Comment
Comment Under the Volcano Ronald Reagan has cast a shadow of shame over the American people. After months of brutal repression by the South African police and armed forces, after a bull-necked...
...First, South Africa is seen as an important ally because of its supply of "strategic minerals" on which the Pentagon, and U.S...
...Window of Gullibility Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger and other Reagan Administration shills are waging war against the term arms race...
...Its rulers maintain a rabidly anti-Soviet position, which has placed them firmly in the U.S...
...investors are beginning to back off...
...In Massachusetts, the state Supreme Court ruled that The Christian Science Monitor had every right to fire a lesbian reporter after she refused to "heal" herself of homosexuality...
...the blacks are on their side...
...This is an unprecedented assault on freedom of speech...
...In the Greenpeace Affair, most French socialists maintained a discreet silence while their socialist government engaged in cover-up and whitewash...
...It takes a special kind of naivete to swallow such nonsense—the kind induced by almost four decades of unrelenting Cold War propaganda...
...Reagan is simply following the script...
...Thanks to diligent detective work in New Zealand, the individuals responsible for sinking the Rainbow Warrior and for killing Fernando Pereira have been identified and some of them have been apprehended...
...Government prosecutors had asked a grand jury to subpoena the notes of Antoni Gronowicz, alleging that the author may have committed fraud when he wrote God's Broker, a book about Pope John Two Salvadoran girls, aged fifteen and sixteen, being held in detention by the U.S...
...In the last decade of the Nineteenth Century, a cabal of reactionary French military commanders conspired to railroad a Jewish fellow officer, Captain Alfred Dreyfus, to disgrace and imprisonment on trumped up charges of espionage...
...Scientists and engineers, he said, "have no technological magic" to eliminate the threat of nuclear war...
...some said—and still say—it marked the end of the antiwar movement as an effective political force...
...Bright Stars If David L. Parnas had kept his mouth shut, he'd be earning $1,000 a day as a consultant to the Defense Department...
...I'm proud to be a Carbider, Virginians support Carbide, Kiss a Carbider today: These were among the many slogans that residents of Institute, West Virginia, displayed at a rally to support their corporate benefactor, Union Carbide...
...The Cold War is the third, and overriding, reason for U.S...
...it was organized to counter negative reports about the company, which a week earlier had released 5,000 gallons of toxic chemicals at the local plant...
...Recently, on the fifteenth anniversary of the bombing, the major news media recalled the event and issued solemn sermons on its lessons...
...The executive order, which Lyndon Johnson signed and every President since has affirmed, covers twenty-seven million workers and $100 billion a year in Federal contracts...
...But until those who gave the orders are brought to book, France's name is sullied by the stain at least as large and ugly as the old blot of the Dreyfus Affair...
...Children's programming is taking on a whole new meaning...
...It has sanctioned a grand jury investigation into the veracity of a book...
...As usual, the Administration claims it is merely responding to a Soviet lead in antisatellite weaponry...
...businesses invest there, and they have reaped handsome profits over the years...
...Instead, we should draw from the lessons of Social Security to reshape programs for families with children...
...And it was all couched in perfectly recognizable communist jargon.' They all sound the same, don't they...
...Dismantling the nation's most effective antipoverty program is no way to fight poverty...
...Poverty Shifts Old" and "poor" don't overlap much anymore...
...And until we—all of us—recapture our sense of indignation when such crimes are perpetrated, we are bound to sink deeper and deeper into a morass of officially sanctioned crime...
...Comes now the appeals court declaring that "false statements made intentionally receive no First Amendment protection" when published in a book...
...Five of the six best-selling toys in the United States now sport a military image, according to the Fellowship of Reconciliation...
...More than 300 U.S...
...The scandal rocked France and the entire Western world...
...The new government would still have to sell its minerals somewhere...
...Botha, Reagan had the effrontery to praise the apartheid regime for having "eliminated the segregation that we once had in our own country...
...In fact, the United States has taken the lead in every major round of arms-race escalation, including the atomic bomb, the hydrogen bomb, the neutron bomb, the multiple warhead, the cruise missile, and many more...
...Basically, Americans, the American people and the Congress, have a relatively superficial view of the nature of the problem in South Africa," one high Reagan Administration official said, accusing all the rest of us of being "very emotional...
...the U.S...
...The fumes sent six workers and 129 residents to the hospital...
