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Remembering Communism

—TEN YEARS AFTER VIETNAM

APRIL 20, 1985

 

The hassle over the itinerary of Mr. Reagan when he journeys to Europe invites reflection on anniversaries and what they reveal.

Ten years after V-E Day, we had just finished telling the Soviet Union, our wartime ally, that we didn’t give a damn what they thought about it, we were going to conclude a peace treaty with West Germany (our wartime enemy), which we proceeded to do. We had been intimate friends of Adenauer, the leader of West Germany, from virtually the beginning. We wrote some stiff laws—no Germans would be allowed to publish and circulate Nazi propaganda. We hanged a few criminals (and were a little unhappy about doing so, since there were jurists who said we were violating our own constitutional guarantees against ex post facto justice).

At the other end of the world we also did a spot of hanging, but then propped up the same emperor under whose divine benediction the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor and launched their ravenous war against Manchuria, China, the Philippines, and Southeast Asia. But a few years of Douglas MacArthur and we were the fastest of friends, and five years after V-J Day we were sending American troops to defend, to their death, the South Koreans and the Japanese against communist aggression from North Korea.

How much easier it is to reconcile oneself with countries one has defeated, than with countries that have defeated us. True, the Germans and the Japanese, though defeated, came around quickly, but that was because in order to reconcile themselves with their own defeat it was necessary that they should publicly abominate their older leaders. So that it was all but impossible, a year or two after the war’s end, to find a German who professed veneration for Hitler, or a Japanese who professed veneration for Tojo. And so we became friends with people we struggled so hard to kill, in a war that brought death to 55 million people.

But ten years after the Vietnam War, we do not recognize the government of Vietnam. And our own government has not changed: They are still Republicans, and Democrats run Congress, not communists or Maoists.

No one, on the tenth anniversary of the fall of South Vietnam, is suggesting that we have anything in common with the people who conquered South Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia—and, incidentally, defeated the United States. Nor were we wrong in predicting what would happen if the North Vietnamese took over the South. Peter Berger, the sociologist and philosopher, has said resonantly that anyone who can’t tell the difference between authoritarianism and totalitarianism could not tell the difference between Saigon and Ho Chi Minh City.

But the introspection to which we have been given, on this tenth anniversary of our defeat in Southeast Asia, devotes very little time—have you noticed?—to the awful betrayal of 1975. We no longer stood to lose American soldiers in 1975. They were long since gone. But Congress stood there. President Ford begged it to act. Congress all but laughed at the call to redeem the pledges we had so solemnly made to the South Vietnamese after—as well as before—the Treaty of Paris. The general fit of iconoclasm, brought on by the unpopular war and exacerbated by the apparent moral insouciance of Richard Nixon in the matter of Watergate, coarsened our sensibilities, so that instead of worrying about how to redeem promises made, we worried about executive initiatives that might be taken to redeem those programs. In 1973 we voted $2.3 billion in aid of South Vietnam’s armed forces. In 1974 we cut the figure in half; in 1975, by another third. Southeast Asia learned what it can mean to rely on the United States. And other countries have learned, though most of them have no alternative than to hope that the United States will live up to its obligations.

“Finally, however tragic the outcome,” writes Professor John Roche, who served Lyndon Johnson during his Vietnam years, “I will argue to my dying day that this was the most idealistic war we have ever fought, fundamentally a war for an abstraction: the freedom of a bunch of unfamiliar Asians at the end of the world.” How strange those sounds, which antedated the period during which the American intelligentsia for the most part persuaded itself that the Vietnam War was the high moment of immorality. But that high moment came not while we were fighting, but when we abandoned our wounded. For that reason the focus will be on Europe this season, not on Saigon, or Da Nang, or any cemetery in South Vietnam where the bones lie of men who trusted us.

—WHAT IF THEY WERE NAZIS?

MAY 11, 1985

 

A colleague remarked, apropos of the whole Bitburg business, “What if Daniel Ortega and his Sandinistas were Nazis?”

It is a riveting observation. It informs us deeply about the moral scramble of our time, in which as we struggle to remember how hideous was Hitler, we struggle equally to forget how hideous is communism.

Consider, for instance, the calm revelations of the past few years concerning the Cultural Revolution in Mao’s China.

When eighty top journalists went into Shanghai in 1972 with President Nixon, there was something on the order of elation: Here, finally, we all were. In the Great Kingdom. Mao Tse-tung was a hero. True, he was a tough man, but you needed a tough man to create Mao men. En route to China we all read the glowing accounts of Mao’s accomplishments, written by Ross Terrill of Harvard and published in The Atlantic Monthly. Theodore White, the distinguished American journalist and sinologist who was an early enthusiast for Mao, nowadays shakes his head and says, “We did not recognize just how bad it was.” Yes, it was that bad. Brutal killings, torture, categorical imprisonments of everyone associated with the old Communist Party, a despoliation of college life, burned books, anti-intellectualism rife. All the details are painstakingly collected in the meticulous, resourceful book of Fox Butterfield, China: Alive in the Bitter Sea.

We welcome, of course, the regime of Deng Xiaoping, who has studiedly attempted to institute reforms, economic and political—without, however, altering the totalitarian nature of life in China. But there is detectable no sense of horror among Americans who visit there, either at what happened in China under the banner of Deng’s old boss and mentor Mao Tse-tung, or of Deng’s other boss, Chou En-lai. We treat it as merely an unpleasant episode, on which we do not choose to dwell. It is inconceivable that any American traveling in China would exhibit moral hesitation at fraternizing with surviving members of the Old Guard, those who had a hand in implementing the Bolshevik Revolution. All but inconceivable that any American staying at home would loudly protest such fraternization as a betrayal of the victims of the regime of Mao Tse-tung, the Great Helmsman.

