Bush: applause and boos

Carlos Alberto Montaner

Bush traveled to Italy and the army had to protect him from the people's wrath. In Spain or France, the people -- if they could have -- would have shot him at dawn. They hate him. However, he went to Poland, the Czech Republic, Albania and Bulgaria, and the people there greeted him with open arms and great demonstrations of collective happiness. And that's easy to understand. The societies that lived under the communist boot are grateful to the United States for its constant denunciations of the violations of human rights that occurred in the “socialist paradises,” the Radio Free Europe broadcasts, the political support to the dissidents, and the fact that Washington did not dismay in its defense of the people trapped behind the Iron Curtain after World War II.

While the cowardly slogan “better Red than dead” was increasingly heard in the West, and while the pessimists, disguised as “pragmatic realists,” took for granted the inevitability of communism's constant advance, Kennedy's vibrant voice in Germany, stating in 1963 that “Ich bin ein Berliner,” that he was a Berliner and that he would put his life on the line next to the people of Berlin, and Reagan's voice, 25 years later, almost in the same spot, in front of the Brandenburg Gate, asking Gorbachev to tear down the Berlin Wall, were almost the only expressions of international solidarity that reached those saddened societies, the only friendly hand that kept alive their desire for freedom and the hope that tomorrow would bring an end to the gulags and the firing squads.

In Latin America, something similar is happening. According to the more reliable surveys, the continent's most pro-American societies are those in Nicaragua and El Salvador, precisely two nations where the United States contributed militarily to the defeat of the communists, and the one in Panama, where a U.S. invasion in 1989 removed from power a narco-dictator very close to the Cuban tyranny.

It is true that in those countries there is also a strong anti-American feeling in one segment of the population, but the number of those who have a good opinion of the United States is twice or three times (as in Panama) the number of those who opine the opposite. Even in Cuba, where the government has engaged in a propaganda bombardment for half a century now, it is estimated that 56 percent of the population -- if it could -- would emigrate immediately to the United States, already home to more than two million escapees from the island.

What would have happened if, after the defeat of the Nazis and amid the imperialistic spasms of the Soviets who had swallowed half of central Europe and were about to control Greece, the United States had sat on its hands? What would have happened if, confronted with that madness of worldwide conquest that affected the communists for decades, until the USSR sank as a consequence of the absolute inefficiency of collectivism and the abuses of Party oligarchs, the United States had not developed a defensive strategy of containment, with alliances such as NATO and massive programs of foreign aid such as the Marshall Plan?

It is true that Washington committed numerous mistakes and some excesses in the practice of its leadership, but was any other nation willing to pay the steep price of facing off Moscow and Beijing? Even after the USSR had disappeared and without the danger of a counterattack, when the former Yugoslavia broke apart as the result of several civil wars and plunged into a terrible blood bath, to whom did Europe turn in search of guidance and support to put down the Serbs and bring an end to a horrific slaughter -- aseptically called “ethnic cleansing” -- that was taking place in its own back yard? It quickly called its American friend.

In 1992, during a trip I made to Hungary, a young and brilliant politician who later became Prime Minister, Viktor Orban, recalling the days of the resistance against communism, summarized the situation for me with an emphatic statement: “Without the Americans, our slavery might have never ended.” Most likely. That is why in those places, the people applaud Bush and are not anti-American.
 

June 20, 2007

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