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From: khayo@sonia.cs.ucla.edu (Erazm J. Behr)
Newsgroups: comp.society.futures
Subject: Re: UUCP - USSR
Message-ID: <8751@shemp.UCLA.EDU>
Date: Tue, 20-Oct-87 21:36:16 EDT
Article-I.D.: shemp.8751
Posted: Tue Oct 20 21:36:16 1987
Date-Received: Fri, 23-Oct-87 01:21:05 EDT
Sender: root@CS.UCLA.EDU
Reply-To: khayo@MATH.UCLA.EDU (Erazm J. Behr)
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Summary: WHAT???!!!

In article <2052@encore.UUCP> fay@encore.UUCP (Peter Fay) writes:
(...)
>1. The U.S. State Dept. (and of course FBI, CIA) wants to prevent all
>contact possible between people of the U.S. and socialist countries. This
>contact seriously undermines publicity campaigns against them in the U.S.,
>and thus makes U.S. foreign policy more difficult to justify.
>are merely blinded by ignorance and naivete.
   Go tell Academician Sakharov this.
   Tell it to the Jewish refuseniks.
   Go to Bulgaria, burn your US papers & apply for a passport.
   In case you were simply joking, my sense of humor has been
severely tested.
(...)
>The question (as always) is: who wins the battle for control? The Western
>governments who stand to lose credibility by East-West exchange, or the
>rest of us, who stand only to gain?
   Funny - last time I checked you didn't need a permit for a satellite
dish to receive Molnia, and Radio Moscow isn't being jammed (at least in
CA :-)) Maybe I misread you - say again, who stands to lose credibility?...

>			peter fay
>			fay@multimax.arpa
   I'm all for the idea of global communications - I know that there will
be a whole lot fewer ignorant and unhappy people when it becomes reality.
We are witnessing this on a small scale now and here, in the case of the
infamous FCC proposal (public response to which has been so voluminous that
the Commissioners' mouths and eyes are still wide open in amazement; guess
why so many letters were sent in such a short time?) However, history (whose
value most Americans tend to underestimate) teaches us that in the West the
governments usually manage to adapt to any such change and live with it; in
the East they most often try to squelch it and get away with it. As one of
the posters pointed out, Xerox machines are very tightly controlled in all
Eastern Bloc countries; I was glad to see someone mention it, because my
usual response to questions about "glasnost'" is: I'll believe that things
have *really* changed over there when they will install a copy machine in
the Leningrad GUM, which (a) would accept kopecks (b) would not be guarded by
a militiaman (c) would not have the "out of toner" sign permanently attached
to it. If and when such a time comes (and stays for a while!), I'm sure that
the West will lose many prominent composers, writers, ballet dancers etc. -
who will return to their country of birth. However, as long as the principle
of information control is firmly in place - only relaxed a little wherever
it's most visible to the Westerners, I don't think we can count on dialling
up a *private* Russian and his PC-klonskii and engaging in a free exchange
of thoughts. To quote Hartley's First Law: "You can lead a horse to water,
but if you can make him float on his back, you've got something."
  All this belongs in 'politics.misc', I guess, but I simply couldn't
resist.
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          >>>>--------------->         khayo@MATH.ucla.edu