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PASTOR GENERAL'S REPORT, SEPTEMBER 9, 1983
PAGE 12
up of the nations of Eastern Europe--and the emergence of the final
prophesied ten-nation combine in Europe, with national components from both
West/Central and Eastern Europe.
This Divided World
The latest Soviet action just might cause some people to see today's dan
gerous world a bit more realistically. Too many have engaged in "mirror
imaging," dangerously overlooking the obvious divisive factors of radically
different national ,characteristics, cultures, values and ideologies among
the world's nations.
Commented the editors of the WALL STREET JOURNAL in
their September 2 edition:
Why do we always assume that the Soviets are just like us? Where
is the evidence to support such a belief? Would we find it in
their slave labor camps?... In the use by Soviet soldiers of
incendiary materials to burn to death 105 Afghan villagers
trapped in an irrigation pipe? In the testing of poison gases
(yellow rain) on Hmong villagers in Laos and on Afghans?
The die-hard apologists always answer that the American military
has done some bad things, too, citing My Lai as a case in point.
And indeed, the history of warfare is full of horrors, some com
mitted by people who normally seem quite civilized. But surely
we don't need to go into long relativistic debates about man's
dual capacities for good and evil to discern that there are
crucial differences between the U.S.S.R. and the U.S. On the
face of present evidence, one of those differences is that the
Soviet Union is fundamentally an armed camp, a place where the
regular m1l1tary and param1litary KGB holds sway and do not
flinch at purposeful killing.
Americans tend to view the world through glasses tinted with the American
experience of liberal democracy, with its legal provisions for checks and
balances, governed by the lofty principles of individual freedom and
justice for all. Thus, despite the chasmic differences in this world's
national characteristics, cultures and governments (even varying forms of
democracy), Americans in general tend to hold to a rather simplistic and
unrealistic view of the world--one that says: "We are all alike." Nothing
could be further from the truth--in this world. Here are excerpts from a
very interesting "Essay" in the August 15, 1983 issue of TIME magazine en
titled "Deep Down, We're All Alike, Right? Wrong." The essay was written
by Charles Krauthammer.
Solipsism is the belief that the whole world is me, and •..its
authentic version is not to be found outside mental institutions.
What is to be found outside the asylum is its philosophic cousin,
the belief that the whole world is 1ike me.
This species of
solipsism--plural solipsism, if you like--is far more common
because it is far less lonely. Indeed, it yields a very con
genial world populated exclusively by creatures of one's own
likeness, a world in which...KGB chiefs and Iranian ayatullahs
are, well, folks just like us.
The mirror-image fantasy is not as crazy as it seems. Funda
mentally, it is a radical denial of the otherness of others. Or