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11/22/2007

If Only....

On May 31, 1988, President Ronald Reagan gave the following
speech to students at Moscow State University. Having just
returned from a week in Moscow myself, Reagan’s appearance
almost 20 years ago was on my mind as over the past few months
I have been urging President George W. Bush to take up the
invitation of students at Tehran University to speak there. While
Tehran’s government undoubtedly would not have allowed the
speech, that in and of itself may have roiled things up, as in
massive student demonstrations. Alas, Bush is no Reagan.

I decided to post the speech in its entirety, even though some of
it is dated in terms of the discussion on technology, for example.
But, again, picture this kind of dialogue by an American leader in
Iran.

----

Ronald Reagan

As you know, I’ve come to Moscow to meet with one of your
most distinguished graduates. In this, our fourth summit,
General Secretary Gorbachev and I have spent many hours
together and I feel that we’re getting to know each other well.

Our discussions, of course, have been focused primarily on many
of the important issues of the day – issues I want to touch on
with you in a few moments. But first I want to take a little time
to talk to you much as I would to any group of university
students in the United States. I want to talk not just of the
realities of today, but of the possibilities of tomorrow.

Standing here before a mural of your revolution, I want to talk
about a very different revolution that is taking place right now,
quietly sweeping the globe, without bloodshed or conflict. Its
effects are peaceful, but they will fundamentally alter our world,
shatter old assumptions, and reshape our lives.

It’s easy to underestimate because it’s not accompanied by
banners or fanfare. It has been called the technological or
information revolution, and as its emblem, one might take the
tiny silicon chip – no bigger than a fingerprint. One of these
chips has more computing power than a roomful of old-style
computers.

As part of an exchange program, we now have an exhibition
touring your country that shows how information technology is
transforming our lives – replacing manual labor with robots,
forecasting weather for farmers, or mapping the genetic code of
DNA for medical researchers. These microcomputers today aid
the design of everything from houses to cars to spacecraft – they
even design better and faster computers. They can translate
English into Russian or enable the blind to read – or help
Michael Jackson produce on one synthesizer the sounds of a
whole orchestra. Linked by a network of satellites and fiber-
optic cables, one individual with a desktop computer and a
telephone commands resources unavailable to the largest
governments just a few years ago.

Like a chrysalis, we’re emerging from the economy of the
Industrial Revolution – an economy confined to and limited by
the Earth’s physical resources – into, as one economist titled his
book, ‘The Economy in Mind,’ an era in which there are no
bounds on human imagination and the freedom to create is the
most precious natural resource.

Think of that little computer chip. Its values isn’t in the sand
from which it is made, but in the microscopic architecture
designed into it by ingenious human minds. Or take the example
of the satellite relaying this broadcast around the world, which
replaces thousands of tons of copper mined from the Earth and
molded into wire. In the new economy, human invention
increasingly makes physical resources obsolete. We’re breaking
through the material conditions of existence to a world where
man creates his own destiny. Even as we explore the most
advanced reaches of science, we’re returning to the age-old
wisdom of our culture, a wisdom contained in the book of
Genesis in the Bible: In the beginning was the spirit, and it was
from this spirit that the material abundance of creation issued
forth.

But progress is not foreordained. The key is freedom – freedom
of thought, freedom of information, freedom of communication.
The renowned scientist, scholar, and founding father of this
University, Mikhail Lomonosov, knew that. “It is common
knowledge,” he said, “that the achievements of science are
considerable and rapid, particularly once the yoke of slavery is
cast off and replaced by the freedom of philosophy.”

You know, one of the first contacts between your country and
mine took place between Russian and American explorers. The
Americans were members of Cook’s last voyage on an
expedition searching for an Arctic passage; on the island of
Unalaska, they came upon the Russians, who took them in, and
together, with the native inhabitants, held a prayer service on the
ice.

The explorers of the modern era are the entrepreneurs, men with
vision, with the courage to take risks and faith enough to brave
the unknown. These entrepreneurs and their small enterprises
are responsible for almost all the economic growth in the United
States. They are the prime movers of the technological
revolution. In fact, one of the largest personal computer firms in
the United States was started by two college students, no older
than you, in the garage behind their home.

Some people, even in my own country, look at the riot of
experiment that is the free market and see only waste. What of
all the entrepreneurs that fail? Well, many do, particularly the
successful ones. Often several times. And if you ask them the
secret of their success, they’ll tell you. It’s all that they learned
in their struggles along the way – yes, it’s what they learned from
failing. Like an athlete in competition, or a scholar in pursuit of
the truth, experience is the greatest teacher.

