The U.S. vs. America
ALAN, RAY
Euro vista BY RAY ALAN The U.S. vs. America? With Syrians, Palestinians and Lebanese of various persuasions embroiled in Lebanon, and the rival Ba'athist governments of Syria and Iraq moving...
...Not only did Fraga fail to punish the police officers responsible, he declared, in defiance of all eyewitnesses, that it was the workers who attacked the police...
...In 1970, calling Mao an old ape would have provoked a riot...
...Following the King's surprise appointment of Adolfo Suarez Gonzales as Prime Minister on July 3, Fraga quit the government, himself a victim of what Spaniards fear is a trend toward conservatism...
...will help them put an economic garotte on Israel—and on itself—by supplying them with arms and aircraft so as to lessen the USSR's share of the Mideast hardware trade...
...Fraga, an ambitious liberal conservative who, as minister of information 10 years ago, persuaded the late General Franco to grant the press a mote of freedom, was thought to be just the man to call the police to heel...
...Jordan, too, has recently received American combat aircraft, tanks and missiles...
...Political movements of the more or less extremist Left continue to agitate European universities occasionally, but—unleavened by the artful naivety of the Little Red Book —they are Modern Times without Chaplin...
...A recent headline in the Paris daily Aurore proclaims: dying is to become less expensive and will involve less form-filling...
...American veterans of the Vietnam war have—with official Washington's approval—been training Saudi troops to defend Arabian oil centers against possible attack by United States forces...
...When will the Communists understand that elections are pleasanter for all concerned—as well as simpler and cheaper—than their present system of succession with its dependence on backstabbing, conspiracy or, at best, long-drawn-out politburo intrigue...
...Yet already, two years ago, on one southern French campus, I saw a huge red inscription that yelled: mao = vieux singe...
...The formula is, by now, a classic one: At no time since Arab nationalism was invented, in the second decade of this century, has "Arab unity" been more than a relative term...
...Ostensibly, Cambio's sin was its publication of a friendly cartoon of the King dancing over New York's skyline...
...His tragedy was that, under the Communist system, he could not retire to a country cottage 10 or 15 years ago and write his memoirs: He had to go on being chairman, warding off potential rivals, sniffing out plots, and fostering a sickly personality cult...
...but the offense that had really aroused conservative ire was its publication of photographic and textual evidence that Spanish policemen were still torturing political suspects...
...Chairman Mao Tse-tung is no longer able to receive visitors...
...He—or his successor—might then, in desperation, order Syrian forces in southern Lebanon to attack the nearest Israeli targets...
...by 1974, there were not enough Maoists around to scrub the insult out...
...Mao's Prime Minister, Chou Enlai, shocked Leftists by declaring: "The atom bomb is peace...
...There is nothing sinister in all this, of course...
...In February this year, as if to round off the martyrdom of any surviving Western Maoists, Nixon and Mao got together again...
...Encouraged by analyses (some Soviet-supplied) of what they describe as Israel's grave internal difficulties, the principal Arab leaders appear to have decided to wear down Israel "and its American backers and suppliers" economically...
...If Israel had not existed, Arab politicians would have had to invent it...
...whole companies of armed police have attacked demonstrators in Madrid and Barcelona urging amnesty for political detainees...
...You can't be much more impartial, even-handed, fair-minded, or whatever, than that...
...With Syrians, Palestinians and Lebanese of various persuasions embroiled in Lebanon, and the rival Ba'athist governments of Syria and Iraq moving troops along their common border, propagandists of the Arab League are saying openly that what is needed to bring the Arabs together is a short but sharp clash with Israel...
...Old China hands assure me that in his prime he was a great man...
...My impression is that he hoped to avoid alienating the many conservatives who believe that cops can do no wrong...
...Fraga had little grassroots support and felt the need of conservative allies in the elections promised for next spring...
...Yasir Arafat's Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) representatives in Western Europe are already "explaining" the Lebanese civil war as the outcome of an American-Israeli plot...
