The lessons of Grenada.

CONGRESSMEN Newt Gingrich (Republican from Georgia) and Ike Skelton (Democrat from Missouri) have come up with a very bright idea. It is to ordain the week of October 20 to 26 "The Lessons of Grenada Week." The purpose of it all?

It is disconcerting how ungratefully we deal with the little lodes of vital information we come upon. We are a nation whose tradition called on us to Remember the Alamo and, as recently as a generation ago, to Remember Pearl Harbor. But although it was only two years ago that it all happened, we haven't until now heard a voice enjoining us to Remember Grenada.

Why?

Grenada is infinitely interesting. Begin only with the historical point. It is the first country ever substantially controlled by the Soviet Union that has been emancipated. Indeed if we are at all optimistic about the future, we may indulge ourselves in the thought that future generations will point to Grenada as the high-water mark of Soviet imperialism, even as historians point to Trier as the westernmost point of the Mongol invasion, arrested in the thirteenth century. All the more significant if we remind ourselves of the Brezhnev Doctrine. It is the one that reads, idiomatically: What is ours is permanently ours. What is yours is up for grabs. A more formal version of the Brezhnev Doctrine is that the entire socialist world (as they style themselves) is committed to the irreversibility of socialism (read, Communism) wherever it is established. By the rules of the Brezhnev Doctrine, Grenada should not have been allowed to happen.

That much is easy to remember. But the call for a week devoted to the study of "The Lessons of Grenada" acknowledges that there is much more to consider than merey the bare historical episode. And the reason for this is that when U.S. troops landed in Grenada two years ago they discovered documents that give us a most extraordinary, detailed account of how it is that the Soviet Union goes about colonizing a little country, with the aid of indigenous fellow-travelers.

Under the sponsorship of the State Department and the USIA, two scholars (Michael Ledeen and Herbert Romerstein) were deputized to try to put together in manageable size a cross-section of those documents, their purpose being to tell us, or to remind us, of the kind of things the Soviets do when they are engaged in colonizing. The book that grew out of that effort is called Grenada Documents: An Overview and Selection, and is available from the Department of State and the Department of Defense for $19. Do not be shocked by the price. Be shocked by the size of it. The pagination is not sequential, so that one can only guess at the number of pages, which I would put at, oh, 1,500. Moreover the compilers tell you, in their foreword, that they could have given us another document of equal size and of equal significance, so abundant was the documentary quarry that gave us memorandums, treaties, secret plans for expansion, the record of foreign activities: the whole paraphernalia that goes with the implantation of a Communist revolution, and then its extension.

The authors' summary begins with the sentence, "The revolution that overthrew the Gairy regime in Grenada in April 1979 was designed to create a Communist society and to bring Grenada into the Soviet orbit." That is plain language, but no plainer than what the documents proceed to establish. There is even a comprehensive "Line of March" document that was marked confidential and consecutively numbered by hand. We come upon details that remind us to the modus operandi of revolutionaries. Here Comrade Bishop explains how you go about detaining a suspect: "We don't go and call for no votes. You get detained when I sign an order . . . Once I sign it--like it or don't like it--it's up the hill for them." Special duties are assigned to agents to "monitor" all sermons, with a view to "the controlling of all hirarchy [sic]." And there was the grand sense of engagement in an international effort, as when Marshal N. V. Ogarkov, Soviet Chief of Staff, informs his Grenadian counterpart, Major Einstein Louison, that, "over two decades ago, there was only Cuba in Latin America, today there are Nicaragua, Grenada, and a serious battle is going on in El Salvador."

The Gingrich-Skelton idea is for a week to be given to debates, speeches, resolutions, high-school lectures, television and radio shows. The purpose? To learn from history. And to remind ourselves that we still control the destiny of the free world.