| Global War Articles | The Truth |
----------------------------Original message----------------------------
Date: Mon, 13 Oct 97 23:59:27 EDT
From: Spirit Of Truth Page
Subject: STOP THE DELUSION
***STOP THE DELUSION***
J. Adams
October 13th, 1997
The *Spirit Of Truth* Page
http://www.ucc.uconn.edu//~jpa94001/
If you fancy yourself as someone with the guts to face the
truth, could you please tell me what the hell this is all
about?!:
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WHAT THE HELL IS THIS...
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SOME INTRIGUING GORBY QUOTES:
(Note that Gorbachev supposedly "resigned"
on Christmas Day of 1991.)
On Friday, October 25, 1996 ABC television commentator
Charles Gibson asked Mikhail Gorbachev the following
question during an interview:
"It is an interesting paradox to so many Americans-
you are so honored throughout the world for
fundamental changes, but, I don't have to recite the
election results to you, in the last election you got
a very small, tiny percent of the vote. Why is
Gorbachev seen so differently outside Russia and
inside Russia?"
This was Gorbachev's response:
"Well, let's recall another example. Jesus Christ was
pelted with stones. He was blamed and condemned, and
then he was put with a bandit and they were taken for
execution. And when it was said that one of them could
be spared, the people said the bandit should be spared
and Christ was crucified."
Here are some more recent quotes from Mr. Gorbachev:
"Communist ideology in its pure form is akin to
Christianity. Its main ideas are the brotherhood of all
peoples irrespective of their nationality, justice and
equality, peace, and an end to all hostility between
peoples."
(from Gorbachev's new book- 'Memoirs')
"The socialist tradition....goes back to Jesus Christ,
not (Karl) Marx."
(USA Today, October 28th, 1996)
"Jesus Christ, he was also a reformer. He was pelted
with stones and insulted."
(New York Times, October 25th, 1996)
The excerpt below is from Reuters World Service, December 8,
1996, Sunday, BC cycle:
HEADLINE: FEATURE - "Vital Gorbachev refuses to let go of
politics"
(Gorbachev) is frank, though hardly contrite, about the
failures of judgement that led him to promote to senior
positions the very men who would plot to overthrow him in
1991.
"How do you explain Judas -- right there next to Jesus
Christ?" he asks. "How do you explain that? And Christ
did not recognise him for what he was. You could say
that's a metaphor."
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What are the above quotes by Mikhail Gorbachev, the "former"
leader of the atheistic, antichristian, communist country of
Russia, all about?!
Is it not abvious?
The Bible forewarns:
"The coming of the lawless one by the activity of Satan
will be with all power and with pretended signs and
wonders, and with all wicked deception for those who
are to perish, because they refused to love the truth and
so be saved. Therefore God sends upon them a strong
delusion, to make them believe what is false, so that all
may be condemned who did not believe the truth but had
pleasure in unrighteousness."
(From The Second Letter of Paul
To The Thessalonians, Ch.2; vs.9-12)
And who is it that "(does) not believe the truth but (has)
pleasure in unrighteousness"?!
How about the people who walk the earth today? What about
the American people who have TWICE elected a president who is a
liar of an extraordinary sort? What about the people of this
world who today see the antichrist pursuing global destruction as
a christ-like figure who has saved the world from nuclear self-
destruction.
What the HECK do you think is the consequence of people's
selfishness and cowardice in the face of lies nowadays?!!! A
slight drop in stock prices....a small decline in financial
values....some minor political turmoil....a possible Middle
Eastern war with an unsubstantial rise in oil prices????!!!!
NO!!! The consequence is the destruction of society as we
know it....the consequence is the horrific destruction of the
world around us and an ultimate threat to the freedom people
today enjoy!!!!
How dare people who come across my warnings sit there like
apathetic sheep on their way to the slaughter!!!
WAKE UP...TAKE ACTION....FOR THE TIME DRAWETH NIGH!!!!!!!!
Gorbachev is the ANTICHRIST, Saddam Hussein is the FALSE
PROPHET (false Muhammed) and the world is moving head-long toward
self-destruction. To stop this trend requires a TOTAL COUNTER-
REVOLUTION. The hippies in the '60's were pathetic, drug-deluded
fools. To stop what the world is currently headed for requires
an UTTERLY RADICAL MOVEMENT beyond anything in human history.
