Editing 76-17-B3 (section)

= Human Rights =

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=== Transcript ===
Not too long ago a news item reported that the National Council of Churches
and the Interfaith Center on Corporate Responsibility, an affiliate of the
Council, are going to put pressure on I.B.M., through stockholders, to keep it
from selling computers to Chile and South Africa. The reason, of course, is that
one is ruled by a military junta which, incidentally, overthrew a government bent
on a communist takeover. The other, South Africa, practices a racial separation
which certainly does not meet our ideal of freedom.

Without faulting the sincerity of the Council, may I point out that Freedom
House (a New York based organization which monitors freedom around the world)
has listed 67 countries as "not free" and 48 as only "partly free". I won't
ask why the National Council of Churches has selected Chile and South Africa for
its attention -- that is pretty obvious. But we can ask, why it has ignored the
other 113?

We might also ask why are we so aware of the shortcomings of some countries
and not of others? South Africa and Chile have been long-time friends of the
United States and certainly represent no threat to their neighbors. On the other
hand, our country spends billions of dollars on defense each year because of the
threat posed by one country alone -- the Soviet Union -- which I believe has been a
customer of I.B.M., but with no complaint from the National Council of Churches.

Alexander Solzhenitsyn has told us in his book, The Gulag Archipelago, of
the terror imposed on the people of the Soviet Union by their government. There
are other books, Eugene Lyons', Workers Paradise Lost, The Great Terror, by
Robert Conquest and Alexander Dolgun's story, An American in the Gulag. In addition,
numerous defectors and escapees from behind the Iron Curtain have verified the
stories of cruelty and inhumanity which characterize the Soviet Union.

The point is we can't claim ignorance of the truth about Russia. Why then
are we so much aware of the others? Why have we not been touched emotionally
by the brutality so prevalent in the Gulag? We stand by passively when South
Africa is ruled unfit to participate in the Olympics, but let the Soviet Union
host the games in Moscow.

Let me read a passage from one of the books I mentioned; the story of Alexander
Dolgun, an American who was arrested while walking down the street in Moscow
one afternoon. He spent eight years in Soviet prisons and camps, but the passage
I'll read is his account not of his own torture but of what happened to his mother.
"They had arrested her in 1950", he writes. "For months she had pestered
the M.G.B. (secret police) for news of me. At first they told her I had been
shot as a spy. She had a breakdown. Shortly after she recovered she got my
triangle letter from Kuibyshev in which I asked whether the American embassy had
given her my personal belongings. She went to the embassy to demand help. At
the gates, the M.G.B. arrested her. She was still emotionally very fragile. They
beat her with rubber truncheons, trying to get her to incriminate me. They pushed
needles under her fingernails. Now her nails would never be straight again.
After a very short period of this, she went quite insane and without sentencing
her they put her in a prison insane asylum." -- UNQUOTE.

She never regained her sanity and after Dolgun's release, believed he was
a secret Russian agent sent to spy on her. His father was imprisoned after
his release.

If organizations such as the National Council of Churches are going to
involve themselves in matters such as our commerce with nations which violate
human rights, it would seem to me they have a responsibility to be even handed
and to inform their constituents of all violators -- not just a few. 

This is Ronald Reagan.

Thanks for listening.
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=== Details ===
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<TR><TD WIDTH="150">Batch Number</TD><TD WIDTH="150">{{PAGENAME}}</TD></TR>
<TD>Production Date</TD><TD>07/??/[[Radio1977|1977]]</TD></TR>
<TD>Book/Page</TD><TD>[https://www.reaganlibrary.gov/public/2024-07/40-656-7386263-014-006-2024.pdf#PAGE=13 Online PDF]</TD></TR>
<TD>Audio</TD><TD></TD></TR>
<TD>Youtube?</TD><TD>No</TD></TR>
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===Added Notes===

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