...But that's only half the battle: Parnas has "no objections to weapons development in general," nor do most of his colleagues...
...Obviously, Washington doesn't believe its own rhetoric...
...The article notes how weapons firms cushion themselves against recession: "As the U.S...
...Consumers shell out $842 million each year on such provisions for their own little soldiers...
...On Star Wars alone, the Pentagon plans to spend more than $600 million at American universities over the next five years...
...economy slowed in the early 1980s, United Technologies upped its defense production from 20 per cent of sales in 1980 to 33 per cent in 1982...
...And once the insurgents receive aid from the Soviet Union, the United States invariably exaggerates the significance of the alliance...
...On one level, Reagan's personality plays a part...
...Favorites include several robot warriors and a superhuman doll called He-man...
...If these acts of resistance were to spark a rebellion, Star Wars might be jettisoned—before it did serious damage...
...support of South Africa...
...There is no reason why anyone else should...
...The Fifth U.S...
...foreign policy establishment has, after all, steadfastly supported the Pretoria regime since 1948, when apartheid became official policy...
...oppression, once it is found intolerable, cannot long be borne...
...Sanctions need to be imposed, trade halted, investments withdrawn, loans cancelled, ambassadors recalled, and relations severed...
...On the Plantation Before the Civil War, some slaves remained steadfastly loyal to even the crudest of plantation masters...
...Ambassador to the United Nations...
...They are part of a trend: U.S...
...investment in South Africa dropped from $2.3 billion in fiscal 1983 to $1.8 billion in fiscal 1984...
...With no incentive to conciliate, he opts for the iron hand...
...Again, the Soviet Union might join the battle, and nuclear catastrophe would be upon us...
...Time Warp The Reagan Administration hopes to rewrite the 1965 Presidential executive order on affirmative action...
...war machine needs, including manganese and uranium—24 per cent of which comes to this country from South Africa...
...For proof, look in the nearest toy chest...
...In the Dreyfus Affair, French socialists and decent people everywhere rallied to protest a monstrous miscarriage of justice (though it involved no loss of human life...
...Some pundits of social policy use this development to pit young against old...
...Now, under a different economic arrangement, the same psychological phenomenon surfaces again...
...the worst that could happen is that the United States would have to pay a little more for chromium...
...South Africa is rich in other minerals that the U.S...
...What Washington never manages to realize is that by siding with the oppressor, it pushes the oppressed toward Moscow...
...In any event, blacks in South Africa have a right More wisdom from Edward Teller, developer of the H-bomb and prime pusher of Star Wars: 'I am convinced it is only our own left-wingers who talk about launching a first strike.' to self-determination...
...South Africa supplies 48 per cent of the U.S...
...The South African government is an insult to humanity, and deserves the contempt of all civilized beings...
...Rejected by Washington, South Africa's black liberation movement, the African National Congress, has turned to Moscow for materiel aid and arms...
...Never sympathetic to black causes and ever hostile to demonstrators here and abroad, the President naturally gravitates toward the oppressor, not the oppressed, in South Africa...
...We shall find that the censorial power is in the hands of the people over the Government," he said, "and not in the Government over the people...
...Have we become so thoroughly acclimated to official homicide that we simply shrug and turn to the next outrage in the day's news roundup...
...Consider, next, l'affaire Dreyfus...
...The ironies are profound and pervasive...
...Old loyalties die hard...
...As the civil war escalates, the risks will stretch beyond South Africa's borders...
...Gronowicz refused...
...The African National Congress, the black liberation movement of South Africa, invoked the 'most vicious anti-American rhetoric' recently, complained Vernon Walters, U.S...
...In the Mani-chaean eyes of U.S...
...Indignation everywhere was remarkably restrained—even (or especially) among those who would righteously condemn the wretched killers of Robert Fassnacht...
...Judicial Illness Two August court decisions stand out as symptoms of the antihomosexual fever infecting our country...
...And the African National Congress says it would allow U.S...
...Such proposals are absurd...
...L'affaire Greenpeace Consider, first, the bombing of the Army Mathematics Research Center in Madison, Wisconsin, on an August night in 1970...
...corporations to invest there, much as Angola allowed Gulf Oil and other American companies to come back after the revolution...
...But lately the climate has grown chilly...
...Consider, finally, the demolition last July of the Rainbow Warrior, a ship belonging to the environmental group Greenpeace, at its berth in Auckland, New Zealand, as it prepared to lead a flotilla protesting French nuclear testing in the South Pacific...
