General Election 2010

Reagan's responsibility, for example, for the horrors inflicted upon Latin America is every bit as great and direct as any Soviet leader's responsibility for what happened in Poland or Hungary or Czechoslovakia. The difference is those Soviet leaders are now regarded, rightly, as criminals and Reagan has an airport named after him.

Could it be that we are less aware of these things because we are European - do they learn more about them in America? All of the politics of that time, so much of which we are still suffering the consequences of, did get subsumed by the cold war bigger picture (which is understandable as they were all part of it in some way)

Reagan has an airport named after him in America. At the moment. Stalin, Lenin, Marx etc had whole cities named after them once. Give it time... :-)

To be fair to Reagan he did, apparently out of personal conviction, instigate the reduction in nuclear weapons with the Soviet Union. I'm not going to credit him with ending the cold war as the Americans like to, cos I'm pretty sure nobody ever intended that to happen!