And that’s why it’s so hard for government planners, no matter
how sophisticated, to ever substitute for millions of individuals
working night and day to make their dreams come true. The fact
is, bureaucracies are a problem around the world. There’s an old
story about a town – it could be anywhere – with a bureaucrat
who is known to be a good for nothing, but he somehow had
always hung on to power. So one day, in a town meeting, an old
woman got up and said to him, “There is a folk legend here
where I come from that when a baby is born, an angel comes
down from heaven and kisses it on one part of its body. If the
angel kisses him on his hand, he becomes a handyman. If he
kisses him on his forehead, he becomes bright and clever. And
I’ve been trying to figure out where the angel kissed you so that
you should sit there for so long and do nothing.”

We are seeing the power of economic freedom spreading around
the world – places such as the Republic of Korea, Singapore, and
Taiwan have vaulted into the technological era, barely pausing in
the industrial age along the way. Low-tax agricultural policies in
the subcontinent mean that in some years India is now a net
exporter of food. Perhaps most exciting are the winds of change
that are blowing over the People’s Republic of China, where one-
quarter of the world’s population is now getting its first taste of
economic freedom.

At the same time, the growth of democracy has become one of
the most powerful political movements of our age. In Latin
America in the 1970s, only a third of the population lived under
democratic government. Today over 90 percent do. In the
Philippines, in the Republic of Korea, free, contested, democratic
elections are the order of the day. Throughout the world, free
markets are the model for growth. Democracy is the standard by
which governments are measured.

We Americans make no secret of our belief in freedom. In fact,
it’s something of a national pastime. Every four years the
American people choose a new president, and 1988 is one of
those years. At one point there were 13 major candidates
running in the two major parties, not to mention all the others,
including the Socialist and Libertarian candidates – all trying to
get my job.

About 1,000 local television stations, 8,500 radio stations, and
1,700 daily newspapers, each one an independent, private
enterprise, fiercely independent of the government, report on the
candidates, grill them in interviews, and bring them together for
debates. In the end, the people vote – they decide who will be
the next president.

But freedom doesn’t begin or end with elections. Go to any
American town, to take just an example, and you’ll see dozens of
churches, representing many different beliefs – in many places
synagogues and mosques – and you’ll see families of every
conceivable nationality, worshipping together.

Go into any schoolroom, and there you will see children being
taught the Declaration of Independence, that they are endowed
by their Creator with certain inalienable rights – among them
life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness – that no government
can justly deny – the guarantees in their Constitution for freedom
of speech, freedom of assembly, and freedom of religion.

Go into any courtroom and there will preside an independent
judge, beholden to no government power. There every defendant
has the right to a trial by a jury of his peers, usually 12 men and
women – common citizens, they are the ones, the only ones, who
weigh the evidence and decide on guilt or innocence. In that
court, the accused is innocent until proven guilty, and the word
of a policeman, or any official has no greater legal standing than
the word of the accused.

Go to any university campus, and there you’ll find an open,
sometimes heated discussion of the problems in American
society and what can be done to correct them. Turn on the
television, and you’ll see the legislature conducting the business
of government right there before the camera, debating and voting
on the legislation that will become the law of the land. March in
any demonstration, and there are many of them – the people’s
right of assembly is guaranteed in the Constitution and protected
by the police.

Go into any union hall, where the members know their right to
strike is protected by law. As a matter of fact, one of the many
jobs I had before this one was being president of a union, the
Screen Actors Guild. I led my union out on strike – and I’m
proud to say, we won.

But freedom is even more than this: Freedom is the right to
question and change the established way of doing things. It is
the continuing revolution of the marketplace. It is the
understanding that allows us to recognize shortcomings and seek
solutions. It is the right to put forth an idea, scoffed at by the
experts, and watch it catch fire among the people. It is the right
to follow your dream, or stick to your conscience, even if you’re
the only one in a sea of doubters.

Freedom is the recognition that no single person, no single
authority or government has a monopoly on the truth, but that
every individual life is infinitely precious, that every one of us
put on this earth has been put here for a reason and has
something to offer.

America is a nation made up of hundreds of nationalities. Our
ties to you are more than ones of good feeling; they’re ties of
kinship. In America, you’ll find Russians, Armenians,
Ukrainians, peoples from Eastern Europe and Central Asia.
They come from every part of this vast continent, from every
continent, to live in harmony, seeking a place where each
cultural heritage is respected, each is valued for its diverse
strengths and beauties and the richness it brings to our lives.

