Other milestones lie ahead. Later this week, in Germany, we and our
NATO allies will discuss measures for our joint defence and
America's latest initiatives for a more peaceful, secure world
through arms reductions.
Each stop of this trip is important, but among them all, this moment
occupies a special place in my heart and in the hearts of my
countrymen - a moment of kinship and homecoming in these hallowed
halls.
Speaking for all Americans, I want to say how very much at home we
feel in your house. Every American would, because this is, as we
have been so eloquently told, one of democracy's shrines. Here the
rights of free people and the processes of representation have been
debated and refined.
It has been said that an institution is the lengthening shadow of a
man. This institution is the lengthening shadow of all the men and
women who have sat here and all those who have voted to send
representatives here.
This is my second visit to Great Britain as President of the United
States. My first opportunity to stand on British soil occurred
almost a year and a half ago when your Prime Minister graciously
hosted a diplomatic dinner at the British Embassy in Washington.
Mrs. Thatcher said then that she hoped I was not distressed to find
staring down at me from the grand staircase a portrait of His Royal
Majesty King George III. She suggested it was best to let bygones be
bygones, and in view of our two countries' remarkable friendship in
succeeding years, she added that most Englishmen today would agree
with Thomas Jefferson that ``a little rebellion now and then is a
very good thing.'' [Laughter]
Well, from here I will go to Bonn and then Berlin, where there
stands a grim symbol of power untamed. The Berlin Wall, that
dreadful grey gash across the city, is in its third decade. It is
the fitting signature of the regime that built it.
And a few hundred kilometres behind the Berlin Wall, there is
another symbol. In the centre of Warsaw, there is a sign that notes
the distances to two capitals. In one direction it points toward
Moscow. In the other it points toward Brussels, headquarters of
Western Europe's tangible unity. The marker says that the distances
from Warsaw to Moscow and Warsaw to Brussels are equal. The sign
makes this point: Poland is not East or West. Poland is at the
centre of European civilization. It has contributed mightily to that
civilization. It is doing so today by being magnificently
un-reconciled to oppression.
Poland's struggle to be Poland and to secure the basic rights we
often take for granted demonstrates why we dare not take those
rights for granted. Gladstone, defending the Reform Bill of 1866,
declared, ``You cannot fight against the future. Time is on our
side.'' It was easier to believe in the march of democracy in
Gladstone's day -- in that high noon of Victorian optimism.
We're approaching the end of a bloody century plagued by a terrible
political invention -- totalitarianism. Optimism comes less easily
today, not because democracy is less vigorous, but because
democracy's enemies have refined their instruments of repression.
Yet optimism is in order, because day by day democracy is proving
itself to be a not-at-all-fragile flower. From Stettin on the Baltic
to Varna on the Black Sea, the regimes planted by totalitarianism
have had more than 30 years to establish their legitimacy. But none
-- not one regime -- has yet been able to risk free elections.
Regimes planted by bayonets do not take root.
The strength of the Solidarity movement in Poland demonstrates the
truth told in an underground joke in the Soviet Union. It is that
the Soviet Union would remain a one-party nation even if an
opposition party were permitted, because everyone would join the
opposition party.
America's time as a player on the stage of world history has been
brief. I think understanding this fact has always made you patient
with your younger cousins - well, not always patient. I do recall
that on one occasion, Sir Winston Churchill said in exasperation
about one of our most distinguished diplomats: "He is the only case
I know of a bull who carries his china shop with him."
But witty as Sir Winston was, he also had that special attribute of
great statesmen - the gift of vision, the willingness to see the
future based on the experience of the past. It is this sense of
history, this understanding of the past that I want to talk with you
about today, for it is in remembering what we share of the past that
our two nations can make common cause for the future.
We have not inherited an easy world. If developments like the
Industrial Revolution, which began here in England, and the gifts of
science and technology have made life much easier for us, they have
also made it more dangerous. There are threats now to our freedom,
indeed to our very existence, that other generations could never
even have imagined.
