Spectator's Journal/Pondering Perestroika
Train, John
munism and American Intellectual Life," was moderated by Kovel, the Hiss prof. Historian Blanche Wiesen Cook was not happy: "We stand morally isolated before the world, allied with South Africa and...
...We've all seen what's been happening in the Baltic countries and Armenia...
...3 1/2...
...Like the young lady who saw "anticommunism as basically a reaction to any kind of horizontality whatsoever...
...It is precisely because we can see why the Russians had no choice that we can be sure the withdrawal is authentic and not a temporary tactical maneuver, like the withdrawals from Hungary and Czechoslovakia before the tanks rolled back in...
...They have never known anything approaching self-rule...
...Mussolini switched over to war production early, and looked fine in his campaigns against Ethiopia, Libya, and so forth...
...Are the Hungarians going to believe in Soviet leadership...
...and make a people free...
...2. Some military analysts underline that the Soviet Union is not yet technically able to manage the most complicated aspects of space defense...
...Nathaniel Lehrmann attended many panels, with a comment for almost every question period...
...Why accept dictation in economic matters from a country that is not only an economic basket case but admits that its whole approach is wrong...
...When every mayor of New York was chosen by Tammany Hall it made little difference who became mayor, any more than it matters who becomes president of Mexico today...
...The Russians are dominated by bureaucrats, not, I suspect, because of Lenin, but because they are Russians...
...he said...
...His book will be an essential source for anyone interested in learning more about this very important subject...
...It's necessary, whether or not it ever really happens...
...more conferences just like this one...
...They will be exceedingly hard to wrestle down...
...You wouldn't do all this unless you meant it...
...Women and children, housing and unemployment, welfare rights...
...The possibilities are suggested by Taiwan, which with less than 2 percent of the mainland's population has 30 percent of its GNP...
...278 pages, $29.50 cloth, $14.95 paper The First of Men A Life of George Washington John E. Ferling...
...You can't just say "be free...
...The Soviet Union can quite easily reverse-engineer most pieces of hardware, given enough time...
...And it is precisely because circumstances have forced their hand that one can believe in the authenticity of what is happening...
...Quite simply, the best one-volume biography of Washington to appear in years...
...That's seven million ardent opponents of perestroika...
...Similarly, say these analysts, the Soviet economy requires a period of expansion to stay in the running for the military competition of the next century...
...And so it went...
...However, Gorbachev has ordered that 500,000 bureaucrats should lose their cars with chauffeurs...
...There's another possibility: Perhaps the Soviet empire, like the Roman Empire or the Ottoman Empire or indeed all previous empires, is in a state of irretrievable decay...
...Some analysts draw the following 30 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR FEBRUARY 1989 comparison: In the 1930s, both Mussolini and Hitler foresaw war...
...Thus, things may not change that much whatever happens...
...It actually worked, unlike some of the other pieces of equipment...
...Only competition keeps you onthe qui vive...
...Indeed it's a recurring Russian idea: Peter the Great tried something similar, as did Lenin with his New Economic Policy (NEP...
...No one outside the Institute for Policy Studies orbit claims that the Russians are pulling out because they have achieved their objectives there or have been converted to self-determination for their subject peoples...
...But Will Gorbachev Succeed...
...Then the scene shifted to today, in Red Square, a few hundred yards from where I was sitting at that moment...
...pushing the "MacNeil-Lehrer NewsHour" and National Public Radio to the left...
...The "rapporteurs" were required to be women...
...Furthermore, there is the nationalities problem...
...For roughly half the last 500 years, they have been fighting on their own soil...
...Or Angela Davis, who conceded that "women wait on long lines in the USSR," but quickly added that "they wait on long lines in supermarkets here...
...He opined that "Jesse Jackson is the best Jew in America...
...The 1789 revolution didn't end the idea of French aristocracy, just some aristocrats...
...It is said that the battle management of the campaign against each ICBM requires a computational power equivalent to one of the large Cray computers...
...Among the suggestions for future action: pressuring newspapers for positive reporting on the socialist countries...
...ut there were flora and fauna, LP uniquely rich in color, beyond this...
...So things must change, if they can be changed...
...And the Russian national experience is quite unlike ours...
...Their social welfare guarantees...
...Perhaps a parallel to Gorbachev is Diocletian, whose endless reorganization and reforms could not forestall his empire's decay...
...Western-style democratic government is not even under discussion, of course...
...Yes . . . over seven million bureaucrats...
...Anticommunism destroys time itself...
...And as one General Staff officer said grimly, it hasn't reached the KGB...
...The magnitude of these achievements...
...Of course...
...He provides balanced and thoughtful analysis of the major religious lobbies, on both right and left...
...paranoia were indeed shot like dogs...
...So when a general European war in fact came, Mussolini found himself frozen into obsolete weapons and an inadequate munitions industry, whereas Hitler was ready to go...
...An old flickery blackand-white film was showing him addressing a courtroom in harsh and strident tones during the Moscow purge trials...
