"Mack Reynolds - After Utopia" - читать интересную книгу автора (Reynolds Mack)

line had shifted in one or two particulars just that
morning. Among other things, the American president
was no longer a mad fascist dog; he was now a confused
liberal. Meunier seemed to be of the opinion that he was
still a mad fascist dog.
Jim finally turned to Tracy Cogswell plaintively. “Look,
Mr. Cogswell, what do you think? Should the free world
put up with the Russkies using the UN for a propaganda
drum?”
“Free world!” Pierre Meunier snorted. “Yankee dollar
imperialists on one extreme and feudalistic countries like
Saudi Arabia on the other. The free world! Among others,
Portugal, with its African slave colonies. Morocco, with
its absolute monarchy. South Africa, that land of
freedom! And Spain, that one! And the Dominican
Republic, and Haiti, and Nicaragua, and Formosa, and
South Korea and South Vietnam. All those
freedom-loving countries.”
Tracy Cogswell made a point of avoiding political
discussions in Tangier. It wasn’t his job to make
individual converts. His position as an international
coordinator remained possible so long as he remained
anonymous. He also made a point of not arguing his
political beliefs while he was drinking.
But in this case, something had happened. Jim had
called him Mr. Cogswell. Unconsciously, Cogswell ran his
right hand up over the scar that ran along the ridge of
his jaw, disappearing into the sideburn. A mortar bomb
fragment had creased him there at the debacle at Gerona
during the Spanish civil war. The sideburn was now
going gray. Jim must have been a child when the
Abraham Lincoln Battalion had been all but wiped out at
Gerona toward the end of the Spanish fracas.
Spain! That was where, even as a teenager, he’d gotten
his bellyful of the damn Russians and where he’d begun
to achieve some maturity in political economy. Spain,
where the idealistic kids of a score of countries had
flocked to fight for democracy and had wound up dying
for Russian expediency.
Mr. Cogswell, yet! Was he that far along? Did he look
like an old fogy to the marine?
He pushed his glass over toward Paul Lund and said,
“Let’s have another one.”
To Jim he said, “Our position seems to be that the
virtues of western democracy are so superior to the
Soviet system that a few blasts on our trumpet will bring
the Commie Jericho down. It might’ve been true, had the
premise it rested upon been a little sounder.
Unfortunately, the West doesn’t form the community of
unsullied virgins which the triumph of virtue predicates.