My rewrite of Anthony Lewis

[Seth Ackerman]

> The first three graphs from Anthony Lewis column, with a few very
> minor changes. 
> 
> Notice how the language really would fit in well in Pravda. Stilted,
> banal, worshipful. All due reverence for Our Leader.
> 
> --------------------
> 
> New York Times - June 12, 1999
> 
> ABROAD AT HOME/ By ANTHONY LEWIS
> When Praise Is Due
> 
> Comrade Brezhnev held firm. That was a crucial fact in the Czech war,
> and it
> should be recognized. Under savage criticism at home and abroad, the
> General Secretary stuck to his policy. And it prevailed.
> 
> Right up to the denouement, critics predicted that our Leader would
> weaken his demands on Czechoslovakia. A writer in Novy Mir, Bensky
> Macintyresky, wrote: "Brezhnev is seeking a diplomatic escape route
> that will
> allow him to cut his losses and save face. . . . It is the modus
> operandi
> of a man whose primary instincts are to vacillate, compromise and then
> gloss."
> 
> It is true that comrade Brezhnev has often abandoned positions in the
> past when
> the going got rough. But this time he abandoned nothing. Dubcek, the
> Czech counterrevolutionary
> , had to eat every one of the terms set out by
> Comrade Brezhnev and the Warsaw Pact, including withdrawal of all his
> party's forces from
> the Czech parliament, and its occupation by a Warsaw Pact force with
> the Soviet Union at its core.
> 
>