Capitol Ideas/1980 Forecasts/Teng on Tour/Jonestown Scapegoat
Bethell, Tom
CAPITOL IDEAS by Tom Bethell 1980 Forecasts/Teng on Tour /Jonestown Scapegoat Today one might plausibly predict that Jimmy Carter will be sworn in for a second term in January 1981. My prediction...
...Here is a characteristically Szaszian paragraph: I cannot recall, in the thousands of words I read about the Jonestown affair, a single commentator-journalist, politician, psychiatrist, anyone -characterizing the Reverend Jim Jones as an evil man...
...Both come from the Left...
...At any rate, Reagan v. Kennedy would certainly be an interesting race...
...My prediction is that he won't even be on the ticket in 1980...
...Could he really be the next president...
...Riffraff like this wouldn't even be allowed out onto the street in any self-respecting Communist country...
...If this comes to pass, I shall seriously consider emigrating...
...Lane, and I fully realize how self-serving his public state ments have been, but the evidence for such an accusation has been in the public record for fully 15 years now...
...It has become clear, especially in the past decade, that personal economic freedom (i.e., a measure of capitalism) is the sine qua non of economic growth, and it cannot have escaped Chinese notice that the evidence for this has in particular accumulated in such Far Eastern countries as Taiwan and South Korea (not to mention Japan...
...The birthright of progressive idealism has been thrown away time after time to the spirit of totalitarianism because the exigencies of the moment seemed to demand that...
...Nor will Governor Jerry Brown of California make it to the White House...
...The Reverend Jones, declared Reston, was an "obviously demented man...
...No doubt this means that he won't make it...
...They have everything to do with his having Tom Bethell is Washington editor of Harper's and contributing editor of the Washington Monthly...
...It is hard to agree with Mr...
...The following delicious paragraph by Christopher Dickey appeared in the Washington Post: "While reporters served themselves from an elegant coffee urn and ate danish pastries arrayed on linen-covered tables, members of the Revolutionary Communist Party (USA) stood in front of posters of Mao Tse-tung, Karl Marx and Lenin denouncing Teng as a 'posturing boot-licker and sawed-off pimp' who has sold out to the capitalists...
...An the wake of Jonestown, there seems to have been a kind of unconscious collective decision to put the blame on Mark Lane...
...Brown will be perceived as having similar shortcomings (which I think is not the case: Brown has ideas where Carter has none...
...Thomas Szasz points out in Inquiry that a lot of people, not just Mark Lane, regarded Jones as ''both mentally healthy and morally admirable during the weeks and days immediately preceding the massacre," but changed their minds on November 19 and thereafter found him to have been a "madman," "paranoid," or "psychotic...
...As an addendum to my column last month on Jonestown, and in line with my comments above about the relative truth-telling capacities of liberals and socialists, I would like to draw attention to a couple of fairly honest statements about Jonestown...
...Carter wanted to be president and now he has been president...
...Carter brought no particular agenda to the presidency, save the peculiar notion, not shared by the electorate, that government needs to be made more "efficient...
...He won't run again...
...James Reston's judgment of Jones was sadly typical...
...After quoting the opinion of "one of the most prominent members of the Carter Administration," according to whom the Jonestown massacre was a symptom of ' 'mass lunacy in an age of emptiness," Reston delivered the craven diagnosis that liberal intellectuals, when faced with evil, instinctively issue...
...The difficulty is that Jones has already been declared "crazy" by the nearly unanimous media consensus, and thus exonerated from responsibility...
...A he most noteworthy thing about Teng Hsiao-ping's visit to Washington was the sudden emergence, out of the American heartland, of an ugly mob of Maoist rioters, who staged a pitched battle with police in front of the White House...
...It is impossible to "call" the Republican race at the moment, although Ronald Reagan is now considered the likely winner...
...Their discreet little war on capitalism was coming along so nicely and now...oh, no, 900 million more fires to put out...
...it is possible that Brown even understands something about how the private sector works...
...There are worse things in life than being an ex-president...
...In fact, he fulfilled his mission on November 3, 1976, the day after the election...
