"A TIME FOR CHOOSING " -Ronald Reagan

Emperor2

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I was listening to this speech the other day and was thinking about how much this means today. An amazing speech, his best ever. Love that whole, "There is a price we will not pay! There is a point beyond which they must not advance!" he does it perfect.

Freedom has never been so fragile, so close to slipping from our grasp. Those who would trade our freedom for the soup kitchen of the welfare state have told us that they have a utopian solution of peace without victory. They call their policy "accommodation." And they say if we only avoid any direct confrontation with the enemy, he will forget his evil ways and learn to love us. All who oppose them are indicted as warmongers. They say we offer simple answers to complex problems. Well, perhaps there is a simple answer--not an easy answer--but simple.

If you and I have the courage to tell our elected officials that we want our national policy based upon what we know in our hearts is morally right. We cannot buy our security, our freedom from the threat of the bomb by committing an immorality so great as saying to a billion now in slavery behind the Iron Curtain, "Give up your dreams of freedom because to save our own skin, we are willing to make a deal with your slave masters." Alexander Hamilton said, "A nation which can prefer disgrace to danger is prepared for a master, and deserves one." Let's set the record straight. There is no argument over the choice between peace and war, but there is only one guaranteed way you can have peace--and you can have it in the next second--surrender.

Admittedly there is a risk in any course we follow other than this, but every lesson in history tells us that the greater risk lies in appeasement, and this is the specter our well-meaning liberal friends refuse to face--that their policy of accommodation is appeasement, and it gives no choice between peace and war, only between fight and surrender. If we continue to accommodate, continue to back and retreat, eventually we have to face the final demand--the ultimatum. And what then? When Nikita Khrushchev has told his people he knows what our answer will be? He has told them that we are retreating under the pressure of the Cold War, and someday when the time comes to deliver the ultimatum, our surrender will be voluntary because by that time we will have weakened from within spiritually, morally, and economically. He believes this because from our side he has heard voices pleading for "peace at any price" or "better Red than dead," or as one commentator put it, he would rather "live on his knees than die on his feet." And therein lies the road to war, because those voices don't speak for the rest of us. You and I know and do not believe that life is so dear and peace so sweet as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery. If nothing in life is worth dying for, when did this begin--just in the face of this enemy? Or should Moses have told the children of Israel to live in slavery under the pharaohs? Should Christ have refused the cross? Should the patriots at Concord Bridge have thrown down their guns and refused to fire the shot heard 'round the world? The martyrs of history were not fools, and our honored dead who gave their lives to stop the advance of the Nazis didn't die in vain. Where, then, is the road to peace? Well, it's a simple answer after all.

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.

Great Video:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WpcMIZrCT8E

The actual video is a little too anti-Islam religion for me, at least as far as I see it, but the Audio is spectacular.
 
What did he choose to do when our hostages in Iran were freed? What did he choose to do in response to the killing of our Marines in Lebanon?
 
Soldiers of the Southeast Front:

Since early this morning the German people are at war with the Belgrade Government of intrigue. We shall only lay down arms when this band of ruffians has been definitely and most emphatically eliminated, and the last Briton has left this part of the European Continent. These misled people realize that they must thank Britain for this situation, they must thank England, the greatest warmonger of all time.

The German people can enter into this new struggle with the inner satisfaction that its leaders have done everything to bring about a peaceful settlement.

We pray to God that He may lead our soldiers on the path and bless them as hitherto.

In accordance with the policy of letting others fight for her, as she did in the case of Poland, Britain again tried to involve Germany in the struggle in which Britain hoped that she would finish off the German people once and for all, to win the war, and if possible to destroy the entire German Army.

In a few weeks, long ago, the German soldiers on the Eastern Front swept aside Poland, the instrument of British policy. On April 9, 1940, Britain again attempted to reach its goal by a thrust on the German north flank, the thrust at Norway.

In an unforgettable struggle the German soldiers in Norway eliminated the British within a period of a few weeks.

What the world did not deem possible the German people have achieved. Again, only a few weeks later, Churchill thought the moment right to make a renewed thrust through the British Allies, France and Belgium, into the German region of the Ruhr. The victorious hour of our soldiers on the West Front began.

It is already war history how the German Armies defeated the legions of capitalism and plutocracy. After forty-five days this campaign in the West was equally and emphatically terminated.

Then Churchill concentrated the strength of his Empire against our ally, Italy, in Africa. Now the danger has also been banned from the African theater of the war through the co-operation of Italian and German units.

The new aim of the British warmongers now consists of the realization of a plan that they had already hatched at the outbreak of the war and only postponed because of the gigantic victories of the German Army. The memory of the landing of British troops at Salonika in the course of the first World War also caught little Greece in the spider web of British intrigue.

