LETTERS
Editors: The complicated, long struggle for democratization of the political and economic system in Yugoslavia is not made easier by one-sided, uninformed, and irresponsible articles like the...
...would lose $8.5 billion in sales and tax revenues...
...actions abroad...
...On the contrary, we are merely told that the regime has special problems in Croatia because it is fearful of "the outspoken liberal intelligentsia and the powerful Catholic Church...
...As a newcomer to the Yugoslav scene, I intentionally steered clear of discussing the political complexities of nationalism and terrorism that beset the government...
...I was disappointed to find only Jean Amêry's slander against anti-Zionist leftists rewarmed from years past...
...The move to (an often unacknowledged) Leninist position is most marked outside the U.S...
...Editors: David Bromwich (Dissent, Winter 1982) refers to Major General Robert Schweitzer, who was dismissed from his post as chief of the National Security Council's Defense Policy Cluster...
...notably in Wrong's native Canada), but is also strong in some areas of American scholarship...
...Your summary of my remarks is totally inaccurate...
...What is needed first is a vigorous and explicit discussion of the sufficiency of the revisionist vision of aggressor America spoiling the chances of socialism in an otherwise defensive and reactive world...
...I plan to review collectively several recent books by these scholars in a forthcoming issue of Dissent...
...and Robert W. Tucker are only two prominent scholars who have criticized the neo-Leninist theory of American "imperialism...
...We have a record of tolerance and freedom on such matters that we cherish, and I do not take lightly any insinuations that we have behaved otherwise...
...Denitch cannot refrain from taking pot shots at "nationalist separatists" and the "extremely unlovely emigre circles abroad" with whom he claims they "have 381 ties...
...As of the third week in June, Ms...
...After many days the strike was broken...
...Hardly in the pages of Dissent, where we published Henry Pachter for many years...
...I also recall that I indicated a readiness to talk about my relations with Hannah, which would have included of course the Dissent forum...
...And one point in Dennis Wrong's stimulating article raises the question more sharply...
...Indeed, as I pointed out in my article, Croatia right now is virtually "off limits" to curious foreigners...
...Both sides were represented, and Arendt herself could have spoken at length had she chosen to...
...In the case of the Croat separatists, mostly terrorist groups in migration who claim a pure line of descent from the fascist Ustashi "independent Croat state" of 1941-44, and in the case of the Albanian nationalists, who have links with the adjoining Albanian state, things are clear and do not require the fevered imagination of government agents to conjure up...
...That is not an unreasonable position and happens to be the one I hold...
...384...
...Well and good, one might say, but is not the situation exacerbated by restrictions on free political debate, turning otherwise reasonable people into allies of terrorists and separatists...
...I note that Mr...
...These scholars, unlike the prerevisionist "traditional" historians, do not minimize American misreadings of and overreactions to Soviet intentions and actions, but on balance they treat Soviet behavior in the early postwar years as, in Vojtech Mastny's words, "the ultimate cause of the Cold War...
...That a majority of those who spoke were critics of Arendt's book may tell us something about the opinions of the people who came, the readiness of Arendt's supporters to speak out, or whatever...
...The relevant studies are those of Mastny, John Lewis Gaddis, Daniel Yergin, and William Taubman (all of them, incidentally, young men...
...it will not do, however, to pretend that these are just nice liberal intellectuals and that they do not have ties with extremely unlovely emigre circles abroad...
...The position of Dissent seems odd, considering that it usually shows at least lukewarm support for socialism...
...My point was that if such people could be broken by the totalitarian apparatus, it was mistaken, or inhumane, to expect, or to bemoan the absence of, resistance— with or without the JudenrIlte—from starved, terrorized, defenseless, and unarmed Jews under Hitler's reign...
...Is there really an absence of "vigorous and explicit discussion" of revisionist claims...
...Onesided because it is based on reports by bitter regime and system opponents...
...On the theoretical side, Barrington Moore, Jr...
...As long as people are being punished there for expressing their beliefs, the Yugoslav system is not free...