But all this is also true, though perhaps a little less so, of the Soviet Union, is it not? Two rulers back, less than two years ago, the head of the Soviet Union had been the counterpart of Himmler in Nazi Germany. But about Mr. Andropov we were all tacitly urged to speak in civil accents, and of course there was considerable dismay when President Reagan elected not to attend his funeral, although he did drop by the Soviet Embassy to write his signature into the official book of condolences.

How come this disparity in how we feel about evil regimes indistinguishable from one another?

Probably the difference is not much more complicated than that the Soviet Union has The Bomb. If the Soviet Union so elected, there would be a world war, conceivably the terminal experience of the planet Earth.

Well now, suppose that Hitler had got himself a bomb, which as a matter of fact he came very close to doing. Imagine that that bomb had exploded over Liverpool in the early spring of 1945: exit Liverpool and, by the way, four little baby Beatles. Suppose Hitler had then said that the next bomb would fall on London and the third on Paris, unless we came to terms with him. What would have happened? Yes, precisely that. Just as Japan reacted to Hiroshima, so would London have reacted to Liverpool.

So Hitler lived on—in 1945 he was only fifty-six years old. Say that he lived on to approximately the same age as Churchill, and Mao, and Adenauer, dying a natural death in 1975. There were 300,000 Jews left in the concentration camps when Hitler’s bomb ended World War II, so he polished them off, and of course continued to torture and kill and otherwise persecute any dissidents, even as Stalin did. But before he died, he had amassed in Germany the equivalent nuclear throw-weight amassed by the Soviet Union. Wouldn’t our diplomats be attending anniversaries of Hitler’s rise to power, even as they attend, in Moscow, anniversaries of the October Revolution?

One fears that that is the case. That considerations of self-concern govern our moral attitudes. Evidently we need to defeat a totalitarian power before we can settle down to despising it. If Daniel Ortega wore a swastika on his sleeve, the liberals in Congress would be calling for an American Expeditionary Force to crush him. As it stands, he is relatively safe.

—TERRORISM AT THE EXPENSE OF THE SOVIETS?

OCTOBER 5, 1985

 

Well, what do you know. Soviet victims of terrorism. For years, those Soviet citizens allowed to roam the world have done so with the equivalent of the laissez-passer sign that two thousand years ago permitted a Roman citizen to go anywhere in the world certain that he would not be molested. “Romanus sum”—“I am a Roman.” That was it. The passport to security. This morning’s paper shows upper-torso pictures of four Soviet diplomats somewhere in Lebanon. There is nothing like undressing a diplomat to make your squalid point. One of the victims is dressed in what looks like fatigue pajamas. Two have on T-shirts. The fourth has on nothing. All of them have pistols pointed at their heads. None is smiling.

And not one but two Muslim fundamentalist sects claim credit for abducting the Soviet diplomats. Both cite as their reason for doing so Soviet-backed Syrian attacks on the Lebanese port of Tripoli. Whether the salient the terrorists complain of is actually a Soviet operation is not the point of this inquiry. Rather, that for the first time in memory the Soviet Union is facing up to the kind of thing non-Soviets have been facing up to for years and years.

Never at Soviet gunpoint, almost always at the gunpoint of those who without Soviet backing would have no guns to point.

The mind turned to a rundown six years old of the activities of the Soviet Union involving terrorism. The study was done by Mr. Brian Crozier, director of London’s Institute for the Study of Conflict.

Just to begin with, the two wars in Indochina were for the most part fought by acts of terrorism—i.e., the use of violence for political ends. It was so in the war against South Vietnam, and subsequently in the war within Cambodia.

Libya’s Qaddafi gave refuge to the world’s most wanted terrorist, Carlos (“The Jackal”). Carlos, it was alleged, was given $2 million as reward money for kidnaping the OPEC oil ministers in Vienna. Carlos was recruited by the KGB in Venezuela, trained in Cuba, and received, so to speak, graduate training in Moscow before being turned loose on the world. Arafat, who narrowly missed the retaliatory bombings of Israel in Tunisia, was invited by Moscow to open an office there in August 1974. Ten years earlier, the Vietcong’s political wing had been issued a similar invitation, auguring the Soviet commitment to the final drive against the non-communist Vietnamese.

On and on it goes, the most spectacular recent terrorist events including the attack on our Marines, the killing of the novelist Georgi Markov on Waterloo Bridge by a Bulgarian assassin, the attempted assassination of the pope. One would not be surprised to learn that Judge Crater was whisked off in a Soviet freighter.

The programming must have been done by the Great Impresario in the Sky. Consider: Ever since our Marines were slaughtered in 1983 in Beirut, Washington has been saying: You watch now, you watch. We watched, nothing happened. Then came the great June 1985, Beirut airport hostage crisis, and Washington told us: You watch now, you watch, and all America watched, and nothing happened.

On September 25, three holiday-minded Israelis, on a little sailboat in Cyprus, were killed by Palestinian terrorists. It required exactly six days for a squadron of Israeli fighters to go a huge 1,500 miles to the headquarters of the PLO in Tunisia and destroy those headquarters, killing upward of sixty people. And that happened within twenty-four hours of the abduction of the Soviet diplomats, together with the ultimatum concerning Tripoli.

How has the Soviet Union responded? As expected. The terrorists are counterrevolutionary reactionaries, etc., etc. But if we have learned anything about the psychology of modern terrorists, it is that only sticks and stones will break their bones. There are no words in the Soviet inventory that will frighten them in the least. We even tried to drum up some Muslim holy words with which to scare off the terrorists who held our hostages in the embassy in Iran, to no effect. These people listen only to dive-bombers.

So whom will the Soviets bomb? One of their problems is that they are being asked to bomb their own children, because terrorism as we know it is not the bastard child of communism, quite the contrary: It is the beautiful child of communism, the flower of the union of political ambition and ethical depravity. Stand by.