Yet, all there is now is APATHY, the ultimate source of our self-
destructiion...
RISE UP AND REVOLT AGAINT "THE LIE". TAKE A STAND FOR "THE
TRUTH". STOP THE SELF-DESTRUCTION BEING REAPED BY THE WORLD'S
CURRENT SELF-DELUSION...
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SOME REFERENCES
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The Fresno Bee
October 6, 1997
"Gorbachev says Cold War victor still unsettled"
By Bernard D. K, Aplan
In case you were wondering, America and the West haven't won
the Cold War. The jury is still out.
At least that's the view of Mikhail Gorbachev, the last ruler
of the Soviet Union. He argues that the West is "barking up the
wrong tree" if it assumes the collapse of communism was the final
chapter of a historical process.
The man we all used to call Gorby claims, in fact, that the
opposite is true. When the Soviet empire began crumbling with
the collapse of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and finally disappeared
after the failed coup by Moscow hard-liners in 1991, it marked a
"beginning, not an end," he declares.
'Utopic myth'
Not much has been heard lately from Gorbachev. But he remains
as voluble as ever. He has been in France promoting the local
edition of his autobiography and still talks a great game at
great length.
He said at a news conference the other day that Western
expectations of capitalism sweeping the world in the wake of the
communist debacle will turn out to be false. In fact, he said the
"Westernization of the world" is nothing more than a "utopic
myth" formulated by complacent American theorists.
Gorby himself hasn't done badly with capitalism: His lecture-
circuit career and books have almost certainly made him a
millionaire. His wife, Raisa, dresses even better than she did in
the old days when her spouse was master of the Kremlin and
visited the West equipped with an American Express gold card.
But the one-time Soviet leader refuses to accept the idea that
the free market has worldwide application. He especially
questions whether it will ever really work in Russia.
As he explains it, the abrupt switch to capitalism carried out
by his hated rival, Boris Yeltsin, following his own downfall
left the Russian people bewildered and deeply distrustful. They
remain, he said, highly suspicious of Western motives and gripped
by the "siege mentality" inculcated in them by decades of Soviet
propaganda. The Russians will never accept becoming a kind of
"Slavicized America," he declared.
Western leaders are partly to blame for this attitude, he
added. "(The West) is still frightened by Russia and seeks to
keep it down," he claimed, exhibiting a substantial hunk of
Russian paranoia of his own. "The West, led by the United States,
proclaims friendship but tries to isolate Russia."
Sooner or later, he predicted, these tensions will lead to
fresh antagonism between Russia and the West -- with an outcome
that is by no means assured.
High opinion of self
On the whole, Gorbachev -- never a man known for his modesty -
thinks the situation in Russia and in its relations with the West
would be better today if he had remained in charge. Not many of
his compatriots agree. In last year's presidential election, he
won just over 1 percent of the vote.
Still, it's hard not to admire him for refusing to bow to his
own drastically diminished political fortunes. History's judgment
that he is a loser has left him unmarked.
He continues to talk like someone who believes the world
retains a keen interest in what he has to say. You can't be much
more thick-skinned than that.
Bernard D. Kaplan writes for Hearst Newspapers.
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Reuters World Service
December 8, 1996
"FEATURE - Vital Gorbachev refuses to let go of politics"
By Oliver Wates
The hair is whiter, the famous birthmark less distinct. But
the grin is just as broad, the vitality bubbles out as before.
At 65, Mikhail Gorbachev is a picture of health and energy --
a man, to all intents and purposes, with a bright political
career ahead of him, rather than behind him.
Despite the rebuff he received in the Russian presidential
election in June, when he won a humiliating 0.5 percent of the
vote, he seems to have lost none of his appetite for battle.
The former Soviet leader wants to be part of a new third force
in Russian politics, opposing both the communists and the
Kremlin. And, astonishingly, he does not rule out standing for
president again.
"That's a question that needs thinking over," he said in an
interview during a visit to London.
While Gorbachev's place in Western hearts is secure as the man
who ended the Cold War and destroyed communism as a world force,
in Russia it is hard to find anyone who takes him seriously as a
political figure.
But he has a thick skin and takes in his stride the
transformation from unchallenged master of a superpower to
celebrity on the Western chat-show circuit.
