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From: danc@tekecs.UUCP (Daniel Cobb)
Newsgroups: net.politics
Subject: Re: Dave Holt Good and Bad
Message-ID: <1996@tekecs.UUCP>
Date: Wed, 31-Aug-83 20:03:51 EDT
Article-I.D.: tekecs.1996
Posted: Wed Aug 31 20:03:51 1983
Date-Received: Thu, 1-Sep-83 19:34:25 EDT
Lines: 44

I'm being sucked into this net again.  

Bravo, David for an interesting story/comment on life in the 
Soviet Union.  Now ready yourself for the barrage of disagreement
and personnal attack that will come/is coming from contributors to 
this net who throw diplomacy, manners, and respect to the wind.
By the way, the validity of your opinion is detracted from by your 
spelling errors, and they will attack that too.  I dont completely 
agree with all of your observations, they seem to be somewhat shallow,
but I think they are generally on track. I am not a self-proclaimed 
authority.

The obvious reason that we support Marcos, even though he is 
obviously corrupt as hell and rapidly losing popularity with 
his own people, is that the US Navy has a mammoth base there that
we simply cannot afford to lose.  The flip side of that coin is that
the longer we support Marcos, the more likely we are to lose those bases
when Marcos is forced out of power by revolution or a coup.   

To immediately withdraw our support of Marcos would lead almost 
immediately to the loss of our Naval facilities there.  It seems to 
me we should find a way to convince him that it is in his interests 
to improve significantly the human rights record in his country and 
address the urgent problems associated the high percentage of 
the population that is living in abject poverty, because it is there
that the communists/Marxists find the fuel to feed their revolution 
(TAKEOVER), as they have already. 

Someone on the net responded to David by saying that perhaps the 
hardship his friend had faced in the Soviet Union was because he 
was a Jew, and perceived to be an "enemy of the State" as he put it.   
I ask what the hell difference does that make ??? Would that justify 
the actions of the Soviet govenment?  To justify the actions of the '
Soviet Government in this way validates racism, forced labor camps,
and murder as legitimate government policy. 

Another contributor criticized David's characterization of the takeover
of Angola.  Cubans that were armed by the Soviets perpetrated the Marxist 
takeover of Angola.  This was not a peoples revolution, and it represents 
a loss for the people of that country. To claim otherwise is to 
promote gross distortion. So whats new. 

And now I'll run for cover as the nova of emotional liberalism reponds 
to this opinion and floods the net.