Alert and intelligent visitors can often better evaluate and describe a nation than the natives. The commentaries about America by the 19th century French visitor, Alexis de Toqueville, are still studied in our colleges. Likewise a perceptive modern visitor, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, has described what is wrong with United States’ policy better than any of our would-be leaders or presidential candidates.
In a recent impressive television interview, Solzhenitsyn deplored the way the United States is financing its own destruction. “It is the importation of [American] technology which is saving the Soviets,” he said, while at the same time the Soviets have so geared their system to building up a war-making capability that, “even if it were the unanimous opinion of all the members of the Politburo, they would be powerless not to cause war.”
This view is corroborated by chilling warnings from the Pentagon that the Soviets consider a nuclear war “inevitable.” General Daniel Graham, who recently retired as director of military intelligence, has warned that Soviet spending on military weapons now matches the percentage that Adolf Hitler was spending immediately prior to World War II.
Leonid Brezhnev, in his recent five-hour speech to the 25th Communist Party Congress, laid down the gauntlet of Soviet objectives. He said: “There is no room for neutrality and compromise in the struggle between the two ideologies. Here there is a need for constant political vigilance, active, efficient, and convincing propaganda, and timely rebuffs to enemy ideological subversions.”
Apparently taunting President Ford and/or Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, Brezhnev continued; “Some bourgeois leaders affect surprise and raise a howl over the solidarity of Soviet Communists and the Soviet people with the struggle of other peoples for freedom and progress. This is either outright naivete, or more likely, deliberate mental befuddlement.”
Ford and Kissinger may be “befuddled” about soviet policies, but the American people see them clearly. Presidential candidates have discovered that as many as 70 percent of those responding to polls think that detente helps the Soviets and harms the United States.
Although Solzhenitsyn understands the Soviet mind and behavior so well, he cannot understand “the speed of [American] capitulations” in the face of Soviet aggression. It does not make sense to him that the United States, ”possessing freedom, does not value it enough to defend it.”
When the television interviewer asked Solzhenitsyn if he did not fear returning to the era of the Cold War, Solzhenitsyn reminded him that “the West conceded nothing to the Soviets during the Cold War; but under detente, the West has given up five countries and “all its world positions” of power. When the questioner conjured up the specter of the glib Bertrand Russell slogan, “Rather Red than dead,” Solzhenitsyn replied “Better to be dead than a scoundrel.”