Recently, a few individuals and families have been allowed to
visit relatives in the West. We can only hope that it won’t be
long before all are allowed to do so, and Ukrainian-Americans,
Baltic-Americans and Armenian-Americans can freely visit their
homelands, just as this Irish-American visits his.

Freedom, it has been said, makes people selfish and materialistic,
but Americans are one of the most religious peoples on Earth.
Because they know that liberty, just as life itself, is not earned,
but a gift from God, they seek to share that gift with the world.
“Reason and experience,” said George Washington, in his
farewell address, “both forbid us to expect that national morality
can prevail in exclusion of religious principle. And it is
substantially true, that virtue or morality is a necessary spring of
popular government.”

Democracy is less a system of government than it is a system to
keep government limited, unintrusive: A system of constraints on
power to keep politics and government secondary to the
important things in life, the true sources of value found only in
family and faith.

But I hope you know I go on about these things not simply to
extol the virtues of my own country, but to speak to the true
greatness of the heart and soul of your land. Who, after all,
needs to tell the land of Dostoevsky about the quest for truth, the
home of Kandinsky and Scriabin about imagination, the rich and
noble culture of the Uzbek man of letters, Alisher Navoi, about
beauty and heart.

The great culture of your diverse land speaks with a glowing
passion to all humanity. Let me cite one of the most eloquent
contemporary passages on human freedom. It comes, not from
the literature of America, but from this country, from one of the
greatest writers of the twentieth century, Boris Pasternak, in the
novel ‘Dr. Zhivago.’ He writes, “I think that if the beast who
sleeps in man could be held down by threats – any kind of threat,
whether of jail or of retribution after death – then the highest
emblem of humanity would be the lion tamer in the circus with
his whip, not the prophet who sacrificed himself. But this is just
the point – what has for centuries raised man above the beast is
not the cudgel, but an inward music – the irresistible power of
unarmed truth.”

The irresistible power of unarmed truth. Today the world looks
expectantly to signs of change, steps toward greater freedom in
the Soviet Union. We watch and we hope as we see positive
changes taking place. There are some, I know, in your society
who fear that change will bring only disruption and discontinuity
– who fear to embrace the hope of the future.

Sometimes it takes faith. It’s like that scene in the cowboy
movie ‘Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid,’ which some here
in Moscow recently had a chance to see. The posse is closing in
on the two outlaws, Butch and Sundance, who find themselves
trapped on the edge of a cliff, with a sheer drop of hundreds of
feet to the raging rapids below. Butch turns to Sundance and
says their only hope is to jump into the river below, but
Sundance refuses. He says he’d rather fight it out with the posse,
even though they’re hopelessly outnumbered. Butch says that’s
suicide and urges him to jump, but Sundance still refuses, and
finally admits, “I can’t swim.” Butch breaks up laughing and
says, “You crazy fool, the fall will probably kill you.” And, by
the way, both Butch and Sundance made it, in case you didn’t
see the movie. I think what I’ve just been talking about is
perestroika and what its goals are.

But change would not mean rejection of the past. Like a tree
growing strong through the seasons, rooted in the earth and
drawing life from the sun, so, too, positive change must be
rooted in traditional values – in the land, in culture, in family and
community – and it must take its life from the eternal things,
from the source of all life, which is faith. Such change will lead
to new understandings, new opportunities, to a broader future in
which the tradition is not supplanted, but finds its full flowering.

That is the future beckoning to your generation. At the same
time, we should remember that reform that is not
institutionalized will always be insecure. Such freedom will
always be looking over its shoulder. A bird on a tether, no
matter how long the rope, can always be pulled back. And that is
why, in my conversation with General Secretary Gorbachev, I
have spoken of how important it is to institutionalize change – to
put guarantees on reform. And we have been talking together
about one sad reminder of a divided world, the Berlin Wall. It’s
time to remove the barriers that keep people apart.

I’m proposing an increased exchange program of high school
students between our countries. General Secretary Gorbachev
mentioned on Sunday a wonderful phrase you have in Russian
for this. “Better to see something once than to hear about it a
hundred times.” Mr. Gorbachev and I first began working on
this in 1985; in our discussion today, we agreed on working up to
several thousand exchanges a year from each country in the near
future. But not everyone can travel across the continents and
oceans. Words travel lighter; and that’s why we’d like to make
available to this country more of our 11,000 magazines and
periodicals; and our television and radio shows, that can be
beamed off a satellite in seconds. Nothing would please us more
than for the Soviet people to get to know us better and to
understand our way of life.

