[L-I] Thoughts on Reagan, Enemy of the People

Some thoughts on Ronald Reagan,
Enemy of the People

When I learned of Ronald Reagan's death June 5, I was on a 
bus riding home to New York with other activists who 
participated in a march in Washington against the U.S. 
occupation of Iraq, Haiti, and other countries. 
Ironically, perhaps, the "preemptive war" doctrine of the 
far right used against Iraq is one of Reaganism's 
poisonous fruits.

My first reaction on hearing the news was: It's about damn 
time. Good riddance.

My second reaction was: What a shame he'll never face real 
justice at the hands of the people he abused, tormented 
and murdered. 

Justice for Reagan isn't dying peacefully in a comfortable 
hospital bed. Justice would be a trial before a jury of 
welfare families, Black Panthers, anti-war activists, air 
traffic controllers, Salvadoran peasants and Nicaraguan 
revolutionaries, to name a few.

Ronald Reagan figures mightily in my own political 
development. I was a junior high and high school student 
during his regime. My first memory of genuine political 
consciousness is sitting in front of the television in the 
early '80s, listening to Reagan attack welfare mothers. My 
own family was on welfare, like millions of others, not 
because of any personal lacking, but because of the cruel 
workings of the capitalist economy Reagan championed. 
There were no jobs.

As a child in a rural, virtually all-white area of 
Northern Wisconsin, I couldn't yet understand the racist 
implications of Reagan's welfare bashing for millions of 
oppressed families in the ghettos from Los Angeles to New 
York. But I knew an attack on poor people when I heard it. 
That night he, and capitalism, made an enemy for life.

I remember the humiliation my parents felt at the time, 
forced to grovel every few months to keep the meager 
government assistance coming so my brothers and I could 
eat. I remember what happened a few years later, when 
then-governor and now Bush cabinet member Tommy Thompson, 
following Reagan's lead, eliminated assistance for 
thousands of poor families. I remember how that winter we 
had to eat raccoon carcasses meant for dog food because 
there was nothing else.

Spurred by the painful crisis of my family and others I 
knew, I went on to learn about the Black liberation 
struggle of the 60s, about the civil war in Nicaragua, and 
the enormous Cold War arms buildup designed to run the 
Soviet Union into the ground. The ever-increasing military 
budget was the flipside of Reagan's vicious attack on 
programs to aid the poor and unemployed - money was being 
stolen from the poor to build the rich man's war machine.

At the age of 32, I have spent half my life in the 
progressive movement, and consider myself pretty hardened 
to the hypocrisy of the big-business media. What could be 
worse than post-9/11, after all? Still, their fawning over 
Reagan and his "legacy of freedom" sickens me.

Just like after 9/11, there are millions upon millions of 
people in the U.S. who know better - who know that Reagan 
was no hero, but one of history's worst criminals. But 
they are made to feel isolated by the full-court press of 
slavish media coverage. 

The truth about Reagan and his legacy must be told.

Ronald Reagan was a scab. His political career began when, 
as a leader of the Screen Actors Guild in Hollywood, he 
ratted on fellow union members and others before the 
McCarthyite House Committee on Un-American Activities. 

Ronald Reagan was a racist. As governor of California in 
the 1960s and 70s, he joined the FBI in waging war against 
the rebelling African American community and those heroic 
advocates of Black liberation, the Black Panther Party. He 
was responsible for the deaths of innumerable young Black 
freedom fighters. Only a worldwide movement saved his 
personal nemesis, Angela Davis, from the death chamber. In 
the 1980s, his administration was responsible for 
CIA-sponsored drug running in Black communities to fund 
reactionary wars abroad.

Ronald Reagan hated the poor. He knew that capitalism 
creates armies of poor and unemployed workers, and that 
they constitute the greatest threat to the profit system. 
Over decades, first as governor of California and then as 
president for eight years, he missed no opportunity to 
wage war on the poor - their image in society as well as 
their material wellbeing. He was a prime mover in the 
post-civil-rights era rollback of public perceptions of 
the poor as less than human. He was an early champion of 
the "Cadillac welfare mother" myth, and continued to use 
it throughout his career. Reagan blazed the trail for none 
other than Democratic President Bill Clinton, who smashed 
the federal welfare system in 1996.

Ronald Reagan was a union-buster. He broke the PATCO air 
controller's strike in 1981. This act, at the beginning of 
a reactionary period in world history, dealt a body blow 
to the labor movement from which it is still struggling to 
recover. Workers in the U.S. pay the price every single 
day when they face off with the boss on the job, when they 
collect their paychecks, when they are told they must pay 
for their health benefits or lose them.

Ronald Reagan was a warmonger. The idea of people being 
free of U.S. imperialist domination was anathema to him, 
especially if they were people of color. His war crimes - 
from the funding, arming and training of some of the very 
forces today called "terrorists" to wage war on socialist 
Afghanistan, to the invasion of tiny Grenada - are too 
many to list. But mention should be made of the death 
squads his regime promoted in El Salvador, and the 
reactionary contra army and invasion threats that 
undermined the Nicaraguan Revolution.

Ronald Reagan was a bitter enemy of all poor and working 
people. What is it that the media and political 
establishment are celebrating as Reagan's "legacy"? It is 
his role in helping to destroy the Soviet Union, the great 
achievement of the workers' and peasants' revolution of 
1917, and setting back the world movement for socialism. 
The unrelenting nuclear arms buildup and aggressive 
threats that were the hallmark of his presidency laid the 
groundwork for the USSR's demise. 

The USSR's existence for over 70 years had the effect of 
challenging imperialist aggression in many areas of the 
world. The existence of a major alternative economic and 
political system aided countries in Africa, Asia, the 
Middle East and Latin America to achieve a measure of 
independence from the former colonial powers. In the 
Western imperialist countries, it helped the labor and 
civil rights movements win and hold onto hard-fought 
gains, because workers knew there was another system that 
guaranteed jobs, food, housing and health care for all 
people. 

The history of the last decade-plus is Reagan's real 
legacy: more war, more occupations, a return to openly 
colonialist methods and ideology, more racism, more 
vicious attacks on women and the lgbt communities, fewer 
rights and falling living standards for workers, more 
people hungry and homeless with no safety net.

Of course, Ronald Reagan was only an individual. If he had 
not existed, the reactionary social forces he represented 
would have threw up someone else in his place. But it is 
hard to imagine they could have found someone more 
treacherous, hateful and vicious to represent them. Just 
because he died of a lingering illness that cruelly 
affects millions of people doesn't give him a "Get Out of 
Jail Free" card in the hearts and minds of those who lost 
so much through his cruel actions -- actions he clearly 
relished. 

History will judge Ronald Reagan as one of the bitterest 
enemies of the people. His name will rightly be reviled, 
and his terrible legacy of racism, war and brutality will 
be undone by people united in solidarity to build a world 
that puts people's needs ahead of profit. 

And me? I'm sorry that I'll never see the man face justice 
for his crimes. I have this one consolation: Ronald Reagan 
helped make me a communist. And I know he'd really hate 
that.

Greg Butterfield
June 7, 2004 


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