Among the Intellectualoids / The Thugs and Susan Sontag
Lapset, Seymour Martin
boom, reducing the obligations of the welfare state and shaving the "political power" of privileged workers by increasing competition. "The worry about e n t e r p r i s e zones ts not...
...It sounds like toothpaste and Seven Up, looked n a u s e a t i n g , and t a s t e d wonderful...
...But once in power, the utopians, as Marx anticipated, turn into oppressive authoritarian rulers of impoverished societies...
...Rosa Luxemburg, also noted that "under such fatal conditions even the most gigantic idealism and the most storm-tested revolutionary energy are incapable of realizing democracy and socialism but only distorted attempts at either...
...The same motives that led certain people to look to Communism to improve the situation of the masses in the Soviet Union and China still generate support for Communist-led movements in various less-developed countries+ Utopian socialism remains a live force in the Third World, if not...
...Newsweek got into the backfield last year with a "'Periscope" item to the effect that President Reagan would deliver a State of the World speech at Notre Dame University, the same forum from which Jimmy Carter had announced in 1977 that he was inoculating American foreign policy against an "inordinate fear of Communism...
...The regimes of Salazar, Franco, and the Greek colonels could give way to democratic ones because they were r e a c t i o n a r y and self: interested rather than revolutionary...
...Next came an anteroom, a living room, really, having no discernible purpose except the display of painti n g s - a l l in ornate frames, and all in execrable taste, though that, and the profusion in which they were hung, was t h e i r charm_9 Last, the main dining room, with room for five hundred ff there was room for one...
...I doubt it...
...Eesh evidence has come my way of a narrow category of news that is almost always destined to be downplayed...
...But Chambers's associations were idiosyncratic...
...Marx emphasized that an effort to create socialism in a poor or less-developed society would inevitably result in the re-creation of an oppressive class-ridden social system...
...7] THE THUGS AND SUSAN SONTAG by Seymour Martin L i p s e t A t a rally of left-wing intellectuals in support of Solidarity, held in New York on February 13th, Susan Sontag c r e a t e d a stir by emphasizing the similarities between Fascism and Communism...
...The evidence of the similarities between Fascism and Communism has always been there...
...One was to a "bailout" provision he found too s t r i n g e n t , the other to an easier " r e s u l t s " test in proving that an election procedure discriminates against blacks or ttispanics...
...In 1981, the French Communist Party allied itself with right-wing demands that foreign immigrants be deported...
...Western society is obviously far from ideal, it is severely inegalitarian, it discriminates against various minorities, its political democracy is flawed...
...The linkage between Communism and Fascism, emphasized by Susan Sontag, was made by Communists during the period of the Hitler-Stalin pact (1939-1941...
...A report that prime farmlands aren't disappearing...
...CLOSING TIME by Richard Brookhiser I f you have never lived in New York, only visited it, there is still a good Chance you ate at Liichow's, and a good chance you didn't much like i t , at least as f a r as food is concerned...
...Reagan had objections, it turned out...
...Those s i m i l a r i t i e s include a commitment to iaational development a n d / o r recons t r u c t i o n u n d e r a highly, centralized and a u t h o r i t a r i a n p a r t y e l i t e , a r e s t o r a t i o n of the authority of the state, an effective program of class and category collaboration within the confines of a national economic plan, exclusive and systematic training of the youth of the nation in conformity with a secular ideology characterized by a relatively specific constellation of exclusive social and political beliefs, a unitary party monopoly of the means of coercion and communication, and leadership by charismatic or pseudocharismatic leaders charged with enormous responsibilities and endowed with prestigious powers...
...worse, so did the theaters...
...That is more than the Washington Post and a lot of other papers did...
...7"he category: good news about the environment...
...Those who hated America or Britain or France were really not i n t e r e s t e d in how ordinary people were treated under Communism...
...They must then blind themselves to the reality of that paradise...
...Supporters of the faith have been unmoved, or unaware of Communist reliance on racism and religious bigotry...
...I think it must have been at Liichow's, his favorite refuge and rostrum to the end...
...But Liichow's made me think of it...
...9 Population growth doesn't threaten mass starvation across most of the globe next year...
...And yet finally you didn't go to eat...
...Marx polemicized bitterly against utopian socialists, people who sought to institute socialism under conditions of scarcity...
...Forget that Pollyannish tripe...
...Stalin actually delivered a toast to Hitler, saying: "I know how much the German people loves its Fiihrer...
...Without the Skelton story serving as a catalyst, Reagan might have stuck with a complaisant policy on voting rights...
...The trouble was that Attorney General" William French Smith learned of the Skekon report the day it appeared from a Justice Department official in Los Angeles, and he was furious...
