Reagan Dies, and the Media Still Lies

Ronald Reagan
1911 - 2004

Reagan Dies, and the Media Still Lies

Compiled by the Red-Eye Crew
SeeingBlack.com Writers

What was Ronald Reagan's true legacy? Click here to talk about it.

Cartoon by Ramsess

Apparently, even in death, Ronald Reagan's strategy for "perception management" among Americans is still in full effect. At our deadline, we can't even turn on the television or pick up the newspaper, fearful to witness more shameful praise for a president responsible for the murders of tens of thousands around the globe, and, at home, responsible for making Americans comfortable with racism, homophobia, attacks on the poor and wanton greed. (Oh, those glorious 1980s!) Following are excerpts of some sane coverage we have found on the world wide web.

The Coldest War

"The U.S. news media's reaction to Ronald Reagan's death is putting on display what has happened to American public debate in the years since Reagan's political rise in the late 1970s: a near-total collapse of serious analytical thinking at the national level.

Across the U.S. television dial and in major American newspapers, the commentary is fawning almost in a Pravda-like way, far beyond the normal reticence against speaking ill of the dead. Left-of-center commentators compete with conservatives to hail Reagan's supposedly genial style and his alleged role in "winning the Cold War." The Washington Post's front-page headline—"Ronald Reagan Dies"—was in giant type more fitting the Moon Landing.

Yet absent from the media commentary was the one fundamental debate that must be held before any reasonable assessment can be made of Ronald Reagan and his Presidency: How, why and when was the Cold War "won"? If, for instance, the United States was already on the verge of victory over a foundering Soviet Union in the early-to-mid-1970s, as some analysts believe, then Reagan's true historic role may not have been "winning" the Cold War, but helping to extend it.

If the Soviet Union was already in rapid decline, rather than in the ascendancy that Reagan believed, then the massive U.S. military build-up in the 1980s was not decisive; it was excessive. The terrible bloodshed in Central America and Africa, including death squad activities by U.S. clients, was not some necessary evil; it was a war crime aided and abetted by the Reagan administration."
—Ron Parry, www.consortiumnews.com

Would You Like Some Stereotypes with That?

"Reagan spoke to the racial and gender stereotypes of many conservative White Americans when he criticized those on welfare as taking advantage of taxpayer's money. He was committed to a smaller federal government and fewer federal resources for the poor. On election day, 90 percent of the Black vote went for Carter, but Reagan won by a comfortable margin, especially in the South, where only Carter's home state of Georgia went Democratic.

During the Reagan administration, defense spending increased, federal tax revenues declined, the national debt reached an all time high, and governmental support for social programs dwindled. For African Americans, the consequences of these changes were alarming. To protest Reagan's policies, 300,000 members of labor and civil rights groups organized Solidarity Day in Washington, D.C., in 1981.

By the end of the decade, the after-tax income of the richest 1 percent of Americans had increased by 87 percent, while the income of those at the bottom of the economy diminished. Black unemployment also grew during the 1980s; by 1990, more than one in every four adult Black men between the ages of 24 and 54 were out of work. …The crime rate in America rose, and the effect was magnified in poor Black communities. One study calculated that on any given day during the 1980s, 23 percent of all Black men in the United States were under some form of judicial supervision. Military-style weapons and powerfully addictive drugs made gang violence more deadly and swelled the numbers of young people killed in the inner city.

Not only did poverty and unemployment and their deadly effects increase for Black Americans, but the income gap between them and White Americans grew dramatically. That gap had decreased during the 1960s and early 1970s, but by 1984 the disparity had returned to the level it had been in 1960. Yet, some middle class Blacks had become more economically secure, as the proportion of Black households earning incomes of $50,000 or more rose 46 percent during the 1980s."
— James Oliver Horton, www.msn.com

Race-Baiting?

"The sad truth is that many Republican leaders remain in a massive state of denial about the party's four-decade-long addiction to race-baiting. They won't make any headway with Blacks by bashing [Trent] Lott if they persist in giving Ronald Reagan a pass for his racial policies.

