, the eventual collapse would surely taken many more years, or even decades if not longer to unravel, with incalculable cost in human misery that would have engendered. Those of us who have had the luck to avoid that misery are grateful for all the external pressures exercised on that political system that hastened its demise, in particular the pressure that United States has exercised during all those decades of the Cold War, culminating with the final strong push by president Ronald Reagan and his administration. This book is a valuable record of what motivated Reagan to see the communism for what it really was - an evil system bent on repressing its own citizens. The book documents Reagan's anti-communist stand from his earliest political days, all the way through his years in the office. It gives an invaluable event-by-event chronology of all the systematic and relentless effort that Reagan put into dismantling the communist influence everywhere in the world that culminated in the final collapse of the Soviet Union and its many Eastern European satellite-states. If there is one criticism that I would have against this book, it would be that it sometimes portrays Reagan too one-dimensionally. The reader gets the impression that anti-communism was the only motivator behind this great American president. Nevertheless, this is a great andextremely well researched book and it is extremely valuable to anyone with interest in either Ronald Reagan or the Cold War.

Any book that glorifies Ronald Reagan has to be nothing but propaganda and lies! The Conservatives talk about Reagan being a great defender of freedom because of his Anti-Communist crusades. We're talking about a man who supported brutal right-wing dictators, because they too claimed to be Anti-Communist. He sent them money, weapons, ammunition, and the like, so they could fight alleged "Communist guerillas." The trouble was that in the eyes of these tyrants, anybody who opposed their oppressive rule or defended the rights of the people, especially the poor people, was somehow connected with Communism. In other words, they were using Anti-Communism as an excuse for Fascist repression, just as Mussolini and Hitler had done in their respective countries. Reagan praised Guatamala's dictator Efrain Mont, saying he "got a bum rap." His Vice-President, George Bush, lauded Ferdinand Marcos of the Philippines for his "democratic principles." MONT GOT A BUM RAP? MARCOS DEMOCRATIC? BULL!!

Reads almost like a spy thriller instead of just another political and personal history. Incredibly well researched and easy to read!