How toTalk to the Russians
Berns, Walter
THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR VOL. 16, NO. 7 / JULY...
...Any predictable pain at all is enough to invalidate a proposal...
...The following speech was delivered at the 39th session of the United Nations Human Rights Commission meeting in Geneva earlier this year...
...but it sometimes wins...
...and he mentioned the difficulties encountered by the special investigating office in the U.S...
...Solomon could referee a contest between Hitler and Stalin-although everyone (at least everyone my age) remembers that both Hitler and Stalin killed millions of their own people...
...My slang dictionary defines "wimp" as a "weak, ineffectual, or insipid person...
...they failed and were arrested...
...A few years ago, a handful of men in Lithuania tried to hijack an airplane, intending to fly it to Israel...
...He served as Alternate U.S...
...In the short run, higher standards predictably serve to identify more people and institutions that do not meet them...
...Chairman, no one familiar with a legal system that guarantees a fair trial before a jury chosen from among the people should be surprised when a jury votes against the government...
...But the system and ideology that produced Stalin is not dead...
...A CADO computer system with custom software now routes and delivers messages throughout Boeing's Puget Sound locations in minutes...
...it has its representatives in this very room...
...Chairman, a word now about the Nazis whom the United States is now trying to deport...
...It fails to take account of the assistance given Hitler by the Soviet Union...
...Contrary to what was said this morning Hitler was not the first totalitarian to seize power, Stalin preceded him by a few years...
...That's what the telecommunications revolution delivers...
...This commission would be well-advised if it were to concern itself with this lively form of totalitarianism...
...Thank you, Mr...
...Policy wimpishness in the education profession has become more visible of late, because of the drive by governors, legislatures, citizens groups, employers, and various task forces to raise educational standards...
...Could this formulation help me, at least heuristically, to understand why it is that I have found much of the education profession to be so squooshy, bland, and saccharin as often to be downright annoying...
...But the important point is that no one find it objectionable, else the proposal is instantly suspect...
...Thus, he cannot understand how the police are charged with the responsibility of protecting the demonstrators, even if this means protecting Fascist demonstrators...
...Information now...
...By entering into the non 11 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JULY 1983 Information Take-off: when the Boeing Commer cial Airplane Company observed that business inquiries received at its Seattle message center often were delayed in routing and delivery, they consulted CADO, the newest subsidiary of Continental Telecom Inc...
...either that or the editor forgot to cancel the story...
...Chester E. Finn, Jr...
...Chairman, these are familiar charges...
...If the "cut-off" score on college entrance tests is boosted, fewer people will be able to enter...
...Representative to the 39th U.N...
...Annual dollar savings in message center operations have been significant...
...And a trial in which the government is required to prove the defendant guilty beyond a reasonable doubt...
...But he does not oppose them with much vigor, certainly not to the point of discommoding anyone who may be evil, for that would not be nice, and the policy wimp seeks above all to be nice, to support things that are nice, and to be accommodating...
...If new teachers are held to a higher intellectual standard, a smaller proportion of those who might wish to join the profession will be able to...
...here's an example of what I mean...
...I was reminded of the similarities between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union as I listened this morning to the distinguished representative of the USSR...
...It is not worth our time to reply to them in detail or at length...
...perhaps the distinguished representative of the USSR can enlighten us...
...In short, here was a full account of what had taken place in that trial...
...Dollars saved...
...0...
...I also feel obliged to remind the distinguished representative of the German Democratic Republic of some historical facts...
...So long as they are peaceful, they have a right to march, and the police have the duty of protecting them...
...That untruth, which he would have this commission accept as the truth, is that my country, if not yet a Fascist country, is moving in that direction...
...And by due process of law, we mean a public trial, before a jury of one's peers, with the assistance of an independent and vigorous legal counsel...
...He complained that Hitler owed his successes to the failure of anyone or any country to resist him...
...Neither one of them believed that human beings have human rights...
...All such measures are apt to produce more short-run discontent than the lower (or nonexistent) standards that they replace...
...That is to say, we wish that the Soviets had opposed Nazi Germany then as vigorously as they did when they themselves were invaded...
...Human Rights Commission...
...Chester E. Finn, Jr...
...Walter Berns HOW TO TALK TO THE RUSSIANS Call them Fascists...
...My profession may not harbor a significantly greater proportion of individual wimps than most other fields of endeavor-more than Marine Corps drill instructors and disk jockeys, I suppose, but not more than accountants, morgue attendants, or keypunch operators-yet its mainstream ideology, its underlying beliefs, and its overriding objectives are Indisputably on the wimpish side...
...In this respect, Stalin was only following Karl Marx...
