Capitol Ideas/Archaic Notions

...This is because the Kremlin ultimately seeks to achieve an ideological rather than a territorial victory...

...One could perhaps respect this outlook if such lefties were themselves prepared to forego their own liberty by emigrating to the Soviet Union, to help Build a New Society, to assist in the construction of New Soviet Man, and so on...

...The Labour Party leadership showed up and addressed the crowd, which was numbered at 150,000 by police (and a quarter of a million by organizers...

...The disheveled Cockneys from the East End of London who somehow made their way to Alder-maston never seemed to mind particularly if they were joined by one or two equally disheveled undergraduates, trumpets and clarinets in hand: That was the only way I could ever get to play with the Londoners, who were all far more proficient on their instruments than I was...

...In part this is just a reflection of the growth of feminism and of the politicization of successive generations of young women...

...Twenty years on," a recent article in the (London) Observer noted, "the predominantly middle-class character of the movement still remains...

...She was looking forward to the march, and the opportunity "to bring people's attention to the fact that we are heading straight for World War III...

...And others seem likely to follow...

...She concluded by saying that she would be joining the CND march on London at the end of October, with 100,000 marchers hoped for...

...The Russians, on the other hand, are rather more formidable and might conceivably take a swipe at those who hoist a placard against them...

...This may well be true, but of course the point is that they would not have to...

...And so on...

...Bearded trumpeters in duffel coats...

...Wasteful energy consumption...

...Corrupt politicians...

...The contemporary movement differs from its predecessor in having a much greater involvement of women...

...I called my sister...

...Oh well, those distant days of the Aldermaston lark seem innocent by comparison with today's determined neutralists...

...I predict, however, that his anomalous position will soon disappear, when he abandons either the pretense of socialism or anti-Soviet-ism...

...No need to agitate or take to the streets while America was doing the Left's dirty work of its own accord...

...I have recently been banging on doors in Whitworth [Lancashire] collecting signatures for the World Disarmament Campaign (yes, even Whitworth has a flourishing peace group...

...They are determined to get their new hardware down: cruise missiles, the neutron bomb, nerve gas, the MX...

...It is of course a delightful prospect to people (such as Professor Thompson) who never did think there was much wrong with Communism to begin with...

...CND [Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament] is losing its off-beat image and is becoming respectable...

...But one can't help notice that they confine themselves to demonstrating against the demonstrably harmless-Americans, Her Majesty's Government...

...After all, atomic weapons on both sides of the Iron Curtain have been unceasingly with us in the interim...

...I suppose that's what my sister meant when she said that CND "is losing its off-beat image...

...I gather that a Soviet camera crew filmed the final stages of the disarmament march...

...1 thought I might reply to this letter pointing out that in my youth, some twenty years ago, I too used to wend my way to London on CND marches, which in those days began at Alder-maston...

...I asked my sister if anyone she had spoken to in the course of the march had said anything to suggest that the Soviet Union was a threat to * peace...

...In what way...

...But somehow it turns out that these people never have the courage of their convictions...

...In short, everything was going badly for America, which of course was intensely satisfying to the international Left...

...Their guru, Professor Thompson, would be marching bravely at the head of the column, risking the wrath of London bobbies, Coldstream guardsmen, and other such resolute defenders of the existing order...

...It's time we stood up to the Pentagon and closed the U.S...

...We're overrun with evils ourselves," she said...

...Thompson, clipped from said Guardian...

...When you look at our Western way of life there isn't much to defend," she went on...

...Countries that abandon resistance to the Soviet Union sooner or later find themselves playing host to a microbial army of occupation, the microbes being ideas...

...Mitterrand of France seems to disprove this thesis at present...

...The churches except the Quakers and Methodists are being typically and disappointingly cautious and 'unChristian' in their lack of willingness to take any initiative...

...at which point military invasion by the Soviets becomes utterly superfluous...

...This comes not just from the younger people but from the old people who are trusting enough to leave their front doors ajar so that I knock and walk right into their front rooms...

...these are dangerous people: Caspar Weinberger, Richard Allen, Lawrence Eagleburger, and all those advisors now grouped around President Reagan-men with minds like delivery systems, whose knowledge of Europe is minimal, who are too busy to read what Europeans have to say, and who have time only to scan a page or two of briefing as they fly from one planning meeting to the next...

...Politicians are beginning to take note...

...One old gentleman refused to sign and then called up the street, 'I'm with you all the way, I hope you get that paper filled up!' It is these people the peace groups are beginning tt> reach...

