Billions & Billions (24 page)

7.… hatred and fear
intentionally fanned by the respective agencies of national propaganda …

8.
In 1899, two years before becoming President, Theodore
Roosevelt … 
[This seems especially nasty, because the material removed makes it likely that 99 percent of Soviet readers will think it’s Franklin and not Theodore Roosevelt being quoted.]

8.
This is not just a matter of mean-spirited Soviet propaganda
.

9 … 
. July 2 …

9.…
the secret protocol to his nonaggression pact with Hitler …

9.…
and how many millions more were killed in consequence
.

11.…
the deficiencies of the argument would be better understood, however, had the Soviet Union not been in the habit of gobbling up other countries
.

18. So when those who once were silenced and humiliated by state terror now are able to speak out—
fledgling civil libertarians flexing their wings
—of course they find it exhilarating,
and so does any lover of freedom who witnesses it
.

19.…
readily caricatured …

20.
In both countries, what passes for public debate is still, on closer examination, mainly repetition of national slogans, appeal to popular prejudice, innuendo, self-justification, misdirection, incantation of homilies when evidence is asked for, and a thorough contempt for the intelligence of the citizenry
.

20. Finding any solution will be hard enough.
Finding ones that perfectly correspond to 18th- or 19th-century political doctrines will be much more difficult
.
[Marxism is, of course, a 19th-century political and economic doctrine.]

23
.… in largely unacknowledged plagiarisms
for a century. Neither the U.S. nor the Soviet Union has a monopoly on truth and virtue.

26.
Nothing is promised
.
[It is one of the self-congratulatory but unscientific tenets of orthodox Marxism that the ultimate triumph of Communism is foreordained by unseen historical forces.]