Defending freedom

I am in a daze. In fact two dazes – a physical one and a mental one. The physical one is easy to recover from. It comes from sitting up for a night and a day in an airplane; This could mean trouble if I'd been crossing, say, ten time zones but one of the pleasant discoveries of flying from New Zealand to California is that very little jet lag is involved. Of course all my friends said, 'You must be way out of kilter from the jet lag' – a phrase as easy on the lips as a catnap or the generation gap.

Well, San Francisco, where I now am, is 21 hours behind New Zealand, which means a jet lag or time-zone lag of only three hours. So I went to bed last night at 11.30, whereas if I'd been going to bed in New Zealand, it would have been 8.30 in the evening. Never mind that it would have been the next evening, that's just the international date line, a device invented by desperate geographers to support the theory that the world is round.

So, the jet lag between New Zealand and San Francisco is no worse than that between flying from San Francisco to New York. Your body time is only three hours behind. Of course, sitting and straddling in a plane for a night and a day does not conduce to tiptop physical condition but it means the next night's sleep is all the sounder. This is only one of many inducements to visit New Zealand, the lucky islands stringing out for 1200 miles through a dozen enchanting landscapes with never a billboard in sight.

I have a hunch that I'll find some pretext for going on about New Zealand another time – a country I'm ashamed to be told, by the doctors, I've discovered rather late in life.

All right, so much for the physical daze. The second daze is mental. At once alarming but also, I have to think, very useful. It's always a good thing to get away from base, especially if you're a reporter. As an example, I did a talk only a few weeks ago about the assassination of Aquino, the refugee returning home to the Philippines. Looking back on it now, I have to confess that in it President Marcos was, if not the villain of the piece, at the least a highly suspect dictator and, conversely, Mr Aquino was the slain, liberal hero.

Well, about three weeks after that talk had gone out on the short wave and was heard in the Philippines, I had two letters from that country written by two people, far apart, who I'm quite sure were unknown to each other. They were very informative letters from Englishmen who'd lived in the Philippines a long time and, considering the topic and my interpretation of it, remarkably courteous.

They each went into the medieval complexity of Philippine society, not unlike, I was given to understand, that of the warring families, the Montagus and Capulets and the rest of Italy in and beyond the Middle Ages. Both of these gentlemen asserted – of course I can't say how correctly – that the Aquino family, too, had or was capable of raising, a private army just like other rich Filipino families and that one of the woeful flaws about the Philippines is that political rivalry is constant. Not so much between conservatives and opposing liberals as between rich families eager for power who, understandably, to achieve power would be bound to appeal to all radical or disaffected groups, just for the time being.

Well, I'm sure it's not as simple as that. My correspondents didn't say it was but in their suspicion of the Aquino family as disinterested democrats hot for freedom, they castigated or bemoaned what they guessed to be my reliance on what they called the clichés of the American news magazines. I wrote back to them and, without for a moment accepting everything they wrote, I had to thank them for opening up complexities which the pat view of news magazines, in Europe as well as America, do not take in.

You understand they were not saying that Marcos is a benign, constitutional monarch. The implication of both letters was that a succeeding president would also be pretty certain to gag the press and restrain, if not safely put away, his political enemies and that, in the main, democracy is a very distant achievement for that unhappy country.

I quote this by way of showing how, if you stay too long in the place you're reporting from, you can swallow the current, local version of things without knowing it.

Which brings us – at least the mention of the word 'democracy' brings us – to a passing word about Grenada and another second thought which does not seem to have occurred to those of us who have either defended or attacked the American invasion itself. You'll recall that the reasons President Reagan gave for going into Grenada were, first, to save the American medical students from becoming hostages on the Iranian model and, secondly, to rid Grenada of the Russian or Cuban surrogate, or local elements that would stifle self-government. In a word, as the administration put it, 'to restore Grenada to its democratic tradition'.

Now most of us commenting on these aims in America, or for that matter in most of Europe, spent our brains wondering if this could be done and how. The actual promise or intention of President Reagan was 'to restore democracy and freedom' to Grenada. Well, the first bombshell of a hint I had that this was a curious aim came to me not from any American source or from anyone in the Antipodes, but from an English commentator writing far away in the English provinces.