...The Police vs...
...Incidentally, where have all our Western Maoists gone...
...You needed the faith of a dervish and the agility of a Sartre to cope with those photos of God entertaining the Devil in the heart of the Forbidden City...
...Shortly after that traumatic letdown, Maoist agitators began concentrating on schoolchildren, the less literate immigrants and other fringe groups that don't read the papers...
...It is always invoked against someone or something, never for anything...
...Since, thanks to oil, their financial resources are virtually unlimited, they believe they can force Israel into runaway inflation, then bankruptcy...
...As they emerged, the workers were clubbed and shot at: Five workers were killed and several were injured...
...The man chiefly responsible for the decline of campus Maoism was Richard Nixon...
...They also believe that the U.S...
...But his personal political calculations are of course irrelevant now...
...In the past weeks, five lawyers have publicly accused the police of sadistically mistreating eight young political prisoners...
...In Vitoria, in the Basque country, the police fired tear-gas grenades and machine-gun bullets through the windows of a church last March to force several hundred workers holding a meeting there—with the permission of the local clergy—to leave the building...
...Maoism...
...After pillorying the European Economic Community as a capitalist ramp, Mao suddenly began supporting it as a counterweight to Soviet imperialism...
...The failure of Fraga Iribarne, the minister of the interior, to exert adequate control over Spain's police forces was one of the two big disappointments of the post-Franco regime (the other: its refusal to proclaim an amnesty for political prisoners...
...The latest edition published in France is bound in red leather embellished with 22-carat gold: It costs about $25, with no discount for undernourished proletarians...
...He recognized the colonels' regime in Greece and General Franco's dictatorship, and sent condolences and a wreath when Franco died...
...Their main tactic will be to build up the level of their armaments in quantity and quality...
...P.S...
...West European diplomats with good Arab contaots maintain that, barring an accident of the kind that could occur this summer in south Lebanon, the Arab governments are likely to avoid another war with Israel for as long as possible...
...Should the Israelis hit back, they would be denounced as aggressors by the United Nations, and within a week Soviet propaganda would have convinced two thirds of humanity that Israel, inspired by Washington, started the fighting in Lebanon...
...It is improbable that Fraga was really too weak an administrator to be able to prevent the police from besmirching Spain's reputation in this way...
...and several reporters and photographers have been beaten up by police officers...
...Mao vs...
...America is already supplying transport aircraft, fighter planes, advanced electronic equipment, communications equipment, armored vehicles, antitank missiles and antiaircraft missiles to Egypt, and combat aircraft in large numbers, helicopters, tracked vehicles, antitank missiles, and missile boats plus other naval vessels to Saudi Arabia...
...Electorally, as Portugal and Italy have just shown, they are insignificant...
...An immediate danger is that President Hafez al-Assad of Syria may find himself out on a limb or be overthrown...
...Not all the news is bad...
...But he had little impact on them...
...Off to China every one...
...Juan Carlos Less than a week after King Juan Carlos had assured the United States Congress of his intention to establish a more democratic regime in Spain, the King's government began preparing punitive measures against the outspoken liberal weekly Cambio...
...Basque spokesmen have said that the torture of political suspects is as prevalent under King Juan Carlos as in Franco's day...
...Only yesterday, it seems, Mao's thoughts were as fashionable as miniskirts, his Little Red Book was a best-seller on every campus, and conservatives and Muscovites alike suspected Peking of trying to undermine Western civilization via its universities...
...The Little Red Book is still on sale, although as a curiosity not a vade mecum...
...Some Egyptian pilots are said to be receiving training from American instructors in Saudi Arabia and Iran...
...Even in the universities, where Muscovite and Trotskyite Communists remain in the front line, bravely manning their paint-sprays and duplicators, Maoists are hard to find...
...But their heart wasn't in it, and Peking did nothing to encourage them...
Vol. 59 • July 1976 • No. 15
