A Year of Disgrace

...Instead of ushering in the new millennium of peace, emancipation, and majority rule, so eagerly awaited by the misguided shepherds of the Left, these alien fruits of our civilization have rotted away in the hands of rulers whose desire for power has not been matched by a corresponding sense of moral and constitutional responsibility...

...It may be thought that the right of national or ethnic self-determination ought never to be infringed and that consequently it was right for Europe to pursue a policy of scuttle (many eminent figures have argued this...

...To the perceptive souls for whom nothing done by the United Nations comes as a surprise, this may appear a naive exclamation rather on a par with that of the British trade union delegate who, at an international conference in Moscow in the thirties, protested that any Communist propaganda which involved the use of the lie as a political weapon was immoral and therefore surely unacceptable to those assembled...

...While Nazi war criminals were being successfully called to account for their atrocities, a million civilian refugees from Soviet Russia were forcibly repatriated by the Allies and sent to face the firing squad or a slow death by forced labor...

...In this sense anticolonial left-wingers have always been paper imperialists betraying their self-proclaimed humanistic mission...

...If any people has earned this right it surely has been the Jews...

...One remembers what Madame Roland said when facing the guillotine: "Liberty...

...This relatively unknown but disgraceful chapter in our history-1945-46 —is documented in detail in The Gulag Archipelago...

...Israel is politically in our camp and represents a potentially civilizing force from which liberal ideas and technical and scientific "know-how" could radiate outwards, providing an invaluable catalyst for the economic development of the surrounding region...

...The abandonment of Indochina inevitably reduces the credibility of the American military guarantees in Europe and undermines the deterrent effect of NATO...

...It must never be forgotten that free societies have been scarce in mankind's history, the most successful barely spanning three centuries...

...That the area of the globe enjoying freedom under law has shrunk so pitifully resulted as much from the ill-judged alacrity with which the British and the French prematurely jettisoned their overseas possessions...

...From the time of the British Mandate—when Arab terrorists, under the leadership of the notorious pro-Nazi Mufti of Jerusalem, launched unprovoked attacks on Jewish settlements—to the Yom Kippur War, the Arabs have given Israel no rest...

...In 1967 Arab armies again mustered on Israel's precarious frontiers and Arab heads of state, Nasser in particular, again openly announced their candid intention of "driving the Jews into the sea...

...Far from being a futile exercise, drawing up the balance sheet reminds us of the essential fragility of freedom and the Rule of Law, now under attack from the most illiberal quarters...

...Apparently not...

...Must be willing to locate in Bloomington, Indiana...

...The Arabs have simply hardened their attitudes and Kissinger's shuttle-diplomacy has been ruined by their intransigence...

...The fact still remains that the only chance Africa ever had of evolving in a liberal-humanitarian direction was under colonial tutelage, and that the headlong retreat from "imperialism" has only produced a recrudescence of authoritarianism and savagery...

...And to what avail is this strategy of appeasement...

...Wherever one turns one's gaze, the omens are worrying...

...How are free societies to maintain themselves if they are unwilling to face their enemies with the determination and clarity of purpose that President Kennedy showed in the Cuban Missile Crisis...

...The story of the UN is disgraceful, as those who remember what it did in Katanga will agree, but it has been documented elsewhere and need not take up further attention in these pages...

...Concurrently, there is the growing imbalance on the ground and in the air (about 4:1) between the forces of the Warsaw Pact and NATO, aggravated by the United Kingdom's latest defense cuts...

...There were five hundred thousand Jewish refugees from the countries of the Arab League who arrived destitute in Israel in the same period to escape unremitting persecution, an episode in history that is seldom recalled...

...Above all, cannibalism and the slave traffic (which existed, for instance, between victorious tribes and Arab and Portuguese slavers in Central and West Africa) were abolished and a reign of peace and order established which the continent has never known since...

...Throughout Africa, personal rights have been trampled upon, legal safeguards torn up, and arbitrary government imposed...

...The Secretary General of the Arab League then, Azzam Pasha, defined the aim of the invasion in these terms: " [This] will be a war of extermination and a momentous massacre which will be spoken of like the Mongolian massacres and the Crusades" (BBC, May 15, 1948...

...A vicious hate campaign was whipped up by Arab propaganda, much of it organized by ex-Nazis who had become employees of the Egyptian and Syrian governments, and Israel was only saved from a terrible fate by her pre-emptive strike...

...Tanzania lives beneath a harsh dictatorship which—so we learn from the findings of Amnesty International—does not scruple to torture and imprison dissidents by the thousands...

