]]]]]]]]]]       WHOM GORBACHEV HAS OFFENDED         [[[[[[[[[[[[[[[[[ 
                                                             (6/19/88)
[The following quotes and extracts are taken from "Beat the Devil" by 
Alexander Cockburn in THE NATION of 6/4/88. As one who has read the 
entire article, and knows both THE NATION and Mr Cockburn's weekly 
column in the Wall Street Journal (yes, they give space to him!), 
I assure Freemen that this is not a spoof. Cockburn is quite straight-
faced about it: Gorbachev is not Communistic enough for him.]
     What would Lenin have made of something called the American Com-
mittee on US-Soviet Relations, whose "bilateral" study was brought 
into the world through the offices of the P.R. firm of Ogilvy and 
Mather? ...
     But far more disturbing is the fact that Arbatov and the other 
Soviet detenteniks had no visible misgivings in signing on to the 
following conclusion:
     [There follows the draft of a Soviet-US study's recommendation 
not to intervene with military force in the Third World, not to intro-
duce proxy forces, not to supply weapons, and to limit the number of 
military advisers.]
     Under such rules of conduct invaluable Soviet support for the 
Angolan revolution would be regarded as illegitimate, as probably 
would similar Soviet efforts to defend the revolutions in Vietnam and 
Nicaragua...
     A gloating story in the WASHINGTON TIMES on May 19 announced that 
the head of Moscow's Institute for Socialist World Economics, a fellow 
named V. Dashichev, has blamed the crisis in US-Soviet relations on 
the invasion of Afghanistan, the creation of Soviet client states, and 
on the Soviet Military build-up.
     Dashichev was pissing on "the miscalculations and incompetent 
approach of the Brezhnev leadership," not a risky venture these days 
in Moscow. So much for Leonid, who did after all preside over the 
consolidation of the Soviet union as a modern industrial state and, 
relatively speaking, a golden age for the Soviet working class, aside 
from sponsoring the exemplary acts of proletarian internationalism 
[this was the expression used to justify such acts as the invasion of 
Czechoslovakia, P.B.] of the sort now rotted by Dashichev and another 
Gorby man, Y. Primakov, quoted by the SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE for May 
11 as saying "The exclusion of the export of the revolution is an 
imperative in the nuclear century." What about support of revolution?
     I'm all for GLASNOST and PERESTROIKA -- at least as articulated 
to me in Moscow last November by B. Kagarlitsky -- but on the interna-
tional side Gorby's alleged intimates and advisers, Arbatov and Bur-
latsky and the others, are becoming singularly unimpressive, mostly 
because they, like their boss, seem resolved to see the world in bi-
polar terms, with the ancillary goal of saying or doing absolutely 
nothing to upset the Atlantic powers, or to deny themselves an hono-
rary doctorate at Tufts some time in the near future.
     Is this where it is all going to end, the heritage of October, 
the tradition of Tukhachevski and Dimitrov, with bilateral commissions 
adorned by a former chief of the CIA and the head of Novosti, jointly 
denouncing "adventurism"? 
     It's enough to make one sympathize with another Leonid, one of 
the Russians withdrawing from Afghanistan, quoted by the LOS ANGELES 
TIMES for May 16 as saying, "I'm really afraid that the Afghans will 
start to fight even more fiercely among themselves now and that the 
bloodshed will be tremendous... Mine may not be a popular opinion back 
in Moscow, but I think we did a great deal here for the Afghan peo-
ple... They have come to depend on us as they build socialism, and now 
we are getting out, largely for our own reasons, and leaving them to 
face a situation even more difficult and complex than in 1979. Is that 
fair?"

                         *   *   *

Return to the ground floor of this tower
Return to the Main Courtyard
Return to Fort Freedom's home page