I have repeatedly warned of the attempt by the British to land troops in Southeastern Europe, and I have said that this constitutes a threat to the German Reich. Unfortunately this warning went unheeded by the Yugoslav nation. I have further tried, always with the same patience, to convince Yugoslav statesmen of the absolute necessity for their cooperation with the German Reich for restoration of lasting peace and order within Yugoslavia.

After long effort we finally succeeded in securing the cooperation of Yugoslavia by its adherence to the Tripartite Pact without having demanded anything whatsoever of the Yugoslav nation except that it take its part in the reconstruction of a new order in Europe.

At this point the criminal usurpers of the new Belgrade Government took the power of the State unto themselves, which is a result of being in the pay of Churchill and Britain. As in the case of Poland, this new Belgrade Government has mobilized decrepit and old people into their inner Cabinet. Under these circumstances I was forced immediately to recall the German national colony within Yugoslav territory.

Members and officers of the German Embassy, employees of our consulates in Yugoslavia were daily being subjected to the most humiliating attacks. The German schools, exactly as in Poland, were laid in ruins by bandits. Innumerable German nationals were kidnaped and attacked by Yugoslavs and some even were killed.

In addition, Yugoslavia for weeks has planned a general mobilization of its army in great secrecy. This is the answer to my eight-year-long effort to bring about closer co-operation and friendship with the Yugoslav people, a task that I have pursued most fastidiously.

When British divisions were landed in Greece, just as in World War days, the Serbs thought the time was ripe for taking advantage of the situation for new assassinations against Germany and her allies.

Soldiers of the Southeast Front: Now your zero hour has arrived. You will now take the interests of the German Reich under your protection as your comrades did a year ago in Norway and on the West Front. You will do just as well on the Southeast Front.

In doing this, your duty, you will not be less courageous than the men of those German divisions who in 1915, on the same Balkan soil, fought so victoriously. You will be humane only in those places where the enemy is humane toward you. Where the enemy confronts you with utter brutality you will beat them back with the same weapon.

The fight on Greek soil is not a battle against the Greek people, but against that archenemy, England, which is again trying to extend the war far into the Southeast Balkans, the same as he tried far in the north last year. For this reason, on this very spot in the Balkans, we shall fight shoulder to shoulder with our ally until the last Briton has found his Dunkerque in Greece.

If any Greeks support this British course, then those Greeks will fall at the same time as the British.

When the German soldier shall have proved himself, shall have proved that he is capable of beating the British in the Balkans, in the midst of snow and mountains, then also he will have proved that he can beat the British in the heat of the desert in Africa.

However, we will pursue no other ultimate aim than to win freedom for our German people and to secure a living space for the German family.

The prayers and thoughts, the very life of all Germans, are again in the heart of every German soldier.
 
Please tell me you aren't seriously comparing Ronald Reagan with Hitler. Although, I don't expect any better from someone that had a communist tyrant for their avatar.
 
It was clever, but in comparison, I was surprised how little Reagan mentioned nation names even to the point of only alluding to the USSR. (Also the US is a nation of ideals not race, open to nearly anyone (or should be imo))
 
Please tell me you aren't seriously comparing Ronald Reagan with Hitler. Although, I don't expect any better from someone that had a communist tyrant for their avatar.

Considering the fact that you find Leopold II a saint, I don't think you're the best authority on the matter of what makes a good leader.
 
I was listening to this speech the other day and was thinking about how much this means today.

How much does it mean today exactly? It is a good speech, I agree; but I don't see how it's relevant today.
 
it's a well delivered speech, but I don't think it has much substance to it. Really it's a meaningless strawman, because we weren't surrendering to anybody nor were we as a people being oppressed in 1980.

attack the Carter administration all you want, but I don't think we were all in danger of becoming enslaved.
 
it's a well delivered speech, but I don't think it has much substance to it. Really it's a meaningless strawman, because we weren't surrendering to anybody nor were we as a people being oppressed in 1980.

attack the Carter administration all you want, but I don't think we were all in danger of becoming enslaved.

The speech was from 1964.
 
it's a well delivered speech, but I don't think it has much substance to it. Really it's a meaningless strawman, because we weren't surrendering to anybody nor were we as a people being oppressed in 1980.

attack the Carter administration all you want, but I don't think we were all in danger of becoming enslaved.

The speech was given during the 1964 campaign; Reagan had not started his political career as yet, but endorsed Senator Goldwater for president. No doubt he was frustrated with Kennedy-Johnson's handling of the Bay of Pigs situation, the country had the Cuban Missile Crisis still relatively fresh in its memory, and Johnson would go on to greatly expand the welfare state.
 
My teacher's a Ronald Reagan nut...

I REALLY didn't need to see that speech again. :sleep:
 
My favorite Reagan lie was the one when he warned that Nicaragua was only two days from Brownsville, Texas, implying that the Nicaraguan army intended to attack the United States.
 
The speech was from 1964.

:lol: well silly me. I still think what i said about being a strawman stands. We weren't in any danger of enslavement, since Kennedy had successfully handled the cuban missile crisis a couple of years back
 
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