—RONALD REAGAN AT THE U.N.

OCTOBER 29, 1985

 

The president’s speech to the United Nations was a joy. It antagonized both the Soviet Union and American liberals, a sure sign that on October 24 God was in his heaven, and all was right with the world.

Here is the point to keep one’s eyes on. It is that our strategic posture vis-à-vis the Soviet Union has for a generation been defensive. We have always, or almost always, left it to them to determine the theater of combat. Obviously, when that happens the enemy will choose favorable terrain. During the past period, the Soviet Union has posed as the suitor for an arms agreement that will leave the world safer from war. What never comes up is why there should be any danger of war in the first place.

But the Western specialty, dating back to the 1948 crisis in Berlin, has been the countersalient. The Soviets block Berlin, so what do we do? Block Vladivostok? No, we airlift to Berlin. The Soviets threaten Lebanon, so we land troops in Lebanon. The Soviets mastermind (there is a historical question here) the invasion of South Korea, we land troops in South Korea. They move nuclear missiles into Cuba, we chase them out of Cuba. They invade Vietnam, we defend Vietnam. They attempt to colonize Grenada, we liberate Grenada.

The theme of Mr. Reagan’s talk can then be defined as: What is it that’s going on in the world that gives rise to international tensions? As I say, it isn’t the existence of a huge inventory of nuclear weapons—weapons aren’t inherently frightening; it is the will to use them as weapons that frightens. The president pointed to four areas of the world in which there is a great deal of tension —indeed, in which people are killing each other. Because of what Moscow has done, in Afghanistan. Because of what Moscow has done, in Nicaragua. Because of what Moscow has done, in Ethiopia. Because of what Moscow has done, in Angola. Subtract Soviet support of these revolutionary governments, and suddenly a great stillness would come. That is the kind of stillness that accompanies true rapprochement.

Sure, there was in the speech an element of national pride. Mr. Reagan referred to the United States as a country that occupies no land abroad except—a lovely metaphor—“beneath the graves where our heroes rest.” But that isn’t bombast, and although some of the editorial writers cringe at any expression of pride in the record of America, it is fairer to say that the difference between our record of conduct abroad since World War II and that of the Soviet Union is rather too infrequently remarked, than so frequently remarked as to elide into chauvinism. We have every reason to call to the attention of the world, as Mr. Reagan did, that we have given $300 billion of aid to the world’s needy: a figure ten times as much as the request we have outstanding for research into a space shield.

And why not recall, as Reagan did, what Premier Kosygin said in 1967 when we suggested a moratorium on ABM technology? Kosygin said, “I believe that defensive systems, which prevent attack, are not the cause of the arms race, but constitute a factor preventing the death of people. Maybe an anti-missile system is more expensive than an offensive system, but it is designed not to kill people but to preserve human lives.” The New York Times editorial writer sniffed at quoting an “eighteen-year-old statement.” Well, the Bill of Rights is older than that.

They didn’t interrupt Mr. Reagan, not once, to applaud him this time around. Last year he was applauded every time he mentioned the need for arms control. It is a key to how things work in the United Nations that when you inquire as to why you need arms control, there is silence. There is applause only when you deal with the obvious threats posed by international tension. By analogy, they would applaud a speech about stopping AIDS, but not a speech about stopping dirty-needle use or aberrant sexual habits.

Mr. Reagan may surprise the skeptics in Geneva. He has certainly not approached the disarmament talks in the spirit of someone who is willing, in exchange for ephemeral trades in arms reduction, to give up on the important things. And these important things are those that distinguish life in the West from life behind the Iron Curtain.

—HOW TO DEAL WITH ONE’S DISSIDENTS

JUNE 12, 1986

 

On the same day that Kurt Waldheim was elected President of Austria, Ricardo Montero Duque arrived in Miami after twenty-five years in Fidel Castro’s prisons. How did he get out? Well, Senator Edward Kennedy arranged it. He asked Fidel Castro, and Fidel gave a seigneurial response.

That morning Ronald Radosh, a professor of history at City University of New York, reviewed for The New York Times a book by a sometime fellow prisoner of Montero Duque, the difference being that Armando Valladares was in prison only twenty-two years, not twenty-five. And how did he get out? President François Mitterrand asked Fidel Castro to let him out, and Fidel gave a seigneurial response.

For some reason, Professor Radosh announces that “it has taken us twenty-five years to find out the terrible reality—Mr. Castro has created a new despotism that has institutionalized torture as a mechanism of social control.” It is not clear why it took “us” twenty-five years to find out that Castro has been systematically torturing people. Some of “us” have known this for about twenty-four years, reporting on such torture regularly, for instance in National Review.

But back to Mr. Valladares’s book, which is called Against All Hope: The Prison Memoirs of Armando Valladares. Valladares was a young employee of the Postal Savings Bank in Cuba when Castro came to power, and he expressed misgivings about the communization of Cuba and was therefore arrested. That was when it began.

In prison he was tortured. Here is how Professor Radosh paraphrases life in the prison of Fidel Castro: “Mr. Valladares and other prisoners who refused ‘political rehabilitation’ were forced to live in the greatest heat and the dampest cold without clothes. They were regularly beaten, shot at and sometimes killed; they were thrown into punishment cells, including the dreaded ‘drawer cells,’ specially constructed units that make South Vietnam’s infamous tiger cages seem like homey quarters.”

He tried once to escape, but unsuccessfully. Retribution was swift. We quote now directly from the author. “Guards returned us to the cells and stripped us again. They didn’t close the cell door, and that detail caught my attention. I was sitting on the floor; outside I heard the voices of several approaching soldiers ... they were going to settle accounts with us, collect what we owed them for having tried to escape.... They were armed with thick twisted electric cables and truncheons. Suddenly, everything was a whirl—my head spun around in terrible vertigo. They beat me as I lay on the floor. One of them pulled at my arm to turn me over and expose my back so he could beat me more easily. And the cables fell more directly on me. The beating felt as if they were branding me with a red-hot branding iron, but then suddenly I experienced the most intense, unbearable, and brutal pain of my life. One of the guards had jumped with all his weight on my broken, throbbing leg.”

