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# Posted 9:02 PM by Ariel David Adesnik

WHAT IS PAST IS PROLOGUE: While doing some research for my dissertation, I came across the following pair of quotations, both in The New York Times.

The first is the more dramatic. In a Week in Review essay from March 8, 1981, Bernard Gwertzman reported that

In a toast at the end of British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher's recent visit, Mr. Reagan said it was necessary to have the ''vision'' to see there would be a time when there would be no Communists. Just as Winston Churchill after Dunkirk had prophesied that Hitler would someday be gone, so, Mr. Reagan said, it was time to ''begin planning for a world where our adversaries are remembered only for their role in a sad and rather bizarre chapter in human history.''

Back in the present, however, the Administration has been slow getting machinery together to deal with very real Communists. The first interagency discussion on strategic arms was only held last week and the director of the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency has not been named; the main candidates seem best known for their hostility to arms control. The Administration suffers from internal lack of coordination...

Just as the abolitionists once dared to believe that slavery would one day end, so Reagan prophesied the end of Communism. And today we should not doubt that there will be an end to dictatorship and terrorism as well.

The second quotation is also from the March 8, 1981 edition of the Week in Review. It is taken from the transcript of a debate between former US Ambassador to El Salvador Robert White and US Ambassador to the United Nations, Jeane Kirkpatrick. During the debate, White observed that

The idea that Latins [sic] are not capable of democracy is just racist nonsense. The Latin Americans are perfectly capable of democracy if we want to assist democracy, but if we place ourselves against democracy and on the side of an oppressive military, then democracy is going to fade away. And this is the great contribution of the human rights policy of the Carter Administration which I will defend forever. That policy gives you a litmus test to distinguish between people who are anti-Communist only because it serves their purposes to stay in power and people who share authentic Western values...

If you replace the words "Latin Americans" with "Muslims" and "Communist" with "terrorist", then the Ambassador's warning is no less applicable today than it was two decades ago.

[And no, there are no permalinks to NYT articles from more than twenty years ago. For the full text, see Lexis-Nexis. Or better yet, visit a library!]

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