...Dubious interventions in Latin America may very well—and deservedly— become unpopular, as did the war in Vietnam, but the position Fred Matthews describes goes far beyond the rejection of particular U.S...
...Rather, it involves a positive acceptance of Lenin's theory of imperialism, often in the form of the dependency theory developed by Latin American scholars, as a sufficient explanation of the dynamics of modern state relations...
...Again, to make my position clear, I do support the right of right-wing nationalists to free political expression...
...Yes, there are problems with democratic rights in Yugoslavia...
...Dissent might do worse than run a few solid articles on the real Yugoslavia, and surely the notion that reality is complicated should not be strange to my fellow editors...
...He claimed the Saudis would then buy Nimrod planes from Britain and Mirage fighters from France, and when this happened, Israel would ask the U.S...
...Denitch claims, but mainly from Serbian intellectuals with whom I met in Belgrade...
...Questions of political dissent and civil liberties are more complicated in cases that involve support for armed terrorists or for forcible separation of territory in multi-ethnic communities: there was not a hint of the fact that the Yugoslav authorities' problems with the Albanian nationalists in Kossovo or with the Croat separatists are anything but a matter of repression of political dissent normally and civilly expressed...
...I would have been entirely within my rights to deny it to him when he came up...
...I assume the editors might have wanted some firmer evidence before printing such a charge about Israel, or Britain, or West Germany, or Italy, or Spain—all charged with the use of torture, by the PLO, the IRA, the West German terrorists, or the Red Brigades...
...When he finished, he went back to his seat and the speakers on the platform began their summaries...
...Bromwich attributes the dismissal to Schweitzer's warning of "a drift toward war" with the Soviet Union...
...Those who hold this position see America as the principal if not exclusive villain of contemporary history, and it is probably futile, as well as dangerous to the intellectual integrity of the left, to disguise this view in order to work for an electoral alliance...
...So do Palestinians, despite Israel's attempts to deny that to them...
...While admitting that there are "problems with democratic rights in Yugoslavia" and affirming his own support of "the right of right-wing nationalists to free political expression," Mr...
...Young-Bruehl, I must express to you my dismay over your inaccurate and tendentious report, on page 360 of your book, concerning the Dissent forum on Hannah Arendt's Eichmann book held in 1964...
...As I recall, you and I had one, perhaps two encounters in which you mentioned you were writing your book...
...I'm aware of the prevalence of neo-Leninist views in some fields, especially among younger academics shaped by the "generational" experience of the New Left in the '60s...
...On the one hand, the Yugoslav system is so much freer than that of any other East European state that it does violence to common sense to insist that it is just more of the same...
...You chose not to take up that offer, though taking it up would not have required you to credit automatically everything (or anything) I told you...
...Army, was made during the heat of senatorial debate on the proposed sale of AWACS reconnaissance aircraft and other military equipment to Saudi Arabia...
...At the time it appeared that the Senate would veto the sale...
...The real Yugoslavia, rather than the ideologized caricature created by the "leading dissident Djilas" (presumably elected by the Western press) and the separatist minority of Croat intellectuals, is that of, say, the former editors of Praxis...
...As Am4ry pointed out, Jews have a right to a national identity...
...There is much good sense and theoretical progress in Wrong's piece, notably his reformulation of the Schlesinger cycle theory even though it may stress material factors in electoral choice too heavily...
...Amery's arguments are as fallacious and poorly supported today as they were years ago...
...Daly said Schweitzer was speaking for himself and that his views on a possible backlash did not reflect the views of the NSC...
...Given what you have in your book, I wonder whether you decided as you did because you knew only too well how you wanted that page to read...
...He could not explain exactly how anti-Zionist Jews can be anti-Semites either, offering only the feeble argument that they are "self-hating...
...Whether Yugoslavia is "freer than any East European state"seems irrelevant in this context...
...Denitch does not substantiate his charges with even as much as "several people have told me," although contacts with emigre circles abroad, be they lovely or "unlovely," are among the major "offenses" for which many Yugoslays are now imprisoned, and for excessively long terms at that...