Just a few years ago, few would have imagined the progress our
two nations have made together. The INF Treaty – which
General Secretary Gorbachev and I signed last December in
Washington and whose instruments of ratification we will
exchange tomorrow – the first true nuclear arms reduction treaty
in history, calling for the elimination of an entire class of U.S.
and Soviet nuclear missiles. And just 16 days ago, we saw the
beginning of your withdrawal from Afghanistan, which gives
hope that soon the fighting may end and the healing may begin,
and that that suffering country may find self-determination,
unity, and peace at long last.

It’s my fervent hope that our constructive cooperation on these
issues will be carried on to address the continuing destruction of
conflict in many regions of the globe and that the serious
discussions that led to the Geneva accords on Afghanistan will
help lead to solutions in Southern Africa, Ethiopia, Cambodia,
the Persian Gulf, and Central America.

I have often said, nations do not distrust each other because they
are armed; they are armed because they distrust each other. If
this globe is to live in peace and prosper, if it is to embrace all
the possibilities of the technological revolution, then nations
must renounce, once and for all, the right to an expansionist
foreign policy. Peace between nations must be an enduring goal
– not a tactical stage in a continuing conflict.

I’ve been told that there’s a popular song in your country –
perhaps you know it – whose evocative refrain asks the question,
“Do the Russians want a war?” In answer it says, “Go ask that
silence lingering in the air, above the birch and poplar there;
beneath those trees the soldiers lie. Go ask my mother, ask my
wife; then you will have to ask no more. ‘Do the Russians want
a war?’”

But what of your one-time allies? What of those who embraced
you on the Elbe? What if we were to ask the watery graves of
the Pacific, or the European battle fields where America’s fallen
were buried far from home? What if we were to ask their
mothers, sisters, and sons, do Americans want war? Ask us, too,
and you’ll find the same answer, the same longing in every heart.
People do not make wars, governments do – and no mother
would ever willingly sacrifice her sons for territorial gain, for
economic advantage, for ideology. A people free to choose will
always choose peace.

Americans seek always to make friends of old antagonists. After
a colonial revolution with Britain, we have cemented for all ages
the ties of kinship between our nations. After a terrible civil war
between North and South, we healed our wounds and found true
unity as a nation. We fought two world wars in my lifetime
against Germany and one with Japan, but now the Federal
Republic of Germany and Japan are two of our closest allies and
friends.

Some people point to the trade disputes between us as a sign of
strain, but they’re the frictions of all families, and the family of
free nations is a big and vital and sometimes boisterous one. I
can tell you that nothing would please my heart more than in my
lifetime to see American and Soviet diplomats grappling with the
problem of trade disputes between America and a growing,
exuberant, exporting Soviet Union that had opened up to
economic freedom and growth.

And as important as these official people-to-people exchanges
are, nothing would please me more than for them to become
unnecessary, to see travel between East and West become so
routine that university students in the Soviet Union could take a
month off in the summer and, just like students in the West do
now, put packs on their backs and travel from country to country
in Europe with barely a passport check in between. Nothing
would please me more than to see the day that a concert
promoter in, say, England could call up a Soviet rock group –
without going through any government agency – and have them
playing in Liverpool the next night.

Is this just a dream? Perhaps. But it is a dream that is our
responsibility to have come true.

Your generation is living in one of the most exciting, hopeful
times in Soviet history. It is a time when the first breath of
freedom stirs the air and the heart beats to the accelerated rhythm
of hope, when the accumulated spiritual energies of a long
silence yearn to break free.

I am reminded of the famous passage near the end of Gogol’s
‘Dead Souls.’ Comparing his nation to a speeding troika, Gogol
asks what will be its destination. But he writes, “There was no
answer save the bell pouring forth marvelous sound.”

We do not know what the conclusion of this journey will be, but
we’re hopeful that the promise of reform will be fulfilled. In this
Moscow spring, this May 1988, we may be allowed that hope –
that freedom, like the fresh green sapling planted over Tolstoi’s
grave, will blossom forth at last in the rich fertile soil of your
people and culture. We may be allowed to hope that the
marvelous sound of a new openness will keep rising through,
ringing through, leading to a new world of reconciliation,
friendship, and peace.

Thank you all very much and ‘da blagoslovit vas gospod.’ God
bless you.

---

I imagine some of you were struck, as I was, in reading the last
third or so of the speech, just how many steps backwards Russia
has taken compared to the period that followed Reagan’s
address. And also, the United States itself has taken a few steps
back, especially depending on your view of the war with Iraq.

Hot Spots will return Dec. 5.

Brian Trumbore


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-11/22/2007-      
Web Epoch NJ Web Design  |  (c) Copyright 2016 StocksandNews.com, LLC.