...It concerns Agenda Item 22-'Measures to be taken against all totalitarian or other ideologies and practices including Nazi, Fascist, and neo-Fascist, based on racial or ethnic exclusiveness or intolerance, hatred, terror, systematic denial of human rights and fundamental freedoms, or which have such consequences "-a resolution introduced by perennial advocates of human rights Afghanistan, Bulgaria, the Byelorussian SSR, Cuba, Czechoslovakia, the German Democratic Republic, Hungary, the Libyan Arab Jamahiriya, Mongolia, Mozambique, Nicaragua, Poland, the Ukrainian SSR, and Vietnam...
...The policy wimp is not satisfied with a utilitarian calculus that estimates the greatest good for the greatest number...
...And timely information in Boeing's competitive business is a key element in their sales process...
...Quite obviously, the distinguished representative of the USSR has no experience with a legal system that guarantees everyone-Fascist, Communist, or anyone else-a fair trial before a jury of one's peers...
...In this connection, he mentioned the trial in Greensboro, North Carolina, where members of the Ku Klux Klan were put on trial for murder and other crimes but were 10 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JULY 1983 acquitted...
...He obviously learned something from Hitler's propaganda minister, Joseph Goebbels...
...Department of Justice which is now attempting to have Nazis deported...
...He learned that if you repeat an untruth often enough, passionately enough, and loud enough, it might someday be accepted as the truth...
...The Soviet Union has a different system...
...It is foreign to him...
...The Soviet Union has been cooperative-fully cooperative, marvelously cooperative...
...We can all be thankful for that...
...That's why, in 1941, they welcomed the German Army with open arms...
...It doesn't happen in the Soviet Union...
...They thought Hitler was the lesser of the two evils...
...Chairman, I want to acknowledge the assistance given my government by the Soviet Union in the collection of evidence against these former Nazis...
...He always referred to them as the "so-called human rights" or the "so-called rights of man...
...In their interventions this morning, the distinguished representatives of Bulgaria, the Soviet Union, and Poland concentrated on Fascism and Nazism, and completely overlooked the first and longest-lived totalitarian ideology, namely, Communism...
...If high school graduation requirements are increased, the number of people who do not graduate from high school will increase...
...That is too simple an explanation...
...A wimp can also be a "Valley Girl" without the teeth or the tan...
...My unwimpish research assistant adds that ,..wimp' is usually applied to males, not females...
...Still-and again, the distinguished representative of the USSR knows this-the government of the United States has established a special office within the Department of Justice, an office that is assiduously investigating these cases, and, when it has enough evidence, it goes to court and tries to persuade a jury that these Nazis should be deported because they had entered the United States under false pretenses...
...that it is "soft" on Fascism in the way that Senator Joseph McCarthy used to say it was "soft" on Communism, that it goes out of its way to protect Fascists: the John Birch Society, for example, or the Ku Klux Klan, the various young Fascists, and the various old Nazis...
...Architects of telecommunication...
...How different would be our world today if Stalin had followed the example of, say, Winston Churchill) How many lives would have been saved if, instead of cooperating with Hitler, instead of invading gallant Finland, the Soviet Union had cooperated with France, Britain, and Poland...
...He also mentioned the street riots in Washington last fall...
...And when it comes to denying human rights, only a judge with the wisdom of Walter Berns is Resident Scholar at the American Enterprise Institute...
...The distinguished representative of the USSR cannot understand this sort of legal system...
...From telephony to satellites...
...Another Nazi, knowing that the government had very good evidence against him, voluntarily left the country...
...And that's where Contel shines...
...Cultural decay, economic decline, political ennui, and social boredom will all deepen, he opined, if the younger generation continues to be colonized by diffident, inarticulate, noncommittal individuals whose noblest characteristic is their inoffensiveness.* It set me to thinking...
...THE POLICY WIMP COMES OF AGE He means no harm...
...As I suggested, only a Solomon could judge between Hitler and Stalin...
...is Professor of Education and Public Policy at Vanderbilt University...
...And a Nazi is sometimes deported...
...the USSR has made them before, here and in the General Assembly...
...The government does not always win...
...Why, inquired the curmudgeonly columnist over an elegant dinner, are so many "wimps" emerging from American high schools and colleges...
...We only wish the Soviet Union had been more cooperative with the French and British in 1939...
...It is a profession heavily populated by what I now think of as policy wimps...
...Chairman, ideologies in addition to Nazi, Fascist, and neo-Fascist ideologies-all ideologies that have the consequence of systematically denying human rights and fundamental freedoms...
...If a proposed policy or program makes everyone smile, so much the better...
...Whatever the distinguished representative of the Ukrainian SSR may remember (or forget), his forebears in the Ukraine remember this...
...One should not, then, be surprised when Marxist or Communist regimes treat their people as Hitler treated his...
...DEPT 956.245 PERIMETER CENTER PARKWAY...
