President Ford announced recently that he does not intend to use the word detente any more. He has finally realized that it is counterproductive in American politics.
Unfortunately, Leonid Brezhnev, General Secretary of the Soviet Communist Party, has just taken the opposite view. In his ive-hour speech to the 25th Congress of the Communist Parties of the world, Brezhnev made it clear that he likes the word detente because it is so highly productive of Communist goals.
He said, “We make no secret of the fact that we see detente as the way to create more favorable conditions for peaceful Socialist and Communist construction…. Socialism’s positions have grown stronger. Detente has become the leading trend, … and Soviet people can be proud of it.” No wonder Brezhnev looked so happy when he was photographed delivering his speech.
It is certainly true that, since Richard Nixon made detente the watchword of U.S.-Soviet relations, conditions have become more favorable for world Communism. The Communists have taken over South Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, Angola, and Mozambique; they are threatening Southwest Africa and Rhodesia; and they have acquired a foreign legion of battle-trained Cuban troops.
As an example of the successes of detente, Brezhnev boasted that “the Soviet people take pride in having rendered considerable aid to Vietnam in its struggle against the imperialist invaders.” “Imperialist invaders” is Brezhnev’s epithet for the United States. Elsewhere in the same speech, he describes capitalism as “a society without a future.”
Brezhnev dispelled all illusions that detente means relaxation of tensions and peaceful cooperation. He asserted in his speech to his Communist comrades that “Detente does not in the slightest abolish, and cannot abolish or alter, the laws of class struggle.”
In other words, in the Aesopian language of the Communists, detente is perfectly consistent with class struggle, conflict, and war.
As another example of the successes of detente, Brezhnev cited “the international confirmation of the inviolability of the western frontiers of [East Germany], Poland and Czechoslovakia.” That was Brezhnev’s accurate description of the agreement that President Ford travelled all the way to Helsinki to sign last year.
These February, 1976 statements by Boss Brezhnev are up-to-date confirmations of what he told the Russian people in Pravda on August 22, 1973: “Peaceful coexistence does not mean the end of the struggle of the two world powers. The struggle between the proletariat and the bourgeois, between world Socialism and imperialism, will be waged right up to the complete and final victory of Communism on a world scale.”
The West paid a fearful price because it refused to take seriously what Hitler said in MEIN KAMPF. It is high time that we heed the threats of dictator Brezhnev, and his admissions that ‘peaceful coexistence” and “detente” are code words for Soviet Communist victories.
