Posted on March 9, 2012 - by Venik
From the archive, 9 March 1983: Reagan calls Moscow an evil empire
Originally published in the Guardian on 9 March 1983
President Reagan yesterday maintained his uncompromising stance on arms control with a ferocious denunciation of the Soviet Union. He told an evangelical conference in Orlando, Florida that the Russians had “the aggressive impulses of an evil empire” and he lashed out at “those who would place the United States in a position of military and moral inferiority.”
“Simple-minded appeasement or wishful thinking about our adversaries is folly,” the President declared. The issue was not simply the arms race but the struggle between right and wrong.
“I urge you to beware of the temptation of pride, the temptation blithely to declare yourselves above it all and to label both sides equally at fault, to ignore the facts of history and the aggressive impulses of an evil empire, to simply call the arms race a gigantic misunderstanding…I ask you to resist the attempts of those who would have you withhold your support for this Administration’s efforts to keep America strong and free while we negotiate real and verifiable reductions in the world’s nuclear arsenals.”
The tone of Mr Reagan’s remarks recalled the early days of his Presidency and veered sharply from his recent, more temperate, comments. To a degree, of course, the speech was tailored to his Christian fundamentalist audience. But it also seemed to be a response to the pressure on him for greater flexibility at Geneva and to the resurgence of the nuclear freeze movement in the United States.
The President said that the Kremlin must be made to understand that the United States “will never compromise our principles and standards. Let us pray for those who live in that totalitarian darkness, pray they will discover the joy of knowing God. But, until they do, let us be aware that while they preach the supremacy of the state, declare its omnipotence over individual man and predict its eventual domination of all people of the earth, they are the focus of evil in the modern world.”
In Washington, as supporters and opponents demonstrated outside, the House Foreign Affairs Committee spent yesterday putting the finishing touches to a revised nuclear freeze resolution, replacing the one which was narrowly defeated in the last Congress. In a show of bipartisan support the text was accepted in the Committee by 27-9. The resolution is expected to pass comfortably when it conies before the whole House of Representatives. A parallel resolution has been introduced into the Senate.
The Administration, meanwhile, seems to have embarked on an orchestrated campaign to drive home the lesson it has drawn from the West German elections – that the next move at the Geneva talks must come from Moscow. The Assistant Secretary of State for European Affairs, Mr Richard Burt, appeared on Capitol Hill to tell members ” I don’t think the Administration will ever move away from the zero option as the best goal we could achieve.”
He too sent out the signal that Mr Reagan and vice-President Bush have already given to Mr Andropov – “We have always said that if the Soviets have a reasonable proposal we will listen to it”.
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