[Written ten days after the start of The War in Iraq, March 31, 2003]


Let me say it straight. I am almost sixty years old, and I have never in my life been prouder to be an American than I am today.

I was talking to my friend Tony Blankley, editorial editor of the Washington Times, the other day, and when I compared George Bush to Ronald Reagan, Tony replied, “It may turn out to be the other way around.”

Next week, the President of the United States will stand next to the President of Russia in Moscow’s Red Square commemorating the end of World War II. Last week, you learned in No Apology, No Future that on his way to and from Moscow, Bush will meet with the leaders of former Russian colonies Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, and Georgia on how to end the dictatorship of Aleksandr Lukashenko in Belarus.

The Kremlin has publicly voiced its displeasure with these meetings. Yet it ought to be far more concerned with an unknown, anonymous student alliance that has successfully overthrown autocrats in four ex-Soviet states, and now has Belarus and Russia itself in its gunsights. While its constituent student groups have names, the alliance itself has no name and no leader. Here is its history:

In the past dozen years, 700,000 people have sued over 8,000 companies, schools, and municipalities for asbestos-exposure damages. In 2003, some 110,000 individual claims were filed in that year alone. Asbestos litigation has bankrupted over 70 corporations, costing 60,000 jobs, and forced companies to pay out over $70 billion in court judgments and settlements. The suits were filed as “class action” lawsuits by trail lawyers, who of course got most of the money.

The litigation is predicted to eventually produce as many as 3 million individual claims, with a final total of $200 to $300 billion paid by businesses and insurance companies in judgments - or by the taxpayers via Arlen Specter’s bill in the Senate should those companies go bankrupt which many will. That’s over a quarter of a trillion dollar pot of ripped-off gold at the end of the trial lawyers’ rainbow.

And over 95% is willful fraud. The quarter-trillion dollar asbestos litigation is a criminal conspiracy between plaintiff trial lawyers and the medical doctors they bribed to fake the evidence.

In 1997, I was in Budapest speaking to a conference of international business leaders. Another speaker was a Moscow television news commentator well-known in Russia, Boris Notkin. He informed his audience about how humiliated Russians felt, losing their Empire and the Cold War, not winning many medals in the Olympics, and having their Mir space station go belly-up. He warned of a dangerous anti-Americanism emerging among Russians, who resentfully blamed America for their problems.

A gray-haired gentleman with a Central European accent stood up and asked Boris a question: “In addition to their feelings of humiliation and resentment, do Russians have any feelings of remorse for inflicting Communism upon so many countries? After their defeat in World War II, the Germans apologized to the world for being Nazis and for the horrible atrocities Nazism committed. After their defeat in the Cold War, will the Russians ever apologize to the world for being Communists and the equally horrible atrocities Soviet Communism committed?”

Boris looked straight at the man and coldly answered, “No. Russians feel no remorse. They will not apologize.”

This past Monday, April 25, Russian President Vladimir Putin reaffirmed this absence of remorse and refusal to apologize for the genocidal horror perpetrated by Soviet Communism upon so many countries and peoples. In a nationally televised speech to the Russian Federal Assembly in Moscow, he declared that “the collapse of the Soviet Union was the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the 20th century.”

The truth, of course, is that the existence of the Soviet Union was the greatest geopolitical disaster of the 20th century

There was a very funny movie made back in 1987 called The Princess Bride. Imagine an Errol Flynn swashbuckler with a Monty Python script. One of my favorite scenes is when the hero, Westley (played by Cary Elwes) is wounded and his friends drag his limp body to a Yiddish Wizard named Miracle Max (played by Billy Crystal) in hopes of saving him. But it’s too late. He’s dead, they tell Max.

“Look who knows so much,” Max replies after examining Westley. “It just so happens that your friend here is only MOSTLY dead. There is a VERY BIG DIFFERENCE between mostly dead and all dead. Mostly dead is slightly alive. With all dead, well, with all dead there's usually only one thing you can do.”

“What's that?” his friends ask. Max answers, “Go through his clothes and look for loose change.”

It turns out there was an adaptive replay of this scene in the Sistine Chapel this week. The College of Cardinals dragged in the limp body of European Christianity - which means of European civilization and culture - and placed it at Josef Ratzinger’s feet. Can you save him? they asked, because we are afraid he’s dead. Their Dean and Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith replied that yes, he is mostly dead - but not all dead, so there is hope for his revival. That hope is what elected Cardinal Ratzinger to the papacy.

This past weekend, the Chinese Communist government organized a protest demonstration in front of the Japanese Embassy in Beijing. Under the watchful eyes of Chinese security agents and police, the young protestors were encouraged to throw stones at the embassy in protest over the latest Japanese history textbook continuing to omit mention of Japanese atrocities in China during World War II.

Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao, on a charm offensive in India at the time of the protest, told reporters in New Delhi that “Only a country that respects and takes responsibility for history can win over peoples’ trust, in Asia and the world at large… (the protest in Beijing) should prompt deep and profound reflection in Japan.”

A Japanese response to the Chinese accusations will soon be forthcoming. There will be bland public statements, such as Prime Minister Koizumi’s to the Kyodo News Agency: “Any country can face criticism, but it is not good to let confrontation heighten because of that.” Then there will be the unofficial response, a private letter to Wen Jiabao on Koizumi’s official letterhead, which notes:

I, along with many of my fellow Japanese citizens, must admit to being astounded at your admonishing us to “take responsibility for history,” and to engage in “deep and profound reflection” on our history. Astounded because you pretend not to see how much this advice applies to you and the Communist Party of China.

There is an old English proverb of which I am sure you are aware: People who live in glass houses should never throw stones. The government of the People’s Republic of China is such a glass house.

We only recognize giants when they are gone, heroic ages when they are past. The day will come when America’s children will learn that the 1980s was such an age, bestrode by three giants who together rid the world of one of the great evils of history, the Soviet Union. They were Ronald Reagan, Pope John Paul II, and Margaret Thatcher. Now, only one is left.

We mourned the passing of Ronald Reagan last year, Pope John Paul’s this, so before we mourn Lady Thatcher’s, who turns 80 this October, let us acknowledge the incalculable debt those who live in freedom today owe to this triumvirate of truly extraordinary human beings.

It is easy to believe the hand of Providence set them on history’s stage one after the other in the short space of two years, exactly at the time America and the West was on the verge of surrender to the seeming inevitability of Soviet power.

Easy to believe with hindsight. But at the time,a Polish priest, an English woman commoner, and an American movie actor were about to confront the most evil power in the world. How off the wall do you want history to get? Truth is not simply stranger than fiction, it is more dramatic and awe-inspiring.