Hollywood Moguls created Ronald Reagan! They transformed a B- actor, whose career was going nowhere, into a real life California governor for two terms, and then, for two terms as the president of the United States.

Reagan's assets were his affability, good looks and a pleasant-sounding voice. Plus, he had a wife, one Nancy Davis Reagan. Now playing the part of the grieving widow of a supposed national hero, she is a conniving right winger, who makes Rasputin, the mad Russian monk, look like Mother Theresa.

So, it was only appropriate that the manipulating Hollywood creepers, who regularly feed America a steady diet of mindless violence in their demented flicks, would also script Reagan’s final act. Thanks also to a complicit national media, Reagan's political life, as a public snake, was given a happy, Hollywood-like ending, writ large: state funeral and all, along with his phony portrayal as a patriot, America-loving and Red Russia-whipping cowboy, riding off into a golden sunset. The problem is: It is all a big, damnable lie!

First, Reagan never really loved America! He was only capable of loving himself and that artificially contrived persona that his fat cat cronies in California perpetuated for him. He was also smart enough to take care that his governmental policies, such as: tax cuts, military spending, deregulation, supply side economics, etc., first served his cronies' grasping interests.

The real legacy of Reagan reads like this: More state and federal prisons; a national debt running into the trillions of dollars; a crazed crack- cocaine-addicted population that terrorizes our cites; an imperial America, with military bases circulating the globe; a fragile environment open to further exploitation; an educational system in shambles; and, a political philosophy that reeks of a criminally negligent indifference to human suffering.

As for Reagan causing the collapse of the former Soviet Union, that is the mother of all myths. George F. Kennan was the ex-U.S. ambassador to the Soviet Union, an expert on it, and the father of the theory of "containment" of the same country. He asserted that "the suggestion that any United States administration had the power to influence decisively the course of a tremendous domestic political upheaval in another great country on another side of the globe is simply childish." Kennan contends that the extreme militarization of American policy (like Reagan's) strengthened hard-liners in the Soviet Union. "Thus the general effect of Cold War extremism was to delay rather than hasten the great change that overtook the Soviet Union” (See, Bill Blum’s book, “Killing Hope” and also, globalresearch.ca).

Reagan wasn’t the great patriot he was falsely pictured as either. When WWII erupted, "The Gipper” spent three years in a U.S. Army uniform making 400 cheap, pro-war propaganda, training films in Culver City, CA. He never heard a shot fired in anger, unless it was on the set of one of those really forgettable, bad Western movies, that he appeared in. During his professional acting days, he made 53 films and one TV movie in LaLaland.

I will always remember Reagan as a vicious, labor-bashing president, who destroyed PATCO, in 1981, the Air Traffic Controllers Union. Reagan also acted as a lapdog for Britain’s then-Prime Minister, that insufferable Tory, Margaret Thatcher. When the ten Irish Hunger Strikers were dying in the north of Ireland, during the spring of 1981, over the moral and legal issue of their status as POWs, Reagan failed to lift a finger to help them. In fact, the next year, he posed for the cameras at England’s Windsor Castle, while he and Queen Elizabeth II paraded around on horseback on the castle’s manicured grounds. Reagan insisted it was his favorite photograph. He was later knighted “Sir” Ronald Reagan by the Brits' monarch.

“The Gipper” also authorized the notorious Iran-Contra Affair in the 80s, and then, repeatedly lied about it to the American people. As Gary Webb revealed in his shocking expose’, “Dark Alliance: the CIA, the Contras, and the Crack Cocaine Explosion,” that notorious scandal initiated, not only the sale of U.S. arms to Iran, via Zionist Israel and wacky Col. Ollie North, but also gun-running to the Contra thugs in and around Nicaragua. The Contras, in turn, used the profits from those arms sales to launch the crack cocaine plague onto the streets of urban America. All during the 80s, this Reagan-inspired-drug-induced nightmare brought massive misery, death and mayhem to the American people. For this “High Crime” alone, under the U.S. Constitution, Reagan deserved to be impeached by the Congress, and jailed.

Reagan’s list of evildoings goes on and on. He condoned the crime of Apartheid in South Africa during its most virulent days, the death squads in South and Central America, and the rape and murder of the Catholic nuns in El Salvador. His “voodoo economic” policies led to the failure, in this country, of a huge segment of the Savings and Loan Industry and the gutting of the Federal Communication Commission's “Fairness Doctrine." In Afghanistan, his efforts to drive the Russians out, resulted in a “blow back in the form of al Qaeda and extreme instability in Central Asia” (“Washington Post,” 06/10/04, Jim Hoagland’s “Keep Reagan's Record in Balance").

Finally, paraphrasing the immortal Dante Alighieri, if there is a hell, I’m sure there will be "a special place" in it for the likes of that pious fraud and clever hypocrite, political con artist and lackey for the Hollywood Moguls, and willing stooge for the Military-Industrial Complex, Ronald Reagan.

© William Hughes 2004

William Hughes is the author of “Saying ‘’No’ to the War Party” (IUniverse, Inc.). He can be reached at liamhughes-AT-mindspring.com.