Voices for Europe (Special Book Review)
Kaplan, Roger
BOOKS IN REVIEW - "Voices for Europe (Special Book Review)" Born in Tupelo, Mississippi, reared in Tennessee, son of a truck driver, and, for a time, a truck driver himself, he rose on the strength of his talent (as well as some shrewd management by...
...He starts with a lucid and thorough summary of Soviet socialism and an analysis of its bankruptcy...
...2) the first political task is therefore to "destroy the system...
...Their enterprise is deeply philosophical in the old-fashioned sense, but it obviously has political ramifications...
...the Communists find themselves in the ironic situation of resisting further encroachments by the state on the private sector because they do not want to inherit a totally ruined economy...
...His motives, it is implied, must be venal...
...He then asks, in two very fine chapters well worth the price of the book, whether the liberal democracies are going to destroy themselves...
...But this has not necessarily made any less powerful and popular the old myths of the left, nor less virulent the vituperations against the bourgeois-liberaldemocratic "system...
...Between 1970 and 1975, seven major federal regulatory agencies were created and 30 laws making substantial changes in our regulatory framework were enacted...
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...What may once have been thought of as an instrument for social change quickly became an end in itself...
...The official Communist Party has been attacked for over a decade by purists in the art of the dictatorship of the proletariat, and the testimony of the dissidents who have been allowed to leave the Soviet Union has begun to register on many minds...
...Representatives of capitalism combat Stalinism because it wants to destroy them...
...A Santiago Carillo may announce that Moscow is no longer Rome, but his party retains the totalitarian structure which Lenin proclaimed indispensable for the success of the Revolution...
...One need not dwell on his analysis of the "end of the miracle," since a paraphrase would only diminish its excellence, except to say that he sees it as far less serious than the Depression of the 30s...
...What if they are given Resources and Equipments, and find ways of denying paper pulp to unfriendly newspapers...
...Ftiaht How can a decision maker in business or government assess the economic, social, legal and political impact of all these regulatory actions...
...It does not, however, recapitulate what Revel writes...
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...These movements' overlong stay in power, favoritism, cronyism, corruption, and often plain ineptitude have contributed sizably to the fragility of their countries' democratic institutions...
...To Revel, there has never been any real de-Stalinization, because Stalinism is the inevitable creation of a Marxist-Leninist party...
...Writes Aron, "the English disease hovers over all the Western economies: under pretext of redistribution or under pressure from interest groups, the temptation is to increase the role of the state in the national product, until the private sector, starved of capital, or forced to replace an excessively expensive work-force by machinery, will be unable to offer work...
...Two specters, Aron rephrases Marx, are haunting Europe today: liberty and the Red Army...
...Not for Elvis the protest march, or the benefit concert for trendy causes, favored by some performers as a device for expressing "solidarity" with the "working man...
...Far from it—he gave away Cadillacs, and on each occasion when he did so, contributed more to the sum total of human happiness on this planet than all the wailing Joan Baez has ever done for unionized grape picking...
...socialists need feel no shame in doing the same, and for the same reason: because Stalinism wants to destroy them too...
...But at the very least, it was the demise of one who brought simple andhealthy pleasure to a generation of younger Americans, and not a few older ones as well...
...Elvis Presley was a wonder, and I shall miss him...
...Both Revel and Aron have written books which are exceedingly far-reaching not only in their attack on Communism but also in their defense of liberal capitalism...
...The first takes up the principal topic of Revel's book: "Europe Mystified by Marxist-Leninism...
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...but at least the Swedes have understood the meaning of the international market economy and the private sector...
...Yet its demonology continues to haunt guilt-ridden and frustrated intellectuals in those parts of the world where it is still only a proposal, not yet a somber practice...
...Today, the Soviet model is not quite a la mode...
...20036 Name Organzation Address City State Zip Two Wrongs Make Antonin Saili The American Spectator November 1977 33 welfare are insignificant...
...3) "imperialism" is always and everywhere an extension of American capitalism...
...It is a facile system to believe in, and the danger is that it will engulf the world in permanent stupidity, conflict, and repression...
...For the dissatisfied, sexually confused, harassed, overeducated, underwise intellectuals, for the impotent little would-be dictators, for the busybodies and the envious, the sloganeering reduction of the problems of society to supposedly rational and inevitable solutions has proven irresistible again and again...
