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Ronald Reagan's "Tear Down This Wall" speech - FULL VERSION

12 June 1987

   

This is how presidents worthy of the office make speeches. They stir the crowd with optimism and hope. Their personality expresses warmth and love. They seek to bring people together in recognition of aspirations in which we all share. They can be critical of their opponent but in a way that invites them into the room to talk about their differences. They are courageous in their statements and reach out to seek unity. They calm the beasts that live in the darkness within us.

People with a lust for power for its own sake, speak very differently. They appeal to people who feel that they have been wronged in some way. They appeal to their destructive instincts. 

'In crowds the foolish, ignorant, and envious persons are freed from the sense of their insignificance and powerlessness, and are possessed instead by the notion of brutal and temporary but immense strength.' Gustave Le Bon, 1895, The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind.

They either fail to recognise the duplicity, immorality and coarseness of the speaker, or they carry these weaknesses in themselves and the speaker has emboldened them to revel in them. 

'It is terrible at times to think of the power that strong conviction combined with extreme narrowness of mind gives a man possessing prestige.' Le Bon

Right now it is happening at a rapid pace, that 'under totalitarianism, the regime of lies breaks down the psyches of many who live in its grasp convincing them to abandon the search for truth and accuracy in their own thoughts and words as well as those of others. Sometimes this takes the form of intellectual surrender, a cowed willingness to believe everything it is convenient to believe, sometimes cynicism, a refusal to believe anything and an assertion that everything is equally corrupt.' Rebecca Solnit, 2021, Orwell's Roses, Viking. 

'The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the convinced Communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction (i.e. the reality of experience) and the distinction between true and false (i.e. the standards of thought) no longer exist.' Hannah Arendt

The late Dr Mitscherlich who was in 1937 arrested by the Gestapo because of his opposition to National Socialism and was imprisoned for eight months, after the war became head of the German medical commission at the Nuremberg 'Doctors' trials. He lived to see the rise of neo-Nazism among German youth and said, 'the thinking young German who joins the call for authoritarian violence, is abandoning a battle he has waged quite deliberately, quite consciously since Hitler, against the innate authority-hunger which he knows is part of his nature. And that battle, he abandons to his and our peril.'

'You and I have the courage to say to our enemies, “There is a price we will not pay.” There is a point beyond which they must not advance. This is the meaning in the phrase of Barry Goldwater’s “peace through strength.” Winston Churchill said that “the destiny of man is not measured by material computation. When great forces are on the move in the world, we learn we are spirits–not animals.” And he said, “There is something going on in time and space, and beyond time and space, which, whether we like it or not, spells duty.”

You and I have a rendezvous with destiny. We will preserve for our children this, the last best hope of man on Earth, or we will sentence them to take the last step into a thousand years of darkness.' from Ronald Reagan's Barry Goldwater endorsement, titled A Time for Choosing, 27 October 1964, California, USA 


 



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