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Hard-Nosed Détente
| Article
# : |
11230 |
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Section : |
BOOK WORLD
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| Issue
Date : |
5 / 1986 |
2,279 Words |
| Author
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Paul Gottfried
Paul Gottfried is a senior editor of the Modern Thought
section of The World & I and author of The Search for
Historical Meaning: Hegel and the Postwar American Right. |
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
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