WASHINGTON REPORT: Dissidents and Dissent

...Similarly, it is hardly a rhetorical excess to point out that the judge in .the case of Frank Snepp's book about the CIA in the last days of American South Vietnam revealed that he had completely prejudged the case, announced his ver~ct before the trial and clearly sa~ his o~n function as not one of discovering the facts and interpreting the law but as punishing swiftly and certainly an offense against the majesty of Leviathan...

...In both countries there is a normal, natural and constant effort on the part of the state to infringe upon any political freedom that exists or that may be thought to be coming into existence...

...Satire gets us back in touch with the origins of political journalism in this country, v~hen journalists were frankly the property of a party or a candidate and there was no nonsense about the facts...

...In print, Satire can be amusing as he equates minor peccadillos by isolated individuals in the Carter adminis.tration or the Democratic Congresswthe two are by no means the same--with the organized, all-out assault on the Constitution undertaken by Satire's masters, the big crook, Nixon, and the lit.tie crook, Ag.new...

...In those days the subjects of prosecutorial wrath in the Soviet Union were government officials, Old Bolsheviks and dialecticians ,who had failed to follow ,the latest, unannounced swerve in the thought of Josef Stalin or who simply had to be done in to demonstrate that the reason life in the USSR was so rotten was that the place was infested with saboteurs, spies, runrfing dogs and lackeys of imperialism...

...WASHIHGTON REPORT I I DISSIDENTS AND DISSENT Andrew Young claims the recent trials of the two Soviet dissidents are in some fashion a mark of progress toward humanity on the part 'of the Soviet society and its government...

...In the United States there is quite a good deal...

...The very idea _9 is unthinkable in the USSR and in most of the world...

...The move for impeachment was ~nstantly and overwhelmingly rejected in the House of Representatives...

...Obviously, one cannot really equate the condition of political freedom in America with that condition in the Soviet Union...

...That same Attorney-General went out of his way to protect the chief of another secret pol~itical police operation, the CIA...

...In ~hat history, past and continuing, the American Republic has been a wild, radical experiment in antistatism, far more radical than anything ever imagined by anyone anywhere near authority in the Soviet Union or even in the relatively enlightened Communist countries...

...Taken out of that con.tex.t, however, and moved into political, even legislative action, Sa.fireism is fi little alarming...

...Certainly 40 years ago, no Soviet prosecutor of "enemies of the state" would be asking and getting prison terms of eight or fifteen years for his pre-convieted defendants...

...Young's observation .that .there are what he would call political prisoners in the United States and that he himself .had .been tried for having organized a civil rights protest brought predictable demands for his resignation and/or impeachment...

...That move may be considered the translation of Satireism in journalism into active politics, a disturbing switch despite its rejection...

...These are dangerous times and Andrew Young is one of the very few in office who sees that...

...The formulations have differed, the results have been depressingly similar...

...If properly understood, his call to order, just to simple remembrance, could be immensely salutary for this country...

...He is at once a gratifying touch of nostalgia for those good old days and a welcome bit of comic relief from the dull sobriety of the New York Times...

...There weren't any because they were shot in the neck while descending prison stairs or whisked off to Siberia forever when merely suspected of thought or speech in dissent from Stalin's...

...In the latter, there is none...

...And that, finally, is the humiliating truth that Young was .trying, vainly, to call to our atten.tion...

...Anything is and ought to be permitted in political journalism...

...The state as state inevitably regards itself as some sort of supreme being...

...In the Young case, it was not only alarming but, perhaps inevitably, a verification of Young's remarks: clearly, the intent of the impeachment fiasco was to punish 4 August 1978:484 Young for holding and voicing opinions about the United States different from those of the ,authors of the impeachment move: he was an enemy of the state for what he ..had said: on that point, the differences between the USA and the USSR were a matter of degree...

...For all the Carter campaign against government infringements upon citizens' rights, k is his AttorneyGeneral, the Nation's chief law enforcement officer, who has openly defied a court order to produce evidence and has done so openly in the name of protecting a secret, political police operation...

...The theory here has been to constrain the state in its automatic attacks on the citizens, to support the citizens in their defense against the state...

...If a pattern seems to emerge here, it is not the pattern of the Carter administration as such, but simply the pattern of the state, of Leviathan...

...This could be viewed as one of the ill effects of the spread of atheism and agnosticism in our time--"Since l~here is no God, I shaU be God," says the state along with everyone else---except that .the godly states of past and present, including the papacy and Puritan England and New England, have shown no less, sometimes more, inclination to deify the state...

...FRANK GETLEIN Commonweal: 485...

...I.n a society in which 'Khrushchev's getting out of his job alive with a great leap forward, surely some hope can ,be taken from mere prison terms for probably imaginary offenses that are, on the books, capital crimes...

...At ~he moment, in what seems to be an exceedingly curious eounterreaction to the reaction against unbridled statism in Vietnam and Watergate, we are having a .revival, a refurbishing of what is seen as respectable statism and a consequent "moderate" or "reasonable" curt.ailing of the rights of individual citizens in ~avor of the ".needs" of the omnipotent state...

...He may be right...

...Moreover, in ,those days, the defendants would not have been dissidents at all...