Voices for Europe (Special Book Review)

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...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...

...What we eat, wear, breathe, and ride in — even what we watch on television...

...2) the first political task is therefore to "destroy the system...

...Between 1970 and 1975, seven major federal regulatory agencies were created and 30 laws making substantial changes in our regulatory framework were enacted...

...Perhaps the tide is shifting...

...On the contrary, it is the reigning orthodoxy in much of the world...

...Today, the Soviet model is not quite a la mode...

...The idea keeps recurring, and, like all irrational ideas, revelations of what it leads to never seem to be sufficient to explode it...

...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...

...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...

...He contends that democratic socialism (which he espouses) can only come about through and in alliance with capitalism...

...but at least the Swedes have understood the meaning of the international market economy and the private sector...

...Elvis Presley was a wonder, and I shall miss him...

...The totalitarian temptation, then, is the willingness to play with dynamite in the delusion of reaching the promised land...

...The Party always prepares for the monopoly of power...

...He then asks, in two very fine chapters well worth the price of the book, whether the liberal democracies are going to destroy themselves...

...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...

...have convinced their Third World epigones is the cause of their countries' problems...

...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...

...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...

...Aron does not, by the way, forget to criticize Christian Democracy and Gaullism...

...34 The American Spectator November 1977...

...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...

...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...

...Fellow-travelling is a way of life in the elegant cafes of the posh neighborhoods...

...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...

...The Communists insist on judging others by their actions, and yet claim they should be judged only by their electoral promises...

...In the third part of the book, Aron asks whether Europe will be a victim of its own weaknesses and self-doubts...

...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...

...The middle road which it claims to have found, between the Soviet model and reformist social democracy, appears dangerous under his scrutiny...

...The result is that criticism of the Soviet Union and of the Party's behavior is muted and selective...

...Sweden, he suggests, is paternalistic and dull, a relic of the Middle Ages in the level of its conformism...

...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...

...A specter, wrote Karl Marx in 1848, is haunting Europe: Communism...

...Perhaps living in the most beautiful city on earth softens the brain...

...The glamour and excess and virtual idolatry that accompanied his rise were possible only in the affluent, media-conscious culture of this land...

...They are thought of as tough 32 The American Spectator November 1977 guys whose hearts are in the right place...

...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...

...He adds that the tactic works well enough: The anti-Communist voices are lowered...

...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 confident of the United States' capacity for survival, because the rule of law and the guarantees of individual liberty remain our strongest national traditions...

...socialists need feel no shame in doing the same, and for the same reason: because Stalinism wants to destroy them too...

...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...

...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...

...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 is even more important to explain our successes...

...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...

...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...

...Aron is not very big on social democracy, even the Swedish variety which is supposed to have worked so well...

...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...

...As always, he starts with the facts, and examines the economic implications of the changes wrought by the recession of 1973...

...Paris, France, has been for a very long time one of the great distilleries of Marxism...

...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...

...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...

...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...

...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...

...He starts with a lucid and thorough summary of Soviet socialism and an analysis of its bankruptcy...

...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 inflation, meanwhile, is a destabilizing factor inevery sector of society...

...Aron points out that it would be nice if more socialists were as opportunistic as the West Germans...

...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...

...Two specters, Aron rephrases Marx, are haunting Europe today: liberty and the Red Army...

...Reporting their existence was wrong if it distracted the public from the great Soviet achievements...

...It is a facile system to believe in, and the danger is that it will engulf the world in permanent stupidity, conflict, and repression...

...The Communists, Revel points out, contribute to this state of mind constantly and adroitly, though from the outside their tactics seem awfully crude...

...The Western governments are simply too weak to take measures which will be unpopular in the short term...

...What may once have been thought of as an instrument for social change quickly became an end in itself...

...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...

...It does not, however, recapitulate what Revel writes...

...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...

...These movements' overlong stay in power, favoritism, cronyism, corruption, and often plain ineptitude have contributed sizably to the fragility of their countries' democratic institutions...

...Ftiaht How can a decision maker in business or government assess the economic, social, legal and political impact of all these regulatory actions...

...It is the refusal to admit that progress is achieved only by building on past progress...

...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...

...he must harbor some deep personal grudge...

...story...

...To read the Communist press, there is no such thing as an honest anti-Communist...

...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...

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...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...

...What if they are given Resources and Equipments, and find ways of denying paper pulp to unfriendly newspapers...

...20036 Name Organzation Address City State Zip Two Wrongs Make Antonin Saili The American Spectator November 1977 33 welfare are insignificant...

...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...

...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...

...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...

...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...

...To Revel, there has never been any real de-Stalinization, because Stalinism is the inevitable creation of a Marxist-Leninist party...

...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...

...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...

...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...

...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...

...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...

...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...

...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...

...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...

...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...

...The point is that nothing is more important to the Communists than the strength of their party...

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...Representatives of capitalism combat Stalinism because it wants to destroy them...

...It is not enough to expose the lies and the failures of the enemy...

...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...

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...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...

...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...

...3) "imperialism" is always and everywhere an extension of American capitalism...

...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...

...Like Revel, he questions how parties claiming to accept political pluralism can at the same time claim a monopoly on the truth...

...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...

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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...

...He considers our chronic inflation to be the principal problem...

...The first takes up the principal topic of Revel's book: "Europe Mystified by Marxist-Leninism...

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...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...

...To me, as to millions of others, he was indeed the King, a part of the background of my life...

...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...

...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...

...Their enterprise is deeply philosophical in the old-fashioned sense, but it obviously has political ramifications...

...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...

...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...

...Raymond Aron's very large work, Plea for Decadent Europe, is divided among three masterfully presented themes...

...In taking this view he is arguing, like many economists, that the West's present difficulties are largely political, or moral...

...the final battle, discant his disciples...

...intelligent or the most unreasonable...

...If Italy's economy can be turned around, the Communists may yet opt to preserve the legality which has served them so well...

...Aron takes a very dim view of "Eurocommunism...

...Italian capitalism is not exactly dynamic...

...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...

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...He made no pretense to brilliance, or to insight, or to anything other than being an entertainer, and in his field he was unexcelled...

...In the second part of the book, Aron examines the reasons why "Europe is unaware of its superiority...

...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...

...The death knell of capitalism, quoth the Protestant Jew in the British Musuem...

...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...

...His motives, it is implied, must be venal...

...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...

...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...

...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...

...he must be in the pay of the CIA or a multinational firm...

...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...

...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...

...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...