There is first the threat of global war. No President, no Congress,
no Prime Minister, no Parliament can spend a day entirely free of
this threat. And I don't have to tell you that in today's world the
existence of nuclear weapons could mean, if not the extinction of
mankind, then surely the end of civilization as we know it. That's
why negotiations on intermediate-range nuclear forces now underway
in Europe and the START talks - Strategic Arms Reduction Talks -
which will begin later this month, are not just critical to American
or Western policy; they are critical to mankind. Our commitment to
early success in these negotiations is firm and unshakable, and our
purpose is clear: reducing the risk of war by reducing the means of
waging war on both sides.
At the same time there is a threat posed to human freedom by the
enormous power of the modern state. History teaches the dangers of
government that overreaches - political control taking precedence
over free economic growth, secret police, mindless bureaucracy, all
combining to stifle individual excellence and personal freedom.
Now, I'm aware that among us here and throughout Europe there is
legitimate disagreement over the extent to which the public sector
should play a role in a nation's economy and life. But on one point
all of us are united - our abhorrence of dictatorship in all its
forms, but most particularly totalitarianism and the terrible
inhumanities it has caused in our time - the great purge, Auschwitz
and Dachau, the Gulag, and Cambodia.
Historians looking back at our time will note the consistent
restraint and peaceful intentions of the West. They will note that
it was the democracies who refused to use the threat of their
nuclear monopoly in the forties and early fifties for territorial or
imperial gain. Had that nuclear monopoly been in the hands of the
Communist world, the map of Europe - indeed, the world - would look
very different today. And certainly they will note it was not the
democracies that invaded Afghanistan or supressed Polish Solidarity
or used chemical and toxin warfare in Afghanistan and Southeast
Asia.
If history teaches anything it teaches self-delusion in the face of
unpleasant facts is folly. We see around us today the marks of our
terrible dilemma - predictions of doomsday, antinuclear
demonstrations, an arms race in which the West must, for its own
protection, be an unwilling participant. At the same time we see
totalitarian forces in the world who seek subversion and conflict
around the globe to further their barbarous assault on the human
spirit. What, then, is our course? Must civilization perish in a
hail of fiery atoms? Must freedom wither in a quiet, deadening
accommodation with totalitarian evil?
Sir Winston Churchill refused to accept the inevitability of war or
even that it was imminent. He said, "I do not believe that Soviet
Russia desires war. What they desire is the fruits of war and the
indefinite expansion of their power and doctrines. But what we have
to consider here today while time remains is the permanent
prevention of war and the establishment of conditions of freedom and
democracy as rapidly as possible in all countries."
Well, this is precisely our mission today: to preserve freedom as
well as peace. It may not be easy to see; but I believe we live now
at a turning point.
In an ironic sense Karl Marx was right. We are witnessing today a
great revolutionary crisis, a crisis where the demands of the
economic order are conflicting directly with those of the political
order. But the crisis is happening not in the free, non-Marxist
West, but in the home of Marxist-Leninism, the Soviet Union. It is
the Soviet Union that runs against the tide of history by denying
human freedom and human dignity to its citizens. It also is in deep
economic difficulty. The rate of growth in the national product has
been steadily declining since the fifties and is less than half of
what it was then.
The dimensions of this failure are astounding: A country which
employs one-fifth of its population in agriculture is unable to feed
its own people. Were it not for the private sector, the tiny private
sector tolerated in Soviet agriculture, the country might be on the
brink of famine. These private plots occupy a bare 3 percent of the
arable land but account for nearly one-quarter of Soviet farm output
and nearly one-third of meat products and vegetables.
Over-centralized, with little or no incentives, year after year the
Soviet system pours its best resource into the making of instruments
of destruction. The constant shrinkage of economic growth combined
with the growth of military production is putting a heavy strain on
the Soviet people. What we see here is a political structure that no
longer corresponds to its economic base, a society where productive
forces are hampered by political ones.
The decay of the Soviet experiment should come as no surprise to us.
