Today’s column is headlined “In Hindsight it seems Reagan had an eye for evil.”
As they lay Ronald Reagan to rest today, it might be a good time to lay to rest the debate over one of the many controversial things he said .
Few of the president’s statements while in office caused more hair-pulling and sputtering, here and around the globe, than his description of the Soviet Union as an “evil empire.”
Critics, aghast at such an undiplomatic utterance, complained that the ol’ Cold Warrior was at it again, tossing gasoline on a fire that the rest of the world – including diplomats from his own country – were hoping to extinguish.
As one encyclopedia describes the reaction to Reagan’s reference, many feared that “by attempting to assume moral superiority in the Cold War, the U.S. was further inflaming East-West tensions and enhancing the risk of nuclear conflict.”
Not a big Reagan fan at the time, I was among them. I thought it was an unnecessarily crude and unhelpful thing to say when, in the early 1980s, tensions already were frightening enough. After all, as wisdom has it, when you poke an angry bear with a stick, you tend only to make it angrier.
A couple of years after Reagan left office, and a couple of months after the Soviet Union fell apart, circumstances placed me in Moscow as an editor/adviser to the new Russia’s first free-market newspaper, Commersant. One day, while discussing our nations’ past differences with a Russian colleague, the “evil empire” remark came up.
My colleague, Sergei Voitishkin, was a young, liberal democrat – small “D” – who couldn’t have been happier at the collapse of the whole communist nightmare. But his view as a Russian liberal contrasted sharply with that of American liberals when it came to Reagan and the “evil empire” flap.
“You know,” Voitishkin told me, “we were quite surprised at the reaction to what he said. We couldn’t understand why so many people were upset.
“Of course it was an evil empire. When Reagan finally said that, we were quite happy. Our reaction was, 'Finally, somebody over there understands what has happened to us.’”
That was quite a revelation. The very people we’d think would have been the most offended – the smart, young, educated, worldly liberals – had been the ones cheering Reagan the loudest.
Let me interrupt Mr. Addis long enough to make one or two points. First, there is a phenomenal amount of hubris in asserting that this article by an obscure columnist for the cut-and-paste job that is the Virginian Pilot will lay anything to rest, let alone the issue of whether the USSR was an “Evil Empire.” And whether President Reagan should have spoken “Truth to Power” as members of the Left like to say.
Second, the article is really about the intellectual journey of Mr. Addis. An intellect so veiled in false liberal certitude that it was able to ignore the truth about historical drama that unfolded itself before us during the 1980s. It took the face-to-face testimony of one of Communism’s freed serfs to remove certain self-imposed blinders.
To continue:
It only goes to show that the definition of a liberal and a conservative can get pretty well twisted around, depending on where you happen to be standing at the moment in question.
President Reagan said a lot of things while in office that remain suspect. He was prone to mish mashing scenes from real life with scenes from Hollywood movies. He once told Israel’s Yitzak Shamir that he’d personally filmed the liberation of a Nazi death camp. In reality, because of his poor eyesight, the Army never sent him past the California state line. He reportedly told a similar tale to Nazi-hunter Simon Wiesenthal.
Reagan is accused by his opponents of living in a dream world where reality and his film roles blend seamlessly into each other. I have attempted to search the Internet for this particular accusation but was not successful. Fact: newspaper reporters now have the credibility of used car salesmen; columnists are not that well regarded. The NY Times has instituted a regular corrections section devoted just to its columnists like Paul Krugman and Maureen “Ellipses” Dowd. I’m afraid I won’t take Mr. Addis’ word for his version of this story.
Maybe the most suspect of all was his argument that trees cause more pollution than automobiles. (If so, why isn’t Yellowstone under a smog alert?)
This was a comment that caused Liberals to roll over on the floor laughing. Trees? Pristine, Holy, Nature? A source of pollution? What a moron! Except, except…
I did find reference to this on the Internet. It seems that during a campaign speech in either 1979 or 1980 (the date varies depending on the source) Candidate Reagan referred to a study by an industry group that asserted that trees gave of more of the stuff that causes smog than cars. Some reports indicate that he took a swipe at the EPA for hiding this report.