Hot Spots

11/22/2007

If Only....

On May 31, 1988, President Ronald Reagan gave the following
speech to students at Moscow State University. Having just
returned from a week in Moscow myself, Reagan’s appearance
almost 20 years ago was on my mind as over the past few months
I have been urging President George W. Bush to take up the
invitation of students at Tehran University to speak there. While
Tehran’s government undoubtedly would not have allowed the
speech, that in and of itself may have roiled things up, as in
massive student demonstrations. Alas, Bush is no Reagan.

I decided to post the speech in its entirety, even though some of
it is dated in terms of the discussion on technology, for example.
But, again, picture this kind of dialogue by an American leader in
Iran.

----

Ronald Reagan

As you know, I’ve come to Moscow to meet with one of your
most distinguished graduates. In this, our fourth summit,
General Secretary Gorbachev and I have spent many hours
together and I feel that we’re getting to know each other well.

Our discussions, of course, have been focused primarily on many
of the important issues of the day – issues I want to touch on
with you in a few moments. But first I want to take a little time
to talk to you much as I would to any group of university
students in the United States. I want to talk not just of the
realities of today, but of the possibilities of tomorrow.

Standing here before a mural of your revolution, I want to talk
about a very different revolution that is taking place right now,
quietly sweeping the globe, without bloodshed or conflict. Its
effects are peaceful, but they will fundamentally alter our world,
shatter old assumptions, and reshape our lives.

It’s easy to underestimate because it’s not accompanied by
banners or fanfare. It has been called the technological or
information revolution, and as its emblem, one might take the
tiny silicon chip – no bigger than a fingerprint. One of these
chips has more computing power than a roomful of old-style
computers.

As part of an exchange program, we now have an exhibition
touring your country that shows how information technology is
transforming our lives – replacing manual labor with robots,
forecasting weather for farmers, or mapping the genetic code of
DNA for medical researchers. These microcomputers today aid
the design of everything from houses to cars to spacecraft – they
even design better and faster computers. They can translate
English into Russian or enable the blind to read – or help
Michael Jackson produce on one synthesizer the sounds of a
whole orchestra. Linked by a network of satellites and fiber-
optic cables, one individual with a desktop computer and a
telephone commands resources unavailable to the largest
governments just a few years ago.

Like a chrysalis, we’re emerging from the economy of the
Industrial Revolution – an economy confined to and limited by
the Earth’s physical resources – into, as one economist titled his
book, ‘The Economy in Mind,’ an era in which there are no
bounds on human imagination and the freedom to create is the
most precious natural resource.

Think of that little computer chip. Its values isn’t in the sand
from which it is made, but in the microscopic architecture
designed into it by ingenious human minds. Or take the example
of the satellite relaying this broadcast around the world, which
replaces thousands of tons of copper mined from the Earth and
molded into wire. In the new economy, human invention
increasingly makes physical resources obsolete. We’re breaking
through the material conditions of existence to a world where
man creates his own destiny. Even as we explore the most
advanced reaches of science, we’re returning to the age-old
wisdom of our culture, a wisdom contained in the book of
Genesis in the Bible: In the beginning was the spirit, and it was
from this spirit that the material abundance of creation issued
forth.

But progress is not foreordained. The key is freedom – freedom
of thought, freedom of information, freedom of communication.
The renowned scientist, scholar, and founding father of this
University, Mikhail Lomonosov, knew that. “It is common
knowledge,” he said, “that the achievements of science are
considerable and rapid, particularly once the yoke of slavery is
cast off and replaced by the freedom of philosophy.”

You know, one of the first contacts between your country and
mine took place between Russian and American explorers. The
Americans were members of Cook’s last voyage on an
expedition searching for an Arctic passage; on the island of
Unalaska, they came upon the Russians, who took them in, and
together, with the native inhabitants, held a prayer service on the
ice.

The explorers of the modern era are the entrepreneurs, men with
vision, with the courage to take risks and faith enough to brave
the unknown. These entrepreneurs and their small enterprises
are responsible for almost all the economic growth in the United
States. They are the prime movers of the technological
revolution. In fact, one of the largest personal computer firms in
the United States was started by two college students, no older
than you, in the garage behind their home.

Some people, even in my own country, look at the riot of
experiment that is the free market and see only waste. What of
all the entrepreneurs that fail? Well, many do, particularly the
successful ones. Often several times. And if you ask them the
secret of their success, they’ll tell you. It’s all that they learned
in their struggles along the way – yes, it’s what they learned from
failing. Like an athlete in competition, or a scholar in pursuit of
the truth, experience is the greatest teacher.

