Ronald Reagan,
Address to Members of the British Parliament
June 8, 1982
My Lord Chancellor, Mr.. Speaker.
The journey of which this visit forms a part is a long one.
Already it has taken me to two great cities of the West, Rome
and Paris, and to the economic summit at Versailles. And there,
once again, our sister democracies have proved that even in a
time of severe economic strain, free peoples can work together
freely and voluntarily to address problems as serious as inflation,
unemployment, trade, and economic development in a spirit of cooperation
and solidarity.
Other milestones lie ahead Later this week, m Germany, we and
our NATO allies will discuss measures for our joint defense and
America's latest initiatives for a more peaceful, secure world
through arms reductions.
Each stop of this trip is important, but among them all, this
moment occupies a special place in my heart and in the hearts
of my countrymen -- a moment of kinship and homecoming in these
hallowed halls.
Speaking for all Americans, I want to say how very much at
home we feel in your house. Every American would, because this
is, as we have been so eloquently told, one of democracy's shrines.
Here the rights of free people and the processes of representation
have been debated and refined.
It has been said that an institution is the lengthening shadow
of a man. This institution is the lengthening shadow of all the
men and women who have sat here and all those who have voted to
send representatives here.
This is my second visit to Great Britain as President of the
United States. My first opportunity to stand on British soil occurred
almost a year and a half ago when your Prime Minister graciously
hosted a diplornatic dinner at the British Embassy in Washington.
Mrs. Thatcher said then that she hoped I was not distressed to
find staring down at me from the grand staircase a portrait of
His Royal Majesty King George III. She suggested it was best
to let bygones be bygones, and in view of our two countries' remarkable
friendship in succeeding years, she added that most Englishmen
today would agree with Thomas Jefferson that "a little rebellion
now and then is a very good thing." [Laughter]
Well, from here I will go to Bonn and then Berlin, where there
stands a grim symbol of power untamed. The Berlin Wall, that dreadful
gray gash across the city, is in its third decade. It is the fitting
signature of the regime that built it.
And a few hundred kilometers behind the Berlin Wall, there
is another symbol In the center of Warsaw, there is a sign that
notes the distances to two capitals. In one direction it points
toward Moscow. In the other it points toward Brussels, headquarters
of Western Europe's tangible unity The marker says that the distances
from Warsaw to Moscow and Warsaw to Brussels are equal. The sign
makes this point: Poland is not East or West. Poland is at the
center of European civilization. It has contributed mightily to
that civilization. It is doing so today by being magnificently
unreconciled to oppression.
Poland's struggle to be Poland and to secure the basic rights
we often take for granted demonstrates why we dare not take those
rights for granted. Gladstone, defending the Reform Bill of 1866,
declared, "You cannot fight against the future. Time is on
our side." It was easier to believe in the march of democracy
in Gladstone's day -- in that high noon of Victorian optimism.
We're approaching the end of a bloody century plagued by a
terrible political invention -- totalitarianism. Optimism comes
less easily today, not because democracy is less vigorous, but
because democracy's enemies have refined their instruments of
repression. Yet optimism is in order, because day by day democracy
is proving itself to be a not-at-all-fragile flower. From Stettin
on the Baltic to Varna on the Black Sea, the regimes planted by
totalitarianism have had more than 30 years to establish their
legitimacy. But none not one regime has yet been able to risk
free elections. Regimes planted by bayonets do not take root.
The strength of the Solidarity movement in Poland demonstrates
the truth told in an underground joke in the Soviet Union. It
is that the Soviet Union would remain a one party nation even
if an opposition party were permitted, because everyone would
join the opposition party. [Laughter]
America's time as a player on the stage of world history has
been brief. I think understanding this fact has always made you
patient with your younger cousins -- well, not always patient.
I do recall that on one occasion, Sir Winston Churchill said in
exasperation about one of our most distinguished diplomats: "He
is the only case I know of a bull who carries his china shop with
him." [Laughter]
But witty as Sir Winston was, he also had that special attribute
of great statesmen- the gift of vision, the willingness to see
the future based on the experience of the past. It is this sense
of history, this understanding of the past that I want to talk
with you about today, for it is in remembering what we share of
the past that our two nations can make common cause for the future.
We have not inherited an easy world. If developments like the
Industrial Revolution, which began here in England, and the gifts
of science and technology have made Life much easier for us, they
have also made it more dangerous. There are threats now to our
freedom, indeed to our very existence, that other generations
could never even have imagined.
There is first the threat of global war. No President, no Congress,
no Prime Minister no Parliament can spend a day entirely free
of this threat. And I don't have to tell you that in today's world
the existence of nuclear weapons could mean, if not the extinction
of mankind, then surely the end of civilization as we know it.
