Really, there is some historical revisionism that is just beyond
the pale, but, coming from the mainstream media, just as
predictable. So it is any time one of the big networks digs the
sainted Gorbachev out from under whatever dacha he is enjoying
while "advising" the "moral person" of Vladimir Putin. See
this ABC piece today from Claire Shipman. Let us count the ways
that it distorts history. First, the lede sentence alone is absurd:
Mikhail Gorbachev is generally regarded as the man who broke
down the "iron curtain" that separated the communist world from the
West and thawed the Cold War between the United States and the
Soviet Union. Yeah, RIGHT. Gorby just stepped up to that
curtain and tore it from its moorings. Deliberately. On his own.
There never was a guy named Ronald Reagan, much less a Pope John
Paul II, a Thatcher, a Walesa, a Havel....
Then there is this:
Gorbachev found a partner in former President Bush in the
late 1980s and early 1990s. During their time in power,
communism fell in East Germany, when Germans tore down the
legendary wall separating the democratic West from the communist
East. The collapse of communism quickly spread across
eastern Europe, and the leaders worked together to create a
partnership in the changing world .
Again, Shipman cannot even bear to mention Ronald Reagan. As if
the "partnership" began with Bush, rather than being bequeathed to
him by Reagan. And then there's the notion of Gorby and Bush
working together to build the new, post-Communist world:
Balderdash. Until the very end, Gorbachev tried to keep Communism
regnant in the Soviet Union; it fell AGAINST his wishes, in a
military coup where he looked weak and was taken prisoner from his
vacation house, only to have the coup-meisters themselves forced
out by the throngs in the streets led by a very, very brave (if
ultimately a bit buffoonish) Boris Yeltsin. Yeltsin was the
democrat; Gorby the recalcitrant hold-out.
Then again, maybe there IS some truth to how Shipman reported
it. Gorby and the elder Bush DID have a partnership; the Bush
administration actually resisted Yeltsin (I guess he wasn't
"prudent" enough) in favor of trying to prop up the obviously
flailing Gorbachev. But the clear insinuation of the Shipman story
is that Bush and Gorbachev controlled events in the move of eastern
Europe to freedom, whereas the truth is that events controlled
them. Sure, Gorbachev deserves credit for being humane enough to
recognize the evils of the gulag, and credit for being perceptive
enough to see that SOMETHING needed to be done to reform the
system, and brave enough to work with Reagan, Thatcher and Bush for
peace. This is not to utterly denigrate Gorbachev. Thanks God he
came into power when he did. And thank Gorby for his humaneness.
But to the end, he held out the hope for a new form of Communism,
not for democracy and not for real freedom. And he sure as heck
would NOT have been an agent of, or conduit for, change if it
weren't for the man who Shipman just couldn't bring herself to
mention at all, one Ronald Wilson Reagan.
topics:
Vladimir Putin, Mainstream Media, Military, Communism
