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From: notes@ucbcad.UUCP
Newsgroups: net.flame
Subject: Re: Rights to invade: know thine enemy - (nf)
Message-ID: <830@ucbcad.UUCP>
Date: Fri, 25-Nov-83 01:01:54 EST
Article-I.D.: ucbcad.830
Posted: Fri Nov 25 01:01:54 1983
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#R:dciem:-47600:ucbesvax:2900036:000:5229
ucbesvax!turner    Nov 18 16:37:00 1983

Re: Martin Taylor's response to punklet@rlgvax

I think he was using CCCP to stand for Central Committee of the
Communist Party.  I prepared a counterflame, but just haven't
bothered to send it.  Why bother?  All this has been gone through
before, ad nauseum.

Oh, but what the hell--what is net.flame for, anyway?  Here goes:
-----------------------------------------------------------------
Re: Flames from some plunkett-person:

    There were three good reasons to invade Grenada.  Each of them are
    sufficient: (1) At the request of concerned neighbors, (2) To protect
    the lives of Americans, (3) To discourage Communism there and elsewhere.

Do you truly regard a request from "concerned [implicitly, allied] neighbors"
as a sufficient condition?  Thanks for putting our foreign policy in the
hands of a few small islands with pathetic literacy rates.  "Helping our
friends" is all very well, but where does this end?

With regard to the matter of protecting the lives of Americans, you say,
sarcastically "Perhaps we should have waited, and negotiated their
evacuation like President Carter did in his day."  As a matter of fact,
the administration off-handedly admits to having rejected invitations
on the part the coup leaders to arrange safe passage for the students.
This offer was apparently unconditional--so your comparison to the
Iranian hostage situation doesn't bear much scrutiny.

    The third reason, of course, is the most persuasive to those who have
    an intuitive grasp of "freedom".  Freedom in the sense that many of
    those under the domination of the Central Committee of the Communist
    Party hanker for.

Let's try that last sentence again--grammar is apparently not your strong
point.  MY intuitive sense of freedom has little to do with what the
USSR's Communist Party Central Committee does or says.

In your "General Comment To The Critics", you speak of any conclusions
"surprisingly similar to the conventional wisdom at the Kremlin" as
being equivalent to "hatred of the USA".  In blunter terms, I hate the
USA because there are some incidental points of agreement between my
view of these events and (say) Yuri Andropov's.  Should I refrain from
voicing my opinions for fear of advancing the foreign policy goals of
the Soviet Union?  Even if it turns out that these opinions are fact?
Have you ever heard of the "Zhdanov Doctrine"?  Why should it apply in
a supposedly free country?

On to total non-sequiturs:

    Does it worry you that you sound like a Kremlin bureaucrat when you
    liken Grenada with Afghanistan, when you recommend subscribing to a
    Socialist rag, when you defame the institutions of the USA?  To resist
    that question is to reveal an embarassing ignorance about the ruling
    class of the USSR: take the time and discover how at home you feel with
    their views on the World--listen to your echo as you read Pravda.

Any Kremlin bureaucrat who openly compared Grenada and Afghanistan would
be on a one-way trip to a labor camp--for slandering the Soviet Union.
The "Socialist rags" that I have recently recommended are, by the way,
uniformly anti-Soviet when it comes to the foreign policy and human
rights situations in the USSR.  No Kremlin bureaucrat would be caught
dead reading them.  As for hearing my echo when I read Pravda, I happen
to hear a voice which, in tone, sounds a good bit more like yours.
"Embarassing ignorance," indeed.  I don't "resist" these questions--they
are too much fun to refute.

    And then be bold: Educate yourself as to their mission in life.
    Believe them when the CCCP says "world domination", because they
    say it with evangelical enthusiasm, and they have demonstrated an
    iterative process to accomplish the goal.

I believe the ideological catch-phrase is "world revolution".  They may
*think* "world domination", but you don't hear them saying it.  No, the
ones who hear this are doing a little ideological phrase-mapping of
their own.  Exactly what this "demonstrated" "iterative process" is,
I'm not sure.  They seem to have had their share of set-backs.  How about
enumerating some of these, just to prove to us that you know a little
bit of history.  (Oops, sorry--you can't do that--it's ideologically
inconvenient, since any refutation of your rightist arguments might help
the Kremlin Ruling Class.)

    It doesn't require you change your registration to Republican to realize
    the only opposition to the Soviet way of life is the American.  And your
    right of vocal complaint and bitterness toward your own Government is
    obtained from that opposition.  So kindly be aware of this opposition and
    note well who bought the rope you are hanging yourself with.

Us vs. Them.  How tidy.  What about ways of life apart from Soviet and
American?  Are you not also confusing "ways of life" with "regimes"?

Your little sermon is stale.  Right-wing calls for leftist self-
censorship are so often accompanied by distortions and lies that they
hard to see as anything but a plea for the freedom of rightists to distort
and lie unhampered by controversy and contradiction--or even by the truth.
---
Michael Turner (ucbvax!ucbesvax.turner)
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