Editorials/It's Not Over/More Right Stuff
Tyrrell, R. Emmett Jr.
EDITORIALS IT'S NOT OVER by R. Emmett Tyrrell, Jr. From reading the American press one gets the idea that the Cold War is over, and that in the unusually mild early months of 1990 all goes...
...The facts do not always support this illusion...
...My writer was surrounded by security goons all the time he was in Lithuania...
...He is a Ph.D...
...Many of them want to frustrate any move toward independence in the Baltic or anywhere else...
...Now the proud people of Lithuania have declared their independence...
...My writer was no hack journalist...
...He was threatened, accosted on the street, and physically harmed...
...I will not reveal his name out of consideration for his privacy and well being, but what he went through in Lithuania should be reviewed by authorities in our government and in the American press...
...and then his problems began...
...That does not sound very democratic to me...
...I now know this first hand—or perhaps second hand...
...As editor of The American Spectator I sent an American writer to Lithuania recently to cover independence day and subsequent elections...
...Secret police cannot be put on unemployment compensation so easily...
...now returned with a tale of horror...
...At night groups of men would murmur outside his door about how best to kill him, occasionally punctuating their threats by rattling the door knob...
...Those familiar with the brutal tactics of secret police will recognize that my writer got off rather easily...
...They rather like breaking bones and harassing citizens...
...He speaks Lithuanian among other languages, has traveled the world, and is extraordinarily intelligent...
...Fifty years ago it was shorn of its independence by Joseph Stalin, his Red Army, and indigenous Communists...
...Even Lithuanian Communists call for it—or should I say some Lithuanian Communists...
...Americans are fetched by the conclusion that Gorbachev and his countrymen are on the road to freedom and democracy, but then look at the vote Gorbachev commands in his Soviet Parliament...
...He has Adapted from RET's weekly Washington Post column syndicated by King Features...
...The harassment of my writer makes very little sense to most Americans...
...Yet the ongoing events in the Soviet Union are not under the control of American script writers living in Hollywood or, for that matter, in Washington...
...But they also will recognize that these forms of harassment are characteristic of such brutes as those in the KGB...
...He shoved his plan for a stronger presidency through 1,817 to 133...
...They have infiltrated everywhere...
...We do not know what the outcome of Gorbachev's plans might be...
...Thugs accosted him on the street...
...It was not a pleasant trip...
...We have been led to believe that Mikhail Gorbachev is leading a vast liberalization process in his realm...
...Judge for yourself...
...From reading the American press one gets the idea that the Cold War is over, and that in the unusually mild early months of 1990 all goes swimmingly in lands once concealed behind an iron curtain...
...Harassing an Americanwriter serves no higher purpose than to put Gorbachev's ostensible project in doubt...
...On his flight to Moscow he was repeatedly abused and afflicted with the electric shocks one might administer with a cattle prod...
...111 10 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR MAY 1990...
...Possibly they will put him out of business...
...And it is equally possible that both the thugs and Gorbachev are working harmoniously in maintaining power over a country whose only uncontrollable problem is that it is bankrupt and cannot supply its army and secret police with technology equal to that of the West...
...My writer traveled to Lithuania on one of the regular tours that have been taking visitors there...
...Lithuania is alive with aspirations to independence...
...His clothes were slashed...
...He was intimidated and frightened in the creepy way that totalitarian bullies know so well...
...While en route he was told to seek out supposedly friendly Lithuanians...
...They resist job training in new fields...
...We should know, however, that in his totalitarian land bureaucracies of murderers have been at work for more than seventy years...
...People approached him carrying taping devices...
...Perhaps Gorbachev will put these thugs out of business in the near future...
...He did so, asked them about their country's economic, political, and social conditions...
...He is a distinguished student of history and literature...
...In fact, there is no script...
...candidate at one of the most prestigious universities in the United States, and a member of that university's most famous academic program...
...Thus his experience in Lithuania was not that of an innocent abroad...
Vol. 23 • May 1990 • No. 5