And that’s why it’s so hard for government planners, no matter
how sophisticated, to ever substitute for millions of individuals
working night and day to make their dreams come true. The fact
is, bureaucracies are a problem around the world. There’s an old
story about a town – it could be anywhere – with a bureaucrat
who is known to be a good for nothing, but he somehow had
always hung on to power. So one day, in a town meeting, an old
woman got up and said to him, “There is a folk legend here
where I come from that when a baby is born, an angel comes
down from heaven and kisses it on one part of its body. If the
angel kisses him on his hand, he becomes a handyman. If he
kisses him on his forehead, he becomes bright and clever. And
I’ve been trying to figure out where the angel kissed you so that
you should sit there for so long and do nothing.”

We are seeing the power of economic freedom spreading around
the world – places such as the Republic of Korea, Singapore, and
Taiwan have vaulted into the technological era, barely pausing in
the industrial age along the way. Low-tax agricultural policies in
the subcontinent mean that in some years India is now a net
exporter of food. Perhaps most exciting are the winds of change
that are blowing over the People’s Republic of China, where one-
quarter of the world’s population is now getting its first taste of
economic freedom.

At the same time, the growth of democracy has become one of
the most powerful political movements of our age. In Latin
America in the 1970s, only a third of the population lived under
democratic government. Today over 90 percent do. In the
Philippines, in the Republic of Korea, free, contested, democratic
elections are the order of the day. Throughout the world, free
markets are the model for growth. Democracy is the standard by
which governments are measured.

We Americans make no secret of our belief in freedom. In fact,
it’s something of a national pastime. Every four years the
American people choose a new president, and 1988 is one of
those years. At one point there were 13 major candidates
running in the two major parties, not to mention all the others,
including the Socialist and Libertarian candidates – all trying to
get my job.

About 1,000 local television stations, 8,500 radio stations, and
1,700 daily newspapers, each one an independent, private
enterprise, fiercely independent of the government, report on the
candidates, grill them in interviews, and bring them together for
debates. In the end, the people vote – they decide who will be
the next president.

But freedom doesn’t begin or end with elections. Go to any
American town, to take just an example, and you’ll see dozens of
churches, representing many different beliefs – in many places
synagogues and mosques – and you’ll see families of every
conceivable nationality, worshipping together.

Go into any schoolroom, and there you will see children being
taught the Declaration of Independence, that they are endowed
by their Creator with certain inalienable rights – among them
life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness – that no government
can justly deny – the guarantees in their Constitution for freedom
of speech, freedom of assembly, and freedom of religion.

Go into any courtroom and there will preside an independent
judge, beholden to no government power. There every defendant
has the right to a trial by a jury of his peers, usually 12 men and
women – common citizens, they are the ones, the only ones, who
weigh the evidence and decide on guilt or innocence. In that
court, the accused is innocent until proven guilty, and the word
of a policeman, or any official has no greater legal standing than
the word of the accused.

Go to any university campus, and there you’ll find an open,
sometimes heated discussion of the problems in American
society and what can be done to correct them. Turn on the
television, and you’ll see the legislature conducting the business
of government right there before the camera, debating and voting
on the legislation that will become the law of the land. March in
any demonstration, and there are many of them – the people’s
right of assembly is guaranteed in the Constitution and protected
by the police.

Go into any union hall, where the members know their right to
strike is protected by law. As a matter of fact, one of the many
jobs I had before this one was being president of a union, the
Screen Actors Guild. I led my union out on strike – and I’m
proud to say, we won.

But freedom is even more than this: Freedom is the right to
question and change the established way of doing things. It is
the continuing revolution of the marketplace. It is the
understanding that allows us to recognize shortcomings and seek
solutions. It is the right to put forth an idea, scoffed at by the
experts, and watch it catch fire among the people. It is the right
to follow your dream, or stick to your conscience, even if you’re
the only one in a sea of doubters.

Freedom is the recognition that no single person, no single
authority or government has a monopoly on the truth, but that
every individual life is infinitely precious, that every one of us
put on this earth has been put here for a reason and has
something to offer.

America is a nation made up of hundreds of nationalities. Our
ties to you are more than ones of good feeling; they’re ties of
kinship. In America, you’ll find Russians, Armenians,
Ukrainians, peoples from Eastern Europe and Central Asia.
They come from every part of this vast continent, from every
continent, to live in harmony, seeking a place where each
cultural heritage is respected, each is valued for its diverse
strengths and beauties and the richness it brings to our lives.

