Another stunning illustration of the success of propaganda, which has considerable import for the future, is the cult of the great killer and torturer Ronald Reagan, one of the grand criminals of the modern era, who also had an unerring instinct for favoring the most brutal terrorists and murderers around the world, from Zia-ul-Haq and Gulbuddin Hekmatyar in what’s now called AfPak to the most dedicated killers in Central America to the South African racists who killed an estimated 1.5 million people in the Reagan years and had to be supported because they were under attack by Nelson Mandela’s African National Congress, one of “more notorious terrorist groups” in the world, the Reaganites determined in 1988. And on and on, with remarkable consistency.
Now, his grisly record has been quickly expunged in favor of mythic constructions that would have impressed Kim Il-sung. Among other feats, he has been anointed as the apostle of free markets, while raising protectionist barriers more than probably all other postwar presidents combined and implementing massive government intervention in the economy. He was a great exponent of law and order, while he informed the business world that labor laws would not be enforced, so that illegal firing of union organizers tripled under his supervision. His hatred of working people was exceeded perhaps only by his contempt for the rich black women driving their limousines to collect their welfare checks.
Well, there should be no need to continue with the record, but the outcome tells us quite a lot about the intellectual and moral culture in which we live. For President Obama, this monstrous creature was a “transformative figure.” If you go over to Stanford University’s prestigious Hoover Institute, he’s a colossus—I’m quoting—whose “spirit seems to stride the country, watching us like a warm and friendly ghost.” Well, painfully to record, many of the people whose lives he was ruining join in the adulation, and hasten to shelter under the umbrella of the power and the violence that he symbolized.
from an address to the Left Forum, New York City
(broadcast on the May 31st, 2010 edition of Democracy Now!)