...Indeed, it may be backed by the KGB to reform the bloated bureaucracy...
...But the most convincing reason for perestroika is that Gorbachev probably has no choice...
...Multiply this by thirty-eight panels...
...Less known in the U.S...
...SPECTATOR'S JOURNAL, PONDERING PERESTROIKA by John Train "Our past has become unpredictable...
...At the closing plenary session on Sunday, the assemblage broke into small groups for discussion and thenreported on their findings...
...a sensitive but hard-hitting portrait, worthy of the attention of anyone interested in Revolutionary America and the founding of the United States...
...This Vishinsky had dark hair and black owlish glasses...
...And then its institutions must take root—free courts, civilian control of the army, a free press, and so on...
...Time and Public Policy T. Alexander Smith ". . an excellent and creative application of the Austrian economic concept of 'time preference' to public policy in social, political, and cultural areas, as well as in economics...
...the Soviet Union knows that the empire is restless...
...320 pages, $29.95 Representing God in Washington The Role of Religious Lobbies in the American Polity Allen D. Hertzke ". . by far the most comprehensive examination to date of lobbying by religious groups in Washington...
...The aristocratic principle revived soon enough...
...And I heard repeatedly that a huge portion of the top Soviet bureaucracy has been shifted in the last two years, perhaps to loosen up their hold on their positions...
...However, Cray's chairman told me that his big machine, quite aside from the immense amount of programming required to set it up for missile defense, would take years to reverse-engineer, by which time the knowledge would be obsolete...
...Their organizations are proliferating wildly...
...A grim prospect, quite aside from the SDI problem...
...616 pages, illustrations, $39.95 The University of Tennessee Press Knoxville 37996-0325 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR FEBRUARY 1989 31...
...Kovel said that the coming times would be grim, but "the U.S...
...Western TV and radio, magazines, tourists, and gossip get the word around...
...Kovel looked deeply into himself and saw a black hole: "We all have to deal with our own internalizedanticommunism . . . an exploitation of the deep structures of racism for the purpose of managing threats to capitalist rule . ." How could something so . . . low . . . so smarmy . . . as anticommunism understand something so exalted, so totally unrelated to it, the exact opposite of it, as Communism...
...China, by shedding some of Marxism's impedimenta—all farms belong to the farmers, for instance—is booming, while the Russians are just whispering about incentives...
...But the entrenched nobility of the Soviet Union, the nomenklatura, is immensely powerful and corrupt...
...Since this vast territory is open to invasion from all directions, and since major segments of the empire would prefer to get out, the Soviet Union relies on the organs of state—the KGB, the army, and so forth—to penetrate and destroy potential enemies abroad, and to infiltrate and suppress internal opposition...
...His musings suggested that, as the Soviet Union itself has hinted, AIDS is yet another example of capitalism's dirty tricks...
...sabotaging newspaper vending machines (inserting false fronts on boxes with "progressive" news about El Salvador, etc...
...Esther Kingston-Mann, a professor of Russian history at the University of Massachusetts in Boston, won the Walter Duranty prize for Soviet reporting: she complained that too many Sovietologists and journalists think that the only things that matter in the Soviet Union are human rights and politics...
...All the same, in spite of a vast coordinated campaign of talk, there has so far been little sign of reform outside the biggest cities...
...indeed, must be fought for...
...It's like Afghanistan...
...Is Perestroika Real...
...When asked what the perfect daily newspaper would look like, Alexander Cockburn replied that "an expanded version of the Nation magazine would be ideal...
...An old man was grimly reciting his memories of the bad times, not so long ago, when a daring phrase could send you to Siberia, perhaps not to return...
...The challenge has kept these organs fit—and paranoid...
...3. The Soviet empire (Eastern Europe and so on) is restless...
...They have an extremely strong herd instinct, and for half a millennium have been ordered about by autocrats in the Kremlin...
...the editor of Znamia, 1988 O ne day last spring, on a trip to Moscow to talk to ministries and institutes, I turned on the television in my hotel room...
...It's like a mythical beast that can't be killed with one blow, but must be poisoned, then beheaded, then burned, then put through a mincing machine and fed to the fish . . . and will regenerate even then...
...And glasnost: the Soviets are facing up to their criminal past, unlike post-World War II Germany and post-Vietnam America...
...Thus the European Russians know that the other nationalities within the Soviet Union are unhappy (and have two to three times their birthrate...
...As one person noted, there are plenty of veterans of the 1960s teaching high school just waiting for this material...
...Plans were announced to prepare curricula based on the conference...
...With this stroke he created two million determined enemies: the 500,000 drivers and their patrons, plus the 500,000 pairs that find themselves at the head of the line for the next cut . . . not to speak of their families...
...I never saw a Central Asian behind a desk in a ministry...
...In other words, the Soviets can't readily compete in the highest-tech part of strategic defense, although they started earlier, have emphasized it more, and are well ahead of us in some aspects—e.g., particle beams...
...One ministry I visited had no computers, and said it was ordering them from Hungary...
