Underground Notes

...Solzhenitsyn is quoted as writing: "Let there be an authoritarian system, but one based not on hatred but on altrui s m . " This moves Mihajlov to declare: " S o l z h e n i t s y n is verily the Great Witness, but it was not his destiny to comprehend the meaning of his own existence...

...The attack upon Solzhenitsyn leads directly from Mihajlov's conception of freedom in a totalitarian state, a conception which really has two parts...

...This is the point at which MihajIov breaks with Solzhenitsyn...

...the authoritarian is served by the idea...

...The artist interprets everything in terms of his idea...

...In this sense, ideology may indeed have a "liberating" effect in totalitarian and authoritarian countries, which betray ideology for the sake of power...

...After its publication, he lost his lecturing post at Zagreb University and was soon a f t e r sent to prison for nine Deborah Davis is a journalist whose first book, Katharine the Great, a study of the political power of the Washington Post and its owner, was published last year...

...Ideology shapes the external world, religion releases man's inner truth...

...the idea is his end...

...that any political system which is dependent upon the persecution of intellectuals is totalitarian in nature...

...Remember me in your prayers...

...The book's appearance in Yugoslavia in 1974 again resulted in a prison sentence for Mihajlov, this time a seven-year term...

...and that any freedom from political domination resides, in part, in spiritual strength_9 These are the beliefs informing the essays of Underground Notes...

...But, as Mihajlov makes clear in the book's final essay, "Mystical Experiences in the Labor Camps~" the highest level of thought under conditions of repression is not ideological, but religious, in nature_9 30 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR OCTOBER 1980 Inner s t r e n g t h , and political strength as well, can in such conditions only derive from a belief in God...

...months, having been found guilty of "abus[ing] the freedom of expression which exists in Yugoslavia...

...The f e d e r a l b u d g e t , says Mr...

...that totalitarianism is therefore no different whether of the Left or of the Right...

...According to Mihajlov, the theocrat believes in an authoritarianism based upon altruism, upon the principles outlined in the Gospels, and believes that the only thing wrong with Soviet authoritarianism is that it is grounded in the wrong authoritarian principles_9 And here is where he feels Solzhenitsyn is mistaken: "The issue is not at all ideology, or that, in Solzhenitsyn's view, t h e . . , leaders in the Soviet Union are aiming at false ideals guided by a false ideology_9 The issue is that they do not follow any ideology, and their one and only goal has always been power...

...but here too the divergence between Mihajlov and Soizhenitsyn e n d s - - a s well it might...

...The artist serves the idea...

...At the time of his second sentencing, Mihajlov was a devoted and committed socialist, although he complained during his trial that "we intellectuals of socialist societies feel like t r a i t o r s when we speak the t r u t h . " During his second term in prison he underwent a conversion of sorts: He came to understand that truth and "so-called socialism" are natural enemies...

...Lambro found nearly 14,000 audit reports "gathering dust on government shelves, even though they document the loss of $4.3 billion annually in unauthorized use of federal funds...

...El UNDERGROUND NOTES Mihajlo Mihajlov / Catzaras Brothers / 16.00 Deborah Davis I n 1965 a young Yugoslav writer named Mihajlo Mihajlov published a book on Soviet cultural and literary life called Moscow Summer...

...but only religion, the conviction that before God all men are equal, can be the basis of a secular democracy...

...In 1968 he published again, this time a collection of essays criticizing certain Soviet writers for acting as propagandists rather than writing about what they surely knew to be true of the Soviet s t a t e . For this book, Russian Themes, he went to jail for four and a half years...

...No agency head or program officer wants to admit that t h e r e is fraud under his jurisdiction, so even when bureaucrats do act on the audit reports, they tend to resolve discrepancies in favor of the g r a n t e e or contractor...

...But in order to describe just what it is that compels the totalitarian regime to do battle with a r t i s t s , Mihajlov must first address the unusual relation of a t o t a l i t a r i a n regime to the minds of the men over which it rules_9 The artist's understanding of truth, Mihajlov says in Underground Notes, lies in his devotion to an idea--to a religion, for example, or, more f r e q u e n t l y , to an ideology...

...He doesn't buy the "public interest" myth that shields government from the critical perspective that journalists apply to the private sector...

...In "Some Timely Thoughts," the most intellectually daring of the essays in Underground Notes, Mihajlov chastises Solzhenitsyn for his fascination with, and support for, authoritarianism, as expressed in Solzhenitsyn's Letter to the Soviet Leaders...