Back to Professor Radosh: “That treatment was typical. In the punishment cells, prisoners were kept in total darkness. Guards dumped buckets of urine and feces over the prisoners who warded off rats and roaches as they tried to sleep. Fungus grew on Mr. Valladares because he was not allowed to wash off the filth. Sleep was impossible. Guards constantly woke the men with long poles to insure they got no rest.... Even at the end, when the authorities were approving his release, Mr. Valladares was held in solitary confinement in a barren room with fluorescent lights turned on twenty-four hours a day. By then he was partially paralyzed through malnutrition intensified by the lack of medical attention.”

Valladares speculates that when the truth is known about Castro’s political prisoners, “mankind will feel the revulsion it felt when the crimes of Stalin were brought to light.” Professor Radosh evaluates this: “It is not too tough a judgment.”

The world is aflame at Austria’s having elected as president a man suspected of having cooperated with a German Nazi war criminal in Yugoslavia thirty-six years ago. Much of that world accepts Fidel Castro with equanimity; some of the world, with enthusiasm. To do so is the equivalent of waiting until every Jew was killed by Hitler before discovering the evils of Nazism. Diplomats who present their credentials to Fidel Castro should spend the evening before reading Valladares’s book. The man they will meet, the governor of Cuba, is the Hitler-Stalin of today.

—KILLED IN NICARAGUA

MAY 15, 1987

 

The poignant—and infuriating—appearance of the parents of Benjamin Linder before a congressional committee requires us to ask: What on earth is going on? Representative Connie Mack, R-Fla., tried to tell the grieving parents that the moment was not ideal for discussing the circumstances of their son’s death; but no, the parents yanked across the exchange that huge tapestry of historical disorder that is making it all but impossible to recognize what the essential story line is.

The tapestry in question shows the Contras as a demonic force, fed by mean-minded cold warriors bent on killing innocent people engaged in pastoral reforms. I swear, anyone watching the nightly news on CBS would never think to associate the Contras with the idea of liberation. There is not, on CBS, a moment given over to the idea of the Contras, or to the iniquities of the government they are fighting. Hollywood could go no further than Dan Rather in polarizing the principals: Ortega, bowing his head reverentially, mourning the death of Benjamin Linder, Mrs. Ortega kissing the weeping mother. Then rat-tat-tat machine gun bursts of Contras, preparing with their illegal arms to kill more Benjamin Linders, more innocent Nicaraguans.

And we get further personalizations. Eugene Hasenfus, like Benjamin Linder, was involved in Nicaragua. What he did was to get shot down by the Sandinistas, caught trying to get arms to the Contras. He became the object of media ignominy. The reckless merchant of death, helping on a voluntary basis to bring more misery to a torture-ridden people. He is the complement of Benjamin Linder.

It is ironic that, one continent removed, a trial proceeds against Klaus Barbie. There it is absolutely clear who are the heroes, who the villains. The villains were those Frenchmen who simply went along. The heroes were the men and women of the night who struggled to save one Jew here, one there; one innocent child on Monday, another on Friday. These were people headed for death camps at the hands of a totalitarian regime. Nicaragua’s regime has not reached the level of intensity in its war against its own people reached, say, in Cambodia by Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge, but the question to ask is, In what direction is it headed?

The 200,000 Nicaraguans who have fled Nicaragua during the past eight years, preferring to do it while they can rather than to leave as the boat people left Indochina, know the direction in which Ortega is taking Nicaragua; in the direction that Castro—so volubly admired by Ortega—has taken Cuba: toward a totalitarian, militarized state. The heroes, in an orderly canvas, are hardly the Benjamin Linders who travel to Nicaragua primarily to encourage the regime rather than merely to build dams. But try, just try, to get that story via CBS-or, indeed, via the most talkative Democratic spokesmen.

The frustration is brilliantly captured by Joseph Sobran, who writes: “Was Benjamin Linder, the young American engineer killed by anti-communist forces in Nicaragua, a communist? He was, says the columnist Richard Cohen, ‘a man whose intent was to make life a bit better for Nicaraguan peasants ... a dreamer out to bring a little light to a dark corner of the world.’ Yeah, but was he a communist? The New York Times reports that his friends described him as a ‘political activist interested in Central American causes.’ Well, was he a communist? He was ‘a founder of a campus group called Committee in Solidarity with the People of El Salvador.’ And was he a communist? ‘He was a self-effacing, gentle person with a twinkle in his eye and a laugh,’ says his friend Millie Thayer. The nearest thing to a straight answer is provided by The Washington Post: Linder and other foreigners in Nicaragua ‘are among the thousands of internacionalistas who have come to Nicaragua to work for the Sandinista cause. Many are Cubans or East Europeans sent by their governments, but a larger number are American and West European volunteers.’ ”

The Sandinistas have given their people genocide (of the Miskito Indians), poverty (national income down about 40 percent), a one-party press (the opposition for all intents and purposes does not exist), an end to press freedom (La Prensa is finally shut down completely), an end to civil rights (“suspended”), and compulsory military service (75,000 men under arms). There have always been some Americans who sympathize with the communists, but not many of them have been lionized.

—THE U.N. TURNS TO HUMAN RIGHTS IN CUBA

MARCH 11, 1988

 

Even though the 8:30 A.M. English-language news issues from Geneva, there was no mention on March 11 of the developments the day before in Geneva at the United Nations Commission on Human Rights. It was the big day of the U.N. Human Rights season; Maureen Reagan was in town as a member of the U.S. delegation, and also Vernon Walters, our ambassador to the United Nations. The chairman of this year’s delegation to that commission is Armando Valladares (now a U.S. citizen), and if he is not an expert on human rights in Cuba, then Rudolf Hess knew nothing about life inside Spandau Prison. What happened? Let the suspense reign....

