This month we can all rejoice in a wonderful antidote to the Watergate scandals, the illegal campaign contributions, and the acceptance of expensive, questionable gifts by highly-placed and highly-paid U.S. officials.
To lift our spirits and inspire our youth we look, not to Washington, but to Vienna and Moscow. We look to a trio of super-heroes, to three men who have risked everything — their lives, their freedom, and their careers in order to speak the truth about Communist tyranny.
The voice from Vienna, where he lives today, is the courageous clergyman, Joseph Cardinal Mindszenty. During World War II, he was imprisoned by the Nazis because he protested their outrageous treatment of the Jews and because he ordered all the Catholic churches and convents under his jurisdiction to shelter Jews trying to hide from the Gestapo. Later, when the Communists took over his native Hungary, he was arrested, tortured, and imprisoned for 2 3 years because he led the resistance to Communist control of the schools and churches.
Next we look to the Soviet scientist, Andrei Sakharov, who developed Russians hydrogen bomb. Winner of many Soviet awards, Sakharov could have led a life of ease and prestige. Instead, he has literally taken his life in his hands by speaking out against Soviet repression. In an act of supreme heroism he even made public a desperate letter appealing to the U.S. Congress to deny most-favored-nation trading benefits to the Soviet Union until Soviet citizens are granted the right to emigrate.
Contrary to Henry Kissinger’s recent testimony to the Fulbright Committee, Sakharov wrote that the Jackson Amendment does not constitute interference in Socialist countries internal affairs, but is simply a defense of international law “without which there cannot be mutual trust.”
Sakharov even publicly mentioned the unmentionable in stating
that mind-damaging drugs are being injected into some dissidents held in mental hospitals. There is growing evidence from many sources that the Soviets are imprisoning more and more dissidents in “special psychiatric hospitals” where they are given “medical punishment.”
Third we look to the Nobel prize-winning w^riter, Alexander Solzhenitsyn. He could have used his exceptional literary talents to rake in the rewards of pleasing the Soviet bosses. Instead, he has used them to warn the West about the evils of Communism and es- pecially of Soviet slave labor camps.
Cardinal Mindszenty was in the United States this past weekend — his first visit to our country in 25 years. He was given a hero ^s welcome at St. Ladislaus^ Church in New Brunswick, New Jersey.
It would be a good thing for America i f those two other heroes, Sakharov and Solzhenitsyn also come to America. Dr. Kissinger has been telling us that Communism is mellowing, and that Soviet leaders
want friendly commercial and cultural relations. President Nixon can find out whether this is true or not by asking Brezhnev to permit Sakharov and Solzhenitsyn to visit the United States. This would be a good test of the new agreement Brezhnev signed recently when he was in our country.