...And she asked why "many of u s - - . . . I include myself--did not understand the nature of Communist tyranny," when 4migr4s from ComSeymour Martin Ltpset s the Caroline S. G. Munro Professor of Political Science and Sociology, and Senior Fellow of the Hoover Institution on War, Revolution and Peace, Stanford University...
...In terms of making a beeline to journalistic oblivion, this genre of news ranks just below evidence that paring welfare actually spurs the poor toward economic advancement and confirmation that the Soviets are violating some limitation imposed by an arms control treaty...
...Most of the participants were sharply critical, attacking her for giving aid and comfort to reaction...
...Seating himself to a Liichow's dinner, he would position his stomach four inches from the table top, and stop when they touched...
...There is a phenomenon in Washington reporting which my friend Thomas DeFrank of New.sweek refers to as "getting in the backfield...
...What is missing is the willingness to recognize that Western society, including the United States, is more humane, more democratic, more open to progressive social change than any and all of the regimes that call themselves Communist...
...9 Setdel of Pilsner, and he was bringing to a close prestissimo the most amazing _9 monologue . . . . Berlioz and the question of the clang tint of the viola . . . why Nietzsche had to leave Sils Maria between days in 1887 . . . the precise topography of the warts of Liszt . . . what to drink when playing C h o p i n . . . whether a girl educated at Vassar could ever really learn to love . . . what George Moore said about German bathrooms . . . the genuine last words of Walt Whitman . . . L i i c h o w ' s stood at the intersection of 14th Street and Irving Place, in a pair of red brick townhouses, with balconied windows and trim--scallops and other doodads--painted to look gilded...
...Currently, the Soviet Union not only restricts the access of Jews to highlevel education and professions, but it also publishes vitriolic anti-Semitic books for mass distribution...
...a teenager, taken by an older woman, a neighbor and mentor, "from [whom] 1got my German, in fact, all my languages, my Europe, and much else...
...you went to go...
...More recendy, George Skekon of the Los Angeles Times...
...It is hard to understand how there still can be informed and intelligent people who refuse to recognize that Communism in every form is oppressive...
...Demographics is supposed to haye done Liichow's in...
...Mencken, another patron, remembered a meal with the music critic James Huneker: We sat down to luncheon at one o'clock...
...The National Research Council found that its previous estimates of ozone deterioration had been exaggerated...
...J u s t inside the door, a thoug.htful management placed a warning to the f a i n t h e a r t e d in the form of Diamond Jim Brady's scales...
...Visits to the Soviet Union, to China, to Cuba, to Vietnam by successive generations did not dispel the belief...
...The immediate neighborhood slowly became nondescript, 32 THt- AMERICAN SPECTATOR JUNE 1982...
...Many joined " M a r x i s t " movements...
...The worry about e n t e r p r i s e zones ts not that they will fail, but that they won't," he concluded...
...a thirty-foot ceiling and skylight...
...Automobile fumes aren't the cause of yaws, psoriasis, and unsightly warts...
...In 1945, the Italian Communist Party instructed its members to "seek out every former Fascist and offer him membership in our party with a guarantee of amnesty if he joins us...
...In The German Ideology, he wrote that the high "'development of productive- forces is absolutely necessary as a practical premise [for socialisml: for tile reason that without it only want is made general, and with want the struggle fi~r necessities and all the old filthy business [the German word was Scbezsse] would necessarily be 30 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JUNE 1982 reproduced...
...In spite of the absolute power held by Stalin, Mao, Tito, and other leaders, and the considerable discrepancies between the ways of life of the party elite and the masses, they still insisted they had seen a society dedicated to equality and freedom...
...in the West...
...I should, therefore, like to drink to his health...
...Unfortunately, they were right, as the history of the Soviet Union, China, Vietnam, and other Communist nations demonstrates...
...A night at Liichow's was like dining in a time capsule--the nineteenth century in the overripe, overstuffed, underexercised flesh...
...Jean-Francois Revel notes that the party "justifies [racism] with the same arguments as the British National Front...
...She concluded with the statement: "Communism is in itself a variant, the most successful variant of fascism, fascism with a human face...
...Bury it or spike it...
...and live music, a battle of the bands, no less, a string trio in white tie switching off with an oompah band in Alpine caps and Lederhosen, stumping from table to table and blaring brassily...
...Jews and other minority nationalities were openly persecuted in the Soviet Union after World War ll...
...Whittaker Chambers went there as Richard Brookbtser is editor at National Review and wezgbs 175 pounds...
...He even recommends Franz Borkenau's unorthodox Marxist- interpretation of fascism as a 'transitional form of modernizing dictatorship.'" A. James Gregor, a noted student of Fascism, emphasizes that the "structural similarities shared by the Fascist and Stalinist states did not escape the attention of Marxists and non-Marxists alike...
