The Bicentennial Betrayal
ALAN, RAY
Euro vista BY RAY ALAN The Betrayal Could anything have been cruder, or more contemptuous of everything America is supposed to stand for, than what many Europeans are calling the Bicentennial...
...they are not scandalized when their 'boys' destroy any regime that does not suit their balance of payments...
...Spanish democrats are already saying they will reject it because it is the product of U.S...
...And only the other day, according to the French press, Kissinger boobed incredibly by declaring that trial by jury does not exist in Continental Europe: Is there really nobody in the State Department who could have put him right on that...
...Details of the agreement are still being negotiated...
...We've been repeating that for 40 years, but it would be useful to have it demonstrated by men of your eminence...
...He has certainly left behind a tangle: A country divided and subdivided by regional, political and social problems...
...What's your price for stomping on your principles, turning your backs on your European friends and buttressing my international prestige...
...This year he became an advocate of those Portuguese Rightwingers whose ambition is to stage a coup, or perhaps an invasion, to reverse the revolution...
...Russian imperialism has been a reply to American imperialism...
...Franco desperately needed a friend...
...A London journalist I know who used to be on the fringes of British intelligence now works with the CIA...
...And there, appalled by the news from Spain, were the democracies of Western Europe, belatedly plucking up courage to condemn Franco's torturers and drumhead tribunals...
...British policy in the Middle East was never in a worse mess than when a record number of British and Arab newspaper and radio commentators were—for various reasons, some financial—toeing lines laid down by a covert offshoot of the Foreign Office...
...A ridiculous aspect of the situation is that the pact is not immediately necessary...
...He used to be a moderate liberal, mildly contemptuous of the Franco and Salazar dictatorships, but soon after changing employers he switched to producing material favorable to the Franco regime...
...more likely, the change is a result of sociopolitical osmosis and he thinks that orthodox reactionary views are the key to success in his business...
...Euro vista BY RAY ALAN The Betrayal Could anything have been cruder, or more contemptuous of everything America is supposed to stand for, than what many Europeans are calling the Bicentennial Betrayal...
...All right, it was not very brave of Western Europe to have waited until Franco was on the way out before discovering its democratic conscience...
...There, tottering toward his moment of truth, was General Francisco Franco, reduced to staging a 1940ish mass rally to persuade the world that Spaniards loved his dictatorship...
...Anthology The government-controlled Spanish press is undoubtedly the most anti-American in Europe outside the Soviet bloc...
...and some of the anti-Franco demonstrators in Paris, Rome and elsewhere were simply thugs out for a spree of cop-bashing and window-smashing...
...At last, however, not only Leftwing trade-unionists but normally mealymouthed diplomats and circumlocuting editorialists were agreed that Franco's regime was an obscenity, an insult to Europe as well as to the Spanish people...
...The trouble is that people in Washington could take his essentially meretricious arguments seriously...
...an embarrassing dispute with Morocco...
...I doubt that anyone ever actually asked him to take this line...
...defenses or to U.S...
...I also remember a U.S...
...One of our basic tenets is that all democracies are corrupt and willing to bend their principles to suit whoever pays the right price...
...I know you know that my regime is based on a social and political establishment whose members hate these pet ideals of yours and are strongly anti-American...
...in recent weeks?while Madrid sought to squeeze dollars, arms and a defense-treaty out of Washington: ?"North Americans are not scandalized when their 'boys' drop napalm on hospitals and murder the children of the Third World...
...communications with Europe and the Middle East...
...but, clearly, it will be both precarious and dangerous...
...Those bustling, impressive embassies and well-heeled intelligence services can be alarmingly out of touch with prosaic street-level reality...
...and, if they are too affluent, they tend to waste a lot of money paying people to produce reports, studies and analyses tailored to suit what their authors think are their readers' prejudices...
...I remember the U.S...
...ambassador to Madrid who did far more to sell the Franco dictatorship to America than to popularize American democracy in Spain...
