Noah, tell all the freed people from the DDR and Eastern Europe that history did not stop. History at the time of Buckley's cry to stop considered socialism and communism inevitable. History at the time could not conceive that the only totalitarian states left in the world would be in Cuba, North Korea, Burma.

You libs will never give Buckley and Reagan credit for this, because deep down you wanted them to lose. Like the East Berlin brainwashed mother in Hedwig and the Angry Inch (2001), you simply couldn't deal with the idea that people might prefer freedom to the nanny state.

I agree about the failures of Bush 41 and 43 though, and that is a testament not to WFBs failure but once again to the fact that he was right more often than anyone of his day.

Here's what I don't get. You types are always trying to pin our Cold War victory on the achievements of individual people -- Buckley, Pope John Paul II, especially Reagan -- but you also believe deeply that communism is a fundamentally flawed system. That it's a model for a government which can't be managed well, that can't succeed if managed by the right people; that there are no conditionals, if onlys, or qualifications which explain the dismal failure of communism in every country which has tried it.

Well, if communism can't work anywhere, then how can you praise the individual for single-handedly stopping it? According to your own belief system, that would be like giving credit to an Olympic sprinter who beats a one-legged opponent in the 100 meter dash.

Maybe if Buckley (or Reagan or John Paul II) hadn't come along, the Soviet Union would've collapsed in 1994, or 1998, or 2001. Or maybe the Soviets would have colonized Mars in 2013! But you see, not being a communist, I believe that the Soviet Union would have collapsed eventually, sooner rather than later. You should agree. Unless you're a communist or something...

I agree with eg4190. I too have noticed how conservatives hold two contradictory ideas about the Soviet Union. On the one hand they claim communism is a weak economic system that is doomed to failure. On the other hand the Soviet Union was a mighty empire that was on the edge of winning the world until the demi-god Ronald Reagan showed up to stop them.

As it turns out the first belief was the correct one. Communism was doomed. People who had traveled to the SU during the 50s and 60s could see the mess it was creating and knew that they were not going to come out on top. They started the race far behind America and continued to lose ground as the years passed. Reagan, the Pope and Buckley did nothing worth mentioning to end the SU. These men are comparable to a relief pitcher who enters a game in the 9th inning when their team is up 15-0. He pitches a few balls, a couple strikes, mostly the fielders do the work and the game ends. Yet conservatives heap endless praise upon the relief pitcher and ignore the other players and 8 innings.

Buckley and his magazine only stroked the egos of the wealthy and limited thinkers. Lets hope they pass away and are forgotten.

-Doughdee222

"Will conservatives ever tire of being wrong all the time?"

Flawed and cruel systems can't go on? How about feudalism? That was about a millenium. Egypt was a cruel culture of death that lasted about, oh 3 thousand years. How about Cuba? NK? What is flawed for the people isn't flawed for the dictator. In fact it serves him well. You guys are confusing political, military and economic weakness. North Korea is a failed state that still persists. Fear is a powerful weapon. Even Gorbachev conceded that Reagan hastened the demise by crushing them in the arms race. But the American liberal won't give the guy any credit. You were writing the same tacky snipy obits when he died too. Wait for the body to cool and show some class.

The conservative myth that Reagan won the Cold War notwithstanding, opposition to communism has been an entirely bipartisan endeavor since the end of World War II.

why is reagan a hero in eastern europe instead of someone like say, teddy kennedy?

irvingchang:

why is reagan a hero in eastern europe instead of someone like say, teddy kennedy?

You fail to specify among whom Reagan is a hero in Eastern Europe. Smart people there, like Vaclav Havel, were highly critical of Reagan.

Fact is, Reagan is a hero among chumps and those who excel at cognitive disonance (as earlier participants in this thread noted), regardless of their geographical location.

'Reagan is a hero among chumps and those who excel at cognitive disonance (as earlier participants in this thread noted), regardless of their geographical location.'

you mean people who aren't smart like you? what do they think of the fat, drunken, women killing, liberal, senator from massachusetts over there?

bill buckley was a reagan fan and i'm sure you and your toney litter mates think he was a doofus as well.

i'd love to sit and argue but i am a capitalist and i must go produce something so that the lazy, collectivist, recipients can benefit.

have a nice day, or as nice as you can with it being this cold!!

