Demanding Justice

Your Aug. 24 edition featured an excellent article, “Angry Muscovites Clamor for Justice” (front page.) It vividly described how thousands of Soviet activists had surrounded the Communist Party complex, demanding justice and accountability from the officials inside.

How ironic that here in America, where there has never been KGB-style coercion, citizens have voluntarily abrogated their responsibility to work for the same humanitarian values! Obsessed with the decay of totalitarianism in Russia and Eastern Europe, we have become blind to its ascension in the power centers of our own society.

Consider this: As our President lambastes the forces of Soviet militarism, he bolsters U.S. arm sales to Third World nations so that we now have the dubious distinction of being the planet’s principal merchant of death. As our chief executive lauds Poland’s Solidarity union, he pushes for more laws castrating our own labor movement and eroding workers’ pay. As the Dalai Lama pleads on behalf of his people, cut down by communist Chinese genocide, corporate America cheerfully steps up MFN imports of Chinese products made in political slave-labor camps. Even as the CIA admits its involvement in BCCI and the savings and loan crisis, Americans are told that taxpayers must foot the bill for generations to come.

We have infinitely more freedom and opportunity than the citizens of Russia who have labored under tyranny for nearly a century. But if we choose not to be informed, not to change our aberrant priorities, not to take up the cause of our activist heritage, we stand to lose much more than the Soviets have gained.

JAMES DAVID HIMMELSBACH

Cardiff