The United States was fervently backing the most modest human rights resolution ever formulated. It followed the conventional form of those resolutions, which come in U.N.-sonnet form. The first eight or ten or twelve batches of prose describe the motives of the resolution’s originator (“Aware of its responsibility to promote and encourage respect for human rights and fundamental freedoms; recalling Economic and Social Council resolution 1235 ...”) until staggereth the patience of any nonbureaucratic reader. After that are the three or four patches of prose that state the resolution.

In this case, all the United States was asking for was that Cuba be urged by the Secretary-General of the United Nations to permit the Red Cross to travel to Cuba to examine its prisons. One would think this a reasonable request. In the first place, Cuba could always say no, the Red Cross can’t examine our prisons. And what then would happen? Nothing.

But in the surrealistic world of the United Nations, these things achieve their own importance, so that intensive lobbying went on for weeks. As one might expect, a vicious campaign was mounted against Armando Valladares’s Against All Hope, a brilliant, devastating expose of twenty-two years of life in Castro’s prisons. It was charged that Valladares had been—oh, a member of the Nazi Youth Guild, or whatever: Even the most fastidious clerks tend to forget what was today’s distortion extruded by the Castro propaganda machine.

One unusual development was embarrassing not so much to Castro, who is not easily embarrassed (he wasn’t embarrassed in 1962 when the Soviet Union was detected having moved one half of its nuclear missiles into Cuba), but embarrassing to Felipe González, the prime minister of Spain. The Madrid daily ABC got hold of an official, confidential report on human rights in Cuba conducted for the Spanish government by Spaniards, which report concluded, to use language more economically than the United Nations, that there are no human rights in Cuba. But such is the fraternal feeling of socialist prime minister Felipe González for Castro (they exchanged, a couple of years ago, on Castro’s first and only trip to Europe, the biggest public smooch in the history of osculation), that the government managed to suppress the report’s circulation. Spain determined to vote against the U.S. resolution and was left pretending to be ignorant of the state of human liberties in Cuba.

If you can follow a little Byzantine thought, it went as follows: If a) the Red Cross were to enter Cuba and report that the prisons and psychological institutions were in fact torturing political prisoners, then b) the report of Spain’s secret commission investigating human rights would indeed be verified; but c) since that report had been suppressed, the result of that verification would be embarrassing to the Spanish Government. That is a specimen of U.N. logic.

In any event, tension mounted greatly, and huge efforts were made to line up the votes. One arithmetician figured that the deciding vote might be cast by São Tome. The Europeans, with the exception of Spain, were with us. The communist bloc and its fellow travelers, against—of course. The big effort was not to persuade the Latin American states to vote for us—that would be too much to expect—but to abstain. Our representatives in Geneva know that most Latin American countries do not dare to show hostility to Cuba. Castro might send Che Guevara, Jr., to do a little terrorizing in return. On the other hand, to abstain or to vote in favor of Cuba costs nobody anything.

The great moment came, and flash! the Cuban Government proposed that a delegation from the Human Rights Commission travel to Cuba to see for themselves how squeaky-clean Cuban prisons are and how secure Cuban rights are. There was instant commotion, and the Senegalese chairman said he wanted to modify the invitation at least to the extent of turning it around: The United Nations investigators’ trip to Cuba would be paid for by the United Nations Commission on Human Rights, not by Castro. That seemed a major concession, when Castro said OK. And so? The Cuban proposal was carried, unanimously.

That is the kind of thing that has been passing for a concern for human rights by the United Nations for forty-three years.

—TIANANMEN: A CRACK IN THE CONCRETE?

MAY 19, 1989

 

On an off-duty morning in Hangchow pursuing Mr. Nixon about on his historic trip to China in 1972, four journalists set out toward the marketplace for a stroll. We came upon a little one-woman stand where embroidered handkerchiefs were being sold. Teddy White trotted out his thirty-year-old Chinese to converse with the pretty, middle-aged saleswoman, asking discursive questions. Suddenly James Michener broke in, and he was all business. White translated for him.

“Do you have any children?”

“Yes, I have a boy and a girl.”

“How old is your boy?”

“Sixteen.”

“What do you want him to do when he grows up?”

“I want him to do whatever Chairman Mao wants him to do.”

“But what do you want him to do?”

“Whatever Chairman Mao wants him to do.”

“If Chairman Mao asked you what you wanted your son to do, what would you say?”

“I would say, ‘I hope it will please Chairman Mao that I wish him to join the People’s Army to continue the struggle against the imperialists.’ ”

The scene was vivid in the mind when on Thursday one saw and heard the television reporter inside a bus among the protesting students in Shanghai:

“What do you want to do when you finish school?” one boy in his late teens was asked.

“I want to be an artist. Maybe a writer.”

To another young man, “And you?”

“I want to be”—slight giggle—“a VIP.”

Mao Man!

And then on Thursday in Beijing there was a meeting between a student leader and Zhao Ziyang, the successor to Mao Tse-tung as chairman of the Communist Party, and also Li Peng, the premier. In days gone by a student given such an honor would have reacted with slavish awe. This student, representing the hunger strikers, began by reproaching Li Peng for being late. The student then went on to ask for genuine negotiations. The premier replied that unless the students retreated, there would be “chaos—worse even than the Cultural Revolution.” The student leader was adamant, refraining only from voicing one of the students’ most emphatic demands, namely that Li Peng resign his office.