Wherever the comparisons have been made between free and closed
societies - West Germany and East Germany, Austria and
Czechoslovakia, Malaysia and Vietnam - it is the democratic
countries what are prosperous and responsive to the needs of their
people. And one of the simple but overwhelming facts of our time is
this: Of all the millions of refugees we've seen in the modern
world, their flight is always away from, not toward the Communist
world. Today on the NATO line, our military forces face east to
prevent a possible invasion. On the other side of the line, the
Soviet forces also face east to prevent their people from leaving.
The hard evidence of totalitarian rule has caused in mankind an
uprising of the intellect and will. Whether it is the growth of the
new schools of economics in America or England or the appearance of
the so-called new philosophers in France, there is one unifying
thread running through the intellectual work of these groups -
rejection of the arbitrary power of the state, the refusal to
subordinate the rights of the individual to the superstate, the
realization that collectivism stifles all the best human impulses.
Since the exodus from Egypt, historians have written of those who
sacrificed and struggled for freedom - the stand at Thermopylae, the
revolt of Spartacus, the storming of the Bastille, the Warsaw
uprising in World War II. More recently we've seen evidence of this
same human impulse in one of the developing nations in Central
America. For months and months the world news media covered the
fighting in El Salvador. Day after day we were treated to stories
and film slanted toward the brave freedom-fighters battling
oppressive government forces in behalf of the silent, suffering
people of that tortured country.
And then one day those silent, suffering people were offered a
chance to vote, to choose the kind of government they wanted.
Suddenly the freedom-fighters in the hills were exposed for what
they really are - Cuban-backed guerrillas who want power for
themselves, and their backers, not democracy for the people. They
threatened death to any who voted, and destroyed hundreds of buses
and trucks to keep the people from getting to the polling places.
But on election day, the people of El Salvador, an unprecedented 1.4
million of them, braved ambush and gunfire, and trudged for miles to
vote for freedom.
They stood for hours in the hot sun waiting for their turn to vote.
Members of our Congress who went there as observers told me of a
women who was wounded by rifle fire on the way to the polls, who
refused to leave the line to have her wound treated until after she
had voted. A grandmother, who had been told by the guerrillas she
would be killed when she returned from the polls, and she told the
guerrillas, "You can kill me, you can kill my family, kill my
neighbors, but you can't kill us all." The real freedom-fighters of
El Salvador turned out to be the people of that country - the young,
the old, the in-between.
Strange, but in my own country there's been little if any news
coverage of that war since the election. Now, perhaps they'll say
it's - well, because there are newer struggles now.
On distant islands in the South Atlantic young men are fighting for
Britain. And, yes, voices have been raised protesting their
sacrifice for lumps of rock and earth so far away. But those young
men aren't fighting for mere real estate. They fight for a cause -
for the belief that armed aggression must not be allowed to succeed,
and the people must participate in the decisions of government the
decisions of government under the rule of law. If there had been
firmer support for that principle some 45 years ago, perhaps our
generation wouldn't have suffered the bloodletting of World War II.
In the Middle East now the guns sound once more, this time in
Lebanon, a country that for too long has had to endure the tragedy
of civil war, terrorism, and foreign intervention and occupation.
The fighting in Lebanon on the part of all parties must stop, and
Israel should bring its forces home. But this is not enough. We must
all work to stamp out the scourge of terrorism that in the Middle
East makes war an ever-present threat.
But beyond the trouble-spots lies a deeper, more positive pattern.
Around the world today, the democratic revolution is gathering new
strength. In India a critical test has been passed with the peaceful
change of governing political parties. In Africa, Nigeria is moving
into remarkable and unmistakable ways to build and strengthen its
democratic institutions. In the Caribbean and Central America, 16 of
24 countries have freely elected governments. And in the United
Nations, 8 of the 10 developing nations which have joined that body
in the past 5 years are democracies.
In the Communist world as well, man's instinctive desire for freedom
and self-determination surfaces again and again. To be sure, there
are grim reminders of how brutally the police state attempts to
snuff out this quest for self-rule - 1953 in East Germany, 1956 in
Hungary, 1968 in Czechoslovakia, 1981 in Poland. But the struggle
continues in Poland. And we know that there are even those who
strive and suffer for freedom within the confines of the Soviet
Union itself. How we conduct ourselves here in the Western
democracies will determine whether this trend continues.
