National Suicide
Griffith, Wellington J. III
"National Suicide" really no greater than himself. The major reason he went to work for the CRP was not to get Richard Nixon re-elected, but to get himself a better job after the campaign. And the major reason he...
...Jeb's courtly old mentor on the Watergate Committee is one of those Americans...
...Leigh, Gable, Atlanta, and a cast of zillions...
...One claim is that some products are military and some are peaceful and the former, naturally, are not sold to the Communists...
...That same machinery can be used to produce tanks, armored personnel carriers, rocket launchers, and other war materiel...
...It reappears every decade or so to remind us of how they used to make magnificent films, and to spirit the little fascists out of hiding, the little fascists who want to censor the film because its portrayals of Negroes don't accord with the 1974 version of Revealed Truths...
...Yes, it's back again: the rape of the South, Margaret Mitchell's Magnum dud of a book emerged as one of the greatest-loved movies of all time...
...Much of the technology that the Kremlin obtains in Western Europe comes not from indigenous firms but from American subsidiaries...
...American companies have built and/or equipped complete Soviet facilities to produce military aircraft, radio communications, explosives, submarines, and motor fuel...
...The Clyde Griffithses and Jeb Magruders of this world will always be around...
...It does no good to ask ourselves, as Jeb Magruder does, if his failures do not reflect the failures of our society as a whole...
...Jeb Magruder destroyed the President and the cause he served to save his own power and prestige...
...Scenes from a Marriage: Ingmar Berg-man's seemingly endless investigation of a modern marriage gone sour, distilled from his 300-minute six-part TV series into a massively powerful movie starring the incomparable Liv Ullmann...
...Harold and Maude: Bud Cort and Ruth Gordon as the unlikeliest couple since Colson and Christ, and even more fun...
...Jeb says he hopes that other young people going into politics will learn from his "cautionary tale...
...Chinatown: Roman Polanski's dissection of political and business corruption in Los Angeles during the '30s...
...On the contrary...
...According to Sutton, Washington has never employed its veto power...
...The Promised Land: Miguel Littin's historical pageant of Chile in the 1930s, of an attempt at socialist revolution in certain regions...
...His befriender is the proverbial whore with heart of gold...
...No one suggested during World War II that since Sweden was selling iron ore to Hitler, America should do the same...
...The Communists depend or East-West trade to feed their eternal appetite for war...
...That generosity continues to this day, as Sutton proves...
...Sutton notes that our NATO allies have also added valuable nuts and bolts to the Soviet military machine...
...Gone With the Wind: Lawdy, Ms...
...It is a joy throughout...
...Claustrophobic in photography...
...Liddy worked for him, and Jeb was the one who had gotten Mitchell to approve Liddy's surveillance schemes...
...Despite the official secrecy that shrouds Americ,an trade with the enemy, Suttor has managed to assemble sufficient facts to prove that trade has never generated an atmosphere of peace, just the bloody opposite...
...Well, almost never...
...So Magruder's tale is not new...
...American firms helped provide the arms that those vessels transported...
...No, I believe we can learn much better from those who always understood politics in its best sense...
...Finally, the United States could block the transfer of technology to the Soviet Union through its membership in CoCom, an international agency designed to regulate trade with the Communists...
...Obviously Washington, Moscow, and the companies involved know what technology has been transferred to the Communists...
...He denies that deathless myth, perpetrated since the Wilson Administration...
...But it would have cost Jeb his job...
...The equipment and technology which thegoo4 Rev,44v National Suicide: Military Aid to the Soviet Union by Antony Sutton Arlington House $8.95 West—primarily the United States—ships to Moscow is usually the most advanced...
...Last year, for example, the Soviet regime signed a contract with two American firms to construct a $100 million petrochemical complex...
...All of them were either built or designed in Western Europe...
...An elated Communist official noted that the manufacturing process his country bought "is the best in the world...
...The Communists acknowledge what our own government has consistently denied, that the United States has constructed most of the enemy's military-industrial complex...
...And, says- Douglas Dillon, former undersecretary of state: "I can recall no instance in which a country shipped a strategic item to the Soviet bloc against the disapproving vote of a participating member of CoCom...
...and his hideout is the most opulently decadent brothel imaginable in 1930s Italia...
...If Soviet ICBMs can strike American targets, it is only because American businessmen, supported by the White House, have sold the Kremlin the necessary guidance systems...
...After all, Jeb was deeply involved in Watergate...