Visiting Britain to promote his newly-published memoirs,
Gorbachev signed copies for the public and swapped banter with
television wits with poise and good humour.
"Was there any sexual chemistry between you and (former prime
minister Margaret) Thatcher?" asks a member of a British
television audience.
Gorbachev guffaws. "That's the first time anyone has asked me
that question since perestroika was launched," he grins.
DESPISES YELTSIN
Despite the bonhomie, Gorbachev is deadly serious about one
thing -- his successor in the Kremlin, Boris Yeltsin.
If he had been like Yeltsin, Gorvachev says, there would have
been no perestroika reforms and the Soviet Communist Party would
still be in power.
"It's already well-known and proven that for him the most
important thing is winning power, that he doesn't give a damn
about Russia, about reform, and all the rest," he says.
"There's no point in being bitter, I know what his nature is.
I don't get bitter, I just observe," he says unconvincingly.
In his memoirs, Gorbachev paints the man who threw him out of
the Kremlin as an unprincipled opportunist, mendacious and
offensive, who calmly sabotaged attempts to hold the Soviet Union
together for the sake of seizing power for himself.
"Yeltsin even then showed that he was not a real reformer," he
writes.
It is an unflattering portrait of the man who rallied
democrats from the top of a tank during a hardline coup against
Gorbachev in August 1991, who in 1992 presided over perhaps the
most radical free-market revolution ever, and who was twice
elected president by the Russian people.
Gorbachev is also on shaky ground when he blames his poor
showing in the presidential elections on a Kremlin strategy to
isolate him.
He is, he says, kept off Russian television screens and out of
the press, journalists are sacked for interviewing him, potential
backers frightened off and his memoirs are suppressed.
Critics tend to see the memoirs, which go from his youth in
Stavropol, through his rise to head of the Communist Party in
1985, to his downfall in 1991, as self-serving and partial.
In his memoirs, Gorbachev paints the man who threw him out of
the Kremlin as an unprincipled opportunist, mendacious and
offensive, who calmly sabotaged attempts to hold the Soviet Union
together for the sake of seizing power for himself.
"Yeltsin even then showed that he was not a real reformer," he
writes.
It is an unflattering portrait of the man who rallied
democrats from the top of a tank during a hardline coup against
Gorbachev in August 1991, who in 1992 presided over perhaps the
most radical free-market revolution ever, and who was twice
elected president by the Russian people.
Gorbachev is also on shaky ground when he blames his poor
showing in the presidential elections on a Kremlin strategy to
isolate him.
He is, he says, kept off Russian television screens and out of
the press, journalists are sacked for interviewing him, potential
backers frightened off and his memoirs are suppressed.
Critics tend to see the memoirs, which go from his youth in
Stavropol, through his rise to head of the Communist Party in
1985, to his downfall in 1991, as self-serving and partial.
ADMITS ERRORS
Gorbachev says he tried to be objective. And he does
acknowledge mistakes. "I was still under the illusion we could
successfully solve new problems and produce radical reforms while
keeping the same leaders," he writes. "It took me too long to
understand this."
He is frank, though hardly contrite, about the failures of
judgement that led him to promote to senior positions the very
men who would plot to overthrow him in 1991.
"How do you explain Judas -- right there next to Jesus
Christ?" he asks. "How do you explain that? And Christ did not
recognise him for what he was. You could say that's a metaphor."
For Gorbachev, the breakup of the Soviet Union into 15
republics -- most of them still struggling politically and
economically five years on -- was an avoidable disaster which
cost tens of thousands of lives and is still hampering reform.
And he takes strong exception to the fashionable Western view
that the sclerotic Soviet system had needed the radical all-out
thrust for reform that Yeltsin gave it.
"The sad state of Russia today is directly due to the fact
that...the evolutionary approach was abandoned, to be replaced by
Sturm und Drang (storm and stress) methods which tore apart our
society, destroying people's lives," he writes.
Yeltsin's reforms, he says have benefited just 10 to 12
percent of the population.
THE GORBACHEV MYSTERY
It remains something of a mystery why the man who ended seven
decades of Soviet totalitarianism is so unpopular in Russia
today. Gorbachev himself provides a possible answer.
