danc@tekecs.UUCP (Daniel Cobb) (09/01/83)
I'm being sucked into this net again. Bravo, David for an interesting story/comment on life in the Soviet Union. Now ready yourself for the barrage of disagreement and personnal attack that will come/is coming from contributors to this net who throw diplomacy, manners, and respect to the wind. By the way, the validity of your opinion is detracted from by your spelling errors, and they will attack that too. I dont completely agree with all of your observations, they seem to be somewhat shallow, but I think they are generally on track. I am not a self-proclaimed authority. The obvious reason that we support Marcos, even though he is obviously corrupt as hell and rapidly losing popularity with his own people, is that the US Navy has a mammoth base there that we simply cannot afford to lose. The flip side of that coin is that the longer we support Marcos, the more likely we are to lose those bases when Marcos is forced out of power by revolution or a coup. To immediately withdraw our support of Marcos would lead almost immediately to the loss of our Naval facilities there. It seems to me we should find a way to convince him that it is in his interests to improve significantly the human rights record in his country and address the urgent problems associated the high percentage of the population that is living in abject poverty, because it is there that the communists/Marxists find the fuel to feed their revolution (TAKEOVER), as they have already. Someone on the net responded to David by saying that perhaps the hardship his friend had faced in the Soviet Union was because he was a Jew, and perceived to be an "enemy of the State" as he put it. I ask what the hell difference does that make ??? Would that justify the actions of the Soviet govenment? To justify the actions of the ' Soviet Government in this way validates racism, forced labor camps, and murder as legitimate government policy. Another contributor criticized David's characterization of the takeover of Angola. Cubans that were armed by the Soviets perpetrated the Marxist takeover of Angola. This was not a peoples revolution, and it represents a loss for the people of that country. To claim otherwise is to promote gross distortion. So whats new. And now I'll run for cover as the nova of emotional liberalism reponds to this opinion and floods the net.
mmt@dciem.UUCP (Martin Taylor) (09/02/83)
======================= Someone on the net responded to David by saying that perhaps the hardship his friend had faced in the Soviet Union was because he was a Jew, and perceived to be an "enemy of the State" as he put it. I ask what the hell difference does that make ??? Would that justify the actions of the Soviet govenment? To justify the actions of the ' Soviet Government in this way validates racism, forced labor camps, and murder as legitimate government policy. ======================= Of course there is no justification for such instruments of state policy, but please don't exempt "our side" from criticism. In North America alone, just remember the concentration camps for patriotic US and Canadian citizens who happened to be of Japanese descent in WWII, or think of the murder camps arranged for Amerindians less than 100 years ago. The Russians don't run the worlds's most humane society, but blasting them out of the water on the issue is, to mix a metaphor, the pot calling the kettle black. I know, now "we" are good guys :-), but give them a hundred years to emerge from the despotism of centuries and maybe they will be as well. Doesn't the Bible say something about taking the beam out of one's own eye...? Martin Taylor
eich@uiuccsb.UUCP (09/09/83)
#R:tekecs:-199600:uiuccsb:11000015:000:520 uiuccsb!eich Sep 8 19:37:00 1983 The last response is an example of the kind of flirtation with relativism that briefly had Yuri Andropov reading Jackie Susann, listening to Chubby Checker, and thinking liberal thoughts. The USSR is not Russia. Because we are all bound by geography the Kremlin's policies in the past 60 years have in several instances recapitulated the Czars' ambitions. But we face something far more persistent than the kind of thing one "grows out of": Marxist-Leninist theory is a damn effective way to grab power and keep it.