"The same thing"

One of the roots of the contemporary cancer spreading through the Western World is the idea that the US and the USSR are much the same thing, basically differing only in who is "us" or "them." The absurdity that black is white because both are colors is spreading from the sensitive consciousness raisers to circles that had until recently maintained their sanity.

"What's the difference between an Afghan farmer who slits the throat of a Russian soldier and a Salvadoran communist who kills three US Embassy marine guards?" asks an article in the February issue of Reason, which has lost its reason.

Yet this difference seems like a legalistic technicality compared to the deeper difference between the aggression by totalitarian empire builders and the defense of free countries. Vacillating, stupid, counterproductive, appeasement-bent, and even duplicitous as US foreign policy may be, it takes an imbecile to liken it to Soviet policy. What country has the US invaded by force against its population's will? What country does it seek to annex? What, other than containment of the Soviet threat, did the US stand to gain in Viet Nam? When has the US maintained a puppet government by the use of poison gas, biological warfare and explosive toys against an enslaved population?

"Non-intervention" is the bright new buzzword against common sense; but it is not very bright and not new at all. It is a word of the 1930s, coined by the Baldwins and Chamberlains for Spain, Abyssinia, Austria and Czechoslovakia, until it suddenly went out of fashion when the Nazis turned on the non-interventionists. The same idea now appears in another disgusting Reason article "Make money, not war" glorifying assorted fat cats who lavish money on "non-interventionist" causes, and even extolling the Soviet-subservient Center of Defense Information, which never fails to plug the Gorbachev line. These non-interventionists would have offered no support to the war against Nazism; if they had had their way, they would have ended up in a Nazi concentration camp, and they may yet end up in the gulag, for totalitarians have a curious habit of whom to liquidate first: their half-hearted friends.

Defense of a free country includes support of freedom fighters on soil occupied by the totalitarian aggressors, as well as alliances with other countries. There are good and bad ways of doing that. (I believe, for example, that US troops have no more business in Europe, an entity with a bigger population and GNP than the US, which is only being encouraged to shirk its defense responsibilities and to crawl before the Soviets.) But the non-interventionists do not worry about good or bad ways; they want no way at all.

There are two reasons why all this belongs in this newsletter. First, peace and liberty, like the environment, are issues without opponents, but with a hidden agenda. There is nobody who wants war or slavery any more than there is anybody who wants foul air or polluted water. Yet environmentalism has served well to stifle energy, to malign technology, to promote pseudoscience and to enforce a social agenda. Likewise, the good intentions of the peaceniks, whether in leftist or libertarian garb, are paving the road to the gulag; they invite slavery and war.

Second, for some 10 years, I have been on the Board of Directors of the Reason Foundation, where my name did nothing but convey an impression of its ideological position. Part of my credo is to let all flowers bloom, even if I disagree with them. I silently disagreed with the tasteless way in which Reason likened the FDA to the Gestapo, and I silently disagreed with many other of Reason's flowers that had a distasteful odor in my nostrils.

But subverting the one and only legitimate function of government is a matter of principle, and I herewith tend my resignation from the Board. My name shall not stand for the logic that good and evil are the same thing because they are, after all, both merely moral concepts.