76-17-B3
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Human Rights
TranscriptNot 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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