Current Wisdom/KAL 007
Jackasses, Indignant
CURRENT WISDOM/KAL 007 Pravda Trend-setting Pravda lays down its prim observations on the recent misfortune over the Sea of Japan, and all right-thinking American journalists follow. Read on and...
...If anything, the gross Soviet deed over the Sea of Okhotsk reflects Soviet fear, suspicion, insecurity and distrust-not the "aggression" Mr...
...The Soviets who were anti-war because they knew war and had suffered enough have been replaced by the hunkered-down old men who are "uncivilized" and "barbaric...
...And even in our own country, at the beginning of the Presidential election of 1984, we are starting to hear the old sad appeals to "fear"-that if President Reagan is re-elected, or replaced by Walter Mondale or John Glenn, all will be lost...
...September 9, 1983] The Nation The incomparable Nation: TRUTH SHOT DOWN: It must be that the American press, public and political establishment take secret pleasure in suffering the persistent, pervasive lies of their government...
...Andropov is practicing on us, President Reagan is practicing it on them as the '' source of all evil...
...September 6, 1983] The New York Times Still more serene observations from a New York Times don illuminating the mystery of Korean Air Lines Flight 007...
...Levin, who talked with the heads of the Soviet copyright agency, the trade association and the state committee for publishing and printing, said they all "openly discussed their unhappiness over the event...
...September 9, 1983] The Village Voice The azygous Alexander Cockburn (pronounced, ko'burn) in another alarmed state, doubtless similar to his alarmed state when the Soviets went into Afghanistan, Hungary, and forget not the slaughter of the Kulaks: I must say I thought the intensity and indeed the immensity of the US reaction deeply alarming...
...The White House is right in not suspending political-military talks with the Russians...
...September 4,1983] The New York limes Heuristic reflections, historical in nature, on that great Liberal heartthrob, Ike, from Anthony Lewis, occasioned by the hellish Reagan's redbaiting on Yankee T.V.: BOSTON-When President Reagan spoke to the nation the other night about the shooting down of the Korean airliner, angrily denouncing Soviet behavior, I found myself thinking about Dwight D. Eisenhower...
...And Foreign Secretary Gromyko's stonewall remarks at Madrid, together with all the other Soviet bombast, sound much like "whistling past the graveyard"-desperate defiance, that is, of a world fearfully seen as threatening on all sides...
...As Mr...
...With the help of even higher authorities on his side, there would have been no problem at all...
...And Dwight Eisenhower's way worked...
...In fairness, the Russians have no monopoly on the politics of fear...
...If it were my mother, brother, child, friend, I also would be saddened to see these deaths escalate the possibilities of universal catastrophe...
...September 24, 1983] The London Times In the correspondence section of the Times another Western Holy Man speaks out: From the Reverend Claude Riches: Sir, Before we give ourselves up to unrestrained condemnation of the Russians, ought we not to ask ourselves whether we are entirely clear in our own minds what the attitude of British military authorities might be if an Argentinian plane, albeit one having the appearance of a civilian aircraft, were to approach beyond the exclusion zone of the Falklands and refuse to obey or acknowledge all attempts made to divert it...
...September 20, 1983] Publishers Weekly Proof that within the Soviet establishment humanity endures: Publishers agreed that the Soviet officials with whom they spoke regarded the shooting down of the Korean plane as a tragic occurrence...
...Or was I just romanticizing a now remote figure...
...But we live on the same planet, and shouting and posturing will not make it go away...
...Flynt finds weird: A man like MacDonald is so nuts that his martyrdom cannot be ruled out as a motive...
...I would be particularly appalled to see the remains of the peace movement wash up on the political shores like grisly debris on the beaches of Japan...
...the fear of satellites in space and U.S...
...Reagan repeatedly cited...
...September 7, 1983] The Washington Post In a full-page ad in the Washington Post the solomonic Larry Flynt explains the Korean Air Lines mishap as the work of Congressman Larry MacDonald, whom Mr...
...The idea that Soviet power can be restrained by isolation is a dangerous illusion...
...The danger on the American side is a return to a policy that amounts to not talking...
...And the U.S...
...September 4, 1983] The New York Tunes Schoolmarm pontifications from Anthony Lewis, occasioned by Soviet efficiency in the skies over the Sea of Japan: BOSTON-In its values and methods it is a state profoundly alien to us...
...September 17,1983...
...The inconsistencies, half-truths, deceptions, cover-ups and outright falsehoods of the Reagan version were obvious from the start...