...The existing family welfare system provides too little, too late...
...Why should the Russians idly wait for us to catch up...
...That's all there is to it...
...But Soviet antisatellite weapons are much more crude, heavy, inaccurate, and likely to malfunction than those already possessed by the United States...
...Robert C. McFarlane, the President's national security adviser, says, "This will lead to stability by having some equivalent capability...
...If the Soviet Union is the "evil empire" cited in melodramatic Presidential rhetoric, determined to destroy the United States at the first sign of weakness, and if we lag behind the Soviets as the White House insists, why doesn't Moscow launch its missiles now, while it enjoys that great advantage...
...How could people who professed to be devoted to peace engage in reckless killing...
...The State has no business deciding what is truthful...
...The proposed changes would revoke requirements that Government contractors meet goals and timetables for hiring minorities and women, and would forbid use of employment statistics to determine when a company has practiced discrimination in hiring...
...Their position is that only the Soviets are racing, trying frantically to perpetuate and increase an immense arms advantage over the United States, while poor, innocent, li'l ol' us try in vain to catch up...
...Little Soldiers Americans are gearing up for war...
...We call it "the pearl" for the use of man in space,' he said...
...Thanks to the high benefits and universal coverage of Social Security, the poverty rate for persons sixty-five and older has fallen several percentage points below the rate for the population as a whole...
...To address poverty among children, the United States needs a comprehensive benefits program, like Social Security, that would provide food, health care, and day care as a right extended to all...
...foreign policy toward South Africa...
...Or, if the African National Congress actually were to overthrow the white rulers, the United States might itself invade South Africa, sending black American soldiers to kill black South Africans...
...But in Philadelphia, birthplace of the Constitution, a Federal appeals court is proving Madison wrong...
...The Saturday morning program averages eighty-three acts of violence per hour...
...policy toward South Africa...
...The grand jury complied...
...It isn't fair to the United States, they insist, to use words that imply equal culpability on the part of the two superpowers (another word at which they flinch...
...Washington's latest provocation, announced late in August, is the decision to test an antisatellite weapon against a target in outer space...
...Furthermore, the Soviets have voluntarily observed a moratorium on testing and have proposed a treaty severely limiting ASAT...
...Like the attack on the University of Wisconsin's Army Math Research Center, the bombing of the Rainbow Warrior claimed a life—that of Portuguese photographer Fernando Pereira...
...Family welfare programs are targeted for the few, and are therefore vulnerable to budget cuts...
...With more than one child in five living below the poverty line, "young and poor" is a more common condition...
...The attack on the Greenpeace vessel was mounted not by confused students taking misguided action in a noble cause, but by French military intelligence agents acting, deliberately, under orders to protect their government's life-threatening nuclear tests...
...After months of brutal repression by the South African police and armed forces, after a bull-necked speech by South African President P.W...
...But Reagan's reactionary predispositions are, in themselves, too limited an explanation for his backing of the South African government...
...He knows that when push comes to shove, the United States will support him whatever he does...
...policymakers, the issue is simple: South Africa's rulers are on our side...
...Those judges should be taken on a tour of Independence Hall...
...Bucks for the Bang More proof that military contractors know how to get rich quick: During the 1982 recession, as the rest of the economy hobbled along at a growth rate of 1 or 2 per cent, the arms sector of such industries as autos, electronics, telephones, radios, iron, and steel grew between 13 and 28 per cent, according to a recent article by John Cavanagh published by the Coalition for a New Foreign and Military Policy...
...This so-called ASAT test will go a long way toward militarizing the skies, increasing the risk of catastrophic war by accident, malfunction, or miscalculation...
...Our balmy President patted Botha on the head for leading a "reformist administration" and bringing about "substantial changes" in that country's racist policies...
...But there the similarity ends...
...President Botha shrewdly recognizes this...
...So even though nine of the top ten Pentagon contractors are under Federal investigation, they're laughing all the way to the bank...
...Much as the President's aides tried to fudge his remarks, they couldn't muffle the central message that rang out loud and clear: Reagan is an avowed friend and champion of the world's most blatantly racist regime...
...They, too, turned down a share of the gold...
...They suffer under the most cruel and noxious form of governmental oppression...
...the only other large exporters of chromium in the world are the Soviet Union and Zimbabwe...
