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From: eich@uiuccsb.UUCP
Newsgroups: net.politics
Subject: Re: IS THIS WHAT WE'VE BEEN WAITING FOR - (nf)
Message-ID: <2704@uiucdcs.UUCP>
Date: Sun, 4-Sep-83 22:32:49 EDT
Article-I.D.: uiucdcs.2704
Posted: Sun Sep  4 22:32:49 1983
Date-Received: Thu, 8-Sep-83 21:01:37 EDT
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#R:sb1:-13000:uiuccsb:11000001:000:1927
uiuccsb!eich    Sep  4 06:17:00 1983


But the problem is that if we aver that, sharing a planet with the Russians, we
should therefore continue to talk to them, we soon find that little gets done.
This is depressing (how many Max Kampelmanns are there out there--willing to
spend weeks in Madrid trying to hold the line on the Helsinki accords when
the Sovietskis are ready to say Right, then we're agreed, everything's fine).

So to avoid depression we define detente in soothing terms, while Brezhnev 
and his theoreticians and strategists quite openly define it in aggresive
terms.  We fancy a fresh hope whenever one of the senescent brethren in
the Kremlin finally croaks (A New Generation of Soviet Leaders!  Think of
it, a Communist Camelot!).  We (some of us) hold a mirror up when looking
east (American anthropologist and eight-year-old Samantha Smith: "They're
almost...just...like us!").  Yuri Andropov, for a brief while, was rumored
to be a liberal (you know how many liberals head totalitarian state intel-
ligence committees...).

And then... and then... like Jimmy Carter after Afghanistan we in the west
are forced by circumstance to face the fact that the USSR is, while not the 
focus of evil, the principal heavy on the stage.

But pish-tosh!  250 civilians?  Peanuts!!  Why aren't we constantly benumbed,
by Labor camp statistics and histories, by Poland, by Yellow Rain?  Why aren't
there big coffee-table books like the ones on the Holocaust devoted to the
victims of the Soviet state?  The ideological engines that propelled fascism
into the Second World War are dead; why don't we face the fact that World
War III is being waged right now, against a quite vital, peculiarly virulent
ideology [because it's unfashionable?].

All this shall pass, I'm afraid, and we shall resume the hopeful, struthian
policy that, each time we re-inaugurate it, gets us in deeper.  The problem
is when we get in too deep, there will be fighting.

					-be