A Thunderclap

Gorbachev’s proposal that all nuclear missiles be removed from European soil broke over Western Europe like a thunderclap. The pars maior et insanior, the majority, welcomes this proposal as another sign of the USSR’s decision to embark on the road to sanity, peace, tolerance, humaneness, freedom, and all other imaginable virtues. The average European, like people everywhere, is a wishful thinker. The news from Moscow sounds so good and reassuring. And the European (as all other) masses think in clichés.

The intelligent minority rightly sees in the Soviet proposal a new menace: Not only would the “balance of terror,” which has kept the peace in Europe (though only in Europe) since 1948, come to an end, but the immense Soviet superiority in conventional armaments would become glaringly evident. The old observation that initiatives—peaceful or warlike— always come from nondemocratic and ideologically motivated states has been demonstrated with cruel clarity. The democracies have so far only tried to parry Soviet blows. On the rare occasions when they succeed they burst into paeans of self-congratulation and then start waiting anxiously for the next challenge.

EK

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Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn

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Gorbachev’s proposal that all nuclear missiles be removed from European soil broke over Western Europe like a thunderclap. The pars maior et insanior, the majority, welcomes this proposal as another sign of the USSR’s decision to embark on the road to sanity, peace, tolerance, humaneness, freedom, and all other imaginable virtues. The average European, like people everywhere, is a wishful thinker. The news from Moscow sounds so good and reassuring. And the European (as all other) masses think in clichés.

The intelligent minority rightly sees in the Soviet proposal a new menace: Not only would the “balance of terror,” which has kept the peace in Europe (though only in Europe) since 1948, come to an end, but the immense Soviet superiority in conventional armaments would become glaringly evident. The old observation that initiatives—peaceful or warlike— always come from nondemocratic and ideologically motivated states has been demonstrated with cruel clarity. The democracies have so far only tried to parry Soviet blows. On the rare occasions when they succeed they burst into paeans of self-congratulation and then start waiting anxiously for the next challenge.