Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: SATURDAY, April 28, 1990                   TAG: 9004300213
SECTION: EDITORIAL                    PAGE: A11   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: 
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Short

WILL TYRANNY ENTER FROM THE BACK DOOR?

We did see the Iron Curtain collapse; however, the Soviet Union still maintains a few hundred thousand troops in these East European countries, countered by a few hundred thousand U.S. troops in West Germany. We also must remember that the Soviet Union is still a long way from being a multiparty democracy like Britain or France.

This is a minor thing and boils down to a difference of opinion. What bothered me was the tone he took. Frankly, his rhetoric about reforging a "Grand Alliance" to defeat the "deadly challenges of global poverty, overpopulation and environmental decay" and saving the world from "another kind of death" frightens me.

I don't deny that we have some environmental problems that need to be resolved, and that Third World conditions are having a negative impact on these problems. What worries me is that these constant cries of alarm in various publications could easily generate such a level of fear that people will be stampeded into rash decisions that will have little impact on the problem while, at the same time, degrading individual liberties.

We may have defeated tyranny's frontal assault, but I fear we may discover, as the new century dawns, that we have let it in through the back door.

\ JOHN BARNHART\ ROANOKE