BLIND LOVE: WHY ARE WE BACKING GORBACHEV?

Radio talk show host Rush Limbaugh has coined the term "Gorbasm" to capture the overwrought enthusiasm of some in the West for the Soviet leader. Here's a perfect example: Covering the resignation of Soviet foreign minister Eduard Shevardnadze, a CNN reporter described Shevardnadze's anguished warning about a coming new dictatorship. But then, spectacularly missing the point, the reporter lamented that Shevardnadze's departure would leave Mikhail Gorbachev all alone to cope with this looming tyranny.

Only someone blinded by a "Gorbasm" would be capable of that kind of obtuseness. Yet belief in Gorbachev - while every day more difficult to justify as he stands athwart the democratic reformers, sidles up to the KGB, and renews ties to the suffocating communist party.

In the finest leftist tradition, Gorbachev, the communist, is being judged not by his deeds, but by his words.

Andrei Sakharov's widow, Elena Bonner, wears no such blinders. She explicitly warns that Gorbachev has embarked on a course toward dictatorship. "The coup," she told the Wall Street Journal, "has already happened." He has amassed more power than any previous Soviet leader, and is undermining even the flimsy patchwork of law the USSR does maintain.

By propping up Gorbachev with $1 billion in agricultural credits, the Bush Administration is casting its lot, and our dollars, with reform communism rather than true reform.

Why? Some argue that subsidies to the Soviets are a bribe for their continued cooperation in the gulf. Others believe that Secretary of State James Baker and President Bush are more worried about potential chaos in the USSR than about a potential return to Stalinist repression.

If so, they are not alone. Media coverage of the situation in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union is dominated by concerns about the dark forces the collapse of communism may have unleashed. CBS reporter Tom Fenton's comments last week were typical: "We all thought liberal democracy was the natural successor to communism. But ... it really is nationalism. And nationalism was the plague of the '30s and '20s."

Others have devoted enormous amounts of ink and air time to atavistic, anti-Semitic, and anti-democratic groups that have crawled out from under rocks in the Soviet Union - frequently confusing them with nationalists. Indeed, since the violence between Armenia and Azerbaijan last year, all strife in the Soviet Union involving nationalities is cast as a primitive blood feud.

Meanwhile, the real story is being obscured. The real story about both Eastern Europe and the USSR is not what the collapse of communism has unleashed, but what it has destroyed. It is the economic catastrophe left in communism's wake that is creating most (though not all) of the havoc in the East.

And West. We shall not be immune. Indeed, after bleeding us white with an arms race these past 45 years, the last kick in the teeth from the old communist empire will be the economic burden of bailing them out.

In the euphoria of German reunification, no one is admitting what a basket case East Germany is. But American officials there say the situation is desperate. East German industries are practically worthless. The official East German unemployment rate of 6 percent is a lie. It's actually much closer to 25 percent. But in order to maintain the official fiction, the West German government is paying the salaries of 19 percent of the East's workers. That is causing German, and all European interest rates to rise. And that reverberates here. In order to attract capital, we will have to raise our interest rates in turn.

The formerly-communist economies are primitive beyond imagination. In Poland, the rudiments of banking are just being introduced. In the USSR (still communist), no one has ever heard of a checking account. In East Germany, not even the land under the factories has any value, such was the pollution of the workers' paradise.

It is the economic Hiroshima that communism has created, and not the nationalist passions it unsuccessfully tamped, that represents the most urgent threat to order and peace. And the worst way to respond is by supporting European communism's last tribune: Mikhail Gorbachev.