No, democracy is not a fragile flower. Still it needs cultivating.
If the rest of this century is to witness the gradual growth of
freedom and democratic ideals, we must take actions to assist the
campaign for democracy.
Some argue that we should encourage democratic change in right-wing
dictatorships, but not in Communist regimes. Well, to accept this
preposterous notion - as some well-meaning people have - is to
invite the argument that once countries achieve a nuclear
capability, they should be allowed an undisturbed reign of terror
over their own citizens. We reject this course.
As for the Soviet view, Chairman Brezhnev repeatedly has stressed
that the competition of ideas and systems must continue and that
this is entirely consistent with relaxation of tensions and peace.
Well, we ask only that these systems begin by living up to their own
constitutions, abiding by their own laws, and complying with the
international obligations they have undertaken. We ask only for a
process, a direction, a basic code of decency, not for an instant
transformation.
We cannot ignore the fact that even without our encouragement there
has been and will continue to be repeated explosions against
repression and dictatorships. The Soviet Union itself is not immune
to this reality. Any system is inherently unstable that has no
peaceful means to legitimise its leaders. In such cases, the very
repressiveness of the state ultimately drives people to resist it,
if necessary, by force.
While we must be cautious about forcing the pace of change, we must
not hesitate to declare our ultimate objectives and to take concrete
actions to move toward them. We must be staunch in our conviction
that freedom is not the sole prerogative of a lucky few, but the
inalienable and universal right of all human beings. So states the
United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which, among
other things, guarantees free elections.
The objective I propose is quite simple to state: to foster the
infrastructure of democracy, the system of a free press, unions,
political parties, universities, which allows a people to choose
their own way to develop their own culture, to reconcile their own
differences through peaceful means.
This is not cultural imperialism, it is providing the means for
genuine self-determination and protection for diversity. Democracy
already flourishes in countries with very different cultures and
historical experiences. It would be cultural condescension, or
worse, to say that any people prefer dictatorship to democracy. Who
would voluntarily choose not to have the right to vote, decide to
purchase government propaganda handouts instead of independent
newspapers, prefer government to worker-controlled unions, opt for
land to be owned by the state instead of those who till it, want
government repression of religious liberty, a single political party
instead of a free choice, a rigid cultural orthodoxy instead of
democratic tolerance and diversity?
Since 1917 the Soviet Union has given covert political training and
assistance to Marxist-Leninists in many countries. Of course, it
also has promoted the use of violence and subversion by these same
forces. Over the past several decades, West European and other
Social Democrats, Christian Democrats, and leaders have offered open
assistance to fraternal, political, and social institutions to bring
about peaceful and democratic progress. Appropriately, for a
vigorous new democracy, the Federal Republic of Germany's political
foundations have become a major force in this effort.
We in America now intend to take additional steps, as many of our
allies have already done, toward realizing this same goal. The
chairmen and other leaders of the national Republican and Democratic
Party organizations are initiating a study with the bipartisan
American political foundation to determine how the United States can
best contribute as a nation to the global campaign for democracy now
gathering force. They will have the cooperation of congressional
leaders of both parties, along with representatives of business,
labour, and other major institutions in our society. I look forward
to receiving their recommendations and to working with these
institutions and the Congress in the common task of strengthening
democracy throughout the world.
It is time that we committed ourselves as a nation - in both the
public and private sectors - to assisting democratic development.
We plan to consult with leaders of other nations as well. There is a
proposal before the Council of Europe to invite parliamentarians
from democratic countries to a meeting next year in Strasbourg. That
prestigious gathering could consider ways to help democratic
political movements.
This November in Washington there will take place an international
meeting on free elections. And next spring there will be a
conference of world authorities on constitutionalism and self-goverment
hosted by the Chief Justice of the United States. Authorities from a
number of developing and developed countries - judges, philosophers,
and politicians with practical experience - have agreed to explore
how to turn principle into practice and further the rule of law.
