WASHINGTON REPORT: Death Near and Far

...Thus: In Cyprus we saw again that the Turks like killing the Greeks...

...After all, the Russians were the Communists and therefore the source of all evil...

...Imperialism, however, conslated chiefly in picking up foreign !ands considered as somehow outside the system of civilized nationhood-"lesser breeds withou~t the law," the leading imperialist poet called them...

...We started out killing the British who were right here beside us and who, up until then, thought we were fellow-British...

...And, of course, vice versa...

...18 August 1978:516 Unfortunately, the 500 years of history had been rewritten by American foreign policy Scholars so that it was not the Turks the Greeks had to fear, not the Greeks the Turks had to fight, but the Russians for both nations in both relationships...

...But there is a codicil to this lesson, as follows: If, however, aforesaid invader and occupier refuses to withdraw from said occupied territory in spite of our withholding of further arms shipments, then we should resume shipments of arms to see if that will have a more persuasive effect...

...To be sure, if anyone in government had had any notion of Greek and Turkish history, he might have suspected some such outcome from arming the two nations...

...Consider our own history...

...FRANK GETLEIN 18 August 1978:518...

...In the Turkish-Greek-Cypriot instance, it was the Turks who came down like the wolf on the fold and they came down on the Greeks...

...In ,the two outstanding cases of Americans getting killed from fear of Communism, we had to travel halfway around the globe to get them killed...

...In that case, it didn't work and the Turks have been in effective occupation of what seems to anyone as more than the fair share of the island ever since...

...Also, the rule of propinquity governed even in overseas adventures, the imperialists going naturally from country A to next-door country B to country C just down the street...

...military aid is supposed to be used only to defend the recipient country--and thus by extension, the rest of the Free World, including us---against the Soviets who are thought to be lurking just over the frontiers of most countries in the world awaiting only the time when U.S...

...If you tried to train a dog on that method, he'd chew up your trouser cuffs and there is no particular reason to believe militarily opportunistic client states will behave any differently...

...Regardless of the dangers of "rewarding bad conduct," which the President's chief security advisor finds determining in not recognizing the existence of Castro's Cuba, regardless of the obvious message to other clients that all you have to do is hold out, regardless of making ourselves look like poltroons, those arms have got to be got flowing again before it's too late...

...Cut off from Europe by the formidable barrier of the Pyrenees the Spanish, naturally, prefer killing the Spanish and so it goes...

...Meanwhile, the majority of mankind, hopelessly traditionalist, still prefers killing the neighbor they can see to killing the non-neighbor .they cannot see...

...WASHINGTON REPORT DEATH NEAR AND FAR The military aid to Turkey has been solved for the moment at least and, as is depressingly usual with problem-solving these days, nobody seems to have learned a thing from it...

...As the most centrally located country in Europe, the Germans, naturally, like killing everyone around them...

...Longdistance enmity seems another case of American idealism rejected by allies who bog down their minds and passions in the dullness of everyday reality...

...It certainly isn't worth your time if there are people right there beside you waiting to be knocked off...

...If you have to travel very far to do your killing, it's hardly worth your time...

...military aid ;falters for a moment to come down like the wolf on the fold...

...Our enmity with the Russians, now over 40years-old , may be the all-time record...

...For at least 500 years, the Greeks have regarded the Turks as their worst enemy and the Turks, on the record, have regarded the Greeks as placed upon the earth for the Turks to slaughter and otherwise oppress...

...We then attacked the Canadians again, both times unsuccessfully, and a few years later invaded Mexico, seizing great hunks of land in what was eventually to become our Sunbelt, plague of Northern cities...

...Historically, of course, the great-exception to this rule of propinquity has been provided by imperialism and it is true that both the USSR a.~d the USA regard each other as imperialists...

...The American departure from all ,this is strange but clearly we haven't pulled all our allies along with us all the way, certainly not the Turks...

...If that is indeed the lesson our security advisors and foreign service officials have drawn from ,the Cyprus affair--as it certainly seems to be--there is every reason to suppose the.sequence will be repeated many times...

...It is ancient history yet never ancient enough to stop, that the people the British especially like murdering are the Irish...

...We were astounded...

...What a shock to see the Turks use them to shoot up the Greeks...

...It can only be wondered at that the Russians haven't invaded Turkey during the cutoff, but surely they will not abstain much longer...

...When the Turks invaded Cyprus in assistance to the Turkish-Cypriots in their endless struggle against the Greek-Cypriots, this country cut off military aid to the invaders because U.S...

...When we gave the Turks the arms, we were certain they would be only used to defend that free country from the encirclements and other threats by the dread Russians...

...Long-distance enmity ~eems to be like long-distance love, hard to sustain...

...It's easy: everybody likes to kill the folks next door...

...The reasoning behind the codicil, if reasoning it be, seems to be that since discipline has failed, concurrence may work, and that in any case it is important to get those arms flowing again regardless of disciplinary recalcitrance...

...What do all these individual tastes "n slaughter have in common...

...It's enough to make you wonder if you weren't past all wonderment, secure in the absolute knowledge that Communism is the cause of all wars, rumors of wars, economic discontents and political botherations all over the globe...

...We already know th~ the people the Russians like killing best are neither Americans nor Turks nor Greeks, but their fellow-Slavs and neighbors, the Poles and Czechs...

...You'd certainly have to check the books, but if you take a formula that includes the geographical distances between the capitals, the length of time the enmity endures, and, most iraCommonweal: 517 portant, the percentage of fear based on perceptible reality as opposed to fear based on the fevered imaginings of people selling arms, I think we'd stand a vet'y good chance of getting the nod...

...What is really to be deduced from Cyprus is that our supersensitized fear of the .Russians flies in the face of a great deal of human experience...

...While a great many Americans have died in war i~ the period of our Russian enmity and more or less in its name, they haven't been killed by Russians and almost no Russians have been killed by us...

...We next attacked the Canadians...

...On the other hand, of course, it is worth remembering that the present situation on Cyprus was initiated by a Greek invasion in favor of the GreekCypriots over the Turkish-Cypriots, as a last ditch stand of the former Greek junta, the classic dictatorial gambit of solidifying domestic control through foreign adventure...

...There is, of course, the advantage of long-distance enmity, namely that it is very difficult to kill people...

...Whatever one might have thought about the governments of Greece and Turkey, both were certifiably nonCommunist, even anti-Communist and therefore brotherly comrades in the single great struggle...

...The lesson American foreign policy makers have apparently learned from all this is simple: if a client state uses American arms to invade and occupy the territory of another client state, the invader and occupier is to be disciplined by the withholding of further arms shipments until the invader-occupier withdraws from its illicitly held territory and things are returned to the status quo ante...

...That illusion should have been shattered by the sequence of events on Cyprus: not a Russian around for miles except the sea-going hot-shots who play chicken with our own sea-going hot-shots in the Eastern Mediterranean, and yet there was a war erupting, flourishing, being prosecuted and won by the larger of the two nations, the one, as it happened, with the greater share of American arms to put into the effort...