...Harrison Salisbury of the New York Times, definitely not a hardline anti-Communist, asserts that "the growing repression of the Kremlin against the dissidents . . . [has] appeared to inThe Alternative: An American Spectator December 1974 23 Brudnoy's Film Index ^ Amarcord: Federico Fellini's magnificent reminiscence of his 1930s boyhood...
...Wellington J. Griffith III The Moscow Mooch ANTONY SUTTON OEMONSTRATESwithiinpressiveiimomi;idaiion that East minus West equals Zero ifI may plagarize the title of another hook on trade with the Communist bloc...
...He volunteered his role in Watergate out of "ambition, loyalty, and self-protection...
...he contends, it is economic sanctions that would create peace, simply by disarming the Communists...
...As Sutton says, ". . . successive administrations have committed American soldiers to foreign wars without the resolve to win and obviously in the knowledge that American technical assistance was being provided to both sides in these wars [Korea and Vietnam...
...and no holds barred, yet without the excesses of his most recent retrospective film before this, Fellini's Roma...
...All trade transactions with the enemy are classified...
...Kenneth Rush, when undersecretary of state, contended that, ". . . greater trade and closer economic relations with the Soviets will be a far more effective liberalizing influence than continued isolation and lack of contact...
...Even in the 1920s, a decade before Washington recognized the Communist regime, American businessmen, with State Department connivance and approval, were providing the Kremlin with American technology and machinery...
...Economically, the argument is no sounder...
...United States firms have also provided blueprints and finished products which add to the Kremlin's arsenal...
...Sutton has identified about 80 percent of the marine engines in Soviet vessels carrying war materiel to Haiphong...
...On their own, the Soviets have proved incapable of producing a satisfactory razor blade, let alone an intercontinental rocket...
...His children are atrocious, his ex-galfriend is a honey although senile, and Carney is splendid...
...Western Europe has also made major contributions to the Soviet arsenal...
...Caricatures of the good guys and the bad, but Chile is lovely, the human drama is effectively portrayed, and the result is another example of the distressing fact that right-wing propaganda is invariably awful and left-wing propaganda sometimes effective...
...Further, the Kremlin is obsessed with lowering American trade barriers...
...Some $11 billion in Lend-Lease aid, including billions to rebuild Soviet factories after World War II, did nothing to ameliorate Stalin's murderous paranoia...
...In order to justify trade, several administrations have developed variations on the main theme...
...But individuals can change themselves, and Magruder appears to be well on his way back from Watergate...
...Yet it would not have cost Richard Nixon his election or his Presidency...
...He could have resigned or objected to what was happening—that would have been the honorable thing to do...
...The Longest Yard: Burt Reynolds gone from football hero to football fink to stud for hire to inmate, having a hell of a time adjusting...
...you won't...
...According to Averell Harriman, an ambassador to Russia under Roosevelt, Stalin admitted "that about two-thirds of all the large industrial enterprises in the Soviet Union had been built with United States help or technical assistance...
...They have a ball...
...The same situation is reappearing today, in parallel with quantum jumps in the flow of American technology to the Soviet Union...
...sophisticated, chilling dialogue...
...Obviously, the Soviets are convinced that the United States possesses superior technology...
...Love and Anarchy: Lina Wertmuller's tough story about a hick from the sticks come to town to assassinate Mussolini...
...his new love is another tart, apolitical this time...
...In addition, American firms have provided the Soviets with modern computers and the most advanced machinery not available from other countries for manufacturing miniature ball bearings, both of which are vital to the production of ballistic missiles and other military hardware...
...It is a cult film in college towns, and should last the year...
...No sloppy sentimentality but much sentiment...
...The Communists won't accept second-best...
...Harry and Tonto: Art Carney and his cat, voyaging cross country to visit his children and see America...
...If trade were as beneficial to peace as the Administration claims, there is no reason for secrecy...
...and other transportation executives during the 1930s...
...The same argument is used by the present administration...
...He was not some unwitting pawn at the mercy of higher-ups...
...Scarlett, I don't know nothin"bout birthin' babies—and other mots justes from Steve McQueen's aunt Butterfly...
...Further, American companies are currently supplying the machinery for the Kama River complex which will produce more heavy-duty trucks than all American truck manufacturers combined...
...This is another way of admitting that strategic goods are sold to the Communists but the United States does nothing about it...
...The Red merchant marine would never have left the drydocks without Western European, mainly Danish, engines...
...In a modern, highly interdependent economy such as the one the West has constructed in the USSR, most "peaceful" goods have military application...
