04/11/2013
Steve Sailer writes, in his Taki’s Mag obit for Mrs. Thatcher:
…by the mid-1980s the Soviet Union had 5.3 million personnel in uniform and 53,000 tanks pointed at Western Europe. This threat was several orders of magnitude greater than any we’ve had to deal with in this century.The danger was not that the aged hacks of the Kremlin had an Alexandrine urge to conquer the world, but that that they would continue to be tempted into foreign adventures to shore up their rule at home by bullying abroad.
From 1976 onward, the Soviets deployed SS-20 intermediate range nuclear missiles, which, in the Cold War’s bizarre but terrifying logic, were destabilizing precisely because they weren’t intercontinental ballistic missiles that could threaten the United States.
NATO had long deterred the vast Red Army by threatening to respond to a Warsaw Pact offensive in the Fulda Gap with battlefield nuclear weapons and then, it was often fatalistically assumed, intercontinental nuclear missiles. But Moscow’s development of an accurate intermediate range missile that could conceivably confine World War III to Europe was a political breakthrough that spotlighted the central psychological weakness of NATO: Would the US, protected by the Atlantic, and the UK, protected by the English Channel, launch ICBMs to save West Germany?
Really? …
To forestall this not altogether unreasonable line of thought [the Finlandization of West Germany], Thatcher, Jimmy Carter, Helmut Schmidt, and other NATO leaders signed an agreementin 1979 to install their own intermediate-range Pershing missiles in Europe by 1983. The idea was to give NATO a semi-credible deterrent that wouldn’t require an American president to push the button to launch missiles from North Dakota.
In response, the KGB promoted a “nuclear freeze” (a once vast political movement so forgotten today that it doesn’t even have its own Wikipedia page) to persuade voters in the West to instead acquiesce in intermediate-range missile inferiority and thus set in motion the consequent Finlandization.
[“Baroness Thatcher, Requiescat in Pace” by Steve Sailer, Taki’s Mag, April 10, 2013.]
Yes, I remember it well. I was living in West Germany at the time, and I knew American communist students at my school, the University of Tuebingen, who were participating in the protests. I thought that was extremely bad manners. When leftwing Germans criticized America or Israel (the Right wasn’t a problem back then), I let ‘em have it, but I would never have dreamed of engaging in public protests.
The Pershing missiles were Mittel-Strecken-Raketen (intermediate range missiles), as the West German communists always reminded the public, but I don’t recall hearing that the SS-20s were also intermediates, which was kind of important. (I was an avid reader of West German newspapers, and occasional contributor, but I may have missed that.) I also don’t recall hearing that the “Nuclear Freeze” movement was directed by the KGB, and I don’t think that that’s because I missed that day’s paper.
Not that I’m challenging Steve Sailer. On the contrary. That the “Freeze” movement was a KGB operation is, you might say, the last piece in a certain puzzle.
Old immigration hands have long puzzled over the motivation behind the Immigration Act of 1965. Was it merely a misguided attempt at fairness (as the late Lawrence Auster argued in Path to National Suicide), or a conspiracy to destroy America? Some of my colleagues at VDARE suspect major Immigration Act player, Norbert Schlei, of impure thought. I don’t know Schlei from Adam, but I am familiar with the floor manager during the Senate battle to pass the bill that became the 1965 Immigration Act.
Ted Kennedy.
Kennedy notoriously lied, in promising that the bill would not change America’s ethnic balance. (As did his brother, Sen. Robert Kennedy, in supporting him.)
Senator Edward M. Kennedy (D-MA)
"Out of deference to the critics, I want to comment on … what the bill will not do. First, our cities will not be flooded with a million immigrants annually. Under the proposed bill, the present level of immigration remains substantially the same … Secondly, the ethnic mix of this country will not be upset … Contrary to the charges in some quarters, S.500 will not inundate America with immigrants from any one country or area, or the most populated and economically deprived nations of Africa and Asia. In the final analysis, the ethnic pattern of immigration under the proposed measure is not expected to change as sharply as the critics seem to think. Thirdly, the bill will not permit the entry of subversive persons, criminals, illiterates, or those with contagious disease or serious mental illness. As I noted a moment ago, no immigrant visa will be issued to a person who is likely to become a public charge … the charges I have mentioned are highly emotional, irrational, and with little foundation in fact. They are out of line with the obligations of responsible citizenship. They breed hate of our heritage."(Senate Part 1, Book 1, pp. 1-3)
Senator Robert F. Kennedy (D-NY)
Kennedy sycophants supporters might well argue that Ted Kennedy had no idea that the law would entail such demographic dislocations. If that were so, Kennedy might have apologized. Instead, during his last years, before he descended to that special circle in hell reserved for him, he engaged in shameless race-baiting against anyone talking common sense against yet another mass amnesty for tens of millions of Third World, illegal alien invaders.
In 2006-2007, Kennedy was completely invested in destroying America, and I believe he was just as invested in destroying it in 1965.
Kennedy also sought to impose the sort of economy-wrecking socialized health that we have since been saddled with under Obamacare.
Roughly between the 1965 Immigration Act and the 2006-2007 Amnesty fight, Kennedy was the leader of the American side of the “Freeze” movement. He demanded unilateral disarmament of the West, i.e., he was serving the KGB.
He sought to destroy the American people through mass, Third World immigration, and turn America into a Third World, socialist banana republic.
He sought to destroy the American fisc through socialized health care.
And he sought to destroy American foreign policy, and lose her beachhead against the Russian Communists in Central Europe. Had he prevailed, West Germany and perhaps all of Western Europe would have become Soviet satellites, and the Evil Empire would never have collapsed.
Whether the Russians had something on Ted Kennedy, I don’t know, but whatever his motive, he was a traitor, and to my mind, the most destructive figure in postwar American history.
But is this just a meditation on history? Hardly. Kennedy made promises in 1965 that proved to have been bald-faced lies. Supporters of the 1986 mass amnesty likewise told bald-faced lies (it would be a one-time amnesty, to be followed with stepped up border security and internal enforcement, etc.) that they never intended to enforce. The Gang of Eight, and all who support them, are likewise now telling lies of Kennedyesque dimensions.
When I hear such talk, I always reach for my wallet with one hand, and for my pistol with the other.
This is a content archive of VDARE.com, which Letitia James forced off of the Internet using lawfare.