Pwox, That's right. I guess that a couple more boycotted Olympics and failed hostage rescues would have brought down the Soviet Union and brought the hostages home. I was there in 1986. No one had a clue at the time that the whole thing would collapse within five years. I'm sure Vaclav Havel would have something to say about your community college humanities dept. version of history.

I wasn't there nor do I pretend to understand all the factors that brought down the ussr. However, logic tells me this: As one poster noted, the communist economy fell in part because the arms race bankrupted them. They couldn't afford it along with trying to run the domestic economy. However, we couldn't afford it either. As someone else noted, Reagan ran up enormous debt funding that arms race. We simply pulled out our credit card and left it to future generations to figure out how to pay it. Clinton almost showed us the way out of that mess, but Bush put us right back in with the exact same strategy. Perhaps Reagan had an influence, but to give him credit for bringing down communism is a stretch. How about Gorbichov? How about the Russian people? Did they have nothing to do with it? I agree with the late inning analogy. Yes, Reagan was giving speeches, but he didn't really DO much and certainly doesn't deserve to be deified as the "winner" of the Cold War.

As an aside, if a capitalist country falters badly, as some are doing now with enormous inflation or as others are with huge debt (us), does that make capitalism a failure or just those practicing it? I think capitalism is failing here in the US, or at least the way we are practicing it. Some are doing well, but many millions are just getting by. True, we don't have bare shelves, but we are carrying such unimaginable debt, both personal and national, that our affluence is illusionary.

"As one poster noted, the communist economy fell in part because the arms race bankrupted them. They couldn't afford it along with trying to run the domestic economy. However, we couldn't afford it either. As someone else noted, Reagan ran up enormous debt funding that arms race. We simply pulled out our credit card and left it to future generations to figure out how to pay it. Clinton almost showed us the way out of that mess, but Bush put us right back in with the exact same strategy."

There is another similarity: The USSR suffered greatly when it was bogged down in Afghanistan. We are now bogged down there and in Iraq. And we're again pulling out our credit cards forcing future generations into a huge debt with China.

We will not be stronger for it.

The government consumes 1/4 of GDP, lies worse than Enron (does anyone believe inflation is 2%?), spends itself into oblivion and involves itself in nearly every are of the economy and this is a failure of capitalism? Notice that the most troubled areas (education, health care) are those where the government has made the largest committment. You forgot to mention that Reagan doubled the input to the Treasury with his tax cuts and the deficits were closing in 1988 and 1989 and would have closed completely had the New World Order Wilson GHWB not blown the gift that RWR courtesy of WFB gave him. But of course the Bush's didn't have WFBs vision thing. The shrub had the vision thing, but it was in a tunnel created by William Kristol.

The difference is that feudal states (like medieval Europe) and slave states (like ancient Egypt), while flawed, are still wealth-producing economic systems. Soviet-style communism failed because Soviet-produced goods, being inferior, could not be traded overseas. They had to import everything that couldn't be manufactured domestically, but they could only export natural resources (which carry a lower profit margin). A perpetual trade deficit is unsustainable, and if the Soviet Union didn't collapse in 1989, it would surely have had to retreat to a more contained tyranny with significantly limited global ambitions (this would still count as a Cold War victory for us).

Cuba and North Korea might still exist on paper, but they are hardly economic powerhouses with global reach, and free democratic societies would not choose to become more like them. That was the right's fear of the Soviet Union's success -- that its economy would overtake ours, that Western people would seek to replicate its system of government. That didn't happen because it can't happen, and for this reason Buckley does not deserve credit for causing the inevitable. I don't think pointing this out does anything to disparage the man personally, nor should I wait for the body to cool to point out something that will be true for as long as his body is cold.

I find it rather amusing the number of people who declare that Reagan, John Paul II, et al, don't deserve any credit for bringing down communism because of course communism was going to fall apart, because I don't recall such perspicacity from very many before communism actually collapsed. In fact, I have a poster somewhere fairly loaded with quotes from the 1980's by all types of eminent worthies (John Kenneth Galbraith is the only one I can remember off the top of my head) declaring with absolute certainty the long term stability of the Soviet Union and its empire. The "oh, it was bound to fail anyway" argument by lefties is a lot of 20/20 hindsight and backside covering nonsense.

Buckley, Reagan, John Paul II, Thatcher, et al, deserve the credit for recognizing the structure of international communism for the rotting hulk it was and then giving it a solid push to hasten its collapse.