AN OPEN LETTER TO SPECTATOR READERS
I am paying for this space with money I borrowed.
I realise that individual utterance has almost no public standing in our commercial civilisation. Indeed, private appeals of this kind are associated in the Western mind with cranks and cults of every description. Chances are that even those who know me as a Spectator contributor will think my course of action ill-advised, the content of this letter arbitrary or inconclusive, and the occasion insufficiently grave to warrant a desperate plea for attention.
Moscow, it was announced last week, has asked Britain, France and the United States to sign 'friendship pacts'. Margaret Thatcher is considering her response, while political analysts concur that Britain's acceptance of the Soviet state 'as a full partner in international affairs' is imminent.
In an article in the September number of The Salisbury Review I have challenged the consensus of 'Sovietologicar opinion which has arisen in the absence of informed, equipotent and adversarial debate. That consensus has a thousand throats, and to outshout it in Roger Scruton's tiny journal is impossible. Hence this appeal.
My article is entitled 'Why I am not a Conservative'. The restructuring of Soviet ideology accompanied by the rise of the most cunning dictator since Stalin has allowed the West to forfeit its future freedom and sovereignty without losing face, as Orwell predicted it would. For this epochal breach of responsibility, with the 'peace dividend' their mess of pottage, the Tories in Britain and the Republicans in the United States will be remembered by the denizens of a Finlandised Europe.
But the nightmare does not end there. For 'Finlandisation' is itself a ruse, a 'common European home' of Potemkin cardboard erected by the Soviets while they siphon Western science and technology into their strategic reservoir. This is why last week's announcement, to my ears, heralds the collapse of Western autarchy: after the 'friendship pacts' have been signed, nothing will save COCOM.
What is COCOM ? Few 'Sovietologists' in the West so much as know the name of the ultimate prize in the Soviet game of disarmament. COCOM controls the export of sensitive technology to 'former' Iron Curtain countries. Without COCOM, Nato is a toy, Soviet supremacy absolute, global and irreversible. The 'friendship pacts' are the prelude to a Soviet all-out public-relations assault on COCOM. The strategic end- game which I describe in my article will apparently begin sooner than I anticipated.
I have never been a pessimist. Truth can still cure euphoria. But once the 'friendship pacts' have been signed and COCOM falls, not even truth will make us free.
Taking out this advertisement may have been foolhardy. Yet my conscience tells me that keeping silent would have been cowardly. Such is freedom, and I must choose.
Andrei Navrozov
55 Castle Street Cambridge CB3 OAH
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