...Andrei Sakharov, father of the H-bomb, argues: "The history of the USSR shows that the period of maximum friendship with the USA, the period of Roosevelt . . was at the same time the period when the dictatorship flourished and bloomed...
...Suspicious people might see conspiracies in it all...
...According to Senator Sam, there are two basic commandments for anyone entering politics: "The first is that he must be dedicated to the true purpose of government, which is to promote the good of the people...
...There is a lesson to be learned, but unfortunately he lapses into thoughtless platitudes like "play the game hard but clean," or "bring to public life the same high standards [you] would apply in private life...
...The more wheat Washington sells Moscow, for example, the more farmworkers are freed to work in the war industry...
...Robert Altman's film captures the compulsive spirit of gambling (so I've been told by those who indulge . . .) and the off-hand ease of the dialogue is at times superlative...
...Even during America's massive involvement in Vietnam, American businesses soldmachinery which permitted Moscow to update truck and tank factories built by Henry Ford Sr...
...Based on available statistics, Sutton estimates that "possibly 95 percent of Soviet military vehicles are produced in very large plants originally designed by American engineers in the 1930s...
...So Magruder had as big a stake as anyone in keeping the whole affair quiet...
...Whatever that means...
...Rush is awfully incompetent if he doesn't realize there never has been any economic isolation of the Soviet Union...
...The film, socialist realist propaganda churned out last year, when Allendeism was still in flower, rises above the expectable in some moments of great beauty and force...
...According to State Department files, Edwin Gay, a member of America's 'War Trade Board and the Council on Foreign Relations, suggested in 1918 that "if the people in the Bolsheviksections of Russia were given the opportunity to enjoy improved economic conditions, they would themselves bring about the establishment of a moderate and stable social order...
...a phenomenally fine work...
...11 Harrowhouse: A caper film about diamonds, lots and lots and lots of diamonds, and lots of jejune dialogue interspersed with tidbits of fine acting (by James Mason, John Gielgud, and Trevor Howard, especially), and about as much driving force as a glider in a vacuum tube...
...It takes a big man toadmit he is wrong...
...The White House and companies should be eager to tell the public about their contributions to a better world...
...Their suspicion is easily reinforced by official government policy...
...It is ironic that Magruder once said he would have preferred to call his book An American Tragedy...
...The trade myth was first espoused even before the Communists consolidated their power in Russia...
...Anatole Shubb, Washington Post correspondent in Moscow during the late 1960s, reported that neo-Stalinism was growing right along with East-West trade...
...Another variation is that the Communists can get their technology elsewhereso American businessmen might as well get in on the trade bonanza and make an easy dollar...
...A research fellow at the Hoover Institution, Sutton persuasively argues that without continuous infusions of Western technology almost since the opening shot of the October Revolution, the Communists could not have waged ceaseless aggression against the free world for half a century...
...that Western trade is the economic path to peace with the Communists...
...Virtually all Soviet computer technology comes from American companies or their Western European subsidiaries...
...Soviet dissidents, supposedly the beneficiaries of that trade as a liberalizing influence, deny this fantasy...
...Jack Nicholson's portrayal of a zealous detective at times overwhelms even Faye Dunaway's beauteous, agonized mystery lady, but the City of Angels nearly outpaces them both...
...Both discovered that the success they sought was not worth the price they paid...
...Heavy stuff, but a powerhouse...
...Society will never change...
...In the wake of Watergate, about all one can say is—Amen...
...crease as relations with the United States improved...
...And Sutton demonstrates that the Kremlin heated up the war in Vietnam precisely at the same time that the United States began providing the Soviet Union with more technology...
...A lusty, loving, wry, and tender ramble through the four seasons and the many conditions of ,humankind...
...The only people who don't know are the general public...
...The second is that he must possess the intellectual and moral integrity which is the priceless ingredient of good character...
...C 24 The Alternative: An American Spectator December 1979...
...Theodore Dreiser not only had the title first, he had the character and the plot as well...
...The cons are all dears, give or take a sadist, and the races coexist cheerily when the enemy is the guards' football team...
...Dreiser's Clyde Griffiths was much like Jeb Magruder, an essentially decent young man from modest beginnings who became corrupted by his lust for status and position...
...California Split: George Segal and Elliott Gould as two gambling freaks, devoted to the tables night and day...
...And the major reason he participated in the cover-up was not to protect Richard Nixon, but to protect Jeb Magruder...
...Morally, that's a reprehensible argument...
...Clyde Griffiths destroyed the woman he loved in order to marry a shallow society girl...
Vol. 8 • December 1974 • No. 3
