Imperial Stars 2-Republic and Empire Read Free Page A

became to some extent the orthodoxy everywhere . . ."
    —Paul Johnson, Modern Times
     
    In 1940, the people of the United States believed in individual responsibility. They might look to government for a helping hand, even for temporary assistance to get past a crisis, but the notion that the government might be responsible for feeding and clothing and housing the citizens would have been rejected as socialism. Today, things are a bit different.
    In 1945, the forces of freedom and liberty held dominant power over the world. The Republic of the United States had a monopoly on nuclear weapons, an enormous army in Europe and another in Japan, and a war economy. We might have imposed imperial rule over the world. Instead, we dismantled our army, brought the soldiers home, and used our economy to help our former enemies. We were given the choice between republic and empire, and we opted to remain true to our republican heritage.
    Five years later, we were engaged in war in Korea—war that somehow, for all our might, we couldn't win. Within a generation, a president who had pledged to bear any burden and fight any foe stood below the Berlin Wall and could do no more than shout defiance. Within two generations, more than half the people of the world lived under tyranny, and we were still not done.
"In the days that followed Brezhnev's death in November 1982, the multitude of British and American Sovietologists and political figures interviewed from morning to night by the media urged that we "seize the opportunity" to give the Soviet Union proof of our good will. Most of them specifically recommended that the Americans immediately lift their embargo on technological transfers to the U.S.S.R.—even those with possible military applications (this was done at once)—and that we postpone for one year the deployment of the Euromissiles that were to comprise Western Europe's counterweight to the intermediate-range SS-20s Russia had already positioned on its Western frontiers.
    "Just what was this 'opportunity' to be seized? The death of one leader and his replacement by another do not necessarily mean the country's policy will change. Only the new man's actions can show if he has taken a different tack. In the seven years preceding Brezhnev's death, it was Soviet foreign policy that was aggressive, not the West's. So it was up to Moscow to take the first step, not the West. There was no sign in Andropov's past of liberalism or pacifism. So why offer him unilateral concessions before he had given the slightest indication of his good will or uttered a single word that sounded conciliatory?
    "Why? Because deep down, whatever they may say and write to the contrary, Westerners accept the Soviet Union's idea of them. They very nearly agree that they are at fault for the collapse of detente. We see ourselves through Moscow's eyes, we accept the myth of the Communists' desire for peace, and acknowledge that it is we who are guilty of aggressivity endangering the world's stability."
    —Jean-Francois Revel,
How Democracies Perish
     
    Democracies endure until the citizens care more for what the state can give them than for its ability to defend rich and poor alike; until they care more for their privileges than their responsibilities; until they learn they can vote themselves largess from the public treasury and use the state as an instrument for plundering, first, those who have wealth, then those who create it.
    The American people seem to be learning that fatal lesson. The last forty years have seen the United States reject the temptations of empire, but nearly succumb to the seductions of democracy. We have reached the abyss, but not yet taken the last step over it. The survival of freedom itself is at stake, and that future is by no means certain.
     
    Herewith, stories of republic and empire in the near and far future.

Editor's Introduction To:
Outward Bound
Norman Spinrad
     
    Norman Spinrad lives just up the hill from me, but we