Georgia On My Mind

Having commented only on negative news stories today, I want to wrap up the weekend with a story I’ve been sitting on for a while: the Republic of Georgia has erected a nice, if casual, monument to Ronald Reagan in Tbilisi:

Georgia’s pro-Western president has unveiled a monument to Ronald Reagan in the capital of the ex-Soviet state praising the 40th U.S. president for “destroying the Soviet Empire.”

Mikhail Saakashvili, whose government has for years had tense relations with Russia, also lambasted Moscow’s attempts to “restore” the Soviet Union by creating an economic bloc with other ex-Soviet nations.

He said Wednesday that the bronze statue that depicts Reagan sitting on a bench “deserves a place in the heart of Tbilisi, the heart of Georgia.”

This year is, of course, the centennial of President Reagan’s birth, and several Eastern European countries, who remember the role that Reagan played in liberating them from the Russian Empire, have honored him in recent months. This is the statue that Georgia’s president dedicated in Tbilisi:

So anyone can sit down next to RR and commune. The inscription on the bench is a Reagan quote: “Freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction.” A sobering reminder for us more, perhaps, than for the Georgians.

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