"The promise I had made to the people when I started the
process of perestroika was kept. I gave them freedom," he wrote.
"Perestroika did not give the people prosperity, something
they expected of me as head of state, based on an ingrained,
traditional feeling of dependence. But I did not promise that."
As Gorbachev himself told East Germany's Communist leaders
days before the Berlin Wall came down in 1989: "Life punishes
harshly anyone who is left behind in politics."
But doesn't he feel bitter that he's just been tossed aside?
"Look at the French Revolution, look at Danton and Robespierre,"
he cries. "One day the people bear Robespierre aloft then the
next day they vote to execute him!
"Prime Minister Andreotti once asked Raisa this very
question, he said: 'Why didn't your husband see there were
traitors around him?' And she said, 'Mr Prime Minister, you are a
religious man, you know the Bible, tell me, how did it happen
that Jesus never saw Judas?'." I'm still mulling over this
comparison with Christ when he nudges me and says solemnly, "Hey,
Andreotti thought that was a very good reply!"
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The Guardian (London)
November 2, 1996
"THE JOANNA COLES INTERVIEW: JUST CALL ME PRESIDENT;
Mikhail Gorbachev changed the world,
now he spends his time drinking tea and pondering"
By Joanna Coles
AT THE Dorchester, Mikhail Gorbachev's driver is having a
problem. The doorman won't let him keep the grey Daimler waiting
outside the hotel reception, even for two minutes. Instead he
must circle the traffic, stopping only when he sees Mr and Mrs
Gorbachev emerge from the revolving door.
"But it's Gorbachev, " says the driver incredulously. "He's a
VIP!" "I don't care," retorts the doorman peevishly, bristling in
his racing-green and gold livery. "They're all VIPs here."
I ask who the other VIPs are. "Lionel Ritchie," he says
grandly, "and the foreign minister of Northern Cyprus!"
And so the purveyor of perestroika and one-time keeper of the
nuclear key is summarily dismissed, just another celebrity
checking out, a piece of political flotsam bobbing away on an
ocean of obscurity.
"He still likes to be called President," warns Pavel
Paleshchenko, Gorbachev's interpreter, in a tense whisper as the
ex-president arrives, flanked by three grim bodyguards. We are
meeting in a private bar in the bowels of the hotel - if the
Dorchester can be said to have bowels for, with its black and
gold decor and endless mirrors, it is an unnecessarily fussy
place. "I like the Dorchester very much," Gorbachev says as he
enters, "it is just like an English person's country house."
Which makes me wonder whose house he could possibly have stayed
in.
He gives me a vigorous handshake sandwich then eases himself
into a sofa at one end of the room. "Ah," he sighs sinking into
the upholstery, "I feel just like a Persian Shah!"
Discreet dark suit, pale shirt, reticent tie; he's been out
of power for five years now but he still wouldn't look out of
place in a Kremlin line-up. He's fatter than he appears on
television, with a definite double chin that circumnavigates his
whole face and forces his features inwards to cluster around his
nose. His hands are enormous and fleshy, his hair now white, the
trademark red blotch like a dark red egg yolk someone has smashed
on his skull and left in mid-dribble.
Does it bother him? "For many years it wasn't visible because
I had hair, I've never been upset by it," he smiles. I grin back.
Gorbachev is here. I can hardly believe it. A man who changed the
world, now touting his Memoirs in a hotel basement.
Thirty seconds pass during which his entourage stand around
as he vigorously re-arranges the cushions. Finally, he beckons to
Paleshchenko who quickly cries out with alarm, "He'd prefer a
chair, Mr Gorbachev says he would prefer a chair!"
"A chair, a chair!" shouts an aide in a brown suit.
"A chair, quickly, a chair," calls the girl from the
publishers, throwing down her nubuck briefcase and struggling to
heave a yellow Louis XIVth number over an obstructive coffee
table. Gorbachev springs up and spreads himself across the
coffee table which he tries to manoeuvre out of her way. The girl
looks horrified, Paleshchenko pushes him back and wrestles the
chair from her. It seems to take an age but eventually Gorbachev
sits down and accepts a cup of coffee. "Sugar for Mr Gorbachev! "
cries Paleshchenko urgently, also sitting. The president swivels
obediently and stares into the camera.
