Page 22 - SpringBoard_CloseReading_Workshop_Grade7_Flipbook

From “Address to Members of the British Parliament” by President Ronald Reagan
1 We have not inherited an easy world. If developments like the Industrial Revolution, which began here in England, and the gifts of science and technology have made life much easier for us, they have also made it more dangerous. There are threats now to our freedom, indeed to our very existence, that other generations could never even have imagined.
2 There is first the threat of global war. No President, no Congress, no Prime Minister, no Parliament can spend a day entirely free of this threat. And I don’t have to tell you that in today’s world the existence of nuclear weapons could mean, if not the extinction of mankind, then surely the end of civilization as we know it.
3 At the same time there is a threat posed to human freedom by the enormous power of the modern state. History teaches the dangers of government that overreaches — political control taking precedence over free economic growth, secret police, mindless bureaucracy, all combining to stifle individual excellence and personal freedom.
4 Now, I’m aware that among us here and throughout Europe there is legitimate disagreement over the extent to which the public sector should play a role in a
nation’s economy and life. But on one point all of us are united — our abhorrence of dictatorship in all its forms, but most particularly totalitarianism and the terrible inhumanities it has caused in our time — the great purge, Auschwitz and Dachau, the Gulag, and Cambodia.
5 Historians looking back at our time will note the consistent restraint and peaceful intentions of the West. They will note that it was the democracies who refused to use the threat of their nuclear monopoly in the forties and early fifties for territorial or imperial gain. Had that nuclear monopoly been in the hands of the Communist world, the map of Europe — indeed, the world — would look very different today.
6 The decay of the Soviet experiment should come as no surprise to us. Wherever the comparisons have been made between free and closed societies — West Germany and East Germany, Austria and Czechoslovakia, Malaysia and Vietnam — it is the democratic
key ideas and deTails
What is Reagan’s specific claim about the modern world? What two aspects of this claim does Reagan want to emphasize?
key ideas and deTails
What counterclaim does Reagan acknowledge that he is “aware of”? How does he respond to this disagreement?
key ideas and deTails
How is Reagan’s attitude toward the “Communist world” different than
his attitude toward “the West”? Which words and descriptions reveal this difference in tone?
Close Reading Workshop 2 • Close Reading of Argumentative Nonfiction Texts 21
© 2014 College Board. All rights reserved.