Editorial/ Prime-Time War/ The Tax-Man Behind the Arras
Tyrrell, R. Emmett Jr.
completely surrounded the nine-mile fence around the base. Some shouted, some sang, some prayed. The fence was the most moving sight of my life except for the birth of my children. It was covered...
...It is true that many of us feel that the American Government seems to be escalating the arms race when it should take the initiative the other way...
...The "perimeter," or "fence," surrounding each family is a "barrier" dividing it from all other human units...
...Then most of us went reluctantly home but many stayed and some will continue to stay...
...Much can be made of the argument that our rapid demobilization emboldened Soviet rapacity, thereby bringing the world more violence than might otherwise have been visited upon it...
...O...
...The West, by contrast, is barrier-ridden, with fences dividing us into families and private property...
...embodying a death-wish...
...5 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR APRIL 1983...
...Still, there is textbook material here for those interested in the way the strange religion of social-ism (or commune-ism) captures the allegiance of its converts...
...We use it at Greenham, after all...
...Quite possibly the histories of Korea and Vietnam would have been more peaceful had American statecraff been more patient and alive to Soviet designs in the late 1940s...
...But they feel no love for it, either...
...Few of us seriously believe that Britain disarming would lead the Russians to walk over Europe, and anyway a courageous step means taking some risks...
...The further World War II recedes into the past the more some Americans relish the show...
...So, what is there to fight about, really...
...by R. Emmett Tyrrell, Jr...
...Then comes the desire to "break down barriers," by which is meant institutions...
...The original idea, or theory-commune-ismwas nonetheless sound...
...Apparently it was the last good war, or at least the last good war for prime-time television...
...materialistic, pornographic, etc.-a partly valid complaint...
...Also the Peace Persons are bound to experience a sharp let-down after they come off their present "high," engendered by swaying about in unison and enjoying the "excitement and exhilaration" of collectivism (which in its early phases is experienced as "liberation...
...That experiment has not been very successful to date, Peace Persons will concede, but this is because the revolution fell under the control of utterly insensitive people like Stalin and Brezhnev...
...In brief, the thing was a waste...
...Most of us fully appreciate our freedom...
...ses me...
...These women have given up careers and comfortable lives...
...Comparable demonstrations did not take place in the 1950s or 60s, when the cold metal surrounding U.S...
...In a 1950 reminiscence, former Secretary of State George C. Marshall recalled that right after the war we reduced our huge military establishment to one-and-one-third , divisions: "this is quite a proposition when you deal with somebody with over 260...
...The accusation that many of us are Communists or being used by Communists is ridiculous...
...The pain, the unspeakable sorrow, and the incalculable damage done to our civilization during this war leaves me in some despair...
...Peace People do not resent it because they do not feel betrayed by it...
...bases was equally dehumanized and the weapons within them at least as dangerous...
...As for the Soviet Union, no particular animosity is felt toward it because no particular faith was ever placed in it (at least by the current "Peace" generation...
...Perhaps the most important precondition, omitted by Eileen and my sister but undoubtedly present in both, is an antecedent loss of faith in something they were brought up to believe in: in my sister's case, her own country, and more generally the West (perceived as "consumer" societies...
...We danced around policemen (very British-bemused and benevolent), we lit candles, talked, thought, and sang...
...We did not have enough to defend the air strip at Fairbanks...
...For the war's every stirring moment there were unnumbered instances of squalor, anguish, and barbarous cruelty...
...So perhaps one shouldn't be too critical...
...I have in mind ABC's adaptation of Herman Wouk's The Winds of War and the BBC production "Churchill: The Wilderness Years...
...E D T 0 R I A L PRIME-TIME WAR Last month the better sort of TV viewer entertained himself with stirrings of early World War II and the years immediately preceding it...
...the West disarms, and the Russians come, they will break down our barriers and we in turn will Humanize them...
...Notice that both of my correspondents experience the thought of abandoning their families as a temptation-not because such a course of action would bring personal happiness but because it would serve the higher cause mandated by their new faith...
...Oh, let them try to put up fences again, we'll just dance around their policemen (very Russian-yo ho ho, dancing about with arms folded, hands tucked up sleeves, snow on boots, Vodka bottle sticking out of hip pocket...
...Then, too, this war did not even have a happy ending: Nazism and Fascism were cleared away, but that only left the course all the freer for the third great despotism in modern times...
...In its more mature phases the earlier experience of liberation turns into a kind of rage directed at the permanent features of life, and the socialist imperative becomes highly destructive...
...It's lack of courage, not conviction, that keeps me with the family I love...
...Not I. Though I am a hawk to the tips of my talons, all this gorgeous historic drama distres Adapted from RET's weekly Washington Post column syndicated by King Features...
...That we should be labelled Communist sympathizers for this angers me...
...Undoubtedly, also, a lot of these protesting women are suddenly fearful on account of the weakness of the West, not its running-engine personnel-carrier strength...
...We had nothing in Alaska...
...Moreover, no sooner did the war end than we resumed some of the parochial policies that brought it on...
...Notice, however, that the ideology or faith now animating Peace Persons is the same as that which animated the revolutionaries who overthrew the Czars, and who then undertook to "build a new society" with the help of "new Soviet man" (and woman, I hasten to add...
...In any event the internal vacuum left by this loss of faith becomes intolerable, and into it rushes that strange apostate religion called socialism which, at least since the times of Plato and the early Christian Gnostic sects, has taken up residence in people's minds in extraordinarily predictable and unchanging ways: the abandonment of one's earlier beliefs is first experienced as "liberation...
...It was covered with things we felt and cared about-poems, children's paintings, slogans, baby clothes, photographs of our families and many woven spiders websa symbol that belongs especially to the Greenham women...
...Which is where we came in, with Gandhi using his freedom only to undermine it for those who came later...
...These women have my full support and gratitude...
...Some have left their children because they feel that a peaceful world is not only the best future but the only future they can offer them...
...There's a fair amount of hysteria in the current "peace" movement, so one should be wary of reading too much into it...
...A persistent feature of socialism is the desire to break down families...
Vol. 16 • April 1983 • No. 4