...They had a lot in common, Hitler and Stalin, and the political systems they established had a lot in common-with this difference: Stalin's system survived World War II...
...Instead, in the summer of 1939 they signed a nonaggression treaty with Nazi Germany...
...Chairman-I mean, these verdicts in favor of a defendant...
...One might regret this in some cases, but we in the United States believe in due process of law, even if nasty persons are sometimes acquitted...
...Chairman, it was useful to hear the distinguished representative of Canada remind us of the title of this agenda item...
...And it is no accident, as the Communists would say, that Hitler admired Stalin...
...At any rate, the experience of the Soviet representative is obviously limited to the Soviet legal system and excludes the American system where defendants are first tried and then sentenced, and sometimes tried and acquitted...
...ATLANTA GA 30346 m~ fa aggression pact, the Soviet Union assured Hitler that he would not have to fight on two fronts, east as well as west...
...If wimpishness is on the increase among the products of our schools and colleges, could this have anything to do with the people who staff, run, and make policy for those institutions...
...The only thing wrong with this account duly published in the legal journal was that the trial had not yet taken place...
...And who is to say they were wrong...
...As the distinguished These things happen in the United States, Mr...
...Stalin was a man of iron will, a man who did not hesitate to act (so to speak), a man who did not allow human rights to stand in his way when, in his judgment, things had to be done-even if they were terrible things...
...He said this especially in his essay "On the Jewish Question," which is why anti-Semitism, which used to be a phenomenon of the Right, is now a phenomenon of the Marxist or Communist Left...
...It may be regrettable, but that is the price we pay for due process of law...
...I do not mean that Marx was a gangster or murderer-far from it-I mean that Marx was contemptuous of the very idea of human rights...
...Chairman...
...He stands for decency, generosity, compassion, patience, understanding, tolerance, equality, and happiness...
...I know this because a former student of mine, now working in the special office of the Department of Justice, has at least twice been to the Soviet Union for the purpose of examining Soviet records of Nazi war crimes, and he assures me that the Soviet officials have gone out of their way to be cooperative...
...Rather, he employs an index of social hedonism that gauges alternatives according to the immediate pleasure and pain they are likely to yield, and he employs it with considerable rigor...
...He opposes meanness, invidiousness, distinctions, envy, failure, pressure, discrimination, and unhappiness...
...The policy wimp favors goodness and dislikes evil...
...14 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JULY 1983...
...Among other blessings, Poland might have been Poland today...
...Under such a system, even Fascists and Communists are sometimes found not guilty, because even Fascists and Communists are entitled to a fair -trial...
...But I forgive her...
...7 / JULY 1983...
...The ideal policy is one that nobody finds objectionable, awkward, or unpleasant...
...these are Nazis who, under false names, have been living in the United States since the end of World War II...
...This turns out to be a useful insight, provided one distinguishes between wimpish people and wimpish ideas...
...Chairman, the system that produced Hitler is dead...
...With all the limited fervor at his command, he yearns to accommodate everyone...
...In the same way, the distinguished representative of the USSR obviously has no experience with a legal system that guarantees the human rights of freedom of speech and assembly, even assembly that takes the form of marches and demonstrations in the streets and sometimes leads to riots...
...Molotov was the Soviet foreign secretary and Ribbentrop was the foreign secretary of Nazi Germany, and, as the result of that agreement, the Nazis invaded Poland from the West (thereby beginning World War II) and the Soviets invaded Poland from the East, and there was no Poland left for the Polish people...
...In due course there appeared in a Soviet legal journal a full account of their trial: the charges, the speeches of the prosecution the speeches of the defense attorney, the verdict (guilty, of course), and the sentence...
...This leads to policies that are generous in spirit and accommodating in execution, that seek to make life agreeable for as many people as possible...
...Chairman-I mean, these verdicts in favor of a defendant...
...representative of the USSR knows very well, this too requires a legal trial in the United States, and the government does not always win in those trials...
...WRRE 10 CONTINENTAL TELECOM INC...
...I've often wondered what happened to that editor...
...That title is, "Measures to be Taken Against All Totalitarian or Other Ideologies"-that is, Mr...
...Hence the first question the policy wimp asks about a proposal is who might suffer or be made unhappy as a result of it, particularly in the short run, the time frame he instinctively adopts...
...These things happen in the United States, Mr...
...Perhaps I should explain this to the distinguished representative of Poland where, apparently, the school textbooks no longer refer to it...
...To the policy wimp, this is more telling than the potential long-term benefit to the society that may result from the loftier norms...
...I'm referring, of course, to the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact...
...But, Mr...
...It had been postponed, and someone had failed to inform the editor of the legal journal that it was going to be postponed...
Vol. 16 • July 1983 • No. 7
