European Stars and Stripes (Newspaper) - February 07, 1969, Darmstadt, Hesse                                Friday february 7, 1969 the stars and stripes Page 9 John p. Roche iv4 reds Are masters at forced confession the official inquiry into the behaviour of cmdr. Lloyd m. Bucher of the Pueblo a run into treacherous water. A Usu Al discussions of Bucher s culpability in signing his confession teem to assume that the prob Lem began either when the Pueblo was seized or earlier during the korean War. In fact there is an immense body of relevant literature which to me at least suggests that the offi Cial posture reveal nothing but name rank and serial number is a Good 50 years out of Date. George Orwell once observed that if you wanted to become a Martyr these Days you had to pick your enemies carefully roughly the same proposition applies to heroes. The Point of departure for exploring confessions such As those William f. Buckley or. Uncharted Waters school fight in . Is one for the books the reigning confusion in new York City on the school de centralization Issue has had the interesting effect such often is the Case of increasing the dog Matic pitch of the contenders. Like the israeli Arab confrontation the worse it gets the More each Side claims exclusive Vir tue exclusive historical justification absolute morality. So con fused has it become that new York intellectuals were treated a few weeks ago to the not altogether unfamiliar spectacle of one chronic cause finder or. Dwight Macdonald publicly changing his mind and adopt ing a position exactly contrary to the position he had publicly proclaimed during september. He did this in an open letter to or. Michael Harrington the chairman of the socialist party of America and. Co founder with or. Macdonald according to his account of poverty in America. At first or. Macdonald attributed the intransigence of or. Al Bert Shanker and the United federation of teachers to the Ada Mant defense of the civil liberties of teachers. Now he believes the whole thing is a plot against self governing negro schools and that or. Shanker has merely been seeking the consolidation of the Power of his Union. Non new yorkers cannot appreciate the fratricidal nature of this dispute unless they envision a quarrel Over cough drops be tween the Smith Brothers. As so often happens when people leave one Side to take another they can no longer understand the logic or the morality of the Side they were so vigorously espousing Only moments before. Along came the new York Board of education to recommend certain mollify ing proce dures the purpose of which was to save the idea of decentralization on the one hand and on the other to protect the rights of the teachers. Essentially the Board s recommendations reduce to gradualism. Let the teacher cling to his right to stay in a particular school but let the local District have the Power to Confer tenure upon such team bin a it selects to teach in to Jet District. The idea it to give Obj local unit the right gradually to fuse out those among the Elf hrs who Are unpalatable to it for whatever reason. Rather like the ancient Compromise in tight Industry labor situation where manage ment agrees not to fire any Woik or displaced by automation but is not required to hire a replace ment when the worker resigns or retire. It is a valiant Effort at com Promise and no doubt cities throughout the country which Ore anticipating the kind of troubles new York has had will carefully scrutinize the architecture of the Compromise. Schematically it appears to make sense. In human terms it is not Likely to please either Side. Not the teachers who cling to their rights to continue to teach in the same District for so obvious a reason As that they can be made acutely uncomfortable without resort to the expedient of forcibly transferring them. An analogy would be a conservative on the social science faculty of a major University. And on the other hand the local administrators will not be Satis fied with the glacial schedule. They Are very much in a hurry fascinated by the idea of great and far reaching reforms which they desire to implement instantly. Such Jacobi Nical hunger for instant Reform May not be Pru Dent but it exists and to gainsay it takes More than a stretch of reasoning by Central boards of education. C Washington Star Syndicate . Own propaganda enemy Ernest Cuneo president Nixon is reported to have requested a full briefing on the . Information service. Hence Nixon s major objective to bring us together again is off to a hopeful Start. Since this involves a meeting of the minds in order to bring them together it might be Well to examine what has torn them Asun Der. From the standpoint o f foreign capitals the culprit is easily identifiable. We Are our own worst enemy. For example at a recent Geneva conference a foreign Diplomat dryly observed to an american i heard a most unusual broadcast today. Someone on the american radio had some thing Good to say about the United  this perhaps is the most important problem facing the presi Dent. The current Avalanche of criticism of America is factually Correct. It i also True however that the highest degree of accuracy May be Only a partial truth and a most misleading one a com pared with the whole truth. For example it it absolutely accurate to state that nearly a million people Are on welfare in new York City alone. But it much in Point that on an Overall bails the Famat on american welfare have a Wilher Tankard