WASHINGTON, D.C. – Congressman Thaddeus McCotter (R-MI-11), House Republican Policy Chairman, recently spoke on the House floor calling for President Bush to boycott the Beijing Olympic games in communist China. The video and text of McCotter’s remarks are below:
Click here to play video
“Mr. Speaker, one of our greatest Presidents was Harry Truman. And one of the reasons President Truman was held in such high regard by people, including my own father, was that he had the courage to go against conventional wisdom, especially in the area of foreign relations.
“It was President Truman who had the moral courage to tell the American people that our World War II ally the Soviet Union was no longer our friend and had become a threat to the very liberty that our people had helped advance throughout the course of that conflict. This was not a message that the American people were particularly expecting. In fact, there were many who decried President Truman's analysis at the time. One of them was George F. Kennan, who is, unfortunately, often remembered as the father of the containment policy.
“In fact, when faced with the rise of the Soviet Union as a strategic threat and rival model of governance, it was Mr. Kennan's position that the Soviet Union could be managed, that we should constructively engage them, that their ideology meant nothing to them, and that, in fact, they were but a different variation of the traditional Czarist order within Russia. And, besides, Mr. Kennan concluded, what did it matter? Eventually the two systems of communism and our free Republic's democratic system would merge into one.
“President Truman was not as educated as Mr. Kennan. He was not as sophisticated as Mr. Kennan. And President Truman took the Soviets at their word that they were in fact communists. He took them at their word that they meant they were going to put in practice their intrinsically evil ideology. And Mr. Truman dissented from Mr. Kennan and said that the fundamental goal of the United States foreign policy to defeat the intrinsic evil of communism will be the advancement of liberty throughout our world where and when we can achieve it.
“Recently I came across a picture that I had ordered from a friend of mine in the District, Mr. Doug Brown. It was from one of Mr. Truman's return trips to St. Louis. He was meeting a gentleman from his old World War I Artillery Battery. And a picture that struck me the most was this: The MC of the event that night for President Truman in Missouri was an entertainer named Ronald Reagan. And in that crystalline moment, it was clear for me to see the link in the Cold War's victory between the foundation President Truman courageously laid and the way that President Reagan courageously won it ultimately.
“What we see today now is a repeat of history where we have two paths we can take. We can take the path of Mr. Kennan and the detente crowd of the Kissingerites and others that says we can manage the rise of Communist China, that we can engage them and barter with them and engage in structural diplomacy, all the while the oppression of their own people's God-given rights to rights to life, liberty, and dignity are repressed, while Tibet suffers under their yoke, while the Burmese and Sudanese regimes are propped up, and while they continue their stealth assaults on our national security with sleeper cells, and I could go on. Or we who profess to be the heirs of Ronald Reagan, especially within the Republican Party, can follow the path of President Truman and understand that you cannot barter with butchers. You cannot constructively manage evil nor engage it. But what you can do is unleash the liberty of people yearning to breathe free where and when you can.
“The reason I bring this up is not merely the Beijing Olympics. I'm on record as opposing our President's attendance at the games. I believe it would be a betrayal of our free Republic's commitment to liberty. But I was struck by a statement in this regard by our current Secretary of State, ironically enough herself a Sovietologist. I will not make the joke that a Sovietologist is often considered diplomacy's equivalent of a Latin teacher for this has relevance. She said, ``It is important for the Chinese people to see that the United States supports their emergence onto the world's stage.''
“I fundamentally differ with that assessment. I remain a Reaganite. I remain my Truman Democratic father's son. The United States, and my party in particular, exists to put communism in the ash can of history, not to usher communism onto the world's stage. If my party, as it has strayed from principle in the past, does not understand the emancipation imperative that runs through Abraham Lincoln to Ronald Reagan and to today, we are in a sad state. I trust we wake up while there is still time.”
###