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PASTOR GENERAL'S REPORT, NOVEMBER 6, 1981
PAGE 9
they used for these people [the neutralists], assuming the whole movement
is actually not a Soviet front. They wonder how we can be so blind to what
they perceive as a growing danger and do not understand why these people
oppose preparations to face that danger."
What is to become of Western Europe's slide into the dangerous political
vacuum of leftist-dominated neutralism--a vacuum that could only be filled
by Soviet political dominance, the so-called effect of "Finlandization"?
One possible scenario is grippingly portrayed in the book THE LAST DAYS OF
AMERICA, the latest best-selling novel by famed author Paul Erdman (whose
earlier book, THE CRASH OF '79 foretold the fall of the Shah of Iran) •
Erdman creates a spellbinding scenario centered in the mid-1980's, a time
after the next West German elections (1984).
In his real-life novel,
Erdman casts Franz Josef Strauss as the next chancellor, with a mythical
"Graf
von
Amsburg"
(von
Habsburg?) as his foreign minister. The story line
of the book revolves around a plot by German and other European interests to
acquire, from a private American company, cruise missile technology with
which to neutralize the Russian threat. (By the mid-1980's, the Americans,
turned off by neutralism and plagued by social chaos at home are no longer
perceived as being willing or able to continue as Europe's nuclear protec
tor).
Nuclear-tipped cruise missiles finally in German hands, ready to be de
ployed, the scene shifts to mid-1987. Author Erdman then reflects upon the
political career of Germany's then-chancellor:
...when Strauss lost the election for the chancellorship in 1980,
everyone thought the new German messiah was through. No one wanted to
know that 45 percent of all Germans who went to the polls voted for
him, giving him his country's largest bloc of votes. No one wanted to
realize that Germany was entering an era of revived nationalism and
xenophobia, whose primary external target was the United States. No
one wanted to think that a Franz Josef Strauss would convince the
German people four years later that he, and only he, could save the
world, or at least Europe, or at the very least Germany, from a third
catastrophe in this century, convince them that the new road to per
dition lay in following any further the mindless, intellectually bank
rupt leadership of the United States. Convince them that salvation
lay in the political, economic, and military independence of Germany.
Convince them that the prerequisite to independence from the United
States lay in Germany's military strength, and that the corollary to a
declaration of independence from the United States was a declaration
of willingness to coexist with the Soviet Union.
...the Strauss/van Amsburg objective was to achieve a state of armed
neutrality, with the stress on the adjective "armed"....He only hinted
at all this, sometimes in private meetings, sometimes very obliquely
in television interviews in the 1984 election campaign. He did not
have to shout it from the housetops: the Germans knew what he was
getting at, and they knew he had to be cautious. So they voted him in.
And even in his first two years in office, he had to be careful. For
he still needed the military umbrella of the United States standing
protectively over his Germany.
He still needed the three hundred
thousand American troops stationed in Germany to· stand between his
people and the Soviet tanks. He still needed the threat, even though