Rather than taking the word of a newspaper writer for the validity of this viewpoint, let’s go to some scientific sources:
1. According to a study by the University of Helsinki, coniferous forests--that is to say, those composed of trees such as pines--release nitrogen oxides into the atmosphere that combine with other pollutants to form smog.
2. The Geological Society of London: When Ronald Reagan said trees caused pollution, most people thought he was up a gum tree. Australian researchers have now discovered that, in the case of eucalypts at least, the President was right after all.
Australia's native plants emit chemical compounds that can interact with other air pollutants to exacerbate smog in cities. Scientists from CSIRO Energy Technology and Atmospheric Research have been commissioned by the NSW Environmental Protection Authority (EPA) to investigate emissions of organic compounds from Australian eucalypt trees and grasses that contribute to the formation of photochemical smog.
"It's not just cars and industry that cause air pollution," says Mr Ian Galbally, from CSIRO Atmospheric Research. "Plants release highly reactive hydrocarbons that can add significantly to photochemical smog problems. That is, smog caused by the reaction of sunlight with chemical compounds like those from industry, car exhausts — and now, as we've discovered, plants," he says.
"The blue haze you often see over the Dandenongs in Victoria and in the Blue Mountains near Sydney is caused in part by the gases released by vegetation. We found that grasses, particularly when cut, are potent emitters of reactive hydrocarbons."
"Plants release these compounds into the atmosphere in large quantities. These volatile compounds add to the photochemical smog in the same way as emissions from human sources — there is no discrimination," says Dr Peter Nelson, senior research scientist with CSIRO Energy Technology.
3. And finally, from the Canadian Globe and Mail:
Ottawa — Coniferous forests around the world may be emitting more smog-causing nitrogen oxides than traffic and industry combined, suggests a report in the prestigious journal Nature.
The report, released Wednesday, flies in the face of the accepted view that forests reduce pollution by absorbing it — a theory Canada relied on in demanding credit for forests as pollution "sinks" under the Kyoto climate change accord.
Scotch pine needles release nitrogen oxides directly into the atmosphere when exposed to ultraviolet light, says a study led by Perrti Hari of the University of Helsinki.
Nitrogen oxides are smog precursors: They combine with other pollutants to form ground-level ozone, a major component of smog.
The emissions from Scotch pines increase in proportion to the amount of ultraviolet radiation they receive, says the study.
"Although this contribution is insignificant on a local scale, our findings suggest that global NOx emissions from boreal coniferous forests may be comparable to those produced by worldwide industrial and traffic sources," says the report.
Actually the scientific community has known these things for a very long time. It doesn’t take advanced degrees to determine what plants produce during growth and decay. There are few scientists, however, who are willing to stick out their necks to be chopped by the yahoos at “Earth First” or the feature writers of the newspapers.
Besides, what good would it do? We are certainly not going to chop down the world’s coniferous forests to end smog. The only activists on this issue are the Luddites who prefer a pre-industrial age. Not the real one, of course, where people died of overwork or common diseases at an early age. They prefer an airbrushed version, or should we say “the movie version.” Preferably, one in which they are in charge, steering the fates of the lumpenproletariat from their desks with the stroke of a pen. You know, the ideal society that was the Soviet Union, only this time – because they are in charge – not an Evil Empire but the Communism “with a human face.”
Back to Addis:
But when it came to recognizing an evil empire, Reagan’s eyesight was 20/ 20. I didn’t understand that at the time he said it. But when I finally got to see it for myself, it was clear that you didn’t need prescription lenses to figure out what you were looking at.
Although I have given Mr. Addis a hard time for his ideological blindness, He has seen the truth. There are many in his camp that still refuse to face the facts he faced. Who blame Reagan for destroying their dream, their Socialist fantasy. But perhaps, unlike Dave Addis, they did not have it rubbed in their faces by those freed from that Evil Empire.
Keep working on it Dave. Who knows, one day we may see you out in the woods cutting down those “killer trees.” At that point, we’ll know you have come away from the Dark Side.
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