...On the contrary, they partake of freedom to its fullest, noisily asserting their right to march and demonstrate...

...That is the point...

...The defecting peer Wedgwood Anthony ("call me Tony") Benn said: "The Poles stood up to the Kremlin...

...Most sign, those that don't frequently say that they agree with what we are trying to do but it is hopeless anyway...

...bases in Britain...

...My own impression is that leftists actually rather despise liberty and believe that societies from which it has been excluded are morally superior to those in which it lingers on...

...Almost certainly the election of Ronald Reagan and the renewed American resolve has got a great deal to do with it...

...I suspect that she is typical of hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of people in Western Europe (and the United States, too, I should guess...

...For goodness sake, how can anything be planned if people are allowed to go about making things without permission...

...and Western Europe still do enjoy freedom, while all Communist countries are unfree, as is strikingly demonstrated by the high walls and barbed wire encircling them lest their inhabitants run away...

...Well, the march was a great success, apparently...

...You will probably say the positive ideas it contains are unattainable dreams but I say that peace through Reagan's insane arms escalation is even more a hopeless cause because it is not really a cause at all...

...It was her contention that if Western Europe disarmed itself, the Soviet Union in fact would refrain from launching a Hitler-style attack on the West...

...I turned to the Guardian article, in which this Professor Thompson had written...

...One imagines that the resulting footage was marked "rush'' and mailed to Moscow.rush'' and mailed to Moscow...

...Of course the point is that the U.S...

...The immediate object of the exercise, she said, was to get rid of Pershing II and Cruise missiles...

...These people need the cold war and they are determined to soup it up...

...Readers, be warned: It is WE, the United States, who are the enemy- never mind the foundering boatloads of refugees sailing to our shores...

...The thing that has stunned me most has been to find that there is widespread fear-not of the Russians walking in but of American aggression...

...For some extraordinary reason, which I have never quite been able to grasp, liberty is an utterly trivial thing to left-wing intellectuals...

...They talk about war and wars, particularly the First World War, and American aggression in the same breath...

...The consumer society...

...I suspect it will be anathema to your pro-Reaganist views but I ask you to give it more than a casual glance over," my sister wrote...

...Thus Professor Thompson and his ilk can adopt a pose of "neutrality" between East and West, between slavery and freedom, knowing full well that such a posture-in its refusal to condemn coercion or even draw attention to it-unobtrusively denigrates the cause of liberty...

...I find this very chilling and depressing though at least my own priest who is not very inspiring on most matters has come down firmly on the side of disarmament, no less...

...No no, not a word, she said...

...And as my sister made clear, if you don't particularly admire your own system to begin with, why risk nuclear war to defend it...

...I inquired...

...It's pretty sickening, isn't it...

...Various European countries have already demonstrated the point that once military defenses against Communism are abandoned, then the nation in question becomes simultaneously defenseless against the ideas of Communism, which invade it and infect it like a plague...

...Such countries then are ruled by people who are ideologically compatible with Moscow...

...Anyone who resists their objectives must be neutralist, and neutralists must be pro-Soviet.'' The professor was a tiny bit careless there, letting his Communist sympathies show incautiously, when he used the phrase ' 'for some archaic reason...

...For more than a decade we had the Vietnam quagmire and defeat, Pentagon Papers, Watergate, assault on the CIA, Jimmy Carter in the White House (planting the kiss of peace on Brezhnev's cheek...

...Their main appeal, as far as I was concerned, was the motley array of New Orleans-style brass bands which would add a sprightly beat to the march...

...Just as the media caricature of the early CNDer was of a bearded, pipe-smoking, tweed-suited, sandal-shod, free-thinking vegetarian, nowadays the corresponding image might be of a thirtyish, non-smoking, university educated, professionally employed person [notice how deferentially the writer draws the modern stereotype...

...There are only Two Camps: the USA, sometimes known, for some archaic reason, as 'the Free World,' versus Communist terrorism...

...Then America "would no longer be able to use us as a giant aircraft carrier, for the sake of belief in American freedom...

...Holland comes to mind...

...I have been trying to figure out why the nuclear disarmament movement has suddenly flared up again with such virulence after so many years' remission...

...Freedom, in fact, seemed to occupy a rather lowly place in her system of values...

...CAPITOL IDEAS ARCHAIC NOTIONS by Tom Bethell I recently received a letter from my left-wing, Guardian-reading sister in England, and enclosed with it was a newspaper article by a certain Professor E.P...