European Document/Reaganophobes
Wajsman, Patrick
REAGANOPHOBES by Patrick Wajsman Monday night at a quarter past eight. Television News gave us some clippings that were curious indeed: of a country devastated by unemployment and misery; of a...
...For a very simple reason: the denunciation of the failure of Reaganism corresponds, to their minds, to a political calculation...
...During the six years that preceded Reagan's election, over one-hundred-million souls fell under the direct or indirect influence of the Soviet Union...
...He has asserted with conviction his role of defender of the free world, letting the Soviets understand that they may not view the globe as their playground...
...If nothing else, he has restored national pride to his compatriots...
...As can be seen, propaganda has its uses...
...What wounded land could this be about...
...I admit that for a moment I was moved by this painful report that provoked pity and indignation...
...It therefore becomes necessary to distort the defects of the economic system in force on the other side ,of the Atlantic, thereby discrediting capitalism...
...Is this insignificant?insignificant...
...East Germany...
...something of a dinosaur good for little other than hamming it up in front of cameras...
...Paraguay...
...None of the above: the program was on the United States of America, and for anyone with some knowledge of the United States, what took place was an intolerable job of intellectual intoxication...
...of a country so unhappy, so unfair, and so poorly managed that no sensible person could possibly want to live there...
...Now this is precisely what French television does when it insists upon the "disaster" engendered in the United States by policies supporting free enterprise, individual initiative, limited government, and fiscal restraint...
...This is already something, after all...
...Salvador...
...It is in any case a far better attitude than the one that consists of blaming on imaginary scapegoats' one's own failures...
...For two years now, this destabilizing fantasia has ceased...
...Poland...
...Sensible facts, unfortunately, do not much disturb the princes who rule us and those who, on television, express meekly their desires...
...Q.E.D...
...All the more so since the American people themselves continue to trust their President, and believe in their majority (60 percent in a recent poll) that his economic policies will eventually work...
...This Reaganophobia, however, is mediocre...
...of a country whose rulers, notorious militarists, are rejected by the immense majority of the population...
...For Reagan, like it or not, is far from failure...
...For Mitterrand-style socialism to have a chance of seducing the French people, our leaders believe that Reagan liberalism must play the role of providing the unthinkable alternative, and must show every sign of representing a historical disaster...
...After all, why should the French not believe in the virtues of an all-powerful State, with a controlled economy, a regulated society, and a population entirely on some form of assistance: since the Americans, as we are being told constantly, are failing pathetically in the opposite course...
...He restored the will to overcome hard times...
...And one needn't be a genius to guess which one...
...But the American President has done even better...
...Is he not regularly described as the most carefree President since Eisenhower, the most conservative since Herbert Hoover, the most antisocial White House host since Calvin Coolidge...
...Patrick Wajsman is editor of the French quarterly, Politique Internationale, and a regular editorial writer for the daily, Le Figaro, from which this column is adapted...
...To be sure, this was not the first time that Ronald Reagan has been presented, in our good Socialist France, as a primitive, narrow-minded, and incompetent leader...
...The Soviet Union...
...After the pain of the Vietnam syndrome, the humiliation of the hostage crisis, the negativism and defeatism that the Carter Administration made into a pathetic specialty, Reagan made being American once again a thing of pride...
...Yet, there are erroneous judgments that one has difficulty accepting...
Vol. 16 • March 1983 • No. 3