With permission, I think it worth quoting, or digesting from an editorial, the main points of this comment. I won't tell you the name of the paper it appeared in because, if I did, most listeners, I'm pretty sure, would think first of how they normally feel about this paper and then adjust their reactions accordingly. We all do this.

Incidentally, the only stretch of first-rate scientific training I ever had was in the old days at Cambridge, being given two pieces of prose and two pieces of poetry a week to date – the date when they were written – and to criticise. Masterpieces or trash, the great point was that they were all and always unsigned.

All right! Well here is the piece on Mr Reagan's aim of 'restoring democracy and freedom' to poor Grenada. Quote: 'Grenada has never enjoyed democracy. There is absolutely nothing to restore. The first prime minister of independent Grenada, Eric Gairy, had some 6,000 or so secret police who took, as their model, the tactics of Papa Doc Duvalier's police in Haiti. While the attending British dignitaries were watching a pageant, Gairy sent his so-called 'mongooses' to round up the opposition and whisk away Morris Bishop, the young Marxist leader, and the house of the lawyer of the opposition was put to the torch. It burned all night above the independence celebrations.

'With Whitehall's connivance, Prime Minister Gairy became a petty dictator. Four and a half years later he was booted not voted out – booted from office – it was the end of a corrupt and brutal régime. After him came Morris Bishop, most decidedly no Democrat and he was murdered, as we all know, by the precursors of a régime even less dedicated to democracy, but faking its true nature, as all Communist régimes do, by calling themselves something like "a people's republic".'

The conclusion of this sad commentary is this: 'Freedom in the Caribbean is a sanitised condition, not a way of life. Leaders and elections may be tolerated as long as, like the Finns in the shadow of Moscow, they operate within preordained limits.'

Well, I, for one, have absolutely no doubts at all that President Reagan means what he says when he talks of restoring democracy and freedom even to a place in which either blessing would have to be created. All honour to him. One of the engaging – in fact, the most engaging – thing about the president is his unqualified sincerity in wanting other nations, near and far, to be as open a society as that of any of the world's democracies. His trouble is that he pitches in with absolutely genuine rhetoric to problems and places he seems very ill-informed about.

The governmental problems of Grenada are only just beginning and even if Grenada were, had been, the poor little strangulated democracy it's being pictured as, we all have to face the awkward true doubt expressed the other week by Mr Enoch Powell, whether we can, anywhere, at any time, create democracy by military force.

Certainly, as I've had good cause to notice these past few weeks, listening to people outside the United States, an awful lot of outsiders share Mrs Thatcher's thought that if the United States is going to keep moving in on countries to see that they vote our way, we are in for a lot of terrible wars.

Here, back in America, there seems to be much less serious discussion of, first, the difficulty of restoring democracy to a country that's never had it, and secondly, the consequences of bravely trying to impose democracy by a show of arms, but there is growing and widespread anxiety about the increasing spread, the thin spread, of American military forces around the globe.

I think most Americans have rarely stopped to count them but a rash of maps and articles are making them do it and my guess would be that they're being surprised to learn that there are over a quarter of a million armed Americans in Germany, 27,000 in Britain, 35,000 distributed between Italy, Spain, Turkey, Greece and Iceland, 35 ships in the Indian Ocean, 40 in the Persian Gulf, 40 in the Far East, 50,000 men in Japan, 40,000 in Korea, 15,000 in the Philippines, a naval task force or forces split between Bermuda, Puerto Rico, Grenada and Cuba.

Cuba? Yes! At the long-time, permanent US naval base in Guantanamo. It would be interesting to hear how Americans would feel if the Cubans had a naval base on Long Island.

Well, what emerges, or will emerge, from these insistent recitals of the global spread of, let us say, precautionary American forces, is the same question that was rudely answered after Vietnam. Not, is America willing to defend threats to freedom throughout the Five Seas? But, is she able?

This transcript was typed from a recording of the original BBC broadcast (© BBC) and not copied from an original script. Because of the risk of mishearing, the BBC cannot vouch for its complete accuracy.

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