Editorials/The Totalitarian Comeback/Boycott the Germans
Tyrrell, R Emmett Jr.
EDITORIALS THE TOTALITARIAN COMEBACK rin he massacre in Tiananmen Square 1 —also called the Square of Heavenly Peace, by the way—and the subsequent wretched recantations now broadcast on...
...The evidence of West German muzziheadedness toward the USSR is prodigious...
...In reality, Gingrich said, "Wright's people flacked this thing," to embarrass Foley...
...There was the gargantuan military repression, but there was something worse and more ominous...
...Even in a sea of a billion faces it took only two days for the totalitarians to find him...
...One wondered: Would the Republicans never learn that offense is the only game worth playing in Washington...
...He wants to do his bit to snap them out of it...
...And beneath his picture a caption identified him as a spreader of rumors...
...Their true interests are not with that country whose ruling Communist party signed a pact with Hitler making World War II inevitable but with the people who rid Germany of the tyrant and welcomed it into alliance with the Western democracies...
...There is no reason the citizenry in the Western democracies need patronize a nation given to fantasticating about a totalitarian system while sneering at proven democracies...
...This had been published weeks earlier in a newsletter, the Busby Papers...
...q CRACKING THE WHIP C ongressman Newt Gingrich was standing by the door of his office in the Rayburn Building, briefcase in hand, ready to head off to Atlanta for the weekend...
...Afterward an announcer warns the citizenry not to believe such rumors and to turn the man in...
...Moderate Republicans are often less than . ." Here the bearded former Reagan speechwriter paused and searched for the tactful word...
...How do the state police of these totalitarian regimes manage to batter people into submission without breaking open their skin...
...In the realm of geopolitics the West Germans may be romantics, but when it comes to business they are realists...
...As the Chinese have demonstrated, those foundations can endure a lot of erosion...
...Vic has watched West German opinion drift into lovey-doveyism with the Soviet Union, and he says: "Boycott West German goods...
...Some of them did, yes," he said...
...Vic has been an avid consumer of high-quality German goods for many years, and the Mercedes Benzes that he has driven for twenty years have been an enduring pleasure...
...Only 22 percent viewed the United States as the "stronger force' for peace...
...In fact, he is unloading all his Germanmade essentials, including his Braun razor...
...Gorbachev's economy they were reticent...
...Moreover, media were used to falsify events brazenly and finally to demonstrate to the Chinese public the fate awaiting those who do not knuckle under...
...THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR AUGUST 1989 9...
...They may have greeted President Gorbachev on his recent visit with the kind of fevered elation that in the past they reserved for John F Kennedy and Charles de Gaulle, but when it came to promising more investment in Mr...
...Would they see us as a force for instability had we pulled our troops from Europe when American doves agitated for withdrawal in the early 1970s...
...In fact, he was going over to the Capitol building right away, and so I accompanied him...
...He has to make a decision "every fifteen minutes" and on an average day has to rush across five or six times from his office to the House floor...
...Have to be careful," he said...
...En route by Tom Bethell I visited with Dana Rohrabacher, a Republican congressman from California's Forty-second District...
...Well, Mr...
...He has the jaw of a pugilist, and he was wearing the slightly illfitting pinstriped suit that is becoming familiar on television...
...Vic is an old Washington hand, one of the truly original political writers in this great Gomorrah, and since the early 1960s an associate of Republican potentates—a few weeks ago he was pictured in the public prints jogging with the White House's Jogger-inChief...
...The rising totalitarian regimes of this century resorted to the most advanced techniques of control, techniques capable of tyrannizing the citizens' Adapted from RET's weekly Washington Post column syndicated by King Features...
...Rohrabacher said that he had found the job to be "the most grueling I ever had, and I worked for seven years in the White House...
...He was one of eleven (out of thirteen) freshmen Republicans to vote for Gingrich as whip earlier this year, a contest Gingrich won by two votes...
...Gorbachev's economic and political reforms will succeed...
...Now fully 82 percent believe that Mr...
...Epithets such as "abomination" and "despicable" were hurled by Republicans at each other...
