The dark side of Ronald Reagan

Ronald Reagan began his political career in the 1940s as a Hollywood union leader and liberal. But he secretly spied and fingered his colleagues and friends to the FBI and collaborated with studio bosses to rid the movie industry of Communists in the 1950s. That got him a job as corporate talking-head for General Electric.

Mr Reagan's corporate backers realised that his grandfatherly image was indispensable in delivering their agenda. He fired 11,000 striking air traffic controllers in 1981, signalling an open war on organised labour that continues to this day. His budget cuts forced one million people off food stamps and denied social security disability benefits to 500,000.

Mr Reagan cut the tax rate for the richest Americans from 70 per cent to 28 per cent with the promise that the benefits would "trickle down". Yet, economic growth in the 1980s was slower than in the 1970s, despite the stimulus of military spending, which created massive federal budget deficits and tripled the federal debt.

In 1983 he ordered the invasion of Grenada, a tiny Caribbean island smaller than Malta.

He promoted "constructive engagement" with the racist apartheid regime in South Africa and branded Nelson Mandela's Africa National Congress a "terrorist organisation".

President Reagan also escalated the Cold War with the USSR by placing cruise missiles in Europe. After the USSR's invasion of Afghanistan, Mr Reagan's CIA funnelled money and guns to the Afghan resistance, the Taliban and Osama Bin Laden.

All of this is forgiven because some say Mr Reagan "triumphed" in the Cold War against the USSR "without a shot being fired". Tell that to the survivors of the massacres by Reagan-backed military dictators in El Salvador and Guatemala. And when you hear about how Mr Reagan renewed "optimism" and "confidence" in America, tell it to the hungry and homeless in the US inner cities left defenceless by Mr Reagan - and every President since.

President Reagan's biggest crimes were the bloody military actions to suppress social and political change in El Salvador, Nicaragua, Guatemala and Afghanistan. Also his supposed role in ending the Cold War with the USSR which in reality he prolonged.

It has become conventional wisdom that it was the relentlessly tough anti-communist policies of the Reagan Administration, with its heated-up arms race, that led to the collapse and reformation of the Soviet Union. But this view is not universally held, nor should it be.

Long the leading Soviet expert on the United States, Georgi Arbatov, head of the Moscow-based Institute for the Study of the USA and Canada, wrote his memoirs in 1992. A Los Angeles Times book review by Robert Scheer summed up a portion of it: Arbatov understood all too well the failings of Soviet totalitarianism in comparison to the economy and politics of the West. It is clear from this candid and nuanced memoir that the movement for change had been developing steadily inside the highest corridors of power ever since the death of Stalin. Arbatov not only provides considerable evidence for the controversial notion that this change would have come about without foreign pressure, he insists that the US military build-up during the Reagan years actually impeded this development.

George F. Kennan agrees. The former US ambassador to the Soviet Union, and father of the theory of "containment" of the same country, asserts that "the suggestion that any United States administration had the power to influence decisively the course of a tremendous domestic political upheaval in another great country on another side of the globe is simply childish". He contends that the extreme militarisation of American policy strengthened hard-liners in the Soviet Union. "Thus, the general effect of Cold War extremism was to delay rather than hasten the great change that overtook the Soviet Union." It turned out that the Russians were human after all, they responded to toughness with toughness.

Mikhail Gorbachev's close adviser, Aleksandr Yakovlev, when asked whether the Reagan Administration's higher military spending, combined with its "Evil Empire" rhetoric, forced the Soviet Union into a more conciliatory position, responded: "It played no role. None. I can tell you that with the fullest responsibility. Gorbachev and I were ready for changes in our policy regardless of whether the American President was Reagan, or Kennedy, or someone even more liberal. It was clear that our military spending was enormous and we had to reduce it".

If there's anyone to attribute the changes in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe to, both the beneficial ones and those questionable, it is, of course, Mikhail Gorbachev and the activists he inspired. It should be noted that Mr Reagan was in office for over four years and Pope John Paul for eight years before Mr Gorbachev came to power but in that period of time nothing of any significance in the way of Soviet reform took place despite President Reagan's unremitting malice towards the communist state.

Mr Camilleri resides in the US.