When campaigning for the presidency, Jimmy Carter said: “We ought to be a beacon for nations who search for peace and who search for freedom, who search for individual liberty, who search for basic human rights.”
How can the same man who raised that noble standard entertain the thought of recognizing Red China and cutting our ties of longtime friendship with Free China on Taiwan?
Let’s just take one facet of individual liberty and basic human rights — freedom of speech and press. It exists on Taiwan; it doesn’t on Mainland China.
On Taiwan, 31 daily newspapers, 1400 magazines, and three television networks compete for the attention and minds of the people. Publications from the rest of the Free World are openly circulated. One distributer imports more than 200 U.S. magazines for sale in Taiwan. Newsweek and Time are stocked in school and college libraries.
No non-government-approved newspapers or publications circulate in Red China. Nothing in all history can compare with the thought control imposed on its people by Red China. Visitors have reported that many entire bookstores contain only books by Mao Tse-tung.
When President Nixon made his trip to Red China, an enterprising television reporter asked one young woman in her twenties what she and her boyfriend do when they go out ona date. “We read the writings of Chairman Mao,” she promptly answered.
The United States permits plenty of freedom for pro-Communist speech and press. Communist newspapers and magazines, even when financed by the Soviet Union or its satellites, are widely published and distributed in this country.
I wonder, however, if this same freedom extends to anti-Communist foreigners. Lieutenant Colonel Fan Yuan-yen, the Chinese pilot who defected from Red China and flew a MIG-19 fighter plane to Taiwan last July, is eager to come to the United States and describe what life is like in Mainland China. But he just can’t seem to get a visa to come to America. Somehow the State Department has not issued one to him.
The Republic of China on Taiwan is an old and faithful ally of the United States. We are bound together by a Mutual Defense Pact signed by President Eisenhower in 1955. Red China killed thousands of American boys in Korea and Southeast Asia. What kind of a double standard decrees that diplomats, athletes, and other visitors from Red China are welcome, but an outspoken anti-Communist from Taiwan is not?
Likewise, an inquiry is in order as to why we have not heard recently from the gallant Soviet pilot, Lieutenant Viktor Belenko, who flew a Soviet MIG-25 to Japan a year ago, and then came to the United States.
Millions of Americans would like to see and meet this handsome Soviet anti-Communist. Because of his expert knowledge of Soviet military life and weapons, articles and television interviews by Belenko would be popular.
Yet, since his debriefing by the U.S. State Department, Lieutenant Belenko has virtually disappeared from news coverage. We can only speculate about this silence, coming after the widespread publicity that attended his defection.
Did Belenko voluntarily remove himself from the public arena because of fear of Soviet assassination squads, such as those who years ago killed General Walter Krivitsky in a Washington, D.C., hotel room? Or because Belenko doesn’t want to become the victim of an apparent suicide — like Laurence Duggan and Paul Bang Jensen?
Or, has our State Department, in the spirit of detente, deliberately discouraged Belenko from telling the truth about the Soviet government, with whom a new arms agreement is pending? These are some questions we would like the State Department to answer.
