The Polish Challenge

The resort to arms in Poland to crush Solidarity poses a challenge not only to the governments of the West, but to the international peace movement as well. The bravery of the Polish experiment and the honesty of its leaders make the imposition of martial law there seem all the more brutal. Whether the Soviet Union directed the entire operation, as President Reagan has charged, or whether the Polish Communist elite believing themselves to be patriots moved to pre-empt Soviet military intervention is, morally speaking, beside the point. In either case it must be concluded that the Soviet Union could not tolerate an uncontrollable experiment in its backyard, and its displeasure caused the experiment to be ended.

For President Reagan, Poland offered a cheap Cold War victory. It provided a pretext for squeezing the Soviets with symbolic sanctions that neither anger the farm vote or bankers nor offer any hope whatsoever of turning the Kremlin leaders into kindly democrats. Ideological points could be scored: The tragedy in Warsaw signified that communism in Poland was bankrupt--and not just financially.

To hear Ronald Reagan lament the fate of Polish workers on the international airwaves while rolling back the rights and privileges of workers at home in the United States must be particularly infuriating to the Soviets. But making the adversary sputter helplessly is one of the well-established rewards of Cold War diplomacy. Indeed, there is a long history of enlisting the plight of Poland in the service of official hypocrisy. The Cold War began 35 years ago when Secretary of State James Byrnes denounced Soviet violations of the promise to conduct free elections in Poland--even as the entire black population in his native state of South Carolina was being systematically disenfranchised.

An alternative approach taken by Helmut Schmidt, which has been endorsed by many U.S. supporters of detente, avoids using the Polish tragedy for ideological warfare but offers instead a bit of old world "realism" laced with cynicism. Yes, what happened in Poland is bad, but there is nothing that can really be done about it. Did anyone expect the Soviets to act differently? Europe's interest is to avoid war, and that means curbing the impulse to blast the Soviets. To impose economic sanctions, for West Germany at least, is to inflict a wound on the German economy without producing a change of policy in Moscow. So why do it? Like the invasions of Hungary, Czechoslovakia, and Afghanistan, the Polish episode will blow over. Meanwhile, the reasoning goes, officials should make every effort to avoid nuclear confrontation.

President Reagan then warned the West German chancellor that the righteous wrath of the American people would be kindled against Europeans if they took such a cavalier attitude toward Soviet transgression, but his heavy-handed propaganda seems to have produced what the entire KGB apparatus could never have hoped to accomplish: a disgust with the U.S. government sufficient to divert attention from the outrages being carried out in Poland.

Evidently believing in their own whispered claim that a large proportion of the two million or so Europeans who marched for peace in recent months "have been bought and paid for in Moscow," some administration officials apparently expect that the predictable surge in anti-Soviet sentiment on the continent will cool the mushrooming peace movement there. If that does not happen it will be sound proof, they suggest, that Europe has already been "Finlandized," and that the beastlier the Russians and their surrogates act, the more accommodating the terrified Western European allies will become.

The peace movement in Europe has distinguished itself by its clear call on the Soviet Union no less than on the U.S. to take its nuclear weapons out of Europe. But peace activists in Europe as well as in the United States have been confused by the tragic turn of events in Poland. The essence of the peace process is reaching out to those we fear and are taught to hate. Peacemaking does not require and it does not imply moral approbation of brutal conduct. It does demand that we seek moral clarity. A peace movement that excuses the violation of human rights by the great power with missiles aimed at the cities in which its members live appears to be acting more out of fear than out of love. By the same token a peace movement that bows to the enormous social pressures in its own society to join the self-righteous chorus of anti-communism has lost its moral bearings.

The primary task of a peace movement is to help people to overcome their riveting fear that makes them clutch at nuclear weapons. No movement can do that if it projects fear of either principal contestant in the arms race. The strength of the peace movement is based on love of the earth and not fear of our own death. It is the only audible voice warning that we are in danger of destroying everything that we love. The insistence of the peace movement upon speaking as a trustee for the future is the source of its power.