The same could be said, of course, about such Republican heroes as, Barry Goldwater, Richard Nixon or George Bush the elder, all of whom used coded racial messages to lure disaffected blue collar and Southern White voters away from the Democrats. Yet it's with Reagan, who set a standard for exploiting White anger and resentment rarely seen since George Wallace stood in the schoolhouse door, that the Republican's selective memory about its race-baiting habit really stands out
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Space doesn't permit a complete list of the Gipper's signals to angry White folks that Republicans prefer to ignore, so two incidents in which Lott was deeply involved will have to suffice. As a young congressman, Lott was among those who urged Reagan to deliver his first major campaign speech in Philadelphia, Mississippi, where three civil rights workers were murdered in one of the 1960s' ugliest cases of racist violence. It was a ringing declaration of his support for "states' rights"—a code word for resistance to Black advances clearly understood by White Southern voters.

Then there was Reagan's attempt, once he reached the White House in 1981, to reverse a long-standing policy of denying tax-exempt status to private schools that practice racial discrimination and grant an exemption to Bob Jones University. Lott's conservative critics, quite rightly, made a big fuss about his filing of a brief arguing that BJU should get the exemption despite its racist ban on interracial dating. But true to their pattern of white-washing Reagan's record on race, not one of Lott's conservative critics said a mumblin' word about the Gipper's deep personal involvement. They don't care to recall that when Lott suggested that Reagan's regime take BJU's side in a lawsuit against the Internal Revenue Service, Reagan responded, "We ought to do it." Two years later the U.S. Supreme Court in a resounding 8-to-1 decision ruled that Reagan was dead wrong and reinstated the IRS's power to deny BJU's exemption.

Republican leaders and their apologists tend to go into a frenzy of denial when members of the liberal media cabal bring up these inconvenient facts."
—Jack White, www.time.com

Death in Latin America

Father Miguel D'Escoto, a Catholic priest based in Managua, Nicaragua:
"First of all, let me start out by saying that, of course, Reagan is now dead. And I, for one, would like to say only nice things about him. I'm not insensitive to the feelings of many U.S. people mourning President Reagan, but as I pray that god in his infinite mercy and goodness forgive him for having been the butcher of my people, for having been responsible for the deaths of some 50,000 Nicaraguans, we cannot, we should not ever forget the crimes he committed in the name of what he falsely labeled freedom and democracy.

More perhaps than any other U.S. President, Reagan convinced many around the world that the U.S. is a fraud, a big lie. Not only was it not democratic, but in fact the greatest enemy of the right of self-determination of peoples. Reagan, as you mentioned just a few minutes ago, was known as the great communicator, and I believe that that is true only if one believes that to be a great communicator means to be a good liar. That he was for sure. He could proclaim the biggest lies without even as much as blinking an eyelash. Hearing him talk about how we were supposedly persecuting Jews and burning down non-existent synagogues, I was led to believe really, that Reagan was possessed by demons. Frankly, I do believe Reagan at that time as much as Bush today was indeed possessed by the demons of manifest destiny.

Of course, as I say this, I'm quite aware that to the people of say for example, Project for a New American Century, that is counted as a big loss. Because of Reagan and his spiritual heir George W. Bush, the World today is far less safe and secure as it has ever been. Reagan in fact was an international outlaw. He came to the Presidency of the United States shortly after Samosa, a dictator that the U.S. had imposed over Nicaragua for practically half a century; had been deposed by Nicaraguan Nationalists under the leadership of the Sandinista Liberation Front.

To Reagan, Nicaragua had to be re-conquered. He blamed Carter for having lost Nicaragua, as if Nicaragua ever belonged to anyone else other than the Nicaraguan people. That was then the beginning of this war that Reagan invented, and mounted and financed and directed, the Contra War. About which he continually lied to the People. Helping the United States people to be the most ignorant people around the world. I said ignorant, I don't say not intelligent. But the most ignorant people around the world about what the United States does abroad. People don't even begin to see—if they did, they would rebel. And so, he lied to the people, as Bush lies to the people today and as they push on, thinking that the United States is above every law, human or divine. And we took the United States, Reagan's United States, his government to court, the World Court.