At the same time, we invite the Soviet Union to consider with us how
the competition of ideas and values - which it is committed to
support - can be conducted on a peaceful and reciprocal basis. For
example, I am prepared to offer President Brezhnev an opportunity to
speak to the American people on our television if he will allow me
the same opportunity with the Soviet people. We also suggest that
panels of our newsmen periodically appear on each other's television
to discuss major events.
Now, I don't wish to sound overly optimistic, yet the Soviet Union
is not immune from the reality of what is going on in the world. It
has happened in the past - a small ruling elite either mistakenly
attempts to ease domestic unrest through greater repression and
foreign adventure, or it chooses a wiser course. It begins to allow
its people a voice in their own destiny. Even if this latter process
is not realized soon, I believe the renewed strength of the
democratic movement, complemented by a global campaign for freedom,
will strengthen the prospects for arms control and a world at peace.
I have discussed on other occasions, including my address on May
9th, the elements of Western policies toward the Soviet Union to
safeguard our interests and protect the peace. What I am describing
now is a plan and a hope for the long term - the march of freedom
and democracy which will leave Marxism-Leninism on the ash-heap of
history as it has left other tyrannies which stifle the freedom and
muzzle the self-expression of the people. And that's why we must
continue our efforts to strengthen NATO even as we move forward with
our Zero-Option initiative in the negotiations on intermediate-range
forces and our proposal for a one-third reduction in strategic
ballistic missile warheads.
Our military strength is a prerequisite to peace, but let it be
clear we maintain this strength in the hope it will never be used,
for the ultimate determinant in the struggle that's now going on in
the world will not be bombs and rockets, but a test of wills and
ideas, a trial of spiritual resolve, the values we hold, the beliefs
we cherish, the ideals to which we are dedicated.
The British people know that, given strong leadership, time and a
little bit of hope, the forces of good ultimately rally and triumph
over evil. Here among you is the cradle of self-government, the
Mother of Parliaments. Here is the enduring greatness of the British
contribution to mankind, the great civilized ideas: individual
liberty, representative government, and the rule of law under God.
I've often wondered about the shyness of some of us in the West
about standing for these ideals that have done so much to ease the
plight of man and the hardships of our imperfect world. This
reluctance to use those vast resources at our command reminds me of
the elderly lady whose home was bombed in the Blitz. As the rescuers
moved about, they found a bottle of brandy she'd stored behind the
staircase, which was all that was left standing. And since she was
barely conscious, one of the workers pulled the cork to give her a
taste of it. She came around immediately and said, "Here now - there
now, put it back. That's for emergencies."
Well, the emergency is upon us. Let us be shy no longer. Let us go
to our strength. Let us offer hope. Let us tell the world that a new
age is not only possible but probable.
During the dark days of the Second World War, when this island was
incandescent with courage, Winston Churchill exclaimed about
Britain's adversaries, "What kind of a people do they think we
are?'' Well, Britain's adversaries found out what extraordinary
people the British are. But all the democracies paid a terrible
price for allowing the dictators to underestimate us. We dare not
make that mistake again. So, let us ask ourselves, "What kind of
people do we think we are?" And let us answer, "Free people, worthy
of freedom and determined not only to remain so but to help others
gain their freedom as well."
Sir Winston led his people to great victory in war and then lost an
election just as the fruits of victory were about to be enjoyed. But
he left office honourably, and, as it turned out, temporarily,
knowing that the liberty of his people was more important than the
fate of any single leader. History recalls his greatness in ways no
dictator will ever know. And he left us a message of hope for the
future, as timely now as when he first uttered it, as opposition
leader in the Commons nearly 27 years ago, when he said, "When we
look back on all the perils through which we have passed and at the
mighty foes that we have laid low and all the dark and deadly
designs that we have frustrated, why should we fear for our future?
We have," he said, "come safely through the worst."
Well, the task I've set forth will long outlive our own generation.
But together, we too have come through the worst. Let us now begin a
major effort to secure the best - a crusade for freedom that will
engage the faith and fortitude of the next generation. For the sake
of peace and justice, let us move toward a world in which all people
are at last free to determine their own destiny.
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