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Path: utzoo!watmath!water!watcgl!jchapman
From: jchapman@watcgl.UUCP (john chapman)
Newsgroups: can.politics
Subject: Re: Canadian participation in Star Wars.
Message-ID: <2010@watcgl.UUCP>
Date: Mon, 10-Jun-85 11:18:01 EDT
Article-I.D.: watcgl.2010
Posted: Mon Jun 10 11:18:01 1985
Date-Received: Tue, 11-Jun-85 02:30:42 EDT
References: <893@mnetor.UUCP> <5642@utzoo.UUCP> <896@mnetor.UUCP> <5685@utzoo.UUCP>
Organization: U of Waterloo, Ontario
Lines: 60

Two more points.  Sorry to be so verbose.

> > ...  Do the majority of people
> >  in, say, North America really have a "better dead than red" attitude?
> >  Personally I think most people would rather risk soviet domination
> >  (which, as the original message points out, would necessarily be of
> >   a temporary nature) than risk [the nasty consequences of nuclear war.]

   I don't know if you changed my original wording to the paraphrase
   above simple on the grounds of brevity (which I sympathize with)
   or because you don't like emotionally loaded sentences.  In case
   it was the latter I have a comment.  Normally I prefer that both
   discussions and arguments be conducted without undue emotionalism.
   The key word here is undue.  This is a very nasty thing we are
   talking about here and I think that it should be described in
   suitable terms so that people are constantly, inescapably, nauseatingly
   (literally) reminded of the consequences of the actions under
   discussion.  Human beings have an amazing ability to commit quite
   disgusting acts of brutality and violence providing they are able
   to distance themselves from it in some way; "The subject exhibited
   a negative response to the stimulae" rather than "we hurt it and
   it didn't like it" or "You [violent act goes here] and [authority
   figure goes here] will take complete responsibility". Various
   studies have confirmed this.  Newspeak phrases like "build-down"
   are particualrily offensive to me.  Perhaps if everytime someone
   spoke or thought about nuclear war they had to try and visualize
   it there wouldn't be such support war the arms race.


> >  ...  I also think there would
> >  be few people in the soviet union who would be willing to make this
> >  trade.   
> 
> It all depends on the size of the risk; not all risks are equivalent.
> As witness the lack of popular revolt against the current situation (the
> anti-nuclear marchers are numerically insignificant against the population
> of the nations involved), most people are willing to take a (perceived)
> small risk of nuclear war to avoid a (perceived) large risk of Soviet
> domination.  This is a reasonable approach, since life inside the Soviet
> Union and its satellites is not a lot of fun.  Even people who have never
> known anything else sometimes find Soviet life intolerable to the point of
> risking the near certainty of harsh punishment for rebellion, as witness
> the Novocherkassk [sp?] incident and others.  Avoiding this is worthwhile.
> 
> On the other hand, "better dead than red" is a political slogan rather than
> something most people really agree with all the way.  Most people, most
> of the time, would rather be live cowards than dead heroes -- if those
> are *really* the only choices.  Most people don't really think that the
> current situation is that simple; they would prefer to face *neither*
> Soviet rule nor nuclear war.
> 
> As for the temporary nature of Soviet domination, when "temporary" is
> defined as centuries, it's permanent as far as most folks are concerned.
> -- 
> 				Henry Spencer @ U of Toronto Zoology
> 				{allegra,ihnp4,linus,decvax}!utzoo!henry

 No one has responded to my other point: what gives the USSR and the US
 the right to take this risk with the lives of the other few billion
 inhabitants of the planet??