I was Foreign Minister at that time here in Nicaragua. I was responsible for that. And the United States government received the harshest sentence, the harshest condemnation ever in the history of world justice. In spite of the fact that the United States since the early 1920's has been proclaiming to the world that one of the proofs of its moral superiority as compared to other countries around the world is the fact that it abides by the international law and was obedient to the world court when the United States was brought to the world court in Nicaragua and received the condemnation that the United States failed to heed the sentence and they till owe Nicaragua by now must be between 20,000 and $30,000 million.

At the time when we left government the damages caused by that Reagan war was over $17 billion, and this, according to very moderate estimators of damage, people from the United Nations Economic Commission for Latin America, people from Howard University and from Oxford and from the University of Paris, basically this is the team that was pulled together to estimate the damage.

The United States was ordered to pay for the damage. Bush never even wanted to talk to me about it. I said, "Well, let's have a meeting so that you comply with your sentence of the court." He said to me in two different letters that there was nothing to talk about.

So, Reagan did damage to Nicaragua beyond the imaginations of the people who are hearing me now. The ripple effects of that; criminal murderous interventions in my country will go on for what, 50 years or more.
—www.democracynow.org

Death in Africa

"Well, the official policy was called "constructive engagement." During the 1980s, there was enormous pressure to end all support for the apartheid government. Congress passed legislation barring trade and aid. The Reagan administration found ways to evade the congressional legislation, and in fact trade with South Africa increased in the latter part of the decade. This is incidentally the period when Colin Powell moved to the position of national security advisor.

The U.S. was strongly supporting the apartheid regime directly and then indirectly through allies. Israel was helping get around the embargo. As in Central America, where the clandestine terror made use of other states, that helped the administration get around congressional legislation. In the case of South Africa, just look at the rough figures. In Angola and Mozambique, the neighboring countries, in those countries alone, the South African depredations killed about a million-and-a-half people and led to some $60 billion in damage during the period of constructive engagement with the u.s. support. It was a horror story."
—Noam Chomsky, www.democracynow.org

One Watt Short

"There is a movement afoot called The Ronald Reagan Legacy Project that seeks to have something in every state named after our 40th president, Ronald Wilson Reagan. State Rep. Kenneth Weyler (R-Kingston) has embarked upon a crusade to rename Boott Spur, a crag on Mount Washington, to satisfy New Hampshire's participation in the program.

Given Reagan's record of savaging the environment, it is more than ironic that Weyler has selected a pristine mountain crag to recognize the former chief executive. Airport, library, high school, fine, but the man who appointed James Watt as secretary of the interior has no business being honored with such a dedication.

For those youngsters who don't remember James Watt, he was a soulless technocrat with a monumental disregard for the ecology who resembled a six-foot tall walking penis. Look up some pictures of him on the Web and tell me I'm wrong. The scars from Watt's environmental policies can be found in most parts of the country, but the southwestern states' experiments in strip mining are probably his most lasting signature upon the earth.

Watt finally had to resign, not for being the most damaging secretary of the interior since the position's inception, but because in defending his own attitudes about diversity, he said his staff contained "a woman, a black, two Jews and a cripple." That of course is the least of my problems with him, but if a politically correct feeding frenzy was what it took to bring him down, so be it.

Strip mining and clear-cutting flourished under Reagan and Watt in the eighties, and with Reagan's full approval, Secretary Watt carved up thousands of acres of previously protected land and hawked it cheap to large corporations. Privatization, deregulation, and generally giving the foxes the keys to the henhouse were always the Reagan strategies. To call a river, lake, or mountain by the name Reagan would be like naming a synagogue after Hitler.

Let it never be said though that I am an unreasonable person. I'm willing to meet Weyler half-way by renaming Boott Spur "Mount Pollution" or possibly "Mount Erosion" in honor of Reagan's contributions to environmental preservation. Would that get us off the hook with the Ronald Reagan Legacy Project?

Or maybe we could take a slightly different tack and call it "Mount Murdered Guatamalen Citizens" or "Mount Destabilize Sovereign Nations' Governments With Covert Military Incursions." That's quite a mouthful, but it is a fitting tribute to the first guy who tried to make regime change seem O.K.
—Chris Elliot, www.seacoastonline.com