...What I would like to know, in light of the news from China, is what has gone on in the hearts and minds of our liberals: the ones who dream that ultimately they will live in a capitalist-free society but realize that it is not quite respectable to say this, and so barricade themselves behind furbish louseworts, snail darters, and other environmental red-herring...
...It is not a new story for the Left...
...Senator Kennedy is the big imponderable, and I confess to an awful sense of foreboding whenever I think of the man...
...This was the sad, horrific saga of the pro-Gommunist left, which ended in apologizing for the most ghastly acts of Stalin...
...One can imagine how disturbing this prospect must be to leftists everywhere...
...We betray our knowledge that ends and means are always interrelated and that we cannot achieve a socialist democracy through authoritarian-and sometimes criminal-shortcuts...
...When on form Szasz-a psychiatrist often very critical of pscyhiatrists-is a commentator almost of genius: an exhili-rating breath of fresh air in our currently fetid intellectual climate...
...So I don't mind the rock-throwing revolutionary riffraff that came to Washington: At least they are honest about their feelings...
...The perception of Brown as an unreliable opportunist will grow as Carter drops away even further in popular esteem in 1979- It is unfortunate, of course, that Carter's poor performance has done so much to discredit the political "outsider" such as Brown...
...The gist of Brill's complaint, as also of John Crewdson's long article in the New York Times, was that Lane changed his mind about Jones and Jonestown after the massacre...
...Their leader was one Bob Avakian, the 35-year-old son of a Democratic superior court judge in Oakland, California, a veteran of the 1964 "Free Speech" movement in Berkeley, and a "high school football star...
...He would therefore leave the White House with no particular sense of mission incomplete...
...economy works, and with no ideas at all as to what the U.S...
...Why go through the unpleasantness of four more years...
...arrived at the White House without the slightest-not even the vaguest-idea of how the U.S...
...I hold no brief for Mr...
...One can see why they might very well be upset by developments in China, however...
...Mad, insane, crazy, paranoid and variations on that theme-that is the consensus...
...And from In These Times, the "independent socialist newspaper" published by the Institute for Policy Studies, a Washington organization of strongly Marxist inclination, there was at least an expression of concern-a reluctance to take the all-too-easy "madman" escape-route: Too often those of us on the socialist left will support movements, such as the People's Temple, and overlook their undemocratic behavior, because we feel "they are on our side "....We embrace the idea that the ends justify the means...
...The first, by Robert Scheer, appeared in the final issue of New Times magazine: Jonestown all seemed so reasonable, except for one horribly unreasonable fact: the man was a totalitarian...
...Carter's shortcomings have nothing to do with his being a Georgia "farmer" (which, alas, turns out to mean not a farmer at all but the operator of a federally-subsidized peanut warehouse...
...I have not seen anything comparable from our "liberal" commentators (who, I fear, have dissembled so long that they are now barely capable of telling truth from lies...
...It seems quite likely, then, that China will indeed take the "capitalist road," although the Chinese will no doubt have the good sense to continue calling it Communist something-or-other to keep the college professors happy...
...role in world affairs ought to be...
...The day after members of his group had smashed windows at the Chinese chancellery, Avakian held a press conference claiming that "we are working for a civil war...
...And with all his shortcomings, Reagan would have a good chance of winning it, too...
...The demonstrators were part of 400 members of a Maoist group called the Revolutionary Communist Party," according to a story in the Washington Post...
...They came here Monday from cities all over the country to protest the state visit...
...He has found out that it is not a particularly pleasant job, that it is one in which you make a lot of enemies...
...It is worth noting the reason why we still need a scapegoat for the Jonestown massacre when one (Jones himself) is so readily at hand...
...The recent anti-Lane articles in the press (including a mean-spirited piece in Esquire by Steven Brill) undoubtedly stem from a desire to find a scapegoat for Jonestown...
...Capitalism, it would appear, appeals to the oriental mind...
...Avakian, but one must admire his candor...
...My God, 900 million more capitalists to deal with...
Vol. 12 • March 1979 • No. 3
