Peace through strength: Ronald Reagan's voice still calls out to anyone willing to listen

Peace through strength: Ronald Reagan’s voice still calls out to anyone willing to listen

"There was a time, many, many fathers ago that heroes were real. It was a time when we believed in dragons, and our heroes would set off in battle to protect the townsfolk and slay the evil beasts. The stories we know never told us why the dragons had so much disdain for humanity, we only know they did."

Jonathan Garrett - The Day of the Heroes

How much do we really know about some of our great historical heroes? Names like Winston Churchill, Margaret Thatcher, Ronald Reagan, Milton Friedman, and many others. These are names that should invoke nostalgic sentiments from an era not that long ago. Instead, the stories and histories from these great people have been slowly buried under the dust heap of ideology. Facts have been changed, valuable lessons forgotten, and the teachers of our schools who should be reminding our children of these truths have pushed them to the side.

In 1938, the tremendously destructive dragon of totalitarianism was circling in the skies above Europe. This dragon was an evil that demonstrated a disdain for humanity that the twentieth century had not before witnessed, nor ever imagined. 

In the heart of Germany, Hitler had already introduced the Nuremberg laws three years earlier, taking marriage, sexual, and employment rights off the Jewish population. Within two years, he was to rain fire on human civilisation by implementing his Final Solution. The result would be the murder of over twelve million human souls, six million just from the Jewish populations.

Clearly, this evil needed to be slain. But what was happening in the rest of Europe while this dragon was circling? This is a question that not many in today’s population actually know the answer to.

After World War 1, the intelligentsia had decided that in order to prevent future wars, the heroic stories of the past needed to be forgotten. Tales of the glorious and famous battles were shunned, heroes deliberately forgotten, all while the education system, particularly in France, actively taught passivity to students.  

The belief was, if students were taught about the heroic actions of men in battle, then they too would lust for war. So instead, they put a deliberate plan into place that ignored these great national stories, replacing them with the indoctrination of passivism.

It is important to note that there was nothing in the past that had proven these ideas to be successful. It was born purely out of imagination and emotion. This theme of the intelligentsia attempting to force their beliefs onto the rest of society, designs that had been dreamed up in their heads, has repeated itself continually through the ages and still persists today.

Neville Chamberlain - Peace in our times

The then British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain, a great believer in this new age of passivity, flew to Germany, signing the Munich Pact with Adolf Hitler. This pact handed Czechoslovakian territory to Germany in return for a guarantee of peace. Footage of Neville Chamberlain landing on British soil shows him waving the agreement in the air, declaring ‘Peace in our time’. Less than twelve months later, one of the most destructive wars in human history was underway.

What happened? Society forgot a vital lesson told time and time again in history. Being peaceful at all costs doesn’t create peace, it shows weakness. Weakness will be exploited to the maximum benefit of a tyrant. It buys him time, surprise, and easy victories against a passivist enemy. 

During all of this passivity, one hero was willing to face the dragon. A voice that had been warning of the evil of Adolf Hitler for many years prior. This hero was Winston Churchill. A gruff but determined man that had already proven himself in World War 1. This hero, single-handedly inspired Great Britain to rise from their passivity, face their dragon and fight. It took over two years before Britain won its first decisive battle in Egypt. But under Churchill, the dragon was eventually subdued.

One of the key lessons we should have learned from World War 2 is that passivity does not result in peace. In fact, it is catastrophic to world peace. If France and Britain had used strength against Hitler when he was still weak, he would never have had a chance to wreak such destruction on humanity. Who knows how many millions of lives would have been saved?

Margaret Thatcher & Ronald Reagan

There were some heroes, though, that learned the lessons from the past. Both Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan are two prime examples. Margaret Thatcher showed strength against Argentina in the 1982 Falklands war. Argentina had attempted to militarily occupy the British Falkland Islands 1,500km off the Argentinian coast. If passivity had been shown, the Falklands would have been lost. The story would only be a footnote of history. However, Margaret Thatcher earned the title ‘The Iron Lady’ for a very good reason. In a 1982 interview, she stated, “you do not achieve anything without trouble, ever.”

Upon the Argentinian’s seizing the Falklands, Thatcher ordered the British navy to retake it. An order that the Argentinians had not anticipated. Within a matter of weeks, the Argentinian navy had retreated to their territorial waters, and Falklands returned safely to British protection.

This act of strength by Thatcher in the 1980s is an essential lesson to all who are willing to listen. A lesson that Barack Obama failed to learn from in his Neville Chamberlain moment when dealing with Iran’s nuclear capacity. The world will never know how lucky it was when Donald Trump came to power.

Obama, attempting to bring ‘peace in our time’, only enabled the Iranian regime to continue its evil intent, developing nuclear energy. The Israeli intelligence released information showing evidence that Iran was not living up to its end of the bargain. Additionally, Iran’s top general Soleimani set about trying to kill American soldiers, gloating that the American’s would not retaliate. He clearly, was counting on a passivist America. The only problem was, he was now dealing with Trump, not Obama. Under Trump, he was quickly identified and executed, a show of real strength.

Alongside Thatcher, another great hero of the 1980s was American president, Ronald Reagan. It was Reagan that made the phrase ‘Peace through strength’ famous. Very different from the ‘peace in our time’ motto from the other side of the political spectrum. Reagan had dedicated his political life to bringing about the end of Communism in the Soviet Union, one of the greatest evils ever to grace humanity. 

For years, Reagan was lambasted for his strong stance against the Soviet Union by the media and the intelligentsia. Continually he was told he was bringing the world closer to a global nuclear catastrophe. Even after all of the historical evidence showing that passivity does not work, it was promoted as the only solution.

Ronald Reagan, however, knew he was right. He stood firmly in the face of the opposition against him. Alongside other heroes of his age, Margaret Thatcher, Pope John III, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, and others, he helped to bring about the end of the Communist Soviet Union, symbolised by the historic tearing down of the Berlin wall in 1991. 

In the end, Ronald Reagan was proven correct. Who knows how much longer the Soviet system that had destroyed countless millions of lives would have lasted if it had not been for Reagan? A true hero of his time.

Xi Jinping

Today we face new threats as a society. In particular, there is the global threat of China and their brand of authoritarianism. China has set about bullying other nations and territories, ignoring international law. Countries like Australia, India, Taiwan, and even the US have all been exposed to China’s threat. 

China is now slowly implementing its authoritarianism in Hong Kong, deliberately breaking the promises it made to England to have ‘One Country, Two systems’. It has also recently removed the word ‘peaceful’ from its goal to once again bring Taiwan under Chinese control. Add to this, the man-made military island in the South China sea which was built in spite of an international ruling that declared China had no rights to this territory.

With this threat, the same old voice of passivism from the intelligentsia has again risen to the surface, continuing to ignore historical reality. The thinking makes the very naive assumption that everyone is pursuing peace, which is just not the case.

Ronald Regan’s voice, however, calls out to anyone willing to listen. ‘Peace through strength’ is the tried and tested route. As uncomfortable as it is to have to stand up against evil and confront it face to face. It is the only proven way that real peace can be achieved. 

Does showing strength mean that war will not happen? No, there are no guarantees. But in the words of Margaret Thatcher, “you do not achieve anything without trouble, ever.”