...He then discusses the "unfmdable socialism" which almost all his colleagues in the French intelligentsia declare themselves to believe in (even Revel, he notes wryly), and the "imperialism with no empire" which many of these people (not Revel, this time...
...Like every true American hero, he never forgot his humble beginnings, and his way of saying thanks to the commoner folk reflected his continued understanding of the dreams of the people from whom he had sprung...
...Roger Kaplan Voices for Europe A special book review essay of The Totalitarian Temptation by Jean-Francois Revel (translated by David Hapgood, Doubleday, $8.95) and Plaidoyer Pour L'Europe Decadente by Raymond Aron (Robert Laffont, Paris, F. 49.00...
...Born in Tupelo, Mississippi, reared in Tennessee, son of a truck driver, and, for a time, a truck driver himself, he rose on the strength of his talent (as well as some shrewd management by Colonel Tom Parker) to a level of wealth and fame beyond comprehension...
...How can anyone take seriously the conversion to democracy of a party (the French one) which renounced one of its basic tenets, the dictatorship of the proletariat, by a vote of 17,000 to 0? Totalitarian inside, it will establish a totalitarian society once it is in power...
...According to Aron, Marx's fundamental legacy was not a critique of capitalist society, powerful as his was, but a philosophy of history based on prophecy...
...One hundred and thirty years later, Communism is an established fact in half of Europe and more than half of Asia, and in the countries where it reigns it has produced stagnation and repression...
...The idea keeps recurring, and, like all irrational ideas, revelations of what it leads to never seem to be sufficient to explode it...
...The middle road which it claims to have found, between the Soviet model and reformist social democracy, appears dangerous under his scrutiny...
...It is the refusal to admit that progress is achieved only by building on past progress...
...Elvis Presley's death, of course, has caused but a momentary fluctuation in the nation's pulse, and even that for only some of the nation...
...If the French Communist Party remains deeply Stalinist, Aron admits—albeit with great caution—that the Italian Communist Party, because of the circumstances under which it may come to power, is less dangerous, at least in the short run...
...One of his American friends, H. J. Kaplan, had published two years earlier a daring novel, Anywhere Else, which might have spared a whole generation a lot of political stupidity if it had been properly read...
...Aron points out that it would be nice if more socialists were as opportunistic as the West Germans...
...Aron calls the French intellectual class the most intelligent in the world, and he, very possibly its most intelligent member, knows what he is talking about...
...Communism is still riding on its prestige—dishonestly acquired—as the "party of the workers," and leftish intellectuals are afraid to attack it lest they be accused of serving the reactionaries...
...To read the Communist press, there is no such thing as an honest anti-Communist...
...What we eat, wear, breathe, and ride in — even what we watch on television...
...Italian capitalism is not exactly dynamic...
...The totalitarian temptation, then, is the willingness to play with dynamite in the delusion of reaching the promised land...
...If the Communists are incapable of tolerating opposition from their friends (they refuse to abide criticism even from Francois Mitterrand, to whom they may owe their electoral victory next year), how will they behave when they have the Ministry of the Interior...
...Aron takes a very dim view of "Eurocommunism...
...he must harbor some deep personal grudge...
...A specter, wrote Karl Marx in 1848, is haunting Europe: Communism...
...The result is that criticism of the Soviet Union and of the Party's behavior is muted and selective...
...And the tragedy of his early death, including the more grotesque and bizarre events which accompanied it, was, in its way, uniquely American as well...
...If Italy's economy can be turned around, the Communists may yet opt to preserve the legality which has served them so well...
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...Fellow-travelling is a way of life in the elegant cafes of the posh neighborhoods...
...Whether England would benefit from a dose of Marx, along with everything else, is a question rich in black humor, but not of much help to her present problems...
...He has less confidence in France and Italy, where the revolutionary myth—in the sense of a complete overturn of society and the creation of new men—still inspires political parties and activities, and where, as a result, the rules of the democratic game are not accepted universally...
...Aron is not very big on social democracy, even the Swedish variety which is supposed to have worked so well...
...Perhaps living in the most beautiful city on earth softens the brain...
...intelligent or the most unreasonable...
...The Party always prepares for the monopoly of power...
...In the second part of the book, Aron examines the reasons why "Europe is unaware of its superiority...