...Three million Europeans dead in purges, executions, and labor camps, since 1945...

...The history of Africa since the 1960s, which began with the Congo debacle, has been tragic...

...We know all these things but does this affect the stance of our governments...

...One might be forgiven for believing, against this background, that the overriding concern of Western policy in this part of the globe would be for the protection of the interests of Israel, a line of action dictated arguably by expediency and definitely by morality...

...So much that was gained for the cause of freedom by valor, faith, and self-sacrifice was thus destroyed by weakness and blindness...

...Victory over Hitler was followed by the abandonment of Eastern Europe and one hundred million people to the Soviet Union, all because the Allies permitted themselves to be duped by Stalin at Yalta and Potsdam...

...It is a truism that in the past, empires and states have suffered destruction through internal decay and moral abdication as much as at the hands of foreign foes—witness Athens and Rome...

...They (especially West Germany) release hijackers from prison at the first hint of the possibility of reprisals...

...likewise the Sudan, after years of fighting during which the formerly Arab-dominated government tried to exterminate entire Negro communities in the South...

...There has been an embarrassing abundance of military coups and palace revolutions, and tribal warfare and racial persecution have been common occurrences...

...A temporary spell of severe fuel rationing seems too high a price to pay for the sake of our ultimate values and interests...

...Are we to meekly endure that he should be proved right...

...Moreover, the oil-rich Arab states have done nothing to resettle the Palestinians despite the establishment by the UN in 1952 of a $200 million dollar fund for this purpose and despite Israel's repeatedly declared readiness to compensate the refugees for their abandoned lands...

...Box 877, Bloomington, Indiana 47401...

...After the UN partition of Palestine in 1948, then supported even by the Soviet Union, the armies of five Arab states promptly violated the new boundaries and marched into Israel in the first act of armed aggression seen since the end of World War II...

...That this body should be regarded in liberal circles as the conscience of the world when more than half its member states are dictatorships is an irony that Voltaire would have savored...

...The worst are filled with a passionate intensity—so it is indeed, and nowhere are they to be found in greater numbers than in the United Nations, which, as Solzhenitsyn rightly described it in his Nobel Prize speech ("One Word of Truth"), "is not a United Nations organization but a united governments organi18 The Alternative: An American Spectator August/September 1975 zation where all governments stand equal: those which are freely elected, those imposed forcibly, and those which have seized power with weapons...

...Now, a similar fate threatens to overtake us because of our incapacity to form a more robust and realistic view of the trends which threaten our liberties...

...They demand a solution of the refugee question at the expense of Israel, helped along of course by a bit of terrorism from the PLO...

...Their currents of otherworldly idealism have merely led to the victory of the sacred cow of "national liberation" at the expense of the individual...

...Now, nearly two hundred years later, human beings have once more been sacrificed to abstract dogma simply because, in Yeats' words: "the best lack all conviction while the worst are filled with a passionate intensity...

...The legacy...

...They go crawling to OPEC, begging for preferential treatment and trying to curry favor through demanding that Israel risk physical annihilation by going back to her indefensible pre-1967 borders...

...Send resume and references to Baron Von Kannon, P.O...

...i ust as the civilized community evaded its responsibilities in the thirties and allowed Nazism to rise and devour Austria and Czechoslovakia,so it betrayed its trust as the postwar custodian of freedom...

...The problem of the Palestinian refugees was largely created by the Arabs themselves, because they deliberately plunged Israel into a full-scale war in 1948 during which the Palestinians fled so as not to be caught up in the fighting...

...Oswald Spengler long ago predicted the decline and fall of the West...

...His amused contempt would have been further excited if he could see how incongruously the United States—leader of the Free World —subsidizes an organization dominated by the most backward and tyrannical countries...

...How long can the West carry on in these footsteps if it is to remain true to its highest ideals...

...Worse still, demonstrations of the failure of America's will encourage Soviet adventurism and increase the dangers of war arising through sudden political miscalculation—of the kind Khrushchev was guilty of in the early sixties...

...Thus for 26 years the only genuine liberal democratic state in the Middle East has had to fight off the combined assaults of countries led by some of the most reactionary and militaristic regimes of our day (suchas Egypt, which had no scruples about using poison gas in the war in Yemen) and supported by our greatest contemporary imperialist power: the USSR...

...One does not have to be a fanatical adherent of the "domino theory" to realize that the American refusal to continue adequate military aid to South Vietnam is bound to have dangerous psychological repercussions throughout the world...

