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imagine a medieval tale in which the Soviet Union is a castle besieged in
turn by three different groups: anti-anti-communists, realists, and Rea–
ganites. The anti-anti-communists yell, "Come on out. We accept your
right to live a different way of life; we are not judgmental, and further–
more we realize we bear the greater responsibility for this war." The
realists yell, "Come on out. We have some treaties for you to sign that
should reduce tensions between us so that we can live together in a
peaceful fashion." The Reaganites yell, "Stay there as long as you want.
We are going to strengthen our fortifications, and eventually you'll col–
lapse because your system doesn 't work."
What disturbed me most about the realists and the anti-anti-commu–
nists was their intellectual complacency-their cavalier way of dismiss–
ing the views of dissidents by insinuating that they were not only biased
because of their experiences but also a little crazy for sticking their
necks out as they did. (This is what a State Department official once
suggested to me.) Most of the dissidents [ met struck me as sane and
modest. And to my mind they had a much better knowledge of life
under communist regimes than the realists and anti-anti-communists.
The more we learn about the Soviet Union, the more we find out that
the concerns of the Reaganites were justifiable. According to the
New
Yorker,
the USSR set up its biological warfare research facilities one
year
after
it signed the treaty banning the development, use, and stock–
piling of biological weapons.
Looking back on the forty-year debate about American policy
toward the Soviet bloc, one can criticize all three groups. Anti-commu–
nists like Urban were wrong to lump realists with anti-anti-communists,
for the realist position was tenable, whereas the anti-anti-communist
position was not. The anti-anti-communists deserve to be criticized the
most, for they refused to take seriously the views of the Reaganites–
dismissing them as paranoid, deluded, and obsessive. Whatever differ–
ences I had with some Reaganites, it was the Reaganites who strongly
supported the Radios when many others did not. Most anti-anti-com–
munists regarded the Radios as Cold War propaganda-as obstacles to
detente and barriers to good relations with the Soviet Union.
If
the anti–
anti-communists had gotten their way in the early 1970s, the Radios
would have been shut down.
And that would have been a terrible mistake.
