'We will clarify NATO's love
"Women for peace" workshop in Summer 1983, East Berlin (DR)
DOCUMENT as concessions in the governmental sphere - all convince me of the supremacy • of American imperialism and international capital over the Soviet bloc.
It is precisely the capitalist productive relations prevailing in these countries, combined with their great
THE POSITIONS defended in the preceding article were answered in a contribution written by Peter Uhl, which was published in the same issue of Gegenstimmen. Uhl criticized the analysis made by "Politikus" of the respective responsibilities of the Soviet Union and the imperialists for the dangers threatening humanity. The following are major excerpts from Uhl's article. PETR UHL
The apology for NATO offered by Politikus disconcerts me by its simplification and the selectiveness of its facts. Debating with people who share such views would certainly be very difficult. But I am an optimist.
I would like to think that description and analysis of the general situa tion in the Western bloc - including economic and social relations, the politico-military alliances of the past 40 years, as well as cultural and national relationships and the like would be more comprehensible to people in Czechoslovakia than an exposition of the relationships in Soviet-type bureaucratic dictatorships for the peoples of Latin America, a large part of Asia, the bulk of Africa or even for the people of West Europe and the United States.
In passing, it should be noted that the inhabitants of West Europe and the United States can find consolation for the daily problems in the fact that - unlike the 90 per cent of the rest of humanity who bear the cost of the relative well-being of the Western societies - they live in "an association of free and independent states with elected parliaments, under which human rights are respected."
Even these people in West Europe and the United States - I am not talking now about the peoples of the so-called Third World - are sometimes so ungrateful that they fail to appreciate this fact and impudently demand solutions to their problems. Sometimes, they even point to violations of human rights, restrictions of democracy and freedom, a dubiousness of national independence, and so forth.
So, I remain an optimist - Bohemia has always been a melting pot of cultures - and I would like to think that if we continue the discussion with a modicum of honesty, in which Politikus has been lacking up till now, we will clarify NATO's love of peace and the American politeness, of which we have accumulated so much bitter experience over the past 40 years. 22
After all, Politikus opinion worthy of mention that the Prague Appeal - while not doing this in so many words - implies an equation
Warsaw Pact and NATO. Politikus proffers the argument that this contradicts his (sic) experience of life and cannot satisfy any thinking person who lived through the year 1968 in Czechoslovakia.
For my part, if I signed the Prague Appeal, it was also because it did not put such an equals sign. My experence in life contradicts such a point of view, which I exclude as Eurocentrist, simplistic and politically wrong.
A comparison of the economic and military potential of the two big blocs (in terms of area and population), as well as analysis of the political and social systems of these blocs in their historical development and finally a study of their "aggressiveness" dynamics as well military power extending virtually through the world, that represent a fundamental obstacle to the harmonious development of humanity.
The obstruction of Stalinism in the Soviet Union, which must be removed in a revolutionary way, plays second fiddle in the orchestra of world politics.
The misfortunes humanity has suffered and the dangers to which it has been exposed because of Stalinism have always been less grave than the conflicts engendered by world capital and imperialism.
I think that in the near future it will be necessary for me to analyze the positions I hold by testing them against the facts, if only because my point of view is not at all widespread in this country nor at all popular. If I back up my views in all honesty, they may no longer be considered demobilizing.
Indeed, I have always said that it is our duty to criticize publicly above all the social contradictions (errors, injustices, illegality) that we see in our immediate environment, and I have tried to live in accordance with this principle. But I have always been concerned also about the general context of our action, the direction in which we are moving in this country, in Europe, as well as throughout the world. • ON SIDE FRA 1AU
(FRAUEN PIR ON PRECE
International Viewpoint 24 March 1986
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