How Ronald Reagan changed my life

[Michel Collon <michel.collon at skynet.be>]

How Ronald Reagan changed my life

By Greg Butterfield

President 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 1980s, listening to Reagan attack
welfare mothers. My own family was on welfare, like millions of others,
not because of any personal failings, but because of the cruel workings
of the capitalist economy Rea gan 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 Wisconsin Gov. Tom my Thompson (now a Bush cabinet member) followed
Reagan's lead and 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 1960s, 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 flip side 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.

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

Just like after Sept. 11, there are millions upon millions of people in
the United States 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
1970s, 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 many young
Black freedom fighters. Only a worldwide movement saved his personal
nemesis, Angela Davis, from unjust imprisonment. In the 1980s, his
administration was responsible for CIA-sponsored drug running in Black
communities to fund the contra war against Nicaragua.

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 well-being. 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 also hated gays, lesbians, bi and trans people--and he
promoted a vicious homophobia to characterize AIDS as a "gay disease"
and stigmatize people with AIDS, a disproportionate number of them
people of color. Reagan blocked funding for AIDS education, prevention,
treatment or care, here and in other countries. The AIDS crisis exploded
during the Reagan presidency. He let it. The president now being lauded
as a swell fellow, a kind, good-hearted, decent guy you just couldn't
help but love, was in fact a callous killer. He is directly responsible
for the HIV/AIDS deaths of tens of thousands of people then--and
millions around the world since.

Ronald Reagan was a union buster. He broke the PATCO air controllers'
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 United States 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 the
pro-socialist revolutionary government of 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 helped 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.

There are many other crimes that bear Reagan's stamp: the continuing
rollback of women's right to choose, the war on immigrants, the speech
at a Bitburg, Ger many, cemetery honoring Nazi SS troops, and so many
more.

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 lesbian/gay/bi/trans
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 thrown up
someone else in his place. But it is hard to imagine that 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. I know he'd really hate that. n

-------------------------
Via Workers World News Service
Reprinted from the June 17, 2004 issue of Workers World newspaper
contact John Catalinotto
-------------------------


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