Capitol Ideas/Communists Shoot People, Don't They'?
Bethell, Tom
CAPITOL IDEAS COMMUNISTS SHOOT PEOPLE, DON'T THEY? A t the request of a reader in Maryland, a special Strange New Respect citation will be given this year to Paul H.Nitze, once the leading...
...The professor of economics at Cambridge University, Alfred Marshall, wrote in his Principles of Economics that the "changes in human nature during the last fifty years have been so rapid as to force themselves on the attention...
...And don't forget: "Science" did not give us New Soviet Man, who, according to the plan, and the 1921 prediction of Leon Trotsky, would "become immeasurably stronger, wiser, and subtler...
...Then Nitze joined the Reagan arms control team and something happened...
...The dependent tax exemption can be increased (the conservative or libertarian approach, reducing government involvement in our lives), or socialized child care can be increased (the socialist's preference...
...Since 1970, the effective value of the dependent tax exemption has fallen by more than 70 percent...
...It is not the "human rights abuses" that put the left in such a rage over what has happened in that country (the Communist guerrillas in El Salvador have been murdering mayors and innocent bystanders for years...
...my Maryland man wrote...
...God didn't do the job right...
...A hundred years ago "science" was the shining new city in which the socialists planned to build their home...
...Also present was Marian Wright Edelman, the world's most compassionate human, who earlier that day had berated House Speaker Tom Foley for failing to railroad the child-care bill through conference committee before Thanksgiving adjournment...
...How many invitations does Sen...
...And Nitze is now an honored guest speaker at the elegant rallies of the Arms Control Association in Dupont Circle...
...have :remained a superb fighter for the causes that you still support, as we on the other side of the aisle can ruefully attest...
...Therefore the antibodies are few and the virus still potent...
...The Soviets had been the "guarantor of security" in that part of the world, and he seemed less than reassured by their declining role...
...Felix Rohatