Herbert W Armstrong

European Wariness at Geneva: This week the much-ballyhooed two-day summit in Geneva between U.S. President Ronald Reagan and Soviet Party boss Mikhail Gorbachev finally took place. What was to be agreed upon in Geneva had already been pretty much determined beforehand: the summit itself became largely an exercise in personal sizing-up between the two leaders as well as an attempt by both sides to score valuable public relations points in the world media.

Not as well reported by the journalists was the reaction by Europeans to the high-powered talks held right in the heart of the continent. But as one astute observer (LOS ANGELES TIMES' Don Cook) noted: "The role of the Europeans has been like that of tennis spectators — watching volleys from left and right in the first set of what is going to be a long match, and with the score tied at deuce." Europeans, more than ever before, are caught in the middle — and not just in the NATO countries. At least two Warsaw Pact nations, East Germany and Hungary, have been pressuring Moscow to show flexibility in Geneva. A failed summit would harm their vital economic ties to the West.

While the new Soviet leader has made a generally favorable impression in Western Europe, there are no illusions that Soviet policy will change much in the short run. The numbers of Soviet missiles targeted on Europe continue to escalate. The Belgian and Dutch governments, despite heavy leftist pressure, have been nonetheless able to move ahead with the deployment of American counter-weapons.

To a growing degree it is now Washington's policy that most unsettles moderate, generally pro-American Europeans. The issue revolves around President Reagan's insistence on moving ahead on research and eventual deployment of a space-based defense system, the Strategic Defense Initiative, called "Star Wars" by its detractors. (The Soviets hate SDI, and not only because it could neutralize their offensive strategy. Moscow is even more worried that the billions of dollars of research involved to produce SDI may lead to a whole new generation of defense and weapon technology, leaving their sluggish war industry behind in a cloud of computer dust. And there is no way Mr. Gorbachev can afford to match the American effort and upgrade the Soviet economy at the same time. Hence the standard Moscow charge that Mr. Reagan is "militarizing space.")

The Europeans are wary of SDI from a different point of view. They say that they made the very difficult political decision of accepting the Pershing and cruise missiles to show Washington their faithfulness to the NATO alliance. Now some Europeans feel that a "Star Wars" space weapons shield would give Americans the option of retreating into "Fortress America," decoupling the alliance. Britain's Lord Carrington, secretary general of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, told an audience recently: "I would have to be deaf, blind and impenetrably stupid not to be aware of European concerns about the American Strategic Defense Initiative.... It is important that Allies on both sides of the Atlantic should be aware of the divisive potential of the SDI and take steps necessary to avoid the danger."

Journalist Georgie Anne Geyer told the television audience of WASHINGTON WEEK IN REVIEW (Nov. 15) that the SDI is helping foster a deeper, more widespread feeling of neutrality throughout Western Europe. Ms. Geyer also noted that Western Europe as a whole shows no sign of coming out of its prolonged economic stagnation. The Soviets hope to capitalize on both the mental rift in the Atlantic Alliance and Europe's economic doldrums by dangling more trade prospects. Deals for Soviet acquisition of more than $4 billion in new chemical plants and $1 billion each for steel and automotive projects are in the works. In the July 25, 1985, LOS ANGELES TIMES, columnist F. Stephen Larrabee explained the overall Soviet divide-and-conquer tactic:

While relations with the United States are likely to remain important, there are indications that Gorbachev may put greater priority on other areas — especially Western Europe.

In a 1984 speech, for instance, Gorbachev noted the erosion of the position of the United States in comparison to "new centers of power, above all Western Europe and Japan."... One important indication of this new accent on Europe is Gorbachev's decision to visit France before the summit meeting with President Reagan.... [This] should...be seen as part of a wider campaign to woo Western Europe and exploit differences in the Atlantic Alliance over the Strategic Defense Initiative. French President Francois Mitterrand has expressed strong reservations about SDI, as have Italy's Prime Minister Bettino Craxi and West Germany's former Chancellor Willy Brandt, two Western leaders recently in Moscow. Moreover, during Craxi's visit, Gorbachev showed a new flexibility toward relations with the European Community, and even expressed tacit recognition of its political role.

Europe: Unity Through Weaponry: Meanwhile, unknown to most Americans is the extent to which the nations of Western Europe are unifying their defense manufacturing industries. As a result the U.S. is slipping as the main supplier of weapons to NATO as a whole. At one time NATO arms trade across the Atlantic favored the U.S. nine-to-one. Now the ratio is down to the three-to-one range. Defense experts even envisage the day when Europeans will sell more to the U.S. in arms than they purchase. Some believe the U.S. may well have already seen the last of its big sales to Europe of warplanes, helicopters and battlefield rockets.

The reason for all this is greater cooperation among European NATO partners to jointly produce weapons, thus achieving the economy of scale. In August, for example, four European nations — Britain, Italy, Spain and West Germany — agreed to jointly develop and buy (for about $25 billion) a new European jet fighter plane. American officials have cautiously applauded the joint development efforts. They could not do otherwise, since Washington has carped for years that the Europeans were not doing enough in defense matters. But U.S. defense contractors are worried over the potential loss of business. They also point out the negative impact the loss of sales will have on America's balance of trade. Meanwhile — and this is perhaps the most significant factor??"the November 8 WALL STREET JOURNAL, paraphrasing a Dutch diplomat, says that "by the year 2000, Europe hopes to have an alternative to nearly every major U.S. weapon system used in Europe."

Tax Increase Inevitable for 1986? A footnote to the U.S.-soviet summit is the tragicomic situation which prevailed in Congress just prior to the President's departure for the summit. At the last minute, so as not to embarrass President Reagan in Geneva, both the Senate and the House of Representatives agreed to a temporary funding measure to prevent the government's checks from bouncing. The battle over the budget will resume upon the President's return. It now looks more likely, however, that Mr. Reagan has lost the battle. Five years ago, he had great expectations that "Reaganomics" would work, that tax cuts would stimulate the economy, more than making up for the decreased tax rates, plus producing additional funds for a beefed-up defense budget. The key to it all was his ability to get Congress, specifically the Democrat-controlled House, which holds the purse strings, to cut sufficient public welfare programs. But the President's Democratic opposition remains philosophically opposed to significant cuts in social spending. Thus the deficit widens to appalling proportions.

Experts now believe the Reagan administration will have no choice in 1986 but to cut back on defense and raise tax rates sometime during the year. The simple fact is, too many people (and their representatives) prefer social programs to low taxes. Worse yet, 1986 is an election year. Look for increases in spending. As the Nov. 15 WALL STREET JOURNAL editorialized: "Faced with an opportunity to increase federal spending, Congress can act with head-turning speed. Faced with the responsibility to cut federal spending, Congress can no longer act at all."

Northern Ireland — Peace But No Peace: On Friday, November 15, Prime Ministers Margaret Thatcher of Britain and Garrett Fitzgerald of Ireland signed a long-awaited agreement that gives the Dublin government a first-time-ever advisory role in the affairs of Northern Ireland. The accord establishes an Anglo-Irish Intergovernmental Conference to address political security and judicial and economic affairs in the province. The agreement also stipulates the right of the Irish government to propose measures and be consulted on Northern Ireland issues, while assuring that sovereignty in the province remains with Britain. Dublin, in turn, shelved for now aspirations for Irish unity.

Both sides hope it will be a first step on the road to discovering a peaceful solution to "the troubles” that have ravaged Ulster for decades. But don't hold your breath. Three times before this century, leaders of Ireland and Britain have tried, without success, to reach an accommodation. This time the situation is considerably different, however. The Irish Republic now has a foot in the door in running affairs in Ulster. This is inflaming those in the North who call the agreement a sellout. Protestant politician and minister Ian Paisley, the leader of the Democratic Unionist Party, pledged to destroy the agreement, which he labeled a conspiracy. "It represents the end of Northern Ireland as we know it and is the beginning of joint Dublin¬ London rule," he said. Another Protestant leader, James Molyneaux, spoke of "the stench of treachery and betrayal in London." The Unionists see in the agreement an "undisguised Trojan horse" that will eventually lead to the absorption of the northern six counties into the Irish Republic. Unionist leaders are withdrawing all support from and contact with the British government, adopting a siege mentality.

On the other side of the fence, Gerry Adams, head of the legal political wing of the Irish Republican Army, Sinn Fein, declared that the accord would not stop his party's campaign for British withdrawal from Ulster. Public support for Sinn Fe in in the north is growing at the expense of another, more moderate Catholic party. Just how high the fears and emotions of the Ulster Protestants are was revealed in the November 4 NEWSWEEK:

In Ballynahinch, a small loyalist stronghold that is south of Belfast, a Union Jack flies from every telephone pole on the city's main street. Even the curbs are painted in British colors and graffiti — "No surrender" — decorate the walls....

At a rally, Ethel Smyth, a middle-aged politician, addressed the crowd. "I ask you, will you ever allow the Irish tri­color, the dirty rotten flag of the IRA murderers, to be flown in our land?" she screamed. "No, no, never! " came the angry reply.... "The time for talking is over," cried Smyth, to the sound of wild applause. "And the time for resistance has begun. If Ulster is to be saved, the young men and women must rise up. Prepare and keep your powder dry."...

"No one knows what's going to happen," says John McMichael, spokesman for the Ulster Defense Association, the self­ described "private Protestant army." "But if [our] fears are confirmed, then this is the beginning of the end. We expect the worse and are preparing for it. We have ingredients here for A civil war."...

TV=Televised Violence: Have you noticed that events inside South Africa seem to have calmed down? If so, that could be due to a government ban (why did Pretoria wait so long?) on television crews and still photographers who are no longer permitted to record riotous behavior. Equally as important, without this audience, the perpetrators of violence lose a lot of zeal for their activity. Television, especially, has perverted the coverage of news events, according to Paul Johnson, who wrote in the November 9 issue of THE SPECTATOR, a British news magazine:

The South African government's ban on all television, radio and photographic news coverage of rioting in the areas affected by the state of emergency is a belated recognition by authority that electronic journalism, dealing as it does in instant image and sound, is quite different from the old journalism of word and print. It is different for at least three reasons....

First, television news coverage reaches a near-universal audience. The classes of society most prone to violence, whether criminal, mindless or political (the last two often the same thing), are overwhelmingly composed of male teenagers and young men of poor education in big cities. Many cannot read at all or, if they can, read very little. They read tabloids, perhaps, mainly for sport, comic strips and crime reports. But they all watch television, and potential rioters form one of the most addicted groups. Television has an inherent propensity to promote violence, since it must constantly display dramatic action to hold the flagging attention of its...viewers.... Hence, for the political manipulators who want to increase the level of violence in our society, television is the perfect medium, and that is why terrorists cultivate it so assiduously.

Secondly, the emotional impact of television, especially on immature and poorly cultivated minds, is so much stronger than the printed word as to be different in kind rather than degree. When a writing journalist is describing a scene of violence, he necessarily imposes a kind of order on chaos by the mere discipline of telling the tale in a consequential manner. He rationalises, he gives some kind of meaning to events. He also interposes between the action and the reader the civilising barrier of words.... Television, by contrast, does not need words or shape or meaning .... There is a growing tendency of television news bulletins ...especially when covering riots, simply to let the film run, after a brief introduction, and tell its own tale, the only sound being the shouts of rioters, the noise of missiles being hurled, police bullets or sirens and the incidental cacophony of destruction....

The third reason is that television has a much stronger inherent tendency than print journalism to distort or even fake violent events. For many years now ...the organisers of demonstrations likely or deliberately calculated to end in violent conflicts with the police, have worked closely with television ...to convey to the public a sense of growing crisis, which may be wholly artificial. The television networks want violent real action to grab viewers and raise ratings. So both parties have a common interest in the breakdown of order.... Television is a gigantic magnifying glass which focuses and concentrates the spark of violence and conjures it into a fire.

There is a further dishonesty in the particular case of South Africa. Many people involved in the television coverage of events there are partisan opponents of the country's political system and wish it to be over thrown. They believe that media coverage can help to do this. In other words, their primary interest is not reporting the news, but making it. Of course to some extent journalists have always done this .... It is a question of scale and degree. The selective and biased coverage of South Africa has now gone beyond all bounds. It amounts in effect to an attempted media putsch. This is not the first such media intervention. Richard Nixon, for instance, was the victim of a media putsch, coordinated, if it was not actually planned, by elements in the U.S. press and television who were determined to reverse the verdict of the 1972 election and who used their vast media power — in many respects monopoly power — to destroy a president....

In South Africa, the television lights have been turned off, at least for now. But much damage has been done. The news media played right into the hands of the radical African National Congress, which vowed to make the townships ungovernable. (The ANC continues to broadcast exhortations by radio from Marxist Ethiopia such as: "Police and soldiers must be killed even when they are in their homes. Forward to the people's war.") By means of the media-exaggerated violence and the resultant police crackdowns, a whole generation of youths in the town­ships have been radicalized — down to 4-year-olds who know how to make Molotov cocktails! These youths are now the shock troops of the future real revolution the ANC hopes to ride to victory.

A Political Glossary: Every field has its own special words and expressions which others find hard to understand. Politics is no exception. For those who have difficulty understanding the strange way words are used by liberal politicians and the media, here, according to Thomas Sowell, a black conservative economist with the Hoover Institution of War, Revolution and Peace, is a partly humorous glossary translating political rhetoric into plain English:

"Bilingual: unable to speak English. Equal opportunity: preferential treatment... Compassion: the use of tax money to buy votes. Insensitivity: objection to the use of tax money to buy votes.... Rehabilitation: magic words said before releasing criminals. Demonstration: a riot by people you agree with. Mob violence: a riot by people you disagree with.... People's republic: a place where you do what you are told or get shot. National liberation movements: organizations trying to create People's republics.... A proud people: chauvinists you like. Bigots: chauvinists you don't like.... Private greed: making money selling people what they want. Public service: gaining power to make people do what you want them to.... Moderate Arabs: mythical beings to whom State Department officials make sacrificial offerings.... Accountability: holding teachers, public officials and private business responsible for the consequences of their misdeeds. Chilling effect: holding journalists responsible for the consequences of their misdeeds."

— Gene H. Hogberg, News Bureau