Peace … or prevarication?

By Frank Gaffney Jr.
The Washington Times, 30 April 1996

In one of his darkest insights into the human
condition, Adolf Hitler wrote in his manifesto, Mein
Kampf, that: “The great masses of the people …
will more easily fall victims to a big lie than to a
small one.”

Until recently, the Big Lie was principally a
hallmark of totalitarian regimes like that Hitler
established in Germany. Today, however, democratic
elections in Israel, Russia and the United States are
inducing the incumbents in each country to engage in
practices that would have done Hitler proud.

Consider, for example, Israeli Prime Minister Shimon
Peres’ characterization of the April 24 vote taken by the
Palestine National Council (PNC): “The decision of
the Palestinian [sic] National Council this evening to
cancel the Palestinian Covenant may be the most important
ideological change in this century. … I’ve always said
you can depend on Arafat, and here it’s clear that Arafat
is fighting terror and changed the Covenant just as he
promised.”

This qualifies as a Big Lie for the simple reason
that the PNC did no such thing. On April 27, Dr. Haidar
Abdel Shafi, a prominent member of the Council who
formerly headed the PLO delegation at the Madrid talks,
confirmed that the PNC “did not formally change the
Covenant.” Instead, it merely authorized a legal
committee to consider unspecified changes that will, in
turn, have to secure the approval of yet another group at
some still-to-be-determined time. Even at that, according
to Dr. Shafi, the PNC “had just two of the
[Covenant’s] articles in mind” – two out of 30
articles in the document that call for Israel’s
destruction or urge violent action against Israel and its
people.

Then there is Boris Yeltsin’s Big Lie about ending
the war in Chechnya. For weeks, the Russian president has
trumpeted a unilateral cease-fire, a cessation of
hostilities and a commitment to peace in the region. As
the war continues unabated, these statements evidently
have more to do with his earlier assertion he could not
win re-election unless he had found a way to bring the
Chechen conflict to a halt than they do with his actual
intentions and actions.

Not only have Chechen civilians continued to be
massacred and their villages relentlessly pounded into
rubble by Mr. Yeltsin’s military. It appears that the
Russian government cynically exploited the very act of
peace negotiations to target and assassinate the leader
of the Chechen insurrection – Dzhokhar Dudayev. According
to Russian as well as Chechen sources, the Kremlin used
signals from a satellite telephone on which Mr. Dudayev
was speaking with a Russian peace mediator to vector
missiles to destroy him in his hideout.

If President Clinton has not actually joined Mr.
Yeltsin in declaring the Chechen war over, he certainly
has helped to legitimate the brutal Russian campaign
there. This was the indisputable effect of Mr. Clinton’s
statement following his summit meeting with the Russian
president. It equated today’s genocide, conducted for the
purpose of perpetuating the savage subjugation of
Chechnya, to Abraham Lincoln’s effort to preserve a
voluntarily formed Union and bring an end to slavery.

Meanwhile, Mr. Clinton has been engaging in his own
Big Lie: For reasons having to do with ideology and arms
control theology rather than a regard for the facts, the
president and his subordinates insist there is no threat
of missile attack against the United States. In December
1995, Mr. Clinton vetoed a Defense authorization bill on
the grounds that, since there was no threat, the U.S.
missile defense mandated by that legislation was
unneeded.

Even though communist China subsequently intimated
that its nuclear-armed intercontinental ballistic
missiles might be used against Los Angeles if the United
States interfered in Beijing’s campaign of coercion
against Taiwan, the Clinton administration continues to
propagate the myth that America can safely remain without
effective, deployed anti-missile systems. In fact, Bill
Gertz of this paper reported last Friday that Defense
Secretary William Perry told a George Washington
University audience on April 25: “The United States
today ‘is safe’ from a strategic missile attack but could
be threatened if rogue states build their own
intercontinental ballistic missiles … [a] threat [that]
is ‘more than a decade away.’ ”

But America is not safe today if it cannot reliably
deter a China that professes a willingness to sacrifice
millions of people and whole cities in order to pursue
its national objectives, an attitude the administration
expects in the future from possibly undeterrable rogue
nations like Iran or North Korea. What is more, since
such rogue states are buying missiles and weapons of mass
destruction technology -rather than going to the trouble
of developing these systems themselves – the United
States will almost surely have far less than a decade to
put its defensive systems in place. Under these
circumstances, it is preposterous for a president who has
recently made much of his commitment to provide a needed
national anti-missile defense for Israel to use a Big Lie
to justify denying his own people at least as effective
protection.

Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes once
opined that “the best test of truth is the power of
the thought to get itself accepted in the competition of
the market.” Democracy cannot long endure the
deliberate suppression of that competition. Those who
profess to love democracy cannot tolerate – let alone
engage in – the propagation of Big Lies that compromise
the test of truth.