...Alas, these victims of state John Train's most recent book is Famous Financial Fiascos (Clarkson N Potter/Crain...
...They should be shot like dogs," he snarled at a series of wretched anti-Stalinists who had been dragged before him...
...For many years, one of the official heroes held up for the admiration of Soviet youth was an enthusiastic boy who denounced his own parents for a deficiency of socialist zeal...
...One presumes that the Soviet people can be held down indefinitely...
...Few as they are, anyone who could survive three days of this is a force to be reckoned with...
...It is one of the most important books in public policy in recent years...
...There was happy, genial applause...
...The TV audience was hearing words that at one time could have meant death for the speaker and listener alike...
...No one believes that anymore, least of all the rulers themselves...
...No: it is because the dead and the losses in tanks and helicopters became intolerable, along with the disastrous loss of face in the rest of the world...
...is that the Central Asians live in far worse conditions than the European Russians, and regard them as exploiters...
...Anticommunism was a weed, a deep pathology, a generalized dementia...
...The Russians joke that it's like a forest: light at the top and dark at the bottom...
...So to my mind the odds favor the nobility rather than the reformers, at least for now...
...What will happen to them all...
...I was startled to see the face of a much younger Andrei Vishinsky than the white-haired one I remembered from the 1950s when he was the Soviet delegate to the U.N...
...Simply not true...
...increasing political action through the Rainbow Coalition...
...James Reichley, Brookings Institute...
...And Gorbachev has repeatedly declared that he proposes to fire some 40 percent of the Soviet Union's 18 million managers...
...But that's of an economy half as large as ours and much less efficient, with very little to spare...
...the empire sees its great competitor, China, pushing in front of it...
...There were many new faces at the conference, newly activated college students, reactivated war-horses, and many who were just returning to the fold...
...What is being hidden behind the new billion dollar HIV industry...
...But the economy is still slipping further and further behind the advanced countries, and the people are increasingly aware of what's happening...
...It is bloated and heterogeneous, which means a huge defense establishment, at crippling expense, to hold it down...
...James Kirby Martin, University of Houston...
...Murray N. Rothbard, University of Nevada, Las Vegas...
...One of the best kept secrets of today's world is the social achievements of the USSR...
...A rough figure for the part of Soviet GNP that goes to maintaining their prodigious and growing military establishment is 20 percent—three times our proportion...
...They fluttered back to their nesting places in academia, the alternative press, college campuses, the Rainbow Coalition, senior centers, progressive unions, and Communist party headquarters, dedicated to wiping out that nasty word...
...T here are those who observe that 1 Gorbachev's proposed changes seem for real, but grumble that the Russians are only doing it out of necessity, not out of what we would consider democratic good will...
...So you have to shake things up on occasion...
...The justification for the Soviets imposing their rule on the satellites was that it would lead the people to the economic promised land...
...Any monopoly becomes atherosclerotic...
...Looking ahead, the Soviets must transform their economy and government drastically to keep up with the traditionally hostile Chinese...
...Deng himself has complacently said that if perestroika does not work, then the Soviet Union willlose its superpower status in the next century...
...Here are three and a half reasons: 1. The Soviet nightmare is not West Germany, whose feeble birth rate condemns it to fade away as a great power, but China, whose proud and able population is multiples larger than the Soviet Union's and growing faster...
...Freedom must be earned...
...while the socialist camp in general sees the West disappearing out of sight ahead...
...Anticommunism is no more capable of understanding the reality of Communism than racism is capable of perceiving the reality of the Afro-American experience...
...This requires military relaxation now, particularly in the strategic defense arena...
...The Soviet Union has about one-thousandth as many PCs per capita as the U.S...
...So it's a killing burden, which stifles everything, at the same time that the productivity of a demoralized population is declining...
...Historian Blanche Wiesen Cook was not happy: "We stand morally isolated before the world, allied with South Africa and other killer countries . . . always bellowing, when we are not shrieking, and thumping and bumping and burping our bombs and tanks and missiles Communist Communist Communist . . . incredible shrinking American heart . . . polluted the discourse . . . debased .. . deformed . ." Zoologist Stephen Jay Gould offered up his sunny view of personkind: "Ordinary daily behavior is geniality . . . we step aside for people, we say thank you to the man who sells the newspaper, we smile at a child . . . there are acts of ordinary geniality even on Times Square . . . the species is peaceful . . . the problem is the kind of government we have...
...Hitler, on the contrary, let the civilian economy run on full blast for several more years, rapidly building his industrial bases...
...Oh, they'll find jobs in the service sector, one is told: the service sector needs to develop...
...is weakening and has less capacity to enforce a megalomaniacal ideology like anticommunism...
...A life fellow of the American Psychiatric Association, he handed out his broadside,"Anti-communism: Conspiracy and Terrorism, Psychiatry and AIDS" (hyphen in the original...
...Gorbachev proposes that there be several candidates for each party job, with a limitation on the number of terms of office, but the candidates will naturally come from the party, and the dominant role of the party is not in question...
Vol. 22 • February 1989 • No. 2