Fly living than tto  of fully employed we worker in prosperous Europe. Thus if is a fair inference that the american people Are both human and decent and that the american economic system is Strong enough to support a City of a million within a City of seven million something no communist nation would or could do. It is trumpeted that the Wel fare system is Rotten with irregularity and outright graft. This is undoubtedly True. The welfare system probably adds up to the greatest financial scandal in recorded history. It must be corrected for not even the american Economy can stand this kind of Drain the worst kind of unproductive inflation. But it should also be recorded that the american people have no intention of punishing the in Nocent for the guilty of depriving a beneficiary because the trustee failed his Trust. For example million of funds for the youth of Harlem have been stolen. But this i argument not that Harlem youth should be abandoned but that those who Chat pod them and their country hould be ent to jail and if cursory Curtoys Are accurate by the Carload. Prof. Clinton Rossiter Points out that it of the principal Power the opinion apr a in the column Sand Curtoni on this pa90 apr int who of the author and ant in no Wayto a Conil trod rear Nung the vow of the itar and Stripe in i roof the United tit government. That the american presidency has acquired is that the president of the United states has become virtually the spokesman for american morality and the White House is close to being the nation s pulpit. If this be the Case the new pastor faces a troubled flock in deed a great nation All but bad gered out of Confidence in ils accomplishments and Faith in its own unparalleled and demonstrated goodness. The first step in bringing the american people together again is in the restoration of that Faith and Confidence by which the nation was built. There is no better place to Start than the . In formation service and the voice of America. It is preposterous that the As sets of the country be used in telling the world what s wrong with our nation. The sickness of this country is minuscule As com pared with it tremendous vitality and health. Indeed half of its illness of spirit u caused by the incessant battering of some of its More vocal citizens telling it How ill it is. Once an american president rallied i american people by telling them they had nothing to fear but fear itself. Today the heart of America Little to fear but faint hearted american. Or. Nixon s Calm Confidence mists great Hopes mat their president will rally the american people again. A North Atno loan new up a Aii Iano signed by cmdr. Bucher and various pos in the korean War is not to engage in High mor Alisa but to examine that Sav age Laboratory in the history of the third degree the great so Viet purge of the 1930s. The forced confession is a communist Art form let us recall that the men who stood up in the Moscow trials and accused them selves of every conceivable crime against the stalinist regime were not simple peasants or even mid dle level bureaucrats and sol Diers. They were men who had faced death in a Hundred forms men who had demonstrated their willingness time and again to sacrifice their lives. Robert Conquest in his Superb study the great terror has recently gone Over the ground Inch by Inch so there is no Point in wasting space Here on details. The key proposition developed by the soviet secret police the Opu later the a kid was that the Man who could not be broken did not exist. Every Achilles has a Heel the trick is to find it. Thus a lion hearted old cadre Man who would resist physical torture with unbelievable Cour age would confess to being an agent of the Mikado the nazis and the French if the interrogators put o pistol to his daughter s head. The soviet Union applied this conclusion to its own agents abroad when a spy was Cap tured they took it for granted that he would sing. This often did not happen because both the nazis and the japanese relied heavily on physical torture and in the process killed the Man under interrogation. But cyanide capsules became Standard equip ment for soviet intelligence operatives. The Savage professionalism of a kid interrogators is highlighted by a Story from so Viet sources of a confession Monger who boasted once when drunk that if the Opportunity had presented itself it would take him less than five hours to get Karl Marx to admit he was an agent of Bismarck there is one classic Case of a Man who beat the system and it ought to be kept in mind by the Secretary of defense and the other Pentagon authorities. Or. Alex Weisberg fully recognizing his inability to tackle the a kid head on but also sporting its bureaucratic weakness put on a spectacular demonstration of us ing the system against itself. Accused of belonging to a doctors conspiracy in Kharkov he read ily admitted it asked to name his co conspirators he listed every doctor in the City the a kid thought that one Over for a while and then took a new tack but Weisberg was ready and As i recall again admitted his guilt and denounced every principal soviet bureaucrat in the area in eluding the local head of the a kid As fellow wreckers agents of the Mikado  Why he was t shot summarily i will never understand. What we must realize then when we assess cmdr. Bucher s actions i that he a not con fronted by men raised in the boy scout tradition. He was face to face with a highly developed weapons system terror. Cd 1969, King Fatur