...No guts, no glory," Newt Gingrich replied...
...Wright's fellow Democrats are more occupied with power than ethics...
...Gingrich marveled that within the past few days the Democrats and the news media had managed to turn the tables on the Republicans in what should have been the GOP's hour of glory...
...Less than . . . torchbearers...
...Offense is the best defense," someone was saying...
...Aides were bringing him last minute memos and an old friend was standing by to drive the new Republican whip to the National Airport...
...EDITORIALS THE TOTALITARIAN COMEBACK rin he massacre in Tiananmen Square 1 —also called the Square of Heavenly Peace, by the way—and the subsequent wretched recantations now broadcast on Chinese state media have certainly saved George Orwell's writings from the junk bin of history...
...In fact, all Communist states are fundamentally totalitarian...
...A totalitarian regime controls everything, even the past...
...The Goodin memo compared Foley's voting record to that of Congressman Barney Frank, the openly homosexual, leftist congressman from Massachusetts...
...In Eastern Europe and in the Soviet Union there are signs that the totalitarian foundations are crumbling...
...House Speaker Jim Wright and Majority Whip Tony Coelho had only recently resigned, but now there was this unexpected flap about the Mark Goodin memo put out by the Republican National Committee, hinting that the new House Speaker, Tom Foley, was a homosexual...
...Xiao has now been turned in...
...In a single week, news organizations were fed stories about alleged homosexuality of one Democrat who might move up the succession Tom Bethel...
...Years ago he had a German secretary...
...A slight change in American tastes and an entire European industry can go into decline...
...Outside, the monsoon season was still in full swing...
...In a recent poll, 47 percent asserted that the Soviet Union is a "stronger force" for world peace than the head of the NATO alliance, the United States...
...ladder should Mr...
...In 1982, 55 percent of the West Germans saw the Soviet Union as a military threat...
...Earlier state television had presented an ABC News interview of him taped before the crackdown, angrily recounting the Tiananmen massacre in vivid images: "Tanks and armored personnel carriers rolled over students," he explained, "squashing them into jam...
...The amazing thing about this episode was the way in which Republicans so passively accepted the blame just when they should have been relishing the fall of Wright and Coelho...
...The indignant Chinese demanding democracy yesterday now appears on state television, cowed, apologetic, and with mysterious lumps on his weary face...
...News & World Report...
...Would they view us this way if we had simply let the Russians take Berlin in the late 1940s and otherwise have a free hand in Europe...
...regime such as General Pinochet's Chile...
...Wright step down...
...China, beneath all the rhetoric about economic growth and progress, remains a totalitarian state, a state quite unlike any authoritarian ur national correspondent, Vic Gold, is selling his Mercedes Benz...
...While the rumor was circulating on Capitol Hill, New York Daily News columnist Lars Erik-Nelson phoned up a Gingrich staffer and asked her if she had heard the rumor...
...Is the miracle accomplished with the artful use of the torturers' cosmetics, or do the trained brutes of the state learn secret ways to club people in their torture institutes...
...The government of China's response to protest was the response of a totalitarian regime...
...The only exception was Newt Gingrich, who went on telling anyone who called that it was the Democrats who had started this particular mud fight...
...In fact, in totalitarian states the control of human behavior is a carefully thought-out science...
...The totalitarians' wish is not to be convincing but to be terrifying: to consolidate all power within the state and to use science, the military, terror, to control everything...
...It is unfortunate that Vic Gold will be selling off so many fine German goods, but recent history makes clear that an economic boycott can be persuasive...
...Of course, the totalitarian government does not care if they are convincing...
...Five years later only 24 percent perceived the Soviets thus...
...There is abundant reason to believe that the surest route to the West German heart is through a Mercedes Benz showroom...
...American labor has always understood American foreign policy interests better than most other groups and at a better price can provide all the goods that Germans peddle to us...
...The only real attempt by a journalist to trace the rumor was made by Gloria Borger in US...
...An authoritarian regime seeks only to eliminate political opposition...
...In The Europeans, a wise and engaging book about the various peoples of Europe, Luigi Barzini speaks of the Germans' "mutability...