...Revel's principal theme is that there always has been too much tolerance of the Communist Party in France, and too many excuses made for Communists in general...
...If the tide does shift, and Aron begins to find himself a little less lonely, surely it will be due in large part to both his own efforts and those of jean-Francois Revel...
...The man decked out in the haute couture of pidgin Marxism thinks his noble ends—which are utterly reactionary, as knows any economist who has studied the effects of ever-widening circles of state regulation—allow him to inflict upon his people (if he is in power) humiliation and devastation, and upon his friends (if he is merely a salon pol) hours of tedium...
...have convinced their Third World epigones is the cause of their countries' problems...
...Way back in 1954, Aron took a courageous and lonely position in his classic, The Opium of the Intellectuals, which described the intellectuals' failure, under the influence of politics and ideology, to fulfill their responsibility of critically facing up to reality...
...Not so long ago, for instance, Jean-Paul Sartre, that incredibly foolish genius, was getting away with enormities like: "I know there are concentration camps in the Soviet Union, but I object to the use the bourgeois press makes of them...
...he must be in the pay of the CIA or a multinational firm...
...Raymond Aron's very large work, Plea for Decadent Europe, is divided among three masterfully presented themes...
...the final battle, discant his disciples...
...The French intelligentsia is being told by its youngest stars that it can no longer assume glibly that Marxism contains the fundamental answers—or any answers—to the problems of our times, and, by implication, that it cannot automatically predicate its political choices on a socialist cornerstone...
...Like Revel, he questions how parties claiming to accept political pluralism can at the same time claim a monopoly on the truth...
...The pseudo-scientific analysis combined with moral condemnation is what gives Marxism its longevity, its popularity with serious thinkers as well as political hooligans in need of slogans...
...Revel says quite sensibly that the sincerity of the Communists' espousal of liberal democracy has to be tested against their behavior, that no one should rely on their rhetoric, which for sixty years they always have changed to fit the circumstances...
...As for lucidity, in the past two years a small but influential group of young French philosophers has begun to attack the Marxism which they absorbed in their school years and which they carried boldly into the streets in May 1968...
...The Western governments are simply too weak to take measures which will be unpopular in the short term...
...That is why," writes Revel, "there is no validity to the familiar contention that liberal socialists must be careful to stand aloof from the defenders of capitalism in making their case against Stalinism...
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...The death knell of capitalism, quoth the Protestant Jew in the British Musuem...
...He considers our chronic inflation to be the principal problem...
...As long as the parties resemble armies of militants, under the authority of a few, as long as these parties turn leftward and rightward at the slightest command, no one will take literally their most solemn declarations...
...Duverger, in characteristic French unconcern for day-to-day reality, attacks the British and German socialists for forgetting Marx and, in consequence, drifting into opportunism...
...The Communists insist on judging others by their actions, and yet claim they should be judged only by their electoral promises...
...Inside the parties, there is no dissidence, the Leninist concept of "democratic centralism" being one of the century's earliest examples of Orwellian Newspeak...
...it does not reach the fundamental fact: which is that the Communists are not men of the democratic left, and therefore deserve no help from that sector...
...To me, as to millions of others, he was indeed the King, a part of the background of my life...
...The point is that nothing is more important to the Communists than the strength of their party...
...Aron shows that even some of the most democratic leftists in France, like Le Monde's highly respected Maurice Duverger, are still captives of the "vulgate," the reduction of Marx to easy slogans...
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...While this reflects a mentality which in another age would have accepted the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, it is not restricted to the lunatic fringe...
...The Communists, Revel points out, contribute to this state of mind constantly and adroitly, though from the outside their tactics seem awfully crude...
...Aron does not, by the way, forget to criticize Christian Democracy and Gaullism...
...The inflation, meanwhile, is a destabilizing factor inevery sector of society...
...What if every time Howard Baker made a statement for the minority, he were accused of "obsessive anti-Democratism," or some nonsense such as being in the pocket of Standard Oil...
...He recognizes in state-controlled economies the threat to political liberty which they are, but his intense dislike of nation-states as such leads him to propose, somewhat nebulously, economic planning on a world scale...
...While Revel is concerned mainly with the present situation —the Communists' tactics and the weakness of the democratic left in opposing them—Aron is more the historian, devoting several chapters to an analysis of the Marxist heritage...