So what have you been up to since you arrived, I ask, as the
photographer tries to remove the coffee cup and Gorbachev grabs
it back. "Only peaceful activities!" he grins. "Last night I was
in Oxford. Whenever I come to this country I feel I must go to
Oxford, it's such a wonderful town."
And what about when he's at home, what does an ex-president
of the Soviet Union do all day? He thinks. "I think," he says.
It is a peculiarly Russian answer and not one I would ever
expect from a British leader. What does he think about? "I think
about what's happened in the past and I think about the future. I
write and I also travel a great deal across Russia."
Yes, but which does he enjoy doing the most? "It may sound
strange but I like all of it. I like walking near my country
house, I manage around six kilometres an hour in my jogging suit!
I also like to spend time with my granddaughters and with just me
and Mrs Gorbachev. We have a lot to discuss." He stops for a
burst of coffee. "You know, I like life!"
I have no reason to disbelieve him. Smiles spill frequently
from his lips, but something happens to ex-leaders. It happened
to Thatcher and Reagan. The loss of office sucks the essence out
of them. Without it they are gone, their very centre disappears.
The same has happened to Gorbachev. There is no one less
powerful than a president deposed and you can see the hurt. It
throbs through him. The more he talks, the further the real
events slip away from him, his own role in history now packaged
in anecdotes obligingly recounted to flog his book.
Still, he is pleasant and charming and only once does he get
visibly annoyed, when I ask him the size of his pension. "Ahhh,"
he growls in one ear as Paleshchenko starts translating the growl
simultaneously in the other.
"Ahhh, we've had a very difficult situation, Mr Gaidar's
reforms destroyed my savings.
"My pension initially was set at 1,500 roubles a month!" At
this, the man in the brown suit creeps up and appears to correct
him. Gorbachev nods, "Er . . . actually it was set at 4,000
roubles a month, but despite inflation, we forgot about it until
1994, when it was worth . . . Well, guess how much it was worth
in dollars?"
I shake my head. "Two dollars! Two dollars! That was my
pension! Mr Gorbachev, the former head of state on two dollars!
So I began to travel and give several lectures, but the most
important thing for my livelihood is book-fees." He leans across
the table and slaps my copy of his copiously recorded 700-page
Memoirs. "It's not a secret, I made pounds 1 million from my
publisher. So now I can say I and my family are well provided
for!"
I confess I'm astonished at the paucity of his pension and
wonder how he coped with so public a loss of status? "For me,
power was not an obsession, it wasn't a ruling passion that
captured all of myself. I really feel that a fully fledged life
began for me after being in power."
What does he mean, fully fledged? "I mean freedom. I have
freedom to think, to move around, to have contact with all kinds
of people. Real freedom, something I have always wanted. The
system did not make me a robot!"
But doesn't he feel bitter that he's just been tossed aside?
"Look at the French Revolution, look at Danton and Robespierre,"
he cries. "One day the people bear Robespierre aloft then the
next day they vote to execute him!
"Prime Minister Andreotti once asked Raisa this very
question, he said: 'Why didn't your husband see there were
traitors around him?' And she said, 'Mr Prime Minister, you are a
religious man, you know the Bible, tell me, how did it happen
that Jesus never saw Judas?'." I'm still mulling over this
comparison with Christ when he nudges me and says solemnly, "Hey,
Andreotti thought that was a very good reply!"
The Russians have given Gorbachev their own reply - a
derisory 0.5 per cent voted for him in last summer's elections.
But how does he think history will remember him?
"Gorbachev was a good man," he says with a dark intensity.
"He wanted his people to be free, he wanted to open his country,
he wanted to avoid war."
Is he still a communist? There is a long pause. "I have done
a lot of thinking about this and I have come to the conclusion
that a Utopian model of social development was imposed on Russia
and Utopia is for fairy tales." How would he describe his own
political convictions now? "I think I'm a social democrat," and I
suddenly notice a gold tooth winking at me from his lower jaw.
"Freedom and democracy are the key."
On the morning we meet, the news has broken of Bob Dole's
former mistress and I wonder what Gorbachev makes of the American
campaign. "You can't astonish me with this kind of thing," he
snorts. "My country is knee deep in sleaze!" What does he think
of Bill Clinton? "He's changed, he's learned quickly, if he wins,
his second term will be very different. You won't squeeze out any
more from me on this subject."