That student needed to be helped when leaving the room, so weakened was he by his fast. He was returned either to the hospital or to the trenches in the middle of Tiananmen Square, where history is being written as resonantly, one prays, as the history that was written in Paris on the fourteenth of July when the Bastille was overrun, or in November of 1917, when the Winter Palace was stormed. A great monsoon rain came down, outrageously unseasonable, and the sheer force of it dissipated the protesting crowds; but not for long. They were back, protecting themselves from the rain’s fury as best they could. The hunger strikers prostrate on the pavement in the center of the square did not move, except those who were taken on stretchers to the hospital for intravenous feeding.

The delegations walked through the square carrying banners, all of them calling for reforming the system. Much was spoken about “corruption,” which is an extra-ideological vice, on the scale of the afflictions brought by the communists to the Chinese people, as vexing as Tammany Hall up against the Holocaust. And one student leader said that his legions did not wish to overthrow the Communist Party; they merely wanted to reform it. One wondered whether they know that the only way to reform the Communist Party is either to replace it or to transmute it into an unrecognizable shape even as, traveling in the opposite direction, the East Germans came up with the German Democratic Republic as a name for their totalitarian state.

No, they do not have an explicit program of reforms, which is why they reach out for symbolic reforms, the resignation of two of the principal figures in Chinese official life. Whatever then happens, China must be different, they insist. And as the student leaders cry out with one voice, exhibiting a desire for the kind of freedom they have never experienced, one is dazzled with hope.

All that was required to produce this change was an estimated 30 to 55 million killed, thirty-five years of repression, a revolution seeking to overturn the cultural coordinates of Chinese life, and a foreign policy of which the sponsorship of Pol Pot is symbolic. One is reminded of the one great line of the Russian writer Ilya Ehrenburg: “If the whole world were to be covered with asphalt, one day a crack would appear in the asphalt; and in that crack grass would grow.”

—TIANANMEN: SO WHAT DO WE DO NOW?

JUNE 6, 1989

 

Pundits who need to opine on the developments in China and fear that what we write on Monday will be obsolete on Tuesday can take comfort, even if the National Security Council, the State Department, and the Pentagon can’t, over the extraordinary failure of our sinological cadre, in the academies here in America and in our diplomatic outposts in China and elsewhere, to have predicted anything. They did not sense the latent resentment of the population at large, did not foresee the initial success of the demonstrators ; they predicted a crackdown when it did not happen, did not predict a crackdown when it did happen, and did not predict the severity of the crackdown when it did happen.

Mrs. Bette Bao Lord, born in China—a brilliant analyst and novelist—said on CBS that she didn’t think “anyone would have guessed they [the authorities] would be so brutal.” Lacking in historical perspective? The executors of the Cultural Revolution were ten times more brutal, and they were, well, also Chinese. And her husband, Winston Lord, the learned professional and our most recent ambassador-on-the-scene in China, announced that the Chinese Government had “lost all legitimacy,” raising the question: When, and just how, did the Chinese Government acquire legitimacy, other than by exercising de facto authority over Chinese life? If that is all it takes, who is to say that the government of Deng-Peng will lose its legitimacy? All it needs to do is to continue governing, and precisely that is their manifest objective.

It is revealing to study the ways of our professional diplomatic and journalistic managers. At this writing, the estimate (of Britain’s BBC) is that 2,600 people have been killed in the first thirty-six hours of Deng’s repression. That is a lot of people, by one perspective. It is almost as many people as the United States has executed for capital offenses since Chiang Kai-shek came to power in 1927. So we have graduating perspectives: 1) Killing somebody because he is guilty of murder. 2) Killing somebody because he is, in the judgment of the authorities, creating, as Deng charged, “anarchy.” And then, 3) killing somebody because he stands in your aggressive path. The Ayatollah Khomeini, whom the Prophet permitted to die before Salman Rushdie, killed one million Iranians in his pointless war against Iraq, and he is mourned by a multitude equal at least to the multitude we saw at Tiananmen Square on the most exuberant day. Mikhail Gorbachev stepped into the Afghan invasion, appointed a fiercer general than the incumbent, and the rate of killing increased, reaching 1.2 million Afghans before the decision was made to pull out.

One of ABC’s China correspondents said that the Chinese Government had forever “lost its credibility.” An interesting question: If tomorrow, or the day after tomorrow, the government of Gorbachev were to slaughter 2,600 Lithuanians, or Armenians, or Ukrainians—would it lose its credibility? An ABC correspondent on This Week with David Brinkley accosted guest Henry Kissinger and said: Look, this is the country of Thomas Jefferson. Can’t we do something more to the Chinese than merely “deplore”—he managed a facial condescension in giving out the word used by President Bush—the action of the Chinese Government? Another interesting question: What did we do other than to deplore the action by the Soviets in 1956 in Hungary when they ran their tanks over students and hanged their premier? Or twelve years later, when they took comparable action against Czechoslovakia? The answer is: You don’t get really and truly mad at superpowers that dispose of nuclear weapons. What they do you deplore in the sanctuaries of editorial offices or in the Security Council of the United Nations.

We should rue the awful ignorance from which we all suffer about what really goes on in the mind of the tyrants. Kissinger is right—Deng Xiaoping hardly welcomed a situation similar to one of which he was the victim: The Cultural Revolution put him in jail for ten years and made a paraplegic of his son. And now he is seized, in Karl Wittfogel’s phrase, with the megalomania of the aging despot, and rather than acknowledge the right of his citizens peaceably to assemble in order to petition the government for a redress of grievances—a right guaranteed to Americans by the First Amendment—he shoots them, and tomorrow may hang those his fusiliers missed.

The only thing we can reasonably do isn’t, at this point, fustian retaliation. A moral freeze is in order. Then wait. Wait to see what happens. Whom will we be dealing with? What might be the effect of sanctions withheld? And—finally—do we really have effective, usable sanctions against the third superpower in an age where we seek a triangular disposition of power, rather than the pre-1960 hegemony, China-U.S.S.R. ν.—us?

