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Hard-Nosed Détente
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11230 |
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BOOK WORLD
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5 / 1986 |
2,279 Words |
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Paul Gottfried
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Revel's attack on Western apologists for the Soviet Union and on opponents of Western military defense has received praise from unexpected sources. The left-leaning French daily Le Monde published a supportive review by the recognizably anti-Soviet journalist Jacques Amalric. According to Amalric's review: "Revel's book will set on edge certain teeth, particularly of blind men who reject the true problem which he sets forth and who place the United States and the Soviet Union on a par while pretending to believe that they are essentially the same." The moderately leftist historian Emmanuel LeRoy Ladurie was also complimentary to Revel in a review for l'Express. Although Ladurie expresses concern lest "democrats disguise themselves as fascists or kill democracy in order to save it from its communist enemy," he nonetheless concedes much of Revel's argument. Since the Second World War the Western democracies have reacted slowly and from a rigidly defensive posture to Soviet aggression and bullying. Recently, in what Revel calls "the breviary of laxness," case studies of Western underreaction to Soviet provocations come to include a self-deluded rejection of the view of the Soviet Union as an enemy.
Ladurie is particularly struck by Revel's depiction of Helmut Schmidt, the former Chancellor of West Germany and a supposed hardliner against the Soviets, reacting in January 1982 to the Soviet (re-) invasion of Poland. Schmidt agreed reluctantly to chastise the Soviets on T.V.--in return for Reagan's withdrawal of opposition to his country's support for the Soviet gasline. One might recall that President Reagan opposed the construction of the gasline, to be carried out with European financial assistance, because it would leave Western Europe increasingly dependent on the Soviets for a vital commodity. In one of the most acidulous sketches of the entire book, Schmidt is shown telling his people about the "Polish problem." After scolding the American press for exaggerating his passive reaction to events in the East and after expressing his own opposition to economic sanctions against the Soviets, Schmidt then came to the heart of the matter. The Soviets, he let it be known, "probably count for something" in the establishment of martial law in Poland.
Rehabilitating the Soviets
Revel does not single out Schmidt for any special blame. What he seeks to demonstrate-in a work of 400 densely written pages abounding in black humor--is the lengths to which Western journalists, politicians, intellectuals, and businessmen will go in order to make the Soviet regime look good. And in the process of rehabilitating the Soviet police state, those who are soft on it create horror stories about the Western democracies, lest any moral distinction be made between "the two superpowers." Revel takes almost malicious delight in detailing Western self-deception and spinelessness in the face of Soviet nastiness at home and abroad. Some examples are particularly telling: for example, the desperate attempts of the former center-right president of France, Valerie Giscard d'Estaing, to save détente by attacking the critics of the Soviet invasion of Poland and Afghanistan; and the mass demonstration of students in West Germany held during a visit of Soviet Premier Brezhnev, against American militarism.
An oft-cited section of the work deals with arguments mad to show moral equivalence between the Soviets and the Western democracies. The English translation for this section's title, "The Double Standard," misses the sarcasm
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