The Nation's Pulse
Stein, Benjamin
"The Nation's Pulse" they greatly enlarged its terms and provided missing components of theory. The capability and subsequently the doctrine of flexible response grew out of the revival of conventional forces...
...In the current formulation of American foreign political and military relations, there is a basis for optimism, just as there is for reserved concern...
...It tells a Story of how 1984 arrived in Russia in 1918 with the terror decreed by I~nin...
...It says to Americans that with all of the problems of our American system, we would do well to look at what our chief political 'and military rival has to offer...
...It will do no lasting good to make our system hemorrhage to the point that those who feel no compunction about the slaughter of the millions will overcome, bit by bit, around the world...
...The lesson is the importance of perspective in assessing our American political system and its prospects...
...It is, and should remain, a distinguishable last resort...
...He shows us another kind of perspective too...
...Thus, resistance to even the most outrageously urlfair and brutal acts did not materialize...
...Persons who were intimately associated with the most barbaric forms of terror against the innocent still flourish in positions of power in the Soviet state...
...With the Vietnam war so close, it is hard to believe that flexible response, even in its more conf-med European application, will not invite another misstep...
...For the decision-makers of a generation of peace, the resort to force cannot remain a simple or logical extension of diplomacy...
...When there has been cost or expenditure, there must be an accounting, and when that cost is measured in blood, who can confidently and willingly make that accounting...
...It is bad, even very bad, for people using the power of government to eavesdrop on others' conversations...
...The Alternative March 1.@'/4 13...
...The Gulag Archipelago should tell us that even if the worst of all the allegations about our system are true--the Vietnam war was a cruel misadventure, bungling and immoral men were operating within the White House, the rewards of the economic and judicial system are distributed unfairly--that is all trifling by comparison with a pressing alternative--the Soviet system...
...But for the world at large, its greater significance will be in the American reaction to it...
...In the 1960s, the doctrine of flexible response, by diminishing the significance of the resort to force, became an invitation to intervention and war...
...Knowledge that the whole nation was in fear made the resistance of any individual seem futile...
...When the first man on each side has died, the internal logic of violence may wrest control of subsequent events from the once rational decision-maker...
...But our gain will" be nil if we flagellate ourselves to weakness whil~ these without shame make themselves stronger...
...Facing up to them will make America stronger, not weaker...
...Solzhenitsyn shows hew the system killed its victims not only physically, but first in spirit...
...It should be stopped...
...The American system faces serious and real challenges...
...96 The Nation's Pulse by Benjamin Stein Solzhenitsyn: His Meaning for Americans A T GREAT PERSONAL cost, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn has given the American people a lesson of incomparable value and tiroelihess...
...When force meets counterforce, both initiator and respondent become victims, and victims of violence, the objects of threats and applied force, lose the clearheaded objectivity necessary to read the cost-rist and cost-benefit calculations of a national security manager...
...He shews that terror was woven inextricably into the Soviet system from its first days, and has never left that system...
...It is understandably easier to be rational in the use of force than in the experience of it...
...It is a comprehensive history of the Soviet concentration camp and terror system...
...In such a context the apparent deception involved in a Gulf of Tonkin incident becomes less significant than the experience of ha.ving been shot at, whatever the provocation, whatever the context...
...Solzhenitsyn has just allowed publication of his" book entitled The Gulag Archipelago 1918-1956...
...Solzhenitsyn shows us that even in what some consider a dim hour for our system, that system is still a beacon for the rest of the world...
...The book could hardly have come at a more opportune moment...
...The "Gulag" was the administration of the concentration camps which spread across Russia like islands in an archipelago...
...Thus diplomacy and war remain dichotomous, qualitatively different, because of the internal and irrational dynamic of violence, which is no mystical characteristic...
...The people who rose through the murder of the innocent live in villas and are driven in limousines...
...Solzhenitsyn argues that the terror was not an aberration from Lenin's saintliness, brought on by Stalin...
...Who in the world can match the bravery of the men and women who defy the Soviet system from within...
...The history goes from 1918 to 1956 and is told largely out of the mouths of the survivors and nonsurvivors of the camps, the arrests, and the tortures...
...For their service to a condition which we consider fundamental, they are estranged from their compatriots, impoverished, jailed, beaten, made insane by drugs and conditioning, and finally hounded to their deaths in brutal work camps...
...The capability and subsequently the doctrine of flexible response grew out of the revival of conventional forces following the recommendations of NSC-68, coincident with Soviet acquisition of the bomb...
...The book is obviously full of meaning for those few Russians who will be able to read it...
...The American people have been so buffeted with news stories about hew bad our system is (supposedly) because of the VietnAm war, the Watergate events, the gasoline shortages, that polls have shown new lows of despair about the fundamental moral strength of Our COtLrltFy...
...The use of force invites counterforce, as witness the genesis of the American containment policy of the late 1940s...
...I f we make our President so weak and powerless by harping on whether he knew that a certain conversation was held on a certain date that he cannot lead us to stand against a system that starves men to death because they satirize the government, we will not have done a service to the cause of law...
...For their efforts there are no fund-raisers in Manhattan co-ops, no network television, no worshipful mass following...
...Whole nationalities and classes were exterminated--often upon a whim~ And, the writer says that it i~ as if Bormann and Goebbels were still running things...
...If we lost what we now have, who among us would suffer as much to get it back...
...The replacement of a containment policy by a concept of balance has already demonstrated its potential for a reduction of tension, hostility, insecurity, and instability...
...The Soviet crimes against humanity, he points out, in sheer number, exceed the Nazis...
...But the retention of flexible response as the doctrinal basis for policy is less reassuring...
...But what can and will weaken America is the kind of self-doubt which is rubbed into the American system and psyche by an obsessive dwelling upon faults, real and often imagined, in American life...
...Trials of even the most vicious Stalin era criminals simply do not take place--a shocking comparison with even the sorry record of trials of Nazi criminals...
...That terror surged through time in wave after wave directed at non-Bolshevik revolutionaries, landed peasants, intellectuals, army officers, scientists, and every kind of nationality which ever crossed Lenin or Stalin...
...Theirs is a life of unrelieved torment for what is to them no more than an abstraction--freedom of speech and thought...
Vol. 7 • March 1974 • No. 6