...uninformed because it accepts without any qualification the description of Yugoslav reality by (among other people) right-wing, separatist Croat nationalists...
...Yes, I also believe that there are cases of political repression in Yugoslavia...
...I said nothing about the ruthless Trotsky...
...Schweitzer, in a not-too-subtle warning to Israel and American Jews, added, "I wonder if there isn't going to be some backlash in the U.S...
...but it was not the consequence of any plan or stratagem by the sponsors of the meeting...
...My own information, by the way, came not from "right-wing separatist Croat nationalists," as Mr...
...Reality is complicated, Mr...
...I must say that the sentence about Kazin being "ushered out" has angered me...
...In both cases armed terrorism plays a role...
...But Wrong's analysis of the left's position on foreign policy, however shrewd on the domestic political risk, suggests a great mental distance from the younger generation of academics...
...he had not previously indicated that he wanted the floor...
...We of Dissent have made it a point of principle, and honor, that whenever we hold a public forum, the floor is granted to whoever wishes to participate in the discussion period...
...He spoke as long as he chose to...
...event—I gave him the floor...
...While he pointed to the anti-Semitism in Arab propaganda, he neglected to discuss Israel's internal racism directed against both Asiatic Jews and Palestinians and its unseemly friendship with the South African racists...
...Unfortunately, Amêry confuses the Jewish right to national identity and freedom from persecution with a right to steal the Palestinians' land and convert them into the proletariat and underclass of Israel...
...Amery can hardly be blamed for the perpetuation of his muddled slander, now that he is dead...
...These attacks sound surprisingly like those that Yugoslav officials would mount to justify the repression of intellectuals...
...Peter Daly, the National Security Council spokesman, referred only to these latter comments when the dismissal was announced...
...There is, in fact, a whole school of "postrevisionist" historiography on the origins of the Cold War, which has explored, as the revisionists did not, available Soviet sources and has also made use of new material released under the Freedom of Information Act...
...The atmosphere was permeated with grumblings, innuendoes, and outright accusations that senators opposed to the sale were buckling under pressure from the "Israeli Lobby" and the "Jewish Community...
...Editors: When I caught the title "Anti-Semitism on the Left" in the Winter 1982 Dissent, I looked forward to startling revelations...
...As I suggested in the article, the adoption of these views by the larger liberal-left community, including the Democratic party, would simply work to the advantage of Republicans, and the most right-wing Republicans at that, for there is not the slightest indication that any large segment of the American electorate is prepared to embrace so negative a view of American foreign policy...
...He was not "ushered out"—a phrase that can only mean that he was physically removed or cut short...
...Again, one could have expected in a balanced article the merest mention of the fact that the present dispute between the regime and the Church is over the repeated attempts of the Church to rehabilitate Cardinal Stepinac, who was condemned in the early postwar years for his support of the genocidal Ustashi state during the war, and that the specific Croat intelligentsia the regime has problems with (including some of the former Partisan generals and prominent former Communists) are nationalist separatists rather than liberals or for that matter democrats...
...There is also Robert Maddox's scathing exposure, published in 1973, of the empirical deficiencies and questionable use of sources by revisionist writers (many of whom were not specialists in diplomatic history nor even in a few cases professional historians...
...The atmosphere of this meeting more closely resembled a contentious session of the House of Commons than the usual faculty meeting...
...The vast majority of Yugoslays can travel abroad freely...
...All of the five political trials that I mention in my article were of individuals who have been adopted by Amnesty International as prisoners of conscience and who have neither advocated nor practiced terrorism or violence...
...While these words may have been a factor, the main reason for the dismissal was another segment of Schweitzer's speech...
...As an "old-timer" in the field of human rights, however, it was clear to me that the people about whom I wrote are being persecuted, arrested, or imprisoned for exercising their rights to free expression and free association, as guaranteed by the 1975 Helsinki Accords as well as other legal instruments...
...I was surprised that the editors could do nothing better to fill space than to print what has become part of the standard operating rhetoric of the Begin regime as it plunders Palestinian land...
