Cui bono? — the Latin phrase meaning “for whose benefit?” —- is a good guide to assist discovery of the perpetrator of any crime. When a dastardly deed is done, finding out who made money out of it or who received the benefit is a good rule of thumb.
Look at the current nuclear freeze campaign that appeared to be born fully grown and garbed for war (like Athena from Zeus’ head). Common sense should tell us that nothing grows spontaneously from the grassroots unless seeds were sown and nourished by water and air.
To find out who sowed the seeds and watered them, cui bono? Who profits from the nuclear freeze? It’s obvious that the beneficiaries are the (1) the Soviets and (2) the consortium of special interests that want to divert federal monies from national defense to social-welfare spending programs.
It, therefore, should come as no surprise that the organizers of the June 12 Rally, which demanded “an end to insane nuclear weapons production,” also laced their literature with another principal purpose: “the transfer of monies from military spending to social spending.””
For the purpose of press coverage, the rally was stage-managed to be simply a broad-based disarmament demonstration at the time of the UN Special Session on Disarmament. However, the components of the rally were skillfully drawn from the organizations that know how to lobby to keep the spigot of federal funds flowing to organizations that have grown accustomed to feeding at the public trough.
The June 12 Rally Committee put out very explicit instructions for the “networking” of organizations to achieve this goal. The organizers knew what they were doing when they planned the “networking” of “neighborhood-based community groups.”
Here is how the rally organizers made their appeal to groups that are interested in receiving federal funds far more than they are interested in questions of war and peace, freeze or anti-freeze. “We invite your organization and its affiliates to join with us in
promoting nuclear disarmament and a transfer of funds from military spending to meeting human needs. … We are reaching out to and working with many groups, both on the local and national levels, who have not necessarily worked on these specific issues. It is clear that the time is right to make these connections.”
Earlier this year, a senior editor of Barron’s magazine attended a conference of the Institute for Policy Studies where plans were made to build a large disarmament movement in the United States. He reported that there was general agreement among the conferees that the disarmament message can’t be sold on its own merits all the time, so such issues as economic burdens and unemployment should be used to help recruit supporters.
One of the speakers at the IPS conference, for example, Chester Hartman, referred to “savage” domestic budget cuts in food stamps, Medicaid, public housing and other welfare programs. He elaborately correlated the cost of various pieces of military hardware to the alleged “number of people cut from social benefits.”
It is clear that a major objective of the nuclear freeze campaign is to launch a political attack on Ronald Reagan’s efforts to cut non-defense federal spending. The special-interest groups that profit from a high level of domestic welfare programs have rallied their lobbyists to resist reductions in federal spending by any demagogic tactic they can devise.
The other beneficiary of the nuclear freeze campaign is the Soviet Union. It should be obvious that, if the United States is persuaded not to build the weapons necessary to catch up with the Russians, the men in the Kremlin will be able to maintain their margin of superiority with its capacity for nuclear blackmail.
In order to recruit those fuzzy-minded idealists into the nuclear freeze campaign, the rally organizers echo and reecho the word “peace.” History teaches us that “peace’ is a word with an almost magical ability to lure naive people to follow the Pied Pipers of Politics down the Primrose Path to Foolishness.
Appealing to the “good faith” of the men in the Kremlin to reduce their nuclear weapons to the level of ours has about as much chance of succeeding as the Children’s Crusade of the 13th century — or of Billy Graham’s sermons in Moscow.