...in Christmas season, the l a r g e s t indoor tree you'd ever seen, artificial (which was a minus), but made in Oberammergau (which made it plus again...
...The council, an arm of the National Academy of Sciences,also moderated its assertion that ozone depletion is linked to increases in melanoma, an often-fatal skin cancer, and to damaged food C r o p s . " You have to give the Times credit for passing on this good news at all...
...For sure...
...Sontag's talk was booed by the audience_9 Two New York journals, the Sobo News and the Nation, published symposia by prominent intellectual figures evaluating her analysis...
...For the decades which gave Lfichow's the ambiance it so jealously p r e s e r v e d were not the tumultuous twenties and thirties, but the spaciousfin-de-si~cle...
...Nor was he unique: August Liichow, the founder, required four waiters to hoist him upstairs to his room by meal's end...
...Now, 1 wonder what would have happened if the National Research Council had found that the ozone layer was eroding even faster than previously thought, perhaps twice as fast, and that the link to increases in melanoma was s t r e n g t h e n e d . The same sort of highly publicized environmental scare stories about the ozone layer that we saw several years ago, maybe...
...it will never be perfect...
...and o f . c o u r s e b e e r - - c h i e f l y draft b e e r , in liter Seidels, though my favorite was Berhnerweisser, a kind of beer cocktail which started with a puddle of r a s p b e r r y syrup in a fat, round g l a s s , to which was added a bottle of pale, almost tasteless ale...
...When it was founded, the east side of 14th Street was the double heart of the theater district, and the German community...
...In short, as analytic concepts, "both fascism and the variants of Marxism that today receive so much attention constitute species of a single genus: totalitarianism...
...Communists may not yield power, because they believe they represent historic truth and virtue, much like the Nazis...
...Makes you wonder, though, who's running the show...
...Mihiel...
...It occurs when you report a story too soon, thus causing it not to happen m quite the manner that you had reported or, worse, not happen at all...
...Those who have searched for an ideological justification for opposing capitalism, in terms of a struggle between absolute good and absolute evil, have great difficulty in admitting that Western society is better than its major "leftist" political opponent...
...9 . + a sense of history between the World Wars {Chambers wrote years later] . . . . the soldiered platform at Duren, the train running for miles with the smiling Senegalese holding their machine guns on it from the overheads, Nazis, Communists, the fail of nations, a wedge of wall standing above what had been St...
...The Communists assumed that a Nazi regime was preferable to a Social Democratic one, since it would eliminate their socialist competitors and open the door for a subsequent Communist takeover...
...the Czech regime staged a public trial of Jews in the 1950s and continues to give voice to anti-Jewish sentiments...
...The martyred leader of the German Revolution of 1919...
...Those who have lost or never had a religious faith, a belief in a Kingdom of Heaven, must project an earthly paradise...
...For even in its nonagenarian deCadence,~it offered a handful of splendid dishes, unobtainable elsewhere--saddle of venison, _which melted in the mouth from the consistency of filet mignon to the consistency of zabaglione, with lingonberries, sour cream, and chestD nut puree on the side...
...News like that can't be taken seriously...
...The ideal is the enemyof thegood...
...Polish Communists repeatedly have appealed to deep-rooted antiSemitic prejudices on many occasions from the fifties through the eighties...
...Yet they, and the parties in which they enlisted, ignored a basic dictum laid down by Karl Marx, that economic abundance, a state which could only be reached in a highly ad~,,anced industrial society, is an essential prerequisite for socialism...
...Brady, a r o b b e r baron and philant h r o p i s t (he endowed the James Buchanan Brady Urological Institute at Johns Hopkins) would be considered bulimic by today's standards, but in fact he followed a regimen, which the s c a l e s . h e l p e d enforce...
...Writing in February 1982, Arnold Beichman has called attention to " t h e revisionist thesis of fascism current among Soviet and Soviet-bloc social scientists . . . . According to Boris R. Lopukhov the contemporary communist view regards fascism as progressive . . . . Another Soviet theoretician, Alexander Galkin, says that fascism arose 'spontaneously' during the crisis conditions that followed the First World War...
...The French Communist Party applied to the Nazi occupiers of their country for permission to publish a party newspaper in Paris, justifying the request on the grounds that they were also opposed to the Allied imperialists...
...Walter Ulbricht, who was to become president of the postwar East German Communist state, wrote in the Communist publication, Die Welt, in February 1940, that those "who intrigue against the friendship of the German and Soviet people .are enemies of the German people," and warned the German workers that if England won the war they would face "the muzzling of the workers' press, the establishment of concentration camps, and special laws against the workers...
...The people continue ro suffer as much as, or often more than,, in the past...