...The widespread refusal to admit a signficant enemy on the left is more than "a mechanical negation" of "global anti-Communism...
...The same cannot be said of Dissent...
...Amery's equation of anti-Zionism with anti-Semitism is a vicious attack that demonstrates to what depths supporters of Israel must sink in order to defend the indefensible...
...The speech, to the Association of the U.S...
...because Israel will be asking American taxpayers "to buy them out of a threat" they helped bring about...
...Sincerely yours, iRVING HOWE 383 Editors: While your Fall 1981 issue was most stimulating, it did revive a disturbing question: is the liberal-left community so sharply divided along generational lines as to prevent serious engagement in political action or even debate...
...Denitch and I do not share the same concept of human rights...
...In discussing the AWACS issue, Schweitzer said, if the Saudi arms package is blocked, the U.S...
...The exchange between Irving Howe and Ronald Radosh, while encouraging at first glance, doesn't dig very deeply into the question of the possibility and necessity of representative government...
...for help to meet the new threat, present a "list" of weapons it wanted, and ask Keeping the Record Straight The following letter was sent to Elizabeth Young-Bruehl, author of a recently published biography of Hannah Arendt, published by Yale University Press...
...Dependency theory," after a long run, has also begun to get its lumps—rather belatedly, it seems to me, for the political implications it supposedly suggests rest on a doubtful counterfactual assumption, namely, that dependent areas would, if left alone, have conformed to the Japanese model of economic development...
...Imagine for a moment Dissent running an article (with all due respect for the fact that signed articles do not necessarily represent the view of anyone but the author) about Israel based for the most part on interviews with PLO supporters and their lawyers and stating that "some people also claim that political prisoners are subjected to torture...
...Young-Bruehl has still not favored us with a reply...
...It does not help the many dedicated democrats inside and outside the Yugoslav party and the political system to run one-sided oversimplifications about the very complicated terrain where they will have to continue the good fight...
...The revisionist historiography of the Cold War is now orthodoxy among historians, according to its most influential leader, William Appleman Williams...
...I spoke about Isaac Deutscher, Trotsky's biographer, who reported that in Vorkuta, Siberia (the Gulag) a group of prisoners, experienced oppositional Bolsheviks and some non-Bolshevik leftists, went on a hunger strike during the late thirties against the Stalinist authorities...
...Charges of racism made against antiZionists are the last rhetorical weapons of a nation that must rely on lies and force to defend its lunacy...
...Denitch, but in this one important area it is refreshingly clear...
...More troubling to me is your sentence that Alfred Kazin was "ushered out with a roar from Lionel Abel...
...But since I wanted to lean over backward in behalf of fairness—and perhaps because I sensed that high-minded writers would appear one day to immortalize this 382 for the "50 percent grant aid that you've given us in the past...
...but everyone who wished to speak was heard out, and no one kept from speaking...
...It appears that Mr...
...and irresponsible because it levels the charge that political prisoners are tortured, a charge based on no more than "several people have told me . . . " that it was so...
...The facts are these: Kazin strode up to the platform after the discussion period was closed by the chairman, that is, me...
...Editors: The complicated, long struggle for democratization of the political and economic system in Yugoslavia is not made easier by one-sided, uninformed, and irresponsible articles like the one by Jeri Laber on "Human Rights in Yugoslavia" (Dissent, Spring 1982...
...William Appleman Williams is surely not the most reliable person to pronounce judgment on whether his own opinions have become an "orthodoxy among historians...
...workers strike without legal penalties, sharp and broad debate can be found in the Yugoslav journals and press, and the tendency is for the democratic "space" to increase...
...These tough politicals gave in, cold, starved, defeated...
...but there is not a hint in the Laber article about these problems...
...Presumably by political torture we do not mean occasional individual abuse of prisoners, which I am sure occurs in all systems, but a policy of having political prisoners tortured...
...March 21, 1982 Dear Ms...
Vol. 29 • July 1982 • No. 3
