Another Profile In Courage

Natan Sharansky recounts his learning of Ronald Reagan's calling the Soviet Union an evil empire. (Via Best of the Web):

In 1983, I was confined to an eight-by-ten-foot prison cell on the border of Siberia. My Soviet jailers gave me the privilege of reading the latest copy of Pravda. Splashed across the front page was a condemnation of President Ronald Reagan for having the temerity to call the Soviet Union an "evil empire." Tapping on walls and talking through toilets, word of Reagan's "provocation" quickly spread throughout the prison. We dissidents were ecstatic. Finally, the leader of the free world had spoken the truth--a truth that burned inside the heart of each and every one of us.

I found this quite touching. It's one of those things that makes you feel the glow you associate with truth and right. Reagan was a man who understood right and wrong and the obligation to stand up for what is right. He didn't seem courageous at the time because all we heard were howls from the cowardly in the media, who saw such statements as scary provocations and portrayed Reagan as reckless. Funny that JFK's statement, "Ick bin ein Berliner!" was treated as bold, courageous and inspiring, while Reagan's statement sent the left into spasms of denunciation. The point was the same: The Iron Curtain and the Berlin Wall were evil.

Note, however, that Reagan didn't treat Gorbachev as an evil person. Maybe Reagan was just the continuation of Kennedy's politics in an age when the Democratic Party had moved away from them. Reagan came from an era that recognized the evil of Communism and other attempts to impose tyranny on mankind. He also knew that it was antithetical to what Americans believe and that we had missed the opportunity to confront and destroy it many times since the end of WWII.

Bush is doing just what Reagan would have done. That is really what people today should remember.