...It would therefore be an even greater tragedy if they were eventually to disappear because too many of our statesmen cling to the illusions of what James Burnham, in a famous phrase, described as "the liberal package deal...

...Philip Vander Elst A Year of Disgrace • • Nineteen seventy-four should be remembered as a year of dishonor, because during its course Yasir Arafat was feted and lionized by the UN General Assembly...

...President Kaunda of Zambia, fervent advocate of "democracy" in Rhodesia, runs a one-party state and interferes with the freedom of the judiciary...

...For a quarter of a century the right of Israel to a peaceful and settled existence as an independent state has been close to our hearts...

...After a bitter night of exile, persecution, and genocide, in spite of which the Jews have made an unparalleled contribution to the arts of civilization, they have returned to their ancient homeland and converted its deserts into green pastures, orange groves, and modern cities...

...It may be that colonialism, however benevolent, is inherently unjustifiable...

...What is more heartrending, this evolution has been almost entirely the product of avoidable neglect and shortsightedness, with Western policy suffering one setback after another by default...

...But these remarkable achievements have been constantly put in jeopardy by the virulent hostility of Israel's Arab neighbors...

...Uganda is led by a power-drunk general who has despoiled and expelled fifty thousand Asians and who disciplines his cabinet by assassination...

...The victims of this faintheartedness...

...How many crimes are committed in thy name...

...Needless to say, the beneficiary has not been the African on the street or in the village but a venal political caste which has used power to line its pockets and gratify its lusts...

...Ghana, formerly under the corrupt and despotic Nkrumah, is now managed by a coterie of army officers...

...Nothing, in all honesty, that happened under colonial rule, can match this record...

...The colonial period had its share of abuses and exploitation but these blemishes were not typical and were offset by striking general advances in health, nutrition, industry, agriculture, law, administration, science, and exploration...

...President Bokassa of the Central African Republic has petty thieves mutilated and personally supervises beatings and tortures...

...Secretary Wanted The Alternative is searching for a new executive secretary...

...Moreover, it was inconsistent as well as naive for the "enlightened" intelligentsia to have sought to force Africa into a liberal mould utterly foreign to its traditions and yet to have refused to will the necessary means, which is exactly what the colonial experiment represented...

...What is of more pressing concern is that after making a mess of Africa, well-meaning politicians are once more on their way to destroying civilized standards, this time in the Middle East...

...It is our misfortune, however, to live in an age 'in which—despite our politicians' moralistic bombast about South Africa—genuine moral considerations have rarely exerted so little influence on foreign affairs...

...Ethiopia is now in the grip of revolutionary terror as the new leaders struggle among themselves for absolute power, over the bodies of 50 recently executed ministers and officials...

...The Alternative– An American Snectatnr Ananct/Centemher 1075 10...

...Required abilities include typing, some shorthand, good spelling, familiarity with the English language, bookkeeping, and the ability to manage an office...

...Heroic uprisings against unendurable tyranny in East Berlin in 1953 and Hungary in 1956 which flickered brightly for an inspiring moment, only to be brutally extinguished while the rest of the world sat by, impotent spectators of an inevitable tragedy...

...No surrender to blackmail is too base as long as it avoids the terrible hardship of a year passing without any increase in the living standards of the Western consumer...

...Today the conscience of the West is burdened with the problem of the Palestinians for which Israel is held largely to blame, and the nations of Western Europe are more interested in getting on with the oil sheiks from month to month than in seeing that justice is done and aggression deterred in the Middle East...

...The lessons of postwar history are uncomfortable but we would do well to refresh our memories with them...

...That such a warm welcome should be reserved for the chief of a gang responsible for the innocent blood spilt at Munich, Ma'alot, and Bet'sha'an is an alarming commentary on the moral temper of these times...

...Nigeria is still recovering from one of the bloodiest civil wars on record...

...The growth of the Communist colonial empire has, alas, not been the sole measure of the failure of Western statesmanship...

...As for raison d'etat, democratic governments have a tendency to take the short- and not the long-term view of any matter...

...A whole generation has passed during which the boundaries of liberty have steadily receded and our world has become more dangerous and unstable than for many lifetimes...

...The potential seriousness of the global situation is reinforced at the moment by Portugal's accelerating drift towards autocratic Communism, which menaces NATO's southern flank...

...Nonetheless, we should beware of allowing a weary cynicism, however well grounded, to deter us from enumerating the failings of Western diplomacy during the last twenty-five years...