...It is the Soviet Union that has, often unwisely, played catch-up ball...
...The United States imports chromium to make armored plating...
...The Administration's claim of Soviet superiority is patently absurd...
...It is time, it is long past time, to abandon the pernicious and reckless course of U.S...
...Hogwash...
...Proponents of the sodomy ban cited the AIDS scare in their arguments and praised the court's conclusion as "the right decision based on Judeo-Chris-tian law...
...They want to cut Social Security benefits and restrict them to low-income elderly in order to free funds for poor children...
...Social Security, which serves almost 95 per cent of those aged sixty-five or older, has a huge political constituency to protect it from attack...
...camp...
...Four young Americans, enraged by a criminal war their country was waging in Southeast Asia, frustrated by the failure of all rational efforts to stop the war, committed an irrational act of violence...
...But Parnas took a hard look at his assignment—helping develop computer programs for Star Wars—and resigned...
...Social Security benefits are paid to seniors regardless of income, and therefore keep many of them from dipping below the poverty line...
...demand for this mineral...
...Circuit Court of Appeals, led by six Reagan appointees, reversed a 1979 ruling of its own three-judge panel and declared a Texas law against sodomy constitutional in light of Western culture's "strong objection to homosexual conduct...
...The judges are the ones in need of treatment— for a disease called bigotry...
...Have we concluded that the demands of "national security"—even French national security—are justification enough for any vicious act...
...military contractors, depend for the manufacture of weapons...
...The INS, for its part, denied the charge, saying it held the teenagers because it did not wish to 'add to an already growing problem of child abuse.' Paul II...
...There can be no doubt that black protests will escalate, regardless of the brutal and barbarian tactics employed by Botha...
...corporations with a vast supply of cheap black labor...
...The Pentagon will 'continue to study the potential utility of military men in space and possible use of the NASA Space Station for such things as research and development,' Under Secretary of the Air Force Edward C. Aldridge recently told Congress...
...Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS), were released after a judge heard arguments that the INS was using the minors as lures to apprehend their parents...
...That country Comment BASCOVE could become, as Jesse Jackson has correctly observed, the "ignition point" for a nuclear war...
...Though they intended to destroy a military research facility without endangering human life, the blast they set off killed a graduate student who happened to be working late in a physics lab...
...If South Africa sees the black rebellion raging out of control, it may, in a final resort to desperate force, decide to drop a nuclear bomb on strongholds of the African National Congress...
...With some black workers now organized into unions and with anti-apartheid demonstrations shaking the system, U.S...
...What possible motives impel the President of the United States to ally our government with so despicable a regime...
...The Soviet Union could take this as an unpardonable assault on an ally and enter the fray, and the United States would have little choice but to back its long-favored friends in Pretoria...
...Their protest tragically misfired...
...The controversy, enComment gaging some of the foremost polemicists of that era, continued long past Dreyfus's total vindication in 1906...
...Families with children must fall into poverty to qualify for Food Stamps, Medicaid, and Aid to Families with Dependent Children...
...The Truth-Seeker The ink was hardly dry on the Bill of Rights, but James Madison was optimistic...
...An overthrow of South Africa's government by the African National Congress wouldn't spell disaster for the United States...
...they must be free to do what they feel necessary to redress their situation—without meddling from the United States...
...Time to turn back your clocks...
...Apple Computer, Phibro-Salomon, Inc., and BBDO International Advertising are pulling out...
...A case can be made that it still affects French politics today...
...Second, South Africa and its apartheid system have provided U.S...
...By playing this silly board-game version of diplomacy, the United States is squeezing itself into an extremely dangerous corner...
...The death of Robert Fassnacht shocked the nation...
...About two weeks later, forty-seven physicists at the University of Illinois denounced Star Wars as "technically dubious and politically unwise...
...Three factors have been central to traditional U.S...
...If we have left a modicum of common sense, we should distance ourselves from Pretoria so as to prevent an international conflict...
...That would do a better job of protecting our national security interests than deploying an antisatellite system," says John Pike, head of space policy for the American Federation of Scientists...
...But this was not just any old booster parade...
...If we have left even a shred of decency, we should not let our government support the government of South Africa...
...For instance, "Transformers," the most popular toy set sold in the country, is featured in television's most violent kiddie show...
...Often the toys are manufactured to cash in on violent television cartoons...
Vol. 49 • October 1985 • No. 10
