Coincidance - Principia Discordia

COINCIDANCE 181
terrorism. Those countries have disimproved, especially in the last few
years, and to a certain extent I blame this on President Reagan who has
condoned these atrocities and even supported them financially and militarily.
For forty years now, Americans have been led to believe that the worst offender against
human rights in all the world is the U.S.S.R. You insist that this is no longer true.?
I would not call Russia an ideal society from the human rights standpoint,
but it has definitely improved since Stalin; it has not disimproved. That is
one of Amnesty's successes. In the first years of Amnesty in the early 1960s,
there were vast numbers of political detainees in camps in Siberia and other
places in the Soviet Union and other Marxist countries in Eastern Europe.
There, Amnesty was very successful in making the new leaders feel the
weight of world opinion. We obtained the release of thousands—I would
say, of at least ten thousand persons. Partly, this was because we made the
Soviets realize that these people had been imprisoned for advocating exactly
the policies the new, post-Stalin government was following.
Do you feel that the average Russian is more free of the threat of unreasonable arrest today
than in the past?
Yes; definitely yes—even more free of that threat than they were ten
years ago. Based on Amnesty's studies, there has been great improvement
there. I am not saying that the human rights situation there is as it should
be, but there has been tremendous progress. It speaks well for the Soviet
leadership that Amnesty can get adequate information and do know what
to protest in their treatment of political offenders. Letters from there to
Amnesty are delivered without interference; groups of dissidents there
send us reports and even have long phone conversations with our London
office. By contrast, China is still the most closed society in the world. We
can't even learn the number of political prisoners there, and we have no
adequate information about civil liberties there at all.
Russian officials in the past have accused Amnesty of being a front for the C.I.A. and
American right-wingers sometimes claim you are all a bunch ofSoviet dupes or fellow travelers . . .
Yes, yes, and that delights us. The fact that we are attacked by both sides
is proof of our neutrality and objectivity.
You also have guidelines guaranteeing the neutrality of each Amnesty chapter, do you not?
Certainly. We work through outreach groups, called Adoption Groups.
In order to ensure the neutrality of each Adoption Group, we insist that
they adopt three prisoners—one from the Western block nations, and one
from the Communist bloc, and one from the Afro-Asian bloc. Each group is
then pledged to work equally for the three adopted prisoners. You can t say
"I'll only work for prisoners in Communist countries," or "I'll only work for
prisoners in Capitalist countries"; You have to work equally for political