Another Letter To America…

By Donald “Braveheart” Stewart

As I sit in my Kailyard I often wonder about the future.

Dear America,

Sorry, but I shall try to be quick. I didn’t think I would write so frequently but sometimes you find yourself thinking about something and then feeling you must share it.
And this is quite important. In fact, it is highly necessary.

And this is to the Republican Party. You, know, the MAGA wing.

Now, it is perhaps little known that at one point I was a fully paid-up member of the Margaret Thatcher fan club. I was a 1980’s British libertarian. I was enthusiastic and active. And it is this fact that saw people like me equally enthusiastic about the emergence within the Republican Party of one Ronald Reagan. He seemed like the kind of President that matched the Prime Minister we had. It was, perhaps a little tough for us to take that he had been an actor beforehand, and it appeared a bit Hollywood for the dull reserved Brits to take but, he seemed like a decent chap. And a sound one.

Being “sound” was a thing. It meant that you were one of the people who were on message and believed in the right-wing agenda that was sweeping the world. We were taking the Cold War right to the commies. Never mind all that nonsense of trying to subvert the reds under the bed with committees and that type of nonsense, this was an all out attack on the Soviets, the KGB, China and the Eastern Bloc behind the Iron Curtain.

It was not long before people behind that curtain were doing more than peeking through to see what freedom looked like. As well as having the Reagans in the White House, by 1985, we had Mikhail Gorbachev in the Kremlin. Thatcher called him “a man I could do business with.” We were delighted. We knew about the oppression in communism, of the Gulags and the dissidents being tortured and murdered. The Eastern bloc of communist states, from the Soviets and Poland, to Hungary, Romania, Yugoslavia and Albania were legendary in our politics as representing oppression and danger to anyone’s freedom.

We were against them. Reagan was militantly against them.

He called the Soviet Union an evil empire. It was. The Soviets called this lunatic anticommunism. They were half right.

The greatest symbol of the Soviet era was the KGB. The secret service, which was tasked, like the Gestapo before them in Nazi Germany, to keep their people in check. They were in charge at home, and abroad, of spreading the ethos of communist thinking and working to the glory of the Soviet Empire. Feared, loathed, admired and copied by other communist states, they were one of the fiercest symbols of a desperate ethos and creed that came tumbling down by the end of that decade of change – the 1980’s.

But the seeds of change began in 1981, when in Poland, a trade union – Solidarnosc – stood up to the communist government and sowed the seeds of its eventual dissolution. But the KGB were a grouping that still installed fear in their citizens and were filled with zealots, including a certain Vladimir Putin.

The KGB were highly skilled in rumor and disinformation, often stopping at nothing to win their argument and defeat their enemy. Some might say that former KGB members are still engaged in doing precisely that. And so, as I was thinking the other day about y’all, I came to wonder what Ronald Reagan would think of this cozying up to Putin, a former KGB officer by his party.
The very idea that Russia, in any form, would be the country most quoted by MAGA zealots as one to admire, would be unthinkable to him.

On top of that, the idea that any country fighting for freedom would be abandoned by America whilst trying to stave off an aggressor using lies and falsehoods to beat the democratic opposition into defeat would be anathema to him.

The idea that military spending should be cut to allow other nations to build an arsenal likely to threaten your allies would be seen as a threat to the ideals of America – of freedom and liberty – and a threat to be faced and forced down: anything less would not even be whispered in his presence.

At this and many other things Ronald Reagan is not turning in his grave. He is spinning like an over-active windmill who is blowing a cold wind over the Republican Party. The problem is that there are too many immune to the arctic blast because they are happy to wear the Russian furry hats to keep off the chill.

It’s a worry that the other Presidential candidate MS. Harris noted when in the debate she noted that if Trump were president, “Putin would be sitting in Kyiv right now” adding that that this is why “our NATO allies are so thankful” (and we are) that he is not, and noting, “how quickly you would give up for the sake of favor and what you think is a friendship with what is known to be a dictator who would eat you for lunch.” (and he would)

Freedom has an enemy. It’s not just called Putin. And it is not just called MAGA nor just called Trump.

It is called complacency.

And if you do not vote, then you are ready to give up the hard-won freedoms of centuries which is at stake and was cherished by people you admired.
Whatcha gonna do about it?

Aye Yours,
Donald C Stewart

A view from the new Kailyard or, how you look over there, from over here…

(Kailyard n. a cabbage patch, often attached to a school of writing – the Kailyard School – a genre of overly sentimental and sweet Scottish literature from the late 19th century where sentimental and nostalgic tales are told in escapist tales of fantasy, but here we seek to reverse it by making the Kailyard Observations of effective invective comment from that looks not to return to the past but to launch us into a better future by the one Donald worth believing…)

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