“Let us beware that while they preach the supremacy of the state, declare its omnipotence over individual man, and predict its eventual domination over all the peoples of the earth, they are the focus of evil in the modern world.” – Ronald Reagan

On March 8, 1983, Ronald Reagan appeared before the National Association of Evangelicals and gave perhaps his most famous speech, the one in which he called the Soviet Union an “Evil Empire.” The media uproar was instantaneous.  Reagan was accused of everything from insulting the Soviets to heating up the Cold War.

Should Reagan have used such provocative rhetoric? Alas, I’m not schooled enough in the diplomatic nuances of superpower relations to say.  On the other hand, was the Soviet Union really an “Evil Empire”?  You betcha.

It was certainly an empire.  It had the ultimate say over the political, economic and cultural life of every country behind the Iron Curtain, and it proved in Hungary in 1956, in Czechoslovakia in 1968, and in Poland in 1981 that any attempt to alter that arrangement would be met with brutal force.

It was certainly evil. Tens of millions of people disappeared, or were killed, tortured or imprisoned for the simple crime of having displeased the state.  Instead of freedom there was state control of all economic output, all property, all opinion and all information (Yakov Smirnoff, the expatriate Russian comedian, joked that there were two channels on Soviet television: Channel 2 was round-the-clock Soviet propaganda and Channel 3 was an angry Red Army General who ordered you to turn back to Channel 2).  A Soviet citizen literally could not move from one place to another without receiving permission from the State.

Instead, there was the gulag, the purges, the pogroms, the Berlin Wall, the Show Trials, the Siberian death camps, the KGB and the interrogation rooms in Lubyanka prison.  Instead there was Stalin’s forced starvation of the Ukraine, which caused 8 million deaths. And let’s not forget the expulsion, incarceration and defection of some of the world’s greatest thinkers, scientists and artists, including Andrei Sakharov, Natan Scharansky, Lech Walesa, Alexander Solzhenitsyn and Vladimir Horowitz.

Instead, there was the almighty “Big Brother” that George Orwell described so well.  Black was white, right was wrong, history was false, the truth was lies, and lies were the truth if the government said so.

It was an evil empire, and if calling it so in any way hastened its demise, then Reagan was right to do it, just as he was right when he predicted in another eerily prophetic speech (mostly ignored by the media) that it would soon be on the ash heap of history.

“The Last Lion,” as Winston Churchill’s best biographer, William Manchester, called him, gave his last roar as British prime minister this week (March 1) in 1955 with his final speech to the House of Commons.  His health was failing and he had agreed to step down in April.

But he had one more message to deliver, and it dealt with the central question of the age. In a world increasingly divided between a democratic America and a communist Soviet Union — each of which distrusted the other, and each of which possessed nuclear weapons of staggering destructive power — how would the human race survive?

Churchill had given the question much thought, especially once he learned how powerful nuclear weapons were, which caused a sea change in his strategic thinking.  A born warrior, Churchill had assumed that nuclear weapons were just another step in the inevitable march toward wars being won by bigger and better weapons.  But nuclear weapons, he concluded, were so powerful and destructive that no war that included them could ever be won.  All sides in such a war would be losers, suffering unimaginable destruction, and therefore no nation must ever start such a war.

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A high-powered rifle with sniper’s scope and silencer.  A poisoned cigar.  An exploding pen. An exploding sea shell.  Poisoned toiletries (toothpaste, mouthwash, etc.).  A poisoned scuba diving wet suit.  A poisoned drink.  Mind altering drugs.  Drugs to make facial and scalp hair fall out.  A car bomb.  A house bomb.  An atomic bomb.

No, that wasn’t Theodore “Unabomber” Kaczynski’s Christmas list.  At one time or another every one of the above was proposed or discussed by the CIA, the Pentagon, the Justice Department and/or the White House as a way of ending the rule, and life, of Cuba’s “Maximum Leader,” Fidel Castro. The life began in 1926. The rule began this week (Feb. 17) in 1959 when his rag-tag revolutionary army took power in Havana on the heels of the fleeing former Cuban dictator, Fulgencio Batista.

Interestingly, President Eisenhower’s first reaction to Castro was mixed. He was wary of this self-proclaimed revolutionary but gratified to have finally been rid of the pro-American, but extremely corrupt, ruthless, despised (and embarrassing) Batista.  And as for Castro, at the time he came to power he held no strong ideological convictions. Unlike his fellow revolutionary, Che Guevara, he was not initially a Marxist-Leninist, although like most good Latin Americans he did have a reflexive dislike of the U.S. But many historians have argued that with more patient and flexible diplomacy, Castro might not have wound up in the arms of the Russians and might even have been lured into the American camp.

Perhaps, but several realities get in the way of this hope. First, Castro had made no secret of his intention, once in power, to “nationalize” (confiscate) millions of dollars worth of American owned property — something no U.S. president could shrug off without political consequences. Second, although Castro’s conversion to Marxism came late, it was probably inevitable given his obsession with holding on to power.  The great thing about being a Marxist-Leninist is that you don’t have to hold elections, or seek consensus with rival parties, or worry about public opinion.

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