...Over the weekend, while Gingrich was in Georgia, Time magazine published a vituperative anti-GOP editorial by Margaret Carlson ("Atwater's fouling the civic atmosphere with vicious misinformation is bad enough...
...The modern mass communications media were used to show the faces of demonstrators and to encourage informants to turn them in...
...Yet he sees in the drift of West German public opinion a delusory fixation...
...Who should we see coming toward us but Barney Frank himself, strutting back to his office in the Longworth Building after one more floor vote...
...thoughts as well as their deeds...
...Some commentators have naively remarked that neither the broadcast versions of the confrontation in Tiananmen Square nor the recantations are very convincing...
...West German opinion has rapidly metamorphosed in the 1980s, from good sense toward dreaminess...
...What is important is that they terrorize...
...Rohrabacher explained to me as he half trotted to the Capitol that this constant back and forth was his daily exercise...
...Republican National Committee Chairman Lee Atwater ducked for cover...
...Not even Russians have as much confidence in President Gorbachev as do the West Germans...
...On Monday, the Washington Post Style section came out with an attack-profile of Gingrich, written by the ideologue Myra Macpherson...
...What moved George Orwell to write his classic satires of totalitarianism, Animal Farm and 1984, was his realization that Nazism and Communism were not just brutal regimes insouciant to individual rights as, say, the Medicean regimes of fifteenth-century Florence...
...When she said yes, and repeated it, he wrote a column accusing Gingrich's office of spreading the rumor...
...They do indeed have torture institutes...
...Were she with him today, she would soon be unemployed...
...Well, let these optimistic Germans sell their Mercedes Benzes in Moscow...
...They hold seminars for the jailers...
...I turned and ran after Frank, identified myself, and asked him if it wasn't true that Democrats had spread those rumors...
...Every time he visited Germany "I saw a startlingly new country, only vaguely resembling BOYCOTT THE GERMANS 8 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR AUGUST 1989 what I had seen before...
...And so a Mr...
...Rohrabacher thought the old, go-along-to-get along GOP was in fact changing quite rapidly...
...The West had best remain armed and vigilant against the day when the Soviets' totalitarians might vanquish their reformers...
...Fully 29 percent identified the United States as the world's major source of instability...
...What if we forsake our Benzes for Lincolns...
...Recently, the Washington-based Committee on the Present Danger released an irrefutable report demonstrating that "the Soviets continue to increase their expenditures on, and procurement of, military forces, in spite of Soviet General Secretary Gorbachev's announced cutbacks...
...Xiao Bin appears on state television, blearyeyed, lumpy-faced, forlornly intoning, "I never saw anything"—no military crackdown, no blood in the streets...
...It is quite inaccurate to speak, as Jane Pauley did the other morning on NBC's "Today Show," of China being an "authoritarian" regime...
...Soon he by R. Emmett Tyrrell, Jr...
...Gingrich himself was getting some of the blame...
...q will seek the support of American labor leaders for his boycott...
...Whereupon, Barney Frank seized the opportunity to amplify the rumor by holding a press conference, no doubt much to Foley's discomfiture, in the course of which he threatened to expose top Republicans as homosexuals...
...Goodin was fired...
...Before we left he showed me a wall map of his gerrymandered (not even contiguous) district, the handiwork of California Democrats, who thereby made a net gain of ten seats, Republicans contend...
...This rumor was spread by Democrats and passed around by half the people beating their breasts about the Goodin memo," the columnist Robert Novak told me...
...A few days later I went up to Capitol Hill to see Gingrich...
...Less than two percent of their trade is with the Soviets...
...is The American Spectator 's Washington correspondent...
...Elsewhere in The Europeans Barzini notes that the immense size of the American market makes Europeans apprehensive...
...Usually it allows a citizen his religion, his art, his social intercourse...
...Reporting on the reluctance of German businessmen to invest more heavily in Moscow, the British newsweekly the Economist reports that "most companies complain of extra uncertainties under perestroika in addition to the preperestroika red tape...
Vol. 22 • August 1989 • No. 8