Recently, a few individuals and families have been allowed to
visit relatives in the West. We can only hope that it won’t be
long before all are allowed to do so, and Ukrainian-Americans,
Baltic-Americans and Armenian-Americans can freely visit their
homelands, just as this Irish-American visits his.

Freedom, it has been said, makes people selfish and materialistic,
but Americans are one of the most religious peoples on Earth.
Because they know that liberty, just as life itself, is not earned,
but a gift from God, they seek to share that gift with the world.
“Reason and experience,” said George Washington, in his
farewell address, “both forbid us to expect that national morality
can prevail in exclusion of religious principle. And it is
substantially true, that virtue or morality is a necessary spring of
popular government.”

Democracy is less a system of government than it is a system to
keep government limited, unintrusive: A system of constraints on
power to keep politics and government secondary to the
important things in life, the true sources of value found only in
family and faith.

But I hope you know I go on about these things not simply to
extol the virtues of my own country, but to speak to the true
greatness of the heart and soul of your land. Who, after all,
needs to tell the land of Dostoevsky about the quest for truth, the
home of Kandinsky and Scriabin about imagination, the rich and
noble culture of the Uzbek man of letters, Alisher Navoi, about
beauty and heart.

The great culture of your diverse land speaks with a glowing
passion to all humanity. Let me cite one of the most eloquent
contemporary passages on human freedom. It comes, not from
the literature of America, but from this country, from one of the
greatest writers of the twentieth century, Boris Pasternak, in the
novel ‘Dr. Zhivago.’ He writes, “I think that if the beast who
sleeps in man could be held down by threats – any kind of threat,
whether of jail or of retribution after death – then the highest
emblem of humanity would be the lion tamer in the circus with
his whip, not the prophet who sacrificed himself. But this is just
the point – what has for centuries raised man above the beast is
not the cudgel, but an inward music – the irresistible power of
unarmed truth.”

The irresistible power of unarmed truth. Today the world looks
expectantly to signs of change, steps toward greater freedom in
the Soviet Union. We watch and we hope as we see positive
changes taking place. There are some, I know, in your society
who fear that change will bring only disruption and discontinuity
– who fear to embrace the hope of the future.

Sometimes it takes faith. It’s like that scene in the cowboy
movie ‘Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid,’ which some here
in Moscow recently had a chance to see. The posse is closing in
on the two outlaws, Butch and Sundance, who find themselves
trapped on the edge of a cliff, with a sheer drop of hundreds of
feet to the raging rapids below. Butch turns to Sundance and
says their only hope is to jump into the river below, but
Sundance refuses. He says he’d rather fight it out with the posse,
even though they’re hopelessly outnumbered. Butch says that’s
suicide and urges him to jump, but Sundance still refuses, and
finally admits, “I can’t swim.” Butch breaks up laughing and
says, “You crazy fool, the fall will probably kill you.” And, by
the way, both Butch and Sundance made it, in case you didn’t
see the movie. I think what I’ve just been talking about is
perestroika and what its goals are.

But change would not mean rejection of the past. Like a tree
growing strong through the seasons, rooted in the earth and
drawing life from the sun, so, too, positive change must be
rooted in traditional values – in the land, in culture, in family and
community – and it must take its life from the eternal things,
from the source of all life, which is faith. Such change will lead
to new understandings, new opportunities, to a broader future in
which the tradition is not supplanted, but finds its full flowering.

That is the future beckoning to your generation. At the same
time, we should remember that reform that is not
institutionalized will always be insecure. Such freedom will
always be looking over its shoulder. A bird on a tether, no
matter how long the rope, can always be pulled back. And that is
why, in my conversation with General Secretary Gorbachev, I
have spoken of how important it is to institutionalize change – to
put guarantees on reform. And we have been talking together
about one sad reminder of a divided world, the Berlin Wall. It’s
time to remove the barriers that keep people apart.

I’m proposing an increased exchange program of high school
students between our countries. General Secretary Gorbachev
mentioned on Sunday a wonderful phrase you have in Russian
for this. “Better to see something once than to hear about it a
hundred times.” Mr. Gorbachev and I first began working on
this in 1985; in our discussion today, we agreed on working up to
several thousand exchanges a year from each country in the near
future. But not everyone can travel across the continents and
oceans. Words travel lighter; and that’s why we’d like to make
available to this country more of our 11,000 magazines and
periodicals; and our television and radio shows, that can be
beamed off a satellite in seconds. Nothing would please us more
than for the Soviet people to get to know us better and to
understand our way of life.

