Baltimore-i Értesítő, 1975 (11. évfolyam, 1-12. szám)
1975-05-01 / 5. szám
It is always disheartening to teil troubled overseas friends that the Yanks are not coming to rescue them, as the U S Cavalry always rescued the embattled settlers in the old John Ford movies. It came as a thunderclap of a surprise to millions of Hungarians that we did not send clouds of paratroopers to Budapest to save the brave Freedom Fighters who rose up in 1956 to fight Khrushchev's tanks barefisted. They, or at least some of them, thought they had an understanding with the then fiercely anii-Commumsi U S government, Congress and Defense Department. It became the task of a first-raie American diplomat, Robert Murphy, to explain to a series of emotional Hungarian-American delegations who called on him at the State Department that they were completely wrong — that we had absolutely no intention of intervening, any more than we had intervened when the Russians chopped down the students' uprising in Poland a few months before. So. to salve our national conscience — which has remained the strongest among the nations for two centu ries — we dropped the quota bars and many thousands of Hungarians made it to these friendly shores. Same with the Cuban refugees who got out on their own or we bought, in effect, from Castro. There were 650,000 of them through the 1960s. At a stirring rally in Miami, President Kennedy deeply moved a stadium-full of them when he promised them that they’d one day march back to a liberated Havana with flags flying. Jackie assured them in Spanish that they couldn't miss. Now there's a good chance we'll recognize Castro diplomatically before the year is out. To the consternation of many Czechoslovakians. we didn't send the B-52s and the 82nd Airborne when the Russians cuffed them around pitilessly a few years ago. What some of the older Czechs could not understand is that Woodrow Wilson was their Godfather, so why didn’t we help when the big bully stepped on Dubcek and other brave men and women who asserted Wilsonian democratic doctrines0 So, more or less on the quiet, we gave haver, to hundreds of them, as readily as we had opened our doors to 640,000 displaced people after World War 11. and as emotionally and joyously as we are now taking the Vietnamese orphans into our arms. But what of the other miliions of South Vietnamese from age 12 to 100 that we now must say to, "Sorry, we've had it with your lousy war for survival. We lost more than 50,000 dead, 300,000 wounded and $125 billion. We also lost face with a lot of old cherished allies throughout the world, who now question whether we d help them if they ever got in real trouble ” The South Vietnamese are running out of places to run. Only a tiny fraction of them have the means or influence to get to this country or disappear into some other part of Indochina where they can blend in. The remaining millions who will be overrun . . . ? Former CIA analyst Samuel Adams recently suggested in The Wall Street Journal that the number of heads the Reds will roll as they sweep down through South Vietnam could reach 100,000 Far be it from me to doubt a CIA man when the matter of liquidation is concerned, but I question the analyst's analysis. Sure, the inevitable winners — now that the Yanks aren’t coming — will kill a certain number of leaders, if they can catch them, just as we and the other allies knocked off a baker’s dozen of Nazis and Japanese after the war trials. (.And just as Hitler would have hanged Roosevelt. Churchill, Stalin and DeGaulle if he had won.) But to envision the streets of Saigon, can Tho, Hue and Da Nang awash with the blood of the defeated is a bit too much to conjure. To make the late Ho Chin Minh's old dream come true — a united Vietnam that does not have to pay tribute to the United States, Russia or China — the defeated people of South Vietnam will not be mass executed. One who has been there a few times guesses that they will be "embraced," a synonym for "absorbed.” Millions who fled southward will be put back into their cities and hamlets. They will work for the "state” rather than for themselves or their district leaders. And one day, as we have done in Russia, China, Eastern Europe, and are on the verge of doing in Cuba, wf'll give them full diplomatic recognition, trade and rights to "Gunsmoke" re-runs. — The sorrows, trials and tribulations of the antiwar activists. The self-righteous peace pursuers and campus denmlishers of the 156iis have falién upon hard time of late. Elizabeth McAlister Berrigan. the Joan of Arc of the notorious Berrigan gang, got picked up for indulging in a little pre-Christmas shoplifting last year. No to Red Propaganda 7 Does detente mean that the United --*■ States has to permit Communist propagandists to come here from abroad to spread the Marxist line0 Our laws say no, but the State Department set-ms to ignore the law. They have just admitted Mrs. Salvadoré Allende, widow of the overthrown Marxist president of Chile, for the second time. Mrs. Aliende’s main purpose in coming here appears to be to denounce the United States and the government of Chile This is part of the campaign being waged by the Communists and their friends to gel Congress to terminate alt a:d to Chile. One might say that Mrs. Allende is here to intervene in the interna! affairs of the United States. ft is clear that Mrs. Allende is an eager helper of the Communists. When her husband died, Mrs. Allende was one of the first to say that he had committed suicide with a machine gun given to him by his good friend Fidel Castro. She said that the military' had offered him safe conduct from the country and that he had refused. According to Mrs. Allende then, he said he would kill himself rather than surrender. As soon as she was out of the country, she learned that the Communist line was that her husband had been murdered. She quickly changed her story to fit the line Mrs. Allende visited the United States in February under the auspices of a Communist organization headquartered in East Berlin. She pretends to be concerned about human rights, but like the Cubans and Russians, she is concerned only about the rights of the extremists of the left. She ignores the fact that the Chilean government has offered to trade prisoners in Chile for prisoners who suffer in Castro’s dungeons and Brezhnev's slave labor camps. Who is brave enough to go to Russia and publicly demand the release of those prisoners and acceptance of the Chilean offer? Obviously the Russians would not permit such a person to hold press conferences, and their papers would not publish a word of what he said. He would be lucky to avoid being clapped in jail. Detente is still not a two-way street. WALTER TABAKA Red Harvest 0k STRATEGIC,
