The Art of Making Threats

As of Palm Sunday, the big red machine had not yet rolled across the Polish border, so for the time being at least the world was breathing easier. In fact, there has been easier international breathing for over a week now, ever since April 7, when Leonid Brezhnev, his chest heavy with medals, stood in Prague's Palace of Culture and informed 1,700 attentive delegates to the 16th congress of the Czechoslovak Party that he was confident that the unruly Poles would come to their senses after all. TASS then announced that the three-week-old Warsaw Pact military exercises, with their World's Fair name of Soyuz '81, were coming to a close. Brezhnev's speech was all the more welcome following the growls of Czechoslovak President Gustáv Husák the day before. The game was good-cop-bad-cop, but it worked. So much, then, for the impressive show of force. To be sure, the Soviets might be lying about the troop withdrawal, might be pulling another Czechoslovakia '68 by cutting out temporarily only to set up an imminent invasion. But, at least for the moment, many observers seemed content to consider peace in our time, simply because a threat had not been carried out.

The interesting thing about certain kinds of threats when posed by certain kinds of powers, however, is that they do not need to be carried out in order to do their damage. The law knows this, which is why it distinguishes between assault and battery, yet labels assault a crime in itself. If the threat is made by a seasoned threatener like the Soviet Union, the threatened party will flinch as a matter of reflex or good judgment. That is the immediate effect, and the less enduring. A far deeper effect, and the one that tyrants crave, occurs when a victim is so cowed that he anticipates the threatener's desires, and behaves accordingly.

He may go even farther: if the threatening power is truly devastating, like the Soviet Union again, the victim will sometimes make the ultimate accommodation of taking on the worst and most fearsome characteristics of the threatener itself—first as an act of necessity, then of fealty, and finally of free will. The modern Greek poet C.P. Cavafy wrote "Waiting for the Barbarians" to make just that point. The poem consists of a dialogue between an individual citizen and a crowd assembled in the forum of an unspecified city. When the citizen asks why the legislators are not at work as usual, he is told that the barbarians are due to arrive that day; so what would be the purpose of making laws? When he asks why the city's leaders are at the city gates bearing a scroll and wearing jewels, the crowd answers that the barbarians are dazzled by such things. He asks why all the orators are silent; he learns that the barbarians are bored by rhetoric. Finally, he asks why there is a sudden confusion, and why the people are apparently so lost in thought. Because, he is told, the barbarians have not come as expected, and it is nightfall, and there is even some talk at the border that the barbarians have pulled out.