...And each has testified against the evils of the country he loved: Solzhenitsyn by recreating totalitarianism brick by brick, Mihajlov by weaving the experiences of life under totalitarian domination into a compelling moral and political vision...

...And even as I say this, I am about to get involved in the fall campaign, breaking yet another resolution and sacrificing several weeks of good company and good digestion for the umpteenth time, with my eyes disgustingly wide open...

...But a totalitarian regime is concerned only with the maintenance of its power, and so it uses ideas as a means to power...

...His expos~ of government waste focuses on Washington--Fat Paul Craig Roberts, a columnist for the Wall S t r e e t J o u r n a l , is Senior Fellow in Pohtical Economy at the Center for Strategic and International Studies at Georgetown University, THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR OCTOBER 1980 31...

...He was, however, released three years later as a result of the Helsinki accords and has since emigrated to the United States...

...Its republication now p r e s e n t s another opportunity for taking a look at Mihajlov's important, and sometimes unusual, ideas_9 I n Underground Notes, Mihajlov writes: "The great majority of the artists who lost their lives in prison camps or those who are still there _9 . . have never been political opponents of the regime in the Western sense...

...They were devoted to art . . . . Looked at from the standpoint of maintaining a totalitarian dictatorship, the persecution of a r t i s t s is wholly justified...

...For we should remember that, in choosing to speak the truth in a part of the world inimicable to it, both men risked their lives for the highest moral principles...

...In that sense at least, whatever their differences concerning the proper arrangements of the " e x t e r n a l w o r l d , " they_ stand on common ground...

...One true a r t i s t is more dangerous to a t o t a l i t a r i a n regime than any political adversary...

...Mihajlov writes: The struggle taking place between man and the forces of evil and death is least of all a strictly political struggle . . . . [l]t is the Christians who are truly political, in the sense that it is they who undermine the very essence of totalitarian rule, i.e., the belief in the unlimited power of external circumstances [to] direct man's inner world...

...Here then, in the idea of a transcendent, spiritual "inner truth," Mihajlov's political order finds its moral foundation...

...Lambro, contains $100 billion a year in waste, fraud, and mismanagement (that's an amount equal to the entire f e d e r a l budget of John Kennedy's second year in office) and from all appearances it is not only going to continue but it is going to get worse...

...But he is also a shrewd, humorous political tactician with a real zest for nuts-and-bolts campaigning...

...Greenfield is a political lost s o u l - - a hopeless liberal whose ideological time has come and gone...

...Mihajlov's psychological profile of "Homo sovieticus," which appeared in Moscow Summer, is a p e r f e c t r e n d e r i n g of the abuse of ideology by those in control of a totalitarian state: "[He is] honest, sensitive, pleasant in his personal life, but p r e p a r e d for the g r e a t e s t servilities in the name of a 'higher idea'_9 . . . This was in vain, however, because petty fanatics . . . can in no way understand what it means to serve an idea...

...City itself---and it takes a fat book of 405 pages of facts and examples just to scratch the surface...

...When Underground Notes first came out in this country four years ago it received very little notice (although it was reviewed in these pages by Maurice Friedberg in April of 1977...

...Playing to Win concent r a t e s on the game r a t h e r than the results that follow victory and it is full of good practical advice as far as it goes--more than a few laughs, too...

...T]he freedom to serve ideo l o g y , " he writes at one point, "would be a great step toward liberat i o n . " According to Mihajlov, the free man is able to believe in ideas that are separate from the state, and is therefore able to judge the state's manipulation of power...

...It's well worth reading if you are one of those poor beasts afflicted with the campaign virus though, personally, I would recommend a religious retreat or a month in the country as a preferable t r e a t m e n t for that p a r t i c u l a r complaint...

...Mihaj!ov's well-argued--but highly debatable-point is that Solzhenitsyn, by advocating any kind of authoritarianism, unconsciously supports the bondage to which he acted as the " G r e a t Witness" in The Gulag Archipelago...

...Congress turns a blind eye because it is too busy pushing the agencies to " g e t out the f u n d s . " Moreover, since many of the progra/ns are vote-buying frauds from FAT CITY Donald Lambro Regnery/Gateway / $12.95 Paul Craig Roberts Donald Lambro, a Washington correspondent for UPI, is an unusual journalist...

...General Accounting Office auditors regularly turn up billions of dollars of fraud and mismanagement, but their reports are usually ignored by program officials and higher-ups...