...What he says precisely is that it is either the most Roger Kaplan is a doctoral candidate with the Committee on the History of Culture at the University of Chicago...
...Aron's concern is whether it will bring about the disintegration of the Common Market, the collapse of Great Britain, and the participation of Communists in the governments of France and Italy...
...Perhaps the tide is shifting...
...As always, he starts with the facts, and examines the economic implications of the changes wrought by the recession of 1973...
...Revel cites cases where even some of France's most prestigious left-wing journalists, writers for Le Monde and the editor of Le Nouvel Observateur for instance, have been dragged through the mud...
...His stroke of genius was to point to the aspect of capitalism which he found most abhorrent—the expropriation of what he called surplus-value—and to say that it would be the cause of the system's doom by autodestruction...
...Reporting their existence was wrong if it distracted the public from the great Soviet achievements...
...Aron is confident of the United States' capacity for survival, because the rule of law and the guarantees of individual liberty remain our strongest national traditions...
...The success of the first depends upon the Europeans' lucidity, and their willingness to face economic reality honestly and to arrest the drift toward statism...
...story...
...He made no pretense to brilliance, or to insight, or to anything other than being an entertainer, and in his field he was unexcelled...
...He contends that democratic socialism (which he espouses) can only come about through and in alliance with capitalism...
...Time and time again, democratic socialists have convinced themselves that Communists share their goals, only to end up on the receiving end of the Party's wrath, accused of esoteric sins like "class collaboration" and "capitulation to the bourgeoisie" and "visceral anti-Sovietism...
...Revel argues that the hatred of capitalism, upon which this delusion is based, is really a hatred of industrial society, rooted in an ambivalence stemming from the ambiguous and precarious status of many intellectuals...
...The PCI is committed to the progress Italy has made, and does not want to precipitate a crisis—especially since it already controls so much of the country...
...His death brings home the passing of time in a surprisingly personal sense that I never expected to feel until I was much older—the sense that I am told the elderly feel when they turn to the obituary pages and see yet another two-inch block of newsprint recording the ending of their times...
...A statement critical of the Communist Party is denounced immediately as "obsessive anti-Communism," and the entire international Communist press, led by Tass, hollers shame at the poor reactionary who dared raise his voice...
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...On the contrary, it is the reigning orthodoxy in much of the world...
...Paris, France, has been for a very long time one of the great distilleries of Marxism...
...Washington, D.C...
...They are thought of as tough 32 The American Spectator November 1977 guys whose hearts are in the right place...
...34 The American Spectator November 1977...
...Indeed, one of the curious things about the history of political ideas in liberal democracies is the recurrence of what Jean-Francois Revel calls the "totalitarian temptation...
...It is not enough to expose the lies and the failures of the enemy...
...The sinister and dangerous, heroic and perverse dream of a perfect world has always been deeply entrenched in the more irrational recesses of Western consciousness...
...it is even more important to explain our successes...
...Sweden, he suggests, is paternalistic and dull, a relic of the Middle Ages in the level of its conformism...
...Without this element, which Raymond Aron calls "prophetism," it is doubtful that the idea of the collectivist regimentation of society could ever have attracted the amount of popularity that it did...
...Behind the willingness to risk a dictatorship to "change everything," Revel finds a political pose consisting of three basic elements, the lessons of Paris' "pidgin Marxism": (1) The "system" is unimprovable—its basic freedoms and material • ...a new magazine for decision makers Economic Impact statements James C. Miller III The .fri Policy Analysts David Federal regulation touches almost every aspect of our lives...
...In the third part of the book, Aron asks whether Europe will be a victim of its own weaknesses and self-doubts...
...One of the reasons intellectuals rarely bring themselves to revile Communism with quite the same thoroughness and passion they bring to their detestation of fascism is that they continue to identify Communism as an "aberrant" or "too brutal" variety of the same progressive humanism which they think they stand for...
...The glamour and excess and virtual idolatry that accompanied his rise were possible only in the affluent, media-conscious culture of this land...
...In taking this view he is arguing, like many economists, that the West's present difficulties are largely political, or moral...
...The French Socialist Party, disdaining social democracy and proclaiming bold (and Communist-inspired) nationalization plans, is following ideas which every economist knows will lead to stagnation, panic, and trouble...
...He adds that the tactic works well enough: The anti-Communist voices are lowered...
Vol. 11 • November 1977 • No. 1