That's why negotiations on intermediate-range nuclear forces now
underway in Europe and the START talks -- Strategic Arms Reduction
Talks which will begin later this month, are not just critical
to American or Western policy; they are critical to mankind. Our
commitment to early success in these negotiations is firm and
unshakable, and our purpose is clear: reducing the risk of war
by reducing the means of waging war on both sides.
At the same time there is a threat posed to human freedom by
the enormous power of the modern state. History teaches the dangers
of government that overreaches political control taking precedence
over free economic growth, secret police, mindless bureaucracy,
all combining to stifle individual excellence and personal freedom.
Now, I'm aware that among us here and throughout Europe there
is legitimate disagreement over the extent to which the public
sector should play a role in a nation's economy and life. But
on one point all of us are united -- our abhorrence of dictatorship
in all its forms, but most particularly totalitarian and the terrible
inhumanities it has caused in our time the great purge, Auschwitz
and Dachau, the Gulag, and Cambodia.
Historians looking back at our time will note the consistent
restraint and peaceful intentions of the West. They will note
that it was the democracies who refused to use the threat of their
nuclear monopoly in the forties and early fifties for territorial
or imperial gain. Had that nuclear monopoly been in the hands
of the Communist world the map of Europe -- indeed, the world-
would look very different today. And certainly they will note
it was not the democracies that invaded Afghanistan or supressed
Polish Solidarity or used chemical and toxin warfare in Afghanistan
and Southeast Asia.
If history teaches anything it teaches self delusion in the
face of unpleasant facts is folly. We see around us today the
marks of our terrible dilemma -- predictions of doomsday, antinuclear
demonstrations, an arms race in which the West must, for its own
protection, be an unwilling participant. At the same time we see
totalitarian forces in the world who seek subversion and conflict
around the globe to further their barbarous assault on the human
spirit. What, then, is our course? Must civilization perish in
a hail of fiery atoms? Must freedom wither in a quiet, deadening
accommodation with totalitarian evil?
Sir Winston Churchill refused to accept the inevitability of
war or even that it was imminent. He said, "I do not believe
that Soviet Russia desires war. What they desire is the fruits
of war and the indefinite expansion of their power and doctrines.
But what we have to consider here today while time remains is
the permanent prevention of war and the establishment of conditions
of freedom and democracy as rapidly as possible in all countries.
'
Well, this is precisely our mission today: to preserve freedom
as well as peace. It may not be easy to see; but I believe we
live now at a turning point.
In an ironic sense Karl Marx was right. We are witnessing today
a great revolutionary crisis, a crisis where the demands of the
economic order are conflicting directly with those of the political
order. But the crisis is happening not in the free, non-Marxist
West, but in the home of Marxist-Lenirusm, the Soviet Union. It
is the Soviet Union that runs against the tide of history by denying
human freedom and human dignity to its citizens. It also is in
deep economic difficulty. The rate of growth in the national product
has been steadily declining since the fifties and is less than
half of what it was then.
The dimensions of this failure are astounding: A country which
employs one fifth of its population in agriculture is unable to
feed its own people. Were it not for the private sector, the tiny
private sector tolerated in Soviet agriculture, the country might
be on the brink of famine. These private plots occupy a bare 3
percent of the arable land but account for nearly one-quarter
of Soviet farm output and nearly one-third of meat products and
vegetables. Over centralized, with
little or no incentives, year after year the Soviet system pours
its best resource into the making of instruments of destruction.
The constant shrinkage of economic growth combined with the growth
of military production is putting a heavy strain on the Soviet
people. What we see here is a political structure that no longer
corresponds to its economic base, a society where productive forces
are hampered by political ones.
The decay of the Soviet experiment should come as no surprise
to us. Wherever the comparisons have been made between free and
closed societies -- West Germany and East Germany, Austria and
Czechoslovakia, Malaysia and Vietnam -- it is the democratic countries
what are prosperous and responsive to the needs of their people.
And one of the simple but overwhelming facts of our time is this:
Of all the millions of refugees we've seen in the modern world,
their flight is always away from, not toward the Communist world.
Today on the NATO line, our military forces face east to prevent
a possible invasion. On the other side of the line, the Soviet
forces also face east to prevent their people from leaving.
The hard evidence of totalitarian rule has caused in mankind
an uprising of the intellect and will. Whether it is the growth
of the new schools of economics in America or England or the appearance
of the so-called new philosophers in France, there is one unifying
thread running through the intellectual work of these groups --rejection
of the arbitrary power of the state, the refusal to subordinate
the rights of the individual to the superstate, the realization
that collectivisrn stifles all the best human impulses.
Since the exodus from Egypt, historians have written of those
who sacrificed and struggled for freedom - the stand at Thermopylae,
the revolt of Spartacus, the storming of the Bastille, the Warsaw
uprising in World War 11. More recently we've seen evidence of
this same human impulse in one of the developing nations in Central