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From: fiddler%concertina@Sun.COM (Steve Hix)
Newsgroups: comp.society.futures
Subject: Re: UUCP - USSR
Message-ID: <31695@sun.uucp>
Date: Thu, 22-Oct-87 16:44:20 EST
Article-I.D.: sun.31695
Posted: Thu Oct 22 16:44:20 1987
Date-Received: Sun, 25-Oct-87 09:45:24 EST
References: <11217@orchid.waterloo.edu> <7445@boring.cwi.nl> <2052@encore.UUCP>
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In article <2052@encore.UUCP>, fay@encore.UUCP (Peter Fay) writes:
> 
> "Dirty aggressions and secret, harmful operations..." - is this really
> a criticism directed against the USSR? Espionage is a dirty business by
> any standards. And if you want to make charges, then go straight to the
> source - the CIA wrote the book on dirty aggression (see Agee's,
> Stockwell's, etc. books on the CIA campaigns in Vietnam, assasinations in
> Africa, Latin America, etc.).

I assume you're speaking of getting reading material available on the
reasonably open market...because if not, you're about as wrong as you
could be without going to a lot of trouble.  It's just that the Russians
don't publish equivalent books openly.

The U.S. is a late-comer in the field of "Dirty aggressions and secret,
harmful operations..." and pretty amateur most of the time, at that.

The Czarist period showed lots of examples of such activity, both inside
and outside Russia.  (Ask India or Poland about that, for starters) and
the Soviets have generally improved on the Czarists.  You forgot about
the Soviet assasination teams that operated in Europe during the 1920s
killing White Russian emigres (or even Leon Trotsky).   Don't forget
the taking of the Baltic States, or the suppression of dissent in the
Ukraine.  Don't forget the internal troubles staged by Stalin, who
learned from Lenin, and only outshone him because the latter clocked
out before he was finished.

The English were in the business, and very effective at it, long before
the Russians ever started playing. (And the French, and the Germans,
and the Poles, and Italian city states, and China, and Japan [internally
and externally], and ...)

Various factions in the Islamic world used assasination and intimidation
as normal tools of governing, both against Europe and other Islamic
neighbors.

Rome sometimes seemed to use "covert" dirty tricks as a favorite participant
sport, which they picked up from the Greeks before them.

And if you want to see someone who really got into this sort of stuff,
you really ought to look up the history of the Assyrian Empire.  It
makes the rest of the crown look like a bunch of pansies.  Their kings
made monuments boasting of the horrible things that they did.

This is not to exonerate the U.S.  But to say that the U.S. "wrote the
book on dirty agression" is a grossly ignorant statement.  Do you really
believe that things like Hungary in '56, Czechoslovakia '68, and Poland
in '45 never happened?  Or Afghanistan today?  Just because journalists
can't easily get in and out of Afghanistan freely doesn't mean that
nothing is going on there.

Just because you haven't read anything by Soviet equivalents to Agee
and Stockwell doesn't mean that such doesn't happen... 
 
> 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

The Soviet government doesn't want to prevent all (except carefully
monitored) contact between its citizens and foreigners?  Ever heard
of the MVD Border Troops?  They keep citizens in, not immigrants out,
by the way.  You like the idea of internal passports?  Some people
have lived with them all their lives.

Oh, by the way:  your terminology is loose.  "Espionage is a dirty
business by any standards."  Every nation engages in intelligence-
gathering.  (The vast majority of it, even by those corrupt and
war-mongering Americans, is by reading newspapers and magazines and
listening to the radio.  Almost all people engaged in intelligence
work have the exciting task of reading day in and day out.  Believe
me, reading Pravda is not my idea of having fun.)  Information
gathering isn't the same as assasination, or planting booby-trapped
toys for kids to pick up.  Any nation that doesn't perform some sort
of intelligence-gathering puts itself at horrible risk.  The covert
operations that you're concerned with are another kettle of fish
entirely.  If you're concerned about covert agression, label it
properly.  

	seh