We can loathe what was done, and learn from it. Do not be surprised, Virginia. That kind of thing can happen in countries like that, and regularly does.

—TO BIND THE WOUNDS

DECEMBER 13, 1991

 

It’s a bad time to be asking Americans to give money to foreign countries, and there is of course a special irony that tends to undermine the request for help to a country that in pledging to bury us cost us a few trillion dollars in self-defense.

All of this Secretary of State James Baker was aware of when he spoke at Princeton, which is why he was careful not to mention money to be shipped to “Russia et al.,” as we may as well agree to call that conglomerate. Instead, he put it this way, that he had in mind agricultural and medical relief that would cost every American the sum total of two dollars.

Even though the arithmetic is easy in this case, and an absolute breeze for a Princeton audience, he didn’t do it for them. To have said “$500 million” would have caused every television network on Thursday night to have presented a dozen stricken men and women in a dozen towns, claiming how much they could benefit from a very small fraction of that $500 million.

There is no denying the stress of the times, dramatized by the television news shot of the upscale pawnshop in Beverly Hills. You drive in your Rolls-Royce and walk out without your Rolls, but with a check for fifty grand or so. The Rolls will stay where it is for exactly four months. During each of those four months you must send in 4 percent interest. That means $2,000 per month. If you’re lucky, in April you can get back your car and you are out only $8,000, but the $50,000 you borrowed may have been just exactly critical in saving your real estate business or your funeral parlor enterprise, or keeping your two kids in college by paying the bills.

It is in times like these that one needs to think back on the great structures of Europe, so many of them diadems celebrating the artistic explosion of faith in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. It was then that the four “great ladies” of France were built, at Chartres, Notre Dame, Rouen, and Reims. The four cathedrals make anything built since that time appear to be wistful acts of architectural pettifoggery: One can’t walk into the cathedral of Chartres without knowing that one has seen the most beautiful creation in the world. And, in quieter moments, one asks: How is it that such a monument was paid for?

It is worth repeating to oneself the generality an economics historian made a few years ago—namely, that the level of income did not change much between the time of Christ and the beginning of the Industrial Revolution. In current terms, that would have meant that approximately 99 percent of all human beings lived below the poverty level. And yet they willingly contributed their savings to create such as the great ladies of France.

Mr. Baker is not suggesting that the United States alone bear the burden of seeing Russia et al. through the forthcoming agricultural depression. There are wealthy countries and many of them have much more to lose should the anarchy and fascism described by Baker take hold in that desolate part of the world where one third of the airports are closed because they can’t find enough fuel in the greatest oil-exporting country in the world, where 30,000 nuclear missiles bask in the highest-quality fuel sufficient to propel them to every city in the West with a population of more than 500,000.

What Europe reasonably fears most in the months immediately ahead isn’t a nuclear attack from rogue scientists in Kazakhstan. What it fears most is a wave of immigrants that would make the Mexican irruption into the American Southwest look like an orderly afternoon outing. East Germany could find itself seeking to block 10 million Russians who want—who demand—food, as every human being alive demands food, unless he is an Irish terrorist bent on suicide. There is no way the United States can say no in such a situation.

It has been a crazy year, a voluptuary feast for the historians of the future, the year in which the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics outlawed the Communist Party, in which Mikhail Gorbachev, Time magazine’s Man of the Decade, began to fade into insignificance ; in which Saddam Hussein challenged the greatest power on earth, was humiliated by the greatest power on earth, and somehow ended the year with a higher prestige than the American president who brought him to his knees, but forgot to behead him.

It must not be the year in which America’s concern for itself forces human beings whose entire lives have been a wretched struggle against the totalitarianism of their ideologized elite to suffer now the fate of starvation, or the whiplash of reaction.

—LENIN’S GETTING OLD

JUNE 25, 1991

 

The people at 60 Minutes devoted the entire hour on Sunday to excerpts from programs done over the last decade in and about the Soviet Union. It was a galvanizing hour, reminding us of many things, among them the tenacity of our illusions even in the very recent past about Soviet communism.

In this respect, much credit goes to the producers of 60 Minutes who were not shamed to let us all see the glowing tributes paid to the communist state as recently as 1972. Morley Safer is there, and he speaks about the huge material abundances of Soviet life, about the gaiety of Soviet dress, the color, the general animation. We are introduced to a society that seems to be, finally, working, a dream coming true.

True, Safer concluded that segment, the Russian people don’t have freedom; on the other hand, they never did.

It seems a million years ago, but that is the way so many of our journalists and intellectuals saw the Soviet Union. It was so in China; indeed, 1972 was the year in which Richard Nixon led so many journalists to China, to see and to adore.

The program went on to introduce us to an eighty-year-old woman, married to a writer who was taken in 1936 by the GPU, a predecessor of the KGB. What had he done? Nothing. He was executed. His brother was then imprisoned. And his father. And now the old lady, talking in fluent English to 60 Minutes.

Flash to several Russians, among them young people, who say quite frankly and enthusiastically that they very much wish that Stalin were still alive. Yes, it is important to recall that such neural disorders exist. There are those (mostly in the closet) who wish Hitler were alive. The people of Moscow wept when Ivan the Terrible said he might abdicate his office.

On my first visit to Russia in 1970, on behalf of the United States Information Agency, I was extensively briefed about what was unsafe. Watch the booze—there are Soviet officials who will attempt to exchange toasts at a velocity visiting foreigners can’t control. No sex—Mata Haris are everywhere. Don’t under any circumstances accept a letter from anyone with the request that it be mailed when you get back to the States. And then the supreme commandment: Under no circumstances derogate Lenin in any way. He is the redeemer in the view of almost everybody in the Soviet Union.

