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IPFS News Link • Philosophy: Conservatism

Ronald Reagan: An Autopsy - by Murray N. Rothbard

• LewRockwell.com
 
Many recent memoirs have filled out the details of what some of us have long suspected: that Reagan is basically a cretin who, as a long-time actor, is skilled in reading his assigned lines and performing his assigned tasks. Donald Regan and others have commented on Ronald Reagan’s strange passivity, his never asking questions or offering any ideas of his own, his willingness to wait until others place matters before him. Regan has also remarked that Reagan is happiest when following the set schedule that others have placed before him. The actor, having achieved at last the stardom that had eluded him in Hollywood, reads the lines and performs the action that others – his script-writers, his directors – have told him to follow. Sometimes, Reagan’s retentive memory – important for an actor – gave his handlers trouble. Evidently lacking the capacity for reasoned thought, Reagan’s mind is filled with anecdotes, most of them dead wrong, that he has soaked up over the years in the course of reading Reader’s Digest or at idle conversation. Once an anecdote enters Reagan’s noodle, it is set in concrete and impossible to correct or dislodge. (Consider, for example, the famous story about the "Chicago welfare queen": all wrong, but Reagan carried on regardless.) In the early years of Reagan rule, the press busily checked out Reagan’s beloved anecdotes, and found that almost every one of them was full of holes. But Reagan never veered from his course. Why? God knows there are plenty of correct stories about welfare cheats that he could have clasped to his bosom; why stick to false ones? Evidently, the reason is that Reagan cares little about reality; he lives in his own Hollywood fantasy world, a world of myth, a world in which it is always Morning in America, a world where The Flag is always flying, but where Welfare Cheats mar the contentment of the Land of Oz. So who cares if the actual story is wrong? Let it stand, like a Hollywood story, as a surrogate for the welfare cheats whom everyone knows do exist. The degree to which Reagan is out of touch with reality was best demonstrated in his concentration camp story. This was not simply a slip of the tongue, a Bushian confusion of December with September. When the Premier of Israel visited Reagan at the White House, the President went on and on for three quarters of an hour explaining why he was pro-Jewish: it was because, being in the Signal Corps in World War II, he visited Buchenwald shortly after the Nazi defeat and helped to take films of that camp. Reagan repeated this story the following day to an Israeli ambassador. But the truth was 180-degrees different; Reagan was not in Europe; he never saw a concentration camp; he spent the entire war in the safety of Hollywood, making films for the armed forces.

3 Comments in Response to

Comment by PureTrust
Entered on:

Someone might respond that the ink on paper that the Banksters and Government do, is reality because it represents reality.

Well then, why can't we exchange our paper dollars for gold or silver or platinum or something that we can hold in our hands that has real value?

This whole bank thing is a big scam, designed to steal the property, the labor, of the people from them while offering them little or nothing in return.

And the Federal Reserve Bank, which receives the money and is owned by foreigners, is the device used to send our labor offshore to finance the unrest all around the world. So, we the people, are unwittingly and unknowingly the ones who are supporting the conquest of the world by the One World Government.

Comment by PureTrust
Entered on:

On the other hand, since all loans made by the Federal Reserve Bank and its satellite lending institutions are simply ink on paper (since the value of the ink and the paper is infinitesimal), including loans made to Government, there has never really been anything to repay. Because of this, all things are essentially out-of-whack, and the only thing that holds them together is a virtual reality that the people have been sold on.

The people, by believing that a bunch of banksters and Government oafficials can make REALITY by writing a few numbers on paper, are messing up their own lives by accepting as reality the fiction of the banksters' virtual reality.

It is time we get back to the sense of freedom that is found in the themes of all the founding freedom documents... from the Constitutions back to the Magna Carta.

Comment by Tyger
Entered on:

One thing this article demonstrates is how much better off America was under Reagan than the current administration. For example, just a $200 billion federal budget deficit. The odometer on today's deficit is spinning so fast that it's hard to read the actual number. And there are many other examples the article points out. Not that all of those things were good, but in addition to showing how much worse things are now, it also points out how much closer to a real, government-changing type of revolution the country is, which provides hope that real freedom from the tyranny of big government and corporate power might once again be possible.



www.universityofreason.com/a/29887/KWADzukm