Thought the list might be interested in the "historic" importance of Ronald Reagan, and the recognition from the Poles, especialy relevant today as our US friends celebrate their Independence. Freed Poles build one for the Gipper NEIL REYNOLDS From Wednesday's Globe and Mail - July 4, 2007 at 6:09 AM EDT (Canada) OTTAWA — As early as 1981, in his first year as president, Ronald Reagan thought that he could discern "the first cracks" in the Soviet Union. "It's the beginning of the end," he asserted. In 1982, he anticipated its collapse. "The Marxist economy," he said, "will soon be consigned to the dustbin of history." The CIA couldn't discern the cracks. Nor could anyone else. In 1983, speaking to the National Association of Evangelicals, Mr. Reagan made his provocative reference to the Soviet Union as an evil empire - "the focus of evil in the modern world." The experts were hugely embarrassed. Writing in Time magazine, Strobe Talbott deemed Mr. Reagan moronic for challenging the legitimacy of the Soviet Union. Former president Richard Nixon chided him. A hard line, he said, would not work with the Soviet Union: "We have to make them understand that we're not out to get them." In parts of the Soviet Union, some people felt differently. Natan Sharansky, the famous dissident who would become a cabinet minister in Israel, read Mr. Reagan's "evil empire" remarks - a contemptuous front-page report in Pravda - in his prison cell in Siberia. "By tapping through the walls, Reagan's [speech] quickly spread through the prison," he related in his memoirs. "We dissidents were ecstatic." In 1987, Mr. Reagan stood at the Brandenburg Gate in West Berlin and issued his historic challenge: "Come here to this gate! Mr. Gorbachev, open this gate! Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!" The words reverberated through the Soviet Union, through the vassal states (though not, ironically, through West Germany, where most news media ignored them). In 1988, standing beside Lenin's statue at Moscow University, Mr. Reagan delivered one of his greatest speeches - an unequivocal celebration of economic freedom and religious faith. Simply by cutting tax rates, he said, India had gained the ability to feed itself. China, he said, would be next. He called on young Russians "to break free" - an explicitly revolutionary invocation. In 1989, Poland became the first of the Soviet states to gain independence - and Poland will now become the first to acknowledge Mr. Reagan as a national liberator with heroic statuary. Measuring 10 feet high, the stone and bronze memorial will stand opposite the U.S. embassy in downtown Warsaw. (Poland has three Ronald Reagan Squares.) In a technical sense, Hungary got its Reagan statuary first - but a bust isn't quite the same thing as a larger-than-life, full-body memorial. Erected on a pedestal in Budapest City Park, the Reagan bust stands only a few steps from the city's statue of Winston Churchill and not far from its statue of George Washington. In his remarks at the unveiling of the bust last September, almost precisely 50 years after the Hungarian Uprising, Budapest Mayor Gabor Demszky said Hungarians regard Mr. Reagan "as a second Churchill." In his remarks, Peter Zwack, the prominent émigré businessman who served as Hungary's first post-Soviet ambassador to the Washington, said: "If Reagan had not been in the White House, the Iron Curtain would never have fallen." Statues uniquely define historical eras. When we cast heroes in steel and stone, we intend posterity to remember them as we knew them. Throughout the former Soviet bloc countries, old memorials are going down and new memorials are going up in emphatic affirmation of the U.S. triumph over Soviet despotism. These countries are defiantly Reaganesque. The Russian nationals who have remained behind in these former colonies naturally resist the recasting of history, sometimes violently. In April, when Estonia removed a bronze statue of a Soviet solder in Tallinn, its capital, Russians rioted, killing one person and injuring 150; police arrested 800 protesters. The Russians rightly honour Soviet resistance to Nazi Germany; the Estonians rightly regard Soviet soldiers as oppressors. It's a hard call. As Warsaw erects its imposing statue of Ronald Reagan this summer, Edinburgh will erect an equally imposing statue - of Scotland's Adam Smith, the 18th century economist and philosopher famous as a champion of laissez-faire and limited government. Oddly enough, this statue has been described as the first important statue of Adam Smith in the world. Measuring 10 feet in height, it will stand on a massive stone base in the heart of historic Edinburgh, where Smith wrote his seminal inquiry into the nature and causes of the wealth of nations - his analysis confirmed throughout the Soviet bloc countries where (to cite a single example) Bulgaria's economy now expands at twice the rate of Europe. Simultaneous statues are an appropriate way for history to remember Adam Smith and Ronald Reagan: freedom fighters, 10 feet tall. rreynolds@xplornet.com

Thank you for sharing this with us on the 231st anniversary of our country. It was good to reflect on some of which I already new and to learn that which I did not know. I guess one could say that over time it is easy to forget things from the past,that are very important to freedom, but at least caring individuals were good enough to give us memorials and statues to remind us. Joseph Sealy, TX U.S.A. MICHALISZYN <michaliszyn@rogers.com> wrote: Thought the list might be interested in the "historic" importance of Ronald Reagan, and the recognition from the Poles, especialy relevant today as our US friends celebrate their Independence. Freed Poles build one for the Gipper NEIL REYNOLDS >From Wednesday's Globe and Mail - July 4, 2007 at 6:09 AM EDT (Canada)