He is similarly uncommunicative on which foreign leaders he
admired most, so I throw in religion. Does he pray? "Niet." Does
he believe in anything? "The cosmos." The cosmos? "There is
something very important out there that we still don't know
about." What sort of thing? "Just something."
What about marriage then, how have he and Raisa managed to
tot up 43 years together? "Love, Joanna, is like a good song and
it's not easy to compose a song. I think marriages from student
years are always very good - they're based on personal
affection."
There is a brief silence. "Fate has been good to me," he
remarks, embarking on a paragraph I suspect he has trotted out
before. "Yes, despite all the ordeals and difficult experiences I
was a child whom my mother and father loved, my grandparents also
loved me, I was their favourite and I never forgot where I came
from. I'm proud of that." I jot it down and he nods, pleased.
"This is a good note to end on, no?"
As I get up to leave, I turn round and to my astonishment see
several huge men who have managed to creep into the room without
my noticing. It feels rather sinister and I'm relieved to grope
my way to the foyer and spot Raisa hovering briefly on the hotel
steps, a tiny woman of almost Nancy Reaganesque proportions.
Dressed in a beige cotton suit topped off with a jaunty
neckchief, she waves hurriedly before sliding into the Daimler.
And then they are off, speeding down Park Lane in a convoy of
Land Rovers to make "a personal appearance" at the Knightsbridge
citadel of Harrods.
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Star Tribune Star Tribune
October 27, 1996
"Gorbachev tells his view of Soviet Union's breakup;
But the flat, dry five-pounder reads like
the minutes of a Party Congress"
By Jelena Petrovic
Memoirs
- By: Mikhail Gorbachev, Georges Peronanski and Patjana
Varsausky.
- Publisher: Doubleday, 700 pages, $ 35.
- Review: Autobiography of one of Russia's great movers and
shakers is marred by bureaucratese.
On describing the problems he encountered with the breakup of
the Soviet Union's 15 republics in 1991, Mikhail Gorbachev
uttered memorable words: "Only Jesus Christ could take a few
loaves of bread and feed the thousands . . . Only Jesus Christ
could solve problems such as these." Indeed, he was right.
At 700 pages of minuscule script and weighing in at about 5
pounds, "Memoirs" is, literally and figuratively, a weighty
affair. Begun in 1992, soon after Gorbachev's fall from grace in
the Soviet Union, "Memoirs" covers his entire life, with a
sharper focus on his presidential reign from 1985 to 1991.
Gorbachev will likely be remembered in history books as the
man on the precipice of Soviet politics; the hero who single-
handedly brought about tremendous reform in a stale and
politically corrupt climate, and the antihero who would end up
shouldering a lot of the blame for his homeland's demise. He is
a paradoxical figure in Soviet and world politics, a Nobel Peace
Prize winner whose brilliant reforms have, in spite of
themselves, opened one of the gloomiest chapters in Soviet and
Russian history.
Gorbachev's legacy is enormous. He made nuclear disarmament
a reality, pulled Soviet troops out of Afghanistan, encouraged an
independent press and was arguably the first Soviet general
secretary since Lenin with vision and political iconoclasm.
But perestroika, Gorbachev's greatest restructuring attempt,
ultimately didn't work. After the evil legacy of communism, big
changes in the Soviet Union could not be implemented by one man
with a limited amount of time. The firmest supporter of
democratic socialism the Soviet leadership ever knew, Gorbachev
believed in reeducating the common man, but overlooked the
powerful middle-management politics of his country. Micro and
macro clashed as Gorbachev roused the masses and angered those
clinging to the status quo.
Margaret Thatcher, one of Gorbachev's most ardent European
supporters, once famously declared him "a man you can do business
with." "Memoirs," however, lacks a businessman's conciseness and
trenchancy.
Gorbachev's style, unlike his presidential rule, reflects
sharply the bureaucratic Ariadne's Web of Communist Party
politics. There are more names, dates, functions, titles and all
manner of abbreviations than a reasonably educated reader can
process. "Memoirs" is rife with sentences such as this: "In
November 1964 the Central Committee plenum heard N.V. Podgorny's
report and decided to reunite the industrial and agricultural
oblast and krai Party organizations," Insufficiently tempered by
thoughtful analysis, the assault of factual information has a
desensitizing effect.
