remotely like what they would have faced on our turf. T he journal
of the Salvadoran Jesuits quite accurately pointed out that in their
country Vaclav Havel (the former political prisoner who became
president of Czechoslovakia) wouldn’t have been put in jail—he
might well have been hacked to pieces and left by the side of the
road somewhere.
T he USSR even apologized for its past use of violence, and this
too was unprecedented. US newspapers concluded that, because the
Russians admitted that the invasion of Afghanistan was a crime that
violated international law, they were finally joining the civilized
world. T hat’s an interesting reaction. Imagine someone in the US
media suggesting that maybe the United States ought to try to rise to
the moral level of the Kremlin and admit that the attacks against
Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia violated international law.
T he one country in Eastern Europe where there was extensive
violence as the tyrannies collapsed was the very one where the
Soviets had the least amount of influence and where we had the
most: Romania. Nicolae Ceausescu, the dictator of Romania, was
given the royal treatment when he visited England. T he US gave him
favored nation treatment, trade advantages and the like.
Ceausescu was just as brutal and crazed then as he was later, but
because he’d largely withdrawn from the Warsaw Pact and was
following a somewhat independent course, we felt he was partially
on our side in the international struggle. (We’re in favor of
independence as long as it’s in other people’s empires, not in our
own.)
Elsewhere in Eastern Europe, the uprisings were remarkably
peaceful. T here was some repression, but historically, 1989 was
unique. I can’t think of another case that comes close to it.
I think the prospects are pretty dim for Eastern Europe. T he
West has a plan for it—they want to turn large parts of it into a new,
easily exploitable part of the T hird W orld.
T here used to be a sort of colonial relationship between
Western and Eastern Europe; in fact, the Russians’ blocking of that
relationship was one of the reasons for the Cold W ar. Now it’s being
reestablished and there’s a serious conflict over who’s going to win
the race for robbery and exploitation. Is it going to be German-led
Western Europe (currently in the lead) or Japan (waiting in the
wings to see how good the profits look) or the United States (trying
to get into the act)?
ann
(Ann)
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