...The diplomat took a poor view of an article in which I had written that de Gaulle and most other French Rightwingers were anti-American and would delight in running the U.S...
...Another cartoon shows Uncle Sam, with a Congress-shaped birthday cake, celebrating the Bicentennial...
...Governmental, provincial and municipal employes, schoolchildren and anyone else who wanted a day off, a free ride and 400 pesetas ($9) for "expenses," were bussed into the capital from as far away as Valladolid to join Madrid's vast army of civil servants and plain-clothed police—and, of course, thousands of convinced Rightwingers—to cheer and wave banners for half an hour...
...The new U.S.Spanish pact will be a humiliation for the Spanish government, in that it will be accepting terms it turned down only a few weeks earlier...
...The naval base at Rota is useful, and, since Spanish democrats are not opposed to cooperation with nato—it is the deal with Franco that annoyed them?common sense ought to have suggested less precipitation and more consultation with the men likely to come to the top in the near future...
...it would have been hypocritical to denounce Franco while embracing Antonio de Oliveira Sal-azar...
...and an economic crisis that the government's other worries have caused it to neglect...
...Will Washington, then, be tempted to try to keep a dictatorial regime in power...
...Moreover, the Cold War had arguably obliged the West to prefer the status quo to possible instability in Iberia...
...Grinning satanically, he is opening a curtain to reveal an Asian peasant crucified on a dollar sign...
...Yet the pact will humiliate the United States even more in European eyes—and not only for moral or sentimental reasons...
...So give me a hand...
...Here are some examples of what moderate, respectable journals have been saying about the U.S...
...His own sympathies are said to be slightly liberal, but he is unlikely to feel strong enough to make major concessions to the democrats overnight...
...If it doesn't, how will it react to the "Go home" campaign that will probably develop under a democratic regime...
...British officials and ministers who did not know that the applause being given their Mideast policy was mainly claque-produced were, understandably, strengthened in their belief that it was the right policy, and plunged on into the errors that brought about a succession of British debacles in the region...
...Washington has failed to obtain any promise that Spanish democratic leaders will respect it if they come to power after the present regime's collapse...
...America's three airbases in Spain are not essential to U.S...
...The Test Franco said repeatedly that when he relinquished power he would leave everything "tied up, thoroughly tied up" (atado y bien atado), meaning that he intended to make it difficult for his successors to change the political system he bequeathed them...
...Is there not a risk, either way, of America becoming involved in internal Spanish strife...
...Moscow's agitprop boys can be sent to the Ukraine to grow corn: The Kremlin doesn't need them...
...But Western Europe had for years been inhibited by the presence of the Portuguese dictatorship in nato...
...After years of awkward fence-sitting, he will have to choose between those who want liberalization and the advocates of "Franquismo after Franco...
...demands...
...Embassies, as is well known, tend to become cocooned in paper and a self-sufficient routine...
...The Ford-Kissinger reply came as British and Continental papers were publishing warm articles about the Bicentennial...
...Intelligence services, too, can get perilously paperbound...
...In a cartoon, Kissinger applauds as the deposed head of the Greek dictatorship says: "I like to see tanks in the street and to shut down parliaments and to torture malcontents...
...down...
...Indeed, Spanish conservatives, greatly addicted to conspiracy theories, are alleging that Washington stirred up the recent anti-Franco protests in Western Europe so as to pressure Madrid into accepting the U.S...
...Intelligence Once more, American policymakers appear to have been badly —surely, incompletely—informed...
...diplomat who was pleased when de Gaulle became President of France because, he said, the General was a sound anti-Communist, so U.S.French relations would now flourish...
...He turned to President Ford and Secretary of State Henry Kissinger and said, in effect: Senores, I know America is attached to democracy, freedom of expression, the rights of man, the rule of law, and all that bilge...
...One early measure the international community should press him for is an amnesty for political prisoners...
...The Generalissimo's successor as chief of state, Don Juan Carlos, is going to have a hard time snipping through all these knots...
...connivance with the Franco dictatorship...
Vol. 58 • September 1975 • No. 23