...as he left, he would weigh himself to make sure he had not exceeded 350 pounds...
...So furious, in fact, that he stormed over to the White House and talked the President into changing his mind...
...To that state had Liichow's almost come--almost, not quite...
...The best we can do is to try to make society better...
...The analogy is to a defensive lineman bursting into the backfield and upsetting a running play before it gets started...
...And even earlier, in 1932, the German Communists supported a Nazi-initiated referendum to vote the Social Democratic government of Prussia out of office...
...For Liichow's--founded in 1882, and moving uptown to new quarters this y e a r - - h a d become, in its old age, something perilously close to a tourist trap: one of those New York restaurants like Mama Leone's, or J o e ' s Pier 52, which specialize in high p r i c e s , indifferent food, and hectic s e r v i c e , and which manage year a f t e r year to pay the r e n t because of their famous names and the unwariness of visiting bumpkins...
...What...
...But Jaruzelski and his minions are only retracing the footsteps of those who crushed the movement of the Kronstadt sailors for more freedom in 1921, who killed millions in the Soviet Union in the 1930s on a scale not seen before in the modern world, who murdered Trotskyists and other leftists in Vietnam in the 1940s and 1950s, who suppressed the workers' rebellion in East Germany in 1953, and who destroyed democratic movements in Hungary and Czechoslovakia in 1956 and 1968...
...Consequently, the White House announced a policy on the Voting Rights Act quite different from the one that Skehon had, quite accurately at the time, reported...
...He is also co-editor of Public Opinion magazine and the current president of the American Political Science Association...
...The Soviet system with its vision of an egalitarian social system has been the obvious choice for those looking for an ideal against which they can invidiously compare their own nation...
...Many on the Left are now outraged by the suppression of Solidarity and the effort to create a more democratic Poland...
...Reagan saw the item, then quashed a scheme to have him give such a speech at Notre Dame...
...The council, the Times reported, "cut by more than half its previous estimate of ho.w much the e a r t h ' s protective layer of ozone was being depleted by manmade chlorofluorocarbons released into the atmosphere, although it indicated it still saw reasons for concern...
...Sontag wonders why she and her left-wing friends "were not responding to the t r u t h . " The answer is simple: Many have been so opposed to conditions in their own society that they must project their image of an ideal social system onto foreign soil, onto the closed world of Communism...
...Yet many, including some Jews, have continued to support the extension of Communism to other countries, particularly to those in the Third World...
...Why didn't we informed and intelligent people hear them before, when they were telling us exactly what they tell us now...
...nooks and cul-de-sacs scattered here and there...
...characterized by a g r e a t e r concentration of elite power than exists in an)' Western social system...
...munist countries had been telling them the truth for many decades...
...Their rulers, who p u r p o r t to believe they are serving the people's interests, are more inclined to use terror to foster t h e s e i n t e r e s t s than are those who are only concerned with maintaining power...
...1 didn't start out to.write this...
...A typical Brady repast is said to have consisted of several dozen oysters, halfa dozen broiled crabs, double turtle soup, six or seven lobsters, two orders of terrapin, two ducks, steak, v e g e t a b l e s , p a s t r i e s , a two-pound box of candy, and a gallon of orange juice...
...Will the Polish events end the IHE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JUNEI982 51 appealofCommunism...
...Well, bury it is what the New York Time.~ did in April with a report that the ballyhooed deterioration of the ozone layer in the e a r t h ' s atmosphere is falling behind schedule...
...The Germans left decades ago, without a trace...
...goose, served in chunks that seemed all bone, but what w a s n ' t was worth the work...
...But the politics of moderation, of the possible, of the attainable, continues to strike some as too insignificant, as unworthy...
...Mihaly Vadja, a member of the Hungarian Academy of Science, goes further in attributing to Mussolini's fascism a 'progressive solution' to Italy's backward industrial structure...
...At six, when I had to go, the waiter was hauling in his tenth (or was it twentieth...
...This, despite the fact that a lessening of an environmental danger is truly man bites dog, which is the stuff of news itself...
...He reported, exclusively, that Reagan was ready to sign an extension of the Voting Rights Act in any form in which it might reat:h him, even with several toughened provisions that he opposed...
...mirrored walls and dark wood paneling...
...an unsung but quite capable and eminently fair-minded White House correspondent, slipped into the backfield...
...So, even at the end, it was possible to go to LLichow's without f e e l i n g swindled ol: sickened...
...Stalin used anti-Semitism in his fight against Trotsky as early as the 1920s...
...Those who seek Utopias are the true villains, and this is as true for leftists as it is for rightists_9 The bad can be made much worse...
...And Reagan d o e s n ' t change his mind very often...
Vol. 15 • June 1982 • No. 6