Gorbachev's accounts of his personal life suffer from an
equally antiseptic approach to words. The admirable facts of
this man's personal and political struggle are tainted by his
hopelessly flat prose: "We lived in harmony and helped each other
whenever it was needed. . . . We bought an Elektron television
set." Reading "Memoirs" is like reading the secretarial minutes
of a Party Congress - detailed, dry and boredom-inducing.
If one could separate Gorbachev's outstanding life from his
prose, "Memoirs" would be an informative and enjoyable book.
Sadly for Gorbachev, but fortunately for literature, this is not
the case.
- Jelena Petrovic is a freelance writer and translator living
in Minneapolis.
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Investor's Business Daily
October 10, 1997
"Missile Defense: Now More Than Ever"
By BRIAN T. KENNEDY The end of the Cold War hasn't decreased
the risks of nuclear attack. In fact, changes inside Russia show
that the United States needs a ballistic missile defense now more
than ever.
Of course, no one is advocating a return to the Cold War. But
that conflict brought stability. In today's world that would be
welcome. The fall of the Soviet Union has led to the
disintegration of important nuclear safeguards and opened the way
for terrorist states to be more dangerous than ever.
Alexander Lebed, Russian President Boris Yeltsin's former
national security adviser, admitted last spring that the Russian
Federation couldn't account for over 50 nuclear bombs built into
suitcases. Although Russian officials at first denied the
existence of the bombs, last week Russian scientist and Yeltsin
adviser Alexi Yablokov confirmed that indeed the bombs were built
and designed for terrorist purposes.
One can only presume that America was the target.
Unfortunately this could be more than just a case of misplaced
goods. There are willing buyers for nuclear technology. Russian
military profiteers may be selling Russian nuclear weapons to
terrorist states such as Iran, Iraq and North Korea.
As for the spread of Russian missiles, reports out of Israel
claim Iran is trying to purchase advanced missile technology.
Officially, the Russian government is only building Iran's
nuclear power plant - the platform from which weapons- grade
nuclear materials can be produced. Some Russian ''corporations''
however, are willing to sell their Cold War know-how. Some are
upgrading Iranian guidance systems, and others may be passing on
plans for the Russian SS-4 liquid fueled missile.
This would give Iranian missiles a range of 1,250 miles - well
within range of Tel Aviv.
And despite its economic woes, Russia continues to develop and
modernize advanced nuclear missiles. The new generation of SS-X-
26 and SS-X-27 missiles are reportedly faster, more accurate, and
less detectable by radar than older missiles.
Russian intent may be benign, but is at best hard to read. For
all his talk of a new Russia, Yeltsin has specifically rejected
the former Soviet policy of ''no first use'' of nuclear weapons.
As always, the challenge isn't to divine the intentions of
other nations. The challenge is to be prepared.
If ''suitcase nukes'' can be lost or long-range missiles
bought, then the post-Cold War world demands more, not less,
vigilance. That's why the U.S. should move quickly to improve
our intelligence methods and to develop defenses against
ballistic missile attack.
America already has the technology to deploy an effective
missile defense.
Although experts agree that a space-based system will be more
desirable in the future, a sea-based wide-area defense made up of
existing Aegis cruisers could be in place in five years for $ 2
billion to $ 3 billion.
Last year, a Chinese official told a U.S. official that China
could act militarily against Taiwan without fear of intervention
by the U.S because American leaders ''care more about Los Angeles
than they do about Taiwan.'' If a missile defense were deployed,
this nuclear threat would be largely irrelevant.
One thing stands between the deployment of a ballistic missile
defense and the security of the U.S.: the Anti- Ballistic Missile
Treaty. This Cold War treaty was signed with the Soviet Union, a
state that no longer exists. But there will be serious efforts by
the Clinton administration in the coming year to have the Senate
ratify an expanded treaty. That would cripple our future ability
to defend the U.S. from nuclear attack.
Many Americans believe that the U.S. already has a missile
defense. Others know better. U.S. policy-makers would do well to
heed the warnings from Russia and act to defend America now.
Brian T. Kennedy is director of the Claremont Institute's
Golden State Center for Policy Studies in Sacramento, Calif.
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