The rise of the Solidarity movement was a tremendous boost for peace, for the struggle for democracy and human rights is the only route to a stable society that can afford peace. The revolutionary struggles in Central America are also in historic perspective positive developments for peace, for only societies dedicated to a just measure of political participation and sharing of resources can avoid the threat of civil war and official repression. But the struggles themselves are painful and terribly costly, and they complicate enormously the task of peacemaking.

The responsibility of a serious peace movement is to put forward a vision of peace that confronts these realities, that is honest enough not to ignore the roadblocks to peace but combines enough humanity, reason, and rage to hold out a worldview that challenges both superpowers.

The call to restore the detente of Henry Kissinger and Richard Nixon is doomed for two reasons. The first is that detente as it actually has been practiced is acceptable only to a small fraction of the global population. The 90 per cent of the world's people who are neither American nor Russian--though they have an obvious stake in the peaceful coexistence of the nuclear giants--cannot accept the legitimacy of a security system in which each superpower is accorded a free hand in its own back yard.

The premises of the Brezhnev and Nixon doctrines alike, which hold that the United States and the Soviet Union reserve the right to deal harshly with political and economic movements not to their liking, are increasingly being challenged even as the Soviets and President Reagan attempt to extend them. The proliferation of high technology and nuclear weaponry, and the rise of powerful new economic actors--Japan, the oil producers, the newly industrialized states--are leading to a decentralization of world power. Even if it were morally acceptable for peace to rest on a cynical bargain between the two superpowers, it is no longer possible.

The second problem with the Nixon-Brezhnev doctrine of detente is that it has a built-in self-destruct mechanism. As tensions between the superpowers themselves decline, the traditional satellites, whether in Eastern Europe or Central America, grow restive and assert their independence. Political ferment leads to experimentation, which the giants find dangerous. The response on both sides of the world is to repress the experimenters in the name of stability because independent sources of power, such as a popular front in El Salvador or a Solidarity in Poland, threaten the notion of superpower security.

Since international law, practice, and rhetoric all condemn intervention in internal affairs, the superpowers end up accusing each other of causing these rebellions. Thus Reagan charges that Moscow is behind the agonizing struggle of peasants in El Salvador to free themselves from the exploitation of military rule, and Brezhnev says that the Poles would be one happy family if it were not for the machinations of the CIA. A single powerful foreign enemy is indispensable.

It is self-evident that the high-handed behavior of the superpowers in what each regards as its own back yard poses a mortal threat, for nuclear war will not come out of the blue but most likely out of some superpower confrontation in a third country. As hostility increases, each may be tempted to test the limits of the other's sphere of influence.

For this reason, the Polish crackdown makes real negotiations to stop and reverse the arms race all the more urgent. The renewed possibilities of covert military operations against Nicaragua and Cuba, as well as military escalations in El Salvador, also make a popular movement to stop the arms race all the more critical: The struggle for human liberation everywhere is threatened and prolonged by its entanglement with the nuclear stand-off of the superpowers. Leaders who will not abandon the effort to control the internal developments of other nations will never give up threatening the use of nuclear weapons.

A realism is growing in the United States about security: a recognition at last by the major religious faiths that nuclear "defense" is morally and politically bankrupt; an awareness on the part of an increasing number of business and financial figures that the military budget cannot be controlled within the context of an arms race and that the limitless demands of the Pentagon will destroy the basis of security--the economy; and an understanding by many labor leaders and workers that far more jobs are to be found in peaceful production than in making the high-technology engines of war.

But until the U.S. peace movement joins its brothers and sisters in Europe, Latin America, and throughout the world in dramatizing a vision of a world that is freeing itself of both murderous weapons and murderous governments and proclaiming the truth that great power military intervention against any of us is a threat to all of us, it will not be able to challenge either the premises or the policies that are moving us closer to annihilation.

Richard Barnet was a senior fellow at the Institute for Policy Studies in Washington, D.C., and a contributing editor for Sojourners when this article appeared.