Twenty years later, the majority of the people who live in Leningrad opt to change the name of the city. Back to St. Petersburg, bypassing its former name of Petrograd. Lenin hated saints.

Here and there there had been evidence of anti-Leninist popular thinking: a statue defaced, a wisecrack about the old man. But the gravity of the action of the voters of Leningrad was quickly understood by the Kremlin, which announced that the change in name could not take place.

Many reasons for this were given, among them that it would be extremely expensive to change the name on all the relevant maps and brochures and road signs. But the fear expressed by Mikhail Gorbachev reflects the awful insecurity one would experience on learning that the legitimizing instrument of your faith is crumbling.

If (however inconceivable) it were established that the Constitution was illegitimate, by what would the courts and the legislators and the executive be guided? If (however inconceivable) it were established that Christ was a paid actor and the crucifixion a venture in black theater, what would the Christian world do? Perhaps the YMCA would replace the Vatican.

But now the revolution is decomposing. Lenin instructed us that “Orthodox Marxism requires no revision of any kind either in the field of philosophy, in its theory of political economy, or in its theory of historical development.” But that is never true. Lenin’s sole virtue was a relative indifference to adulation. It was only after he died that Petrograd’s name was changed.

But Lenin, himself as close as any man could be to heartlessness, understood intellectually the need for icons. And as a political matter, he’d have approved the hagiography of communism, not because he believed in the elevation of ideological saints, but because he’d have found it useful to accelerate the revolution.

60 Minutes showed us a slice of today’s Moscow. And there we see—the can-can. Nikita Khrushchev, in 1957, saw it done in Los Angeles and railed against it as evidence of bourgeois degeneracy. All of this in twenty years. Enough to make a man a Couéist (“Every day, in every way, I am getting better and better”).

—A HISTORY OF THE COLD WAR?

MARCH 13, 1990

 

A distinguished British historian, an old personal friend (we were roommates at school), suggested seriously that I undertake to write a history of the Cold War. I told him my book-writing time was mortgaged through 1994, and I don’t intend to embark on such a venture at that point (one can reasonably expect a forest of Cold War R.I.P. books in the interval). But the proposition stayed with me overnight, and bore fruit as follows:

1. Any book on the Cold War should take seriously the thought and analysis of those who participated in the Cold War and agonizingly predicted the defeat of the West. Most widely recognized among these was Whittaker Chambers. His lament, widely quoted and anthologizable in the literature of despair, was phrased in a personal letter to me written in 1954. He said: “The enemy—he is ourselves. That is why we can hope to do little more now than snatch a fingernail of a saint from the rack or a handful of ashes from the faggots, and bury them secretly in a flowerpot against the day, ages hence, when a few men begin again to dare to believe that there was once something else, that something else is thinkable, and need some evidence of what it was, and the fortifying knowledge that there were those who, at the great nightfall, took loving thought to preserve the tokens of hope and truth.”

And there was Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, who wrote that over a very few years he had witnessed the collapse of the will of the West. That for a period, during the fifties and sixties, the uncoordinated resistance within the Soviet Union—a spiritual fraternity, really—had reason to think of the West as an immovable wall against which the Soviet Union would not, could not prevail; but that after our retreat from Vietnam, and our insensitivity to so much that the communists were engaged in, culminating with the declaration of martial law in Poland, there was little reason to hope that we would prevail.

The historian must examine the thought of such as Chambers and Solzhenitsyn without donning a pathologist’s robe. Their concern was deeply rooted in objective analysis—but objective analysis of Western weakness, not of communist weakness. This is a point to stress.

2. Whereas we can proudly say that the Western powers will presented formidable obstacles to Soviet expansionism, we need to say this carefully. The last successful Soviet diplomatic offensive brought them the INF treaty. We think little of it at this point because the prospect of a Soviet military drive across Eastern Europe has all but faded, with the dissolution of the Soviet empire in the region.

But the Soviet offensive was dramatically and frighteningly successful. Any future general at a war exercise, studying the political culture of the late 1980s, would be justified in concluding that the disappearance from Europe of theater nuclear weapons of a range extensive enough to reach the Soviet Union left our potential enemy with a measure of security it had not dreamed of getting in early negotiations.

The West was left with strategic weapons, at closest range from submarines in the Baltic Sea. But the firing of such weapons, aimed at slowing down or aborting a Soviet blitzkrieg, would have been seen by the Kremlin as the equivalent of weapons fired from Omaha. And our knowledge that such would be the Soviet reaction would have resulted in preventing the submarines from firing. The Europe of 1989 might well have been converted, as little as one year later, into a neutralist Europe headed by an anti-nuclear political party in East Germany, to be joined by an anti-nuclear political party winning in Great Britain. Meanwhile, the United States had acquiesced in what seems like a permanent satellite government in Afghanistan, had refused to take decisive action in Nicaragua. And then—

3. And then, as some of us believers might put it, God cleared his throat. And lo, on March 11, 1990, the little state of Lithuania declared that it was independent of the Soviet Union. It is reasonably expected that Latvia and Estonia will follow—in the footsteps of Poland, and East Germany, and Czechoslovakia, Romania, and Bulgaria. A triumph of Western policy?

Only if one chooses to believe that the mere survival of the West was itself triumphant. It is forever to the credit of the West that it elected to remain a nuclear power, exercising the deterrent club, the shield which so many Westerners argued we should do without.

But it was the agony of life under communism that dictated the outcome. The West might have reason to bask in its diplomatic prowess if it had taken less than forty-five years to liberate the swollen kingdom of the slaves. They were liberated primarily by the shortage of bread in the motherland of the proletariat, rather than by the abundance of it in the West. No history of the Cold War will successfully assert that the demise of the Soviet empire was a triumph of Western diplomacy. What we did, essentially, was to stand still. And, in the case of some, to pray for divine intercession.