Innocents of the Ir/est: Travels Through the Sixties
Colebrook, Joan
INNOCENTS OF THE WEST: TRAVELS THROUGH THE SIXTIES Joan Colebrook / Basic Books / $15.00 Jane Larkin Crain Australian-born novelist and journalist Joan Colebrook captures in this chronicle of...
...Again and again in her far-ranging commentary on the United States, Latin America, Europe, and the Middle East, she returns to her central theme: namely, that "clash of ideologies which is the big battle of the century...
...Colebrook seems not so much to state as to uncover the realities of the worlds she is investigating...
...but as well by some of her establishment and many of her intellectuals and professionals-a sense of guilt is defacing truth...
...But when Mrs...
...To be sure, she is precise in her analysis of the spirit of the New Left as one of hostility to American values, and of the socially disruptive machinations of leftist activists as ultimately playing into the hands of America's enemies in Moscow and Peking...
...She has an extraordinary ear for the jargon of the times, whether she is recording the conversation of callow, anti-American Parisian students, the semi-literate but dangerously heartfelt "Black Power" expatiations of Boston junkies and prostitutes, or the panegyrics to Cuba of upper-middle-class American teenagers...
...Colebrook, the anti-war movement more than anything else that fanned rage against America's "malevolence...
...Colebrook reflects: Americans not understanding how important they are, how much their dream has meant to the world at large, can think of nothing to do but apologize...
...political prisoners in the Soviet Union given drugs which permanently destroy the brain...
...It was, says Mrs...
...And now that the United States has been declared the enemy, not only by "outside" groups, or by those "inside" groups ideologically opposed to her...
...Colebrook does not share such sentiments...
...As Mrs...
...Colebrook has rendered a tremendously acute and powerful portrait of an era...
...But Mrs...
...the vile excesses of China's so-called Cultural Revolution...
...Unfit teacher!' " In the face of such totalitarian nightmares the West can seem to summon little but diffident demurrals...
...Although Mrs...
...nine- and ten-year-old Cambodian orphans "heaving onto the gallows rope from which dangled their unfortunate teacher, and chanting aloud, 'Unfit teacher...
...As she details this war between the party of liberty on the one hand and the forces of totalitarianism on the other, she focuses especially on the extent to which the depredations of the New Left were inspired and orchestrated by Moscow as part of a "psychostrategy" to undermine the West...
...Her sense of things, stern and righteous in the best way, flies against that pervasive complacency about America's loss of power and prestige in the world that continues to afflict the country's political and intellectual elites...
...dissidents left literally to rot in their own excrement in the dungeons of Havana...
...her intense engagements with friends, prisoners, prostitutes, and diplomats...
...Indeed, the myth of the 1960s as a kind of springtime of peoples lives on, and with it a conviction that unequivocal anti-Communism is somehow politically gauche...
...Colebrook's concerns are ultimately with political culture and ideology, a wealth of literary strategies lends her observations resonance and immediacy...
...Too, her case against the "innocents" of her title-those intellectual and political types who did so much to animate the ideas and assumptions that held sway during the 1960s, all the while poo-pooing the notion that they were in any way influenced by Communist propaganda -is ironclad in its dissection of the seemingly willful political obtuseness of fellow-travelers on the Left...
...and her reflections on matters as diverse as the assassination of Trotsky (occasioned by a visit to the house in Mexico City where he was killed by Stalin's agents), the 1968 General Strike in Paris, racial unease in Great Britain, and the demoralization of Egyptians after the Six Day War...
...Traumatized by unrest at home, vilified around the world, America somehow could not summon the wherewithal to respond effectively to its critics...
...Passage after passage recounts tales of degradation, torture, and death in Communist camps and prisons in Cuba, Eastern Europe, the Soviet Union, China, and Southeast Asia: the brutal suppression of the Prague Spring...
...Colebrook is at her best when she turns her attention to the troubles that beset the United States during the 1960s: the Black Panthers (and racial unrest in general), the assassinations of Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King, the student riots at Columbia, popular responses to the Vietnam war, and the rise and heyday of the New Left...
...government was accused of waging war against "little yellow men in black pajamas," and Ho Chi Minh, in reality a pitiless Stalinist, was sentimentalized and celebrated as a Vietnamese George Washington, America's spirit to fight and win not just the war at hand but perhaps all future wars against Communist aggression was being profoundly undermined...
...With an eye for detail-of landscapes, costume, mannerisms, and nuances of personality-and a knack for conveying a precise sense of place and time, Mrs...
...But it must be said that her specific charges of direct foreign involvement in the internal affairs of the United States, her insinuations that U.S...
...Colebrook sets out to show how much of the racial and other violent political unrest of the 1960s was not most significantly the manifestation of felt discontent among America's underprivileged, nor even a genuine if misguided call for greater social justice by intellectuals and their campus acolytes, but rather part of a carefully calculated Soviet propaganda offensive...
...Begun as a diary on the West Coast in 1964, Innocents of the West records the author's peripatetic journeys through Mexico, Australia, England, and France...
...Colebrook bogs down in breathless intimations of an actual international Communist conspiracy, she does so in an absence of hard evidence that does scant justice to the incandescent grace and brilliance of the book's other cultural and political investigations...
...INNOCENTS OF THE WEST: TRAVELS THROUGH THE SIXTIES Joan Colebrook / Basic Books / $15.00 Jane Larkin Crain Australian-born novelist and journalist Joan Colebrook captures in this chronicle of the 1960s the dreadful spirit of a decade that was to leave the social fabric of the free world "weakened and frayed/' and usher in ' 'an era in which, for the first time, the physical security of the United States" would be placed at risk...
...citizens and Soviet agents conspired toward political violence in America during the 1960s, are not ultimately convincing...
...And while the U.S...
...Needless to say, though, Mrs...
...Unquestionably, Mrs...
...Colebrook's alarm for the future could hardly be more apposite...
Vol. 12 • November 1979 • No. 11
