Ronald Reagan was hailed as “a great American hero” Monday as his admirers unveiled a 10-foot-tall (3-meter-tall) statue of the former U.S. president near the American embassy in London.

Condoleezza Rice, national security adviser and secretary of state in President George W. Bush’s administration, joined British Foreign Secretary William Hague at the morning ceremony in Grosvenor Square.

“Statues bring us to face to face with our heroes long after they are gone,” Hague said “Ronald Reagan is without question a great American hero; one of America’s finest sons, and a giant of 20th-century history. You may be sure that the people of London will take this statue to their hearts.”

Hague also brought a message from former Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, Reagan’s staunch ally, whose frail health has made her public appearances very rare.

“She has asked me to say these words to you: Ronald Reagan was a great president and a great man—a true leader for our times,” Hague said.

“He held clear principles and acted upon them with purpose. Through his strength and his conviction he brought millions of people to freedom as the Iron Curtain finally came down.”

Read the whole thing here. Remember that one of Obama’s first actions as President was to return to Britain a bust of Winston Churchill that had long had an honored place in the White House. The symbolic rudeness of the act should have foreshadowed everything to come.

Maybe the Third World will help the hedge fund manager and currency manipulator do it.

The preeminent funder of the left in America wants the International Monetary Fund (IMF) to become a kind of globetrotting Bernard Madoff, offering low-interest loans to poor countries so they can invest in the doomed global warming industry.

George Soros, owner, Democratic Party

According to Soros, the loans would allow developing countries to “jump-start forestry, land use, and agricultural projects – areas that offer the greatest scope for reducing or mitigating carbon emissions, and that could produce substantial returns from carbon markets.”

Soros, who personally wants to invest $1 billion in “clean” technology, wants the IMF to help stimulate demand for the technology he plans to underwrite.

Specifically, Soros proposes using the IMF’s special drawing rights (SDRs) to make loans to developing countries. The SDRs, which he describes as “arcane financial instruments that essentially constitute additional foreign exchange” can be converted into one of four currencies and lent out at a low interest rate. The loans would be backed by the IMF’s gold reserves.

Of course carbon markets exist only because governments say they do. Governments artificially create demand for carbon indulgences. When the demand for carbon offsets dies off as market participants finally realize  anthropogenic global warming is a fraud, it’s going to get ugly.

As the Ponzi scheme finally unwinds, the governments of the developing world will be left holding the bag. When the bubble bursts, they’re going to get angry, maybe as angry as Albanians got when they were duped in pyramid schemes after the Iron Curtain collapsed.

The victims aren’t likely to be enthusiastic about markets either.

That day, November 9, 1989, will be remembered forever as one of the greatest in the history of human liberty.  Throughout the East Bloc, communism would begin to fall.  Millions would begin to experience political and social freedom for the first time. Families, separated for nearly 30 years would be reunited. And, throughout Eastern Europe, the fall of the Berlin Wall would create an opportunity to expose communism’s violent and merciless legacy.

In the United States, though, the anniversary will pass with barely a mention.  With a few noteworthy exceptions (see here and here), the American media has treated the event as an opportunity to praise Mikhail Gorbachev, condemn the West, and lament the coming of crony capitalism in Russia.

Not wanting to let the opportunity pass, some of my colleagues at the Competitive Enterprise Institute have produced a short video commemorating the fall of the Berlin Wall .

The fight for freedom is not over, of course.  There remain in the world such tyrannies as China, North Korea, Cuba, Venezuela, and far too many others.  Let us not forget this singular event, nor forget that the price of liberty is eternal vigilance.

After claiming approximately 100 million victims in the 20th century,communism was dismissed to the ash heap of history. But those who suffered under its boot heel have largely been confined to the history books when not forgotten altogether.

Author and historian Lee Edwards set out to correct this oversight with the creation of the Victims of Communism memorial and online museum, dedicated to those who perished because of Communist regimes between 1917 and 1989.

Reason.tv spoke to Edwards about the importance of historical memory, plans for a forthcoming bricks-and-mortar museum in Washington, DC, and the paintings of Ukrainian gulag survivor Nikolai Gettman, currently on display at the Heritage Foundation, where Edwards is a “Distinguished Fellow in Conservative Thought.”

Produced by Meredith Bragg and Michael C. Moynihan.

Interview by Moynihan. Shot and edited by Bragg. Approximately 4 minutes.

The guard’s flight to freedom should inspire us. In the comments, tell us where you were on this day in 1989. Commit to remind at least one person of today’s anniversary. We don’t expect Big Media to note the date.

By contrast, consider the accomplishment of Ronald Reagan who, last I checked, did not receive the Nobel Peace Prize.  According to Margaret Thatcher, Reagan won the Cold War “without firing a shot.”   In the words of Henry Kissinger, it was “the most stunning diplomatic feat of the modern era.”  In the wake of that victory, millions upon millions of people were set free – and, as history has shown, a free people are far more likely to be a peaceful people.

So why didn’t Reagan get the Prize?  The answer is simple, the political Left, including the Nobel committee, didn’t like the way Reagan went about setting people free.   Reagan, we well remember, installed missiles in Europe.  He did so because he believed what Thomas Jefferson told us long ago:  “Whatever enables us to go to war, secures our peace.”  Reagan, in time, would modernize Jefferson’s wisdom by advocating “peace through strength.”

The Left, to be sure, did not and does not believe in that.  Indeed, at the time, former Vice President Walter Mondale stated that “Four years of Ronald Reagan has made this world more dangerous.  Four more will take us to the brink.”  It turns out that Mondale was wrong.  Rather than danger, Reagan brought millions to the brink of freedom because shortly after the Reagan Presidency, the Berlin Wall fell.

The Left, during Reagan’s time, was similarly distressed by Reagan’s designation of the Soviet Union as an “Evil Empire.”  After all, what Hope can there be in such language?  The Soviet dissident, Natan Sharansky, stuck in a Soviet Gulag had some idea. According to Sharansky:

In 1983, I was confined to an 8-by-10-foot prison cell on the border of Siberia. My Soviet jailers gave me the privilege of reading the latest copy of Pravda. Splashed across the front page was a condemnation of President Ronald Reagan for having the temerity to call the Soviet Union an “evil empire.” By tapping on walls and talking through toilets, word of Reagan’s “provocation” quickly spread throughout the prison. We dissidents were ecstatic. Finally, the leader of the free world had spoken the truth — a truth that burned inside the heart of each and every one of us.

Reagan may have confused names and dates, but his moral compass was always good. Today’s leaders, in contrast, may know their facts and figures, but are often woefully confused about what should be the simplest distinctions between freedom and tyranny, democrats and terrorists.

The legacy of Reagan will surely endure. Armed with moral clarity, a deep faith in freedom, and the courage to follow his convictions, he was instrumental in helping the West win the Cold War and hundreds of millions of people behind the Iron Curtain win their freedom.

Contrast that, if you will, with Nobel Prize winner, Barrack Obama who bowed before a foreign dictator, withdrew missile deployments, and, in the face of an obviously rigged Iranian election designed to crush the peaceful aspirations of Iranians seeking Liberty, stated that “It’s not productive, given the history of U.S.-Iranian relations, to be seen as meddling … in Iranian elections.”  

In light of that, ask yourself whose foreign policy has been more productive?  Ask the millions of now free Eastern Europeans who was more Noble.  I am quite certain they prize their freedom, as would Ronald Reagan, far more than Obama’s false prize.