...In this very incident, communication between Soviet and U.S...
...the fear of freedom...
...But even if the story had been flawlessly crafted, the history of governmental mendacity over the last thirty years, at least, should have alerted everyone to the likelihood of deceit...
...September 20, 1983] The Washington Post And Ellen Goodman, that champion of all America's morbidly aggrieved, outperforms Pravda: In all the horrid aftermath of the death of 269 human beings, I am most struck by the way their murder has brought life to America's most hawkish Soviet-watching...
...and Western views, and try to learn how the Kremlin is reasoning...
...The Russian image of last summer, the pen pals of Samantha Smith, are gone, replaced by the Russians of the fall, the builders of the Berlin Wall, the invaders of Afghanistan...
...We should take special care not to seem to be indicting the Russians as people, to be attributing irredeemable iniquity to their nation...
...September 9, 1983] The New York Times From Paris Miss Flora Lewis proffers an urgent prescription occasioned by the Soviets' recent inscrutable act: PARIS-The most important question provoked by the shooting down of South Korea's Boeing 747 is the relation between political and military decision makers in Moscow...
...The more the Russians soil the air with lies and insults, the calmer we should be...
...With the help of the pilot, or other CIA operatives who were just as weird as MacDonald and who could have replaced the pilot, he could have caused the flight to take its fateful course causing the Russians to shoot down the plane...
...Appeals of this kind are what the current US administration has employed from the outset when it proclaimed a "crusade" against Communism...
...It is more urgent than ever to make sure Moscow understands U.S...
...It is almost as though many find the tragedy in some awful way satisfactory, proof positive that the only way to deal with the Soviet Union is to build bigger missiles and head for the deep shelters...
...September8, 1983] The New York Times Scottie gets mad, as the Russians go too far: WASHINGTON-The chances are that we'll never know who gave the orders in the Soviet Union to shoot down the Korean plane, but the guess here is that the motivation goes back into Russian history: the fear of invasion by Napoleon and Hitler, the fear of being overwhelmed by the computer societies of the West and Japan...
...officials over the wandering plane could have prevented the worst...
...It's a foolish argument in both domestic and foreign politics, but the appeal to fear is still standard political procedure...
...Knowing that the accusatory finger would be pointed at the Soviets, he could be assured of escaping any suspicion...
...A tragedy born of miscommunications, paranoia, and hair-trigger hostilities in a dangerous world is being used to increase the danger...
...He would have been just as angry, I thought, but there would have been a different tone in his response: more restrained, more dignified, more convincing...
...this time the observations come from Tom Wicker, psychoanalyst to the Politburo: Actually, there is no link whatever between the "termination" of flight 7 and the supposed need for the MX...
...The aim, after all, is to win the support of fair-minded people everywhere for civilized behavior toward civilian aircraft -for civilized behavior in general in a tense world...
...reconnaissance planes snooping with electronic gadgets into Soviet strategic hideouts...
...What else but a diagnosis of mass informational masochism could explain the credulous acceptance of Washington's official line on the South Korean airliner attack...
...If the reasons for the unsightly show produced by the USA were to be summed up in one sentence, it might be this: the US administration wants yet another pretext to justify its irresponsible and irrational policy of preparing for nuclear war...
...Even in as aggravated an affair as that of the Korean airliner, it is better-more effective-to avoid shrill rhetoric...
...could maintain an appearance of "innocence...
...Not satisfied with propagandistic hysteria within the country, the White House and its closest allies have foisted a discussion of the question upon the UN Security Council...
...The Soviet Union is a state at odds with us in fundamental ways...
...In this fearsome and excessively suspicious atmosphere, it's not hard to imagine that the Korean plane's intrusion into Soviet territory could lead to confusion and a tragic blunder...
...In this connection the American representative, who sank to the level of dirty insinuations and resorted to gross slander against the Soviet Union, attempted to use this authoritative international agency as a forum to violently exacerbate international tensions...
...Read on and marvel: Washington's Amoral Behavior NEW YORK, September 3 (Pravda's special correspondent)-Official Washington is continuing to fan the flames of an unprecedentedly vicious anti-Soviet campaign around the disappearance of an unidentified plane which intruded upon the air space of the Soviet Union...
...In his world the sacrifice of 268 other people would be nothing compared to eliminating the "incomparably greater evil" of communism...
...But in this world there is no alternative...
...Dealing with it is grindingly difficult...
...In the long run there is no safe escape from the hard work of negotiation...
Vol. 16 • November 1983 • No. 11
