I’ve been keeping an eye out for the American Enterprise to post a transcript of Bernard Lewis’s speech from last week’s annual dinner. It’s not there yet, but in looking for it, I began browsing through some of the previous speeches, and came across a marvelous, unabashed and bracing address that President Ronald Reagan gave in 1988. It richly deserves re-reading today. It includes the short, straightforward lines quoted above, and here is a longer excerpt:
We came to Washington together in 1981, both as anti-Communists and as unapologetic defenders and promoters of a strong and vibrant America. I am proud to say I am still an anti-Communist. And I continue to be dedicated to the idea that we must trumpet our beliefs and advance our American ideals to all the peoples of the world until the towers of the tyrants crumble to dust.
Yes, it seems to me that we have been as one these past eight years in an effort to establish a foreign policy that stood in firm opposition to the previous decade’s misguided attempt to place this country on what they used to call in the 1970s the “right side of history”–by which those who used that unpleasant Marxist phrase meant we should accept the dominion of our adversaries over large parts of the world.
We said no. We said we must propound and advance our national ideals abroad and once again hold high the banner for what I will, until the breath is gone from my body, continue to call “the free world.”
You can read the entire transcript here.
Digg This
del.icio.us
PJM Home
1 Comment
1. Alex Reed:Ronald Reagan’s address has all the qualities we all loved in the man. There was always a wonderful open-hearted directness about him that told you in your bones that he meant what he said, a quality sure to have caused monumental angst amongst certain echelons in the old Soviet Union, no less amongst great swaths of the left here. There was nothing sly, or contrived, or complicated about him or the way he thought. He had the gift of correctly seeing, and easily and succinctly expressing the clean, fundamental lines of any situation. An artist’s gift of seeing really. There was something in the way he thought and expressed himself, in the way he was, that made me think of him as always striding forward to see what was on the horizon. An entirely admirable and endearing man. Thanks for pointing us to this great speech.
Mar 13, 2007 - 10:16 pmThere’s another one that I liked very much on the AEI roster, though for very different reasons. Mario Vargas Llosa, the brilliant peruvian novelist, essayist, and sometime politician was awarded the Irving Kristol Award in 2005. Where President Reagan goes straight to the distilled core of his argument, Vargas Llosa considers his from many different, sometimes diffuse, but ultimately interconnected perspectives. He is the author of the vertiginous tour de force novel, Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter, the vastly imagined War of the End of the World, and Conversation in the Cathedral, a novel that, while following the ebb and flow of the lives its protagonists, also explores political power and its corruption, and the importance of personal freedom. Vargas Llosa’s Irving Kristol Lecture, “Confessions of a Liberal”, not unlike his novels, weaves a profusion of sinuous lines of thought. He defines himself as a liberal, in the true sense of the word, “a lover of liberty, a person who rises up against oppression”, adding that “the liberal that I aspire to be considers freedom a core value.” Lots to think about……..Enjoy!