Just a few years ago, few would have imagined the progress our
two nations have made together. The INF Treaty – which
General Secretary Gorbachev and I signed last December in
Washington and whose instruments of ratification we will
exchange tomorrow – the first true nuclear arms reduction treaty
in history, calling for the elimination of an entire class of U.S.
and Soviet nuclear missiles. And just 16 days ago, we saw the
beginning of your withdrawal from Afghanistan, which gives
hope that soon the fighting may end and the healing may begin,
and that that suffering country may find self-determination,
unity, and peace at long last.

It’s my fervent hope that our constructive cooperation on these
issues will be carried on to address the continuing destruction of
conflict in many regions of the globe and that the serious
discussions that led to the Geneva accords on Afghanistan will
help lead to solutions in Southern Africa, Ethiopia, Cambodia,
the Persian Gulf, and Central America.

I have often said, nations do not distrust each other because they
are armed; they are armed because they distrust each other. If
this globe is to live in peace and prosper, if it is to embrace all
the possibilities of the technological revolution, then nations
must renounce, once and for all, the right to an expansionist
foreign policy. Peace between nations must be an enduring goal
– not a tactical stage in a continuing conflict.

I’ve been told that there’s a popular song in your country –
perhaps you know it – whose evocative refrain asks the question,
“Do the Russians want a war?” In answer it says, “Go ask that
silence lingering in the air, above the birch and poplar there;
beneath those trees the soldiers lie. Go ask my mother, ask my
wife; then you will have to ask no more. ‘Do the Russians want
a war?’”

But what of your one-time allies? What of those who embraced
you on the Elbe? What if we were to ask the watery graves of
the Pacific, or the European battle fields where America’s fallen
were buried far from home? What if we were to ask their
mothers, sisters, and sons, do Americans want war? Ask us, too,
and you’ll find the same answer, the same longing in every heart.
People do not make wars, governments do – and no mother
would ever willingly sacrifice her sons for territorial gain, for
economic advantage, for ideology. A people free to choose will
always choose peace.

Americans seek always to make friends of old antagonists. After
a colonial revolution with Britain, we have cemented for all ages
the ties of kinship between our nations. After a terrible civil war
between North and South, we healed our wounds and found true
unity as a nation. We fought two world wars in my lifetime
against Germany and one with Japan, but now the Federal
Republic of Germany and Japan are two of our closest allies and
friends.

Some people point to the trade disputes between us as a sign of
strain, but they’re the frictions of all families, and the family of
free nations is a big and vital and sometimes boisterous one. I
can tell you that nothing would please my heart more than in my
lifetime to see American and Soviet diplomats grappling with the
problem of trade disputes between America and a growing,
exuberant, exporting Soviet Union that had opened up to
economic freedom and growth.

And as important as these official people-to-people exchanges
are, nothing would please me more than for them to become
unnecessary, to see travel between East and West become so
routine that university students in the Soviet Union could take a
month off in the summer and, just like students in the West do
now, put packs on their backs and travel from country to country
in Europe with barely a passport check in between. Nothing
would please me more than to see the day that a concert
promoter in, say, England could call up a Soviet rock group –
without going through any government agency – and have them
playing in Liverpool the next night.

Is this just a dream? Perhaps. But it is a dream that is our
responsibility to have come true.

Your generation is living in one of the most exciting, hopeful
times in Soviet history. It is a time when the first breath of
freedom stirs the air and the heart beats to the accelerated rhythm
of hope, when the accumulated spiritual energies of a long
silence yearn to break free.

I am reminded of the famous passage near the end of Gogol’s
‘Dead Souls.’ Comparing his nation to a speeding troika, Gogol
asks what will be its destination. But he writes, “There was no
answer save the bell pouring forth marvelous sound.”

We do not know what the conclusion of this journey will be, but
we’re hopeful that the promise of reform will be fulfilled. In this
Moscow spring, this May 1988, we may be allowed that hope –
that freedom, like the fresh green sapling planted over Tolstoi’s
grave, will blossom forth at last in the rich fertile soil of your
people and culture. We may be allowed to hope that the
marvelous sound of a new openness will keep rising through,
ringing through, leading to a new world of reconciliation,
friendship, and peace.

Thank you all very much and ‘da blagoslovit vas gospod.’ God
bless you.

---

I imagine some of you were struck, as I was, in reading the last
third or so of the speech, just how many steps backwards Russia
has taken compared to the period that followed Reagan’s
address. And also, the United States itself has taken a few steps
back, especially depending on your view of the war with Iraq.

Hot Spots will return Dec. 5.

Brian Trumbore