Lies... ...and Calumny

To the Editors of The Crimson:

For once I find myself in the unusual position of agreeing with one of the statements made by Errol T. Louis in his "Endpaper" column. Last week he stated that most Harvard students, like most Americans, have been raised on a number of dangerous illusions about the world. However, I feel that the greatest and most dangerous illusion many Americans readily accept is that the United States and the Soviet Union are both motivated by morally equivalent aims in pursuing the arms race and that if only we would take the first step to disarm or institute a nuclear freeze, the Soviets would do likewise. It is precisely this type of wishful thinking that has spawned the so-called peace movements in the United States and Western Europe.

With calls for a nuclear freeze and unilateral disarmament growing, it is time to dispel the illusion that the Soviet Union is a peace-loving nation (as Andropov would have us believe) arming itself merely in response to a Western military build-up. For two decades, military spending as a component of GNP steadily declined in the West as the component of military expenditures allocated for personnel costs continued to rise. The opposite was true in the Soviet Union where its people were forced to make even greater sacrifices of national income to finance the greatest military build-up the world has ever seen in peace-time.

Mr. Louis is correct when he states that many Americans respond with. "Well, what about the Russians?" when faced with criticism directed at this country. His attitude seems to be that we should let the Russians worry about criticizing their own government the same as we criticize our own for policies which we are against. This would be a good arrangement were it not for the fact that Soviet citizens do not have the right to criticize their own government, especially on military and foreign policy issues (witness the number of demonstrations against Soviet involvement in Afghanistan). Mr. Louis might recall an incident last year when a group of peaceniks trying to organize a rally in Red Square against the arms race were met by a gang of KGB thugs who presumably hauled them off to a state psychiatric institution to undergo treatment for "social deviance," a term used by the Soviet government to label those who get out of step with the Party line.

Mr. Louis makes a very puzzling statement when he declares that "My concern is for areas where I can do something constructive: America and its satellite countries." Does he perhaps mean Canada or Western Europe when he refers to our so-called "satellite" countries? I get the impression that he sees no difference between the Soviet Union's satellites in Eastern Europe and America's partners in Western Europe. If this is the case, may I suggest to Mr. Louis that he travel first to West Germany, and then to East Germany, Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, etc. to discover the true implication of the term "satellite country." In the spirit of Orwell's 1984 and Errol T. Louis' "Endpaper," words have a way of losing their distinction so as to make lucid thinking impossible.

Finally, Mr. Louis blames the government, media, textbooks, and even professors (of all people for weaving a fabric of confusions and untruths. But this conspiracy theory rings as hollow as the cavernous emptiness of the rest of his assertions. For every National Review on the periodical shelves you can find a Village Voice (as Mr. Louis knows all too well), and for every Richard Pipes on a college faculty there are at least five John Womacks ranting and raving against supposed U.S. imperialism, oppression, and warmongering. It is precisely in countries such as the Soviet Union (and many Third World countries who all too willingly follow its example) where journalists and writers are mazzled by Big Brother's bullies that this type of thought control is exercised. For it is he who controls the present who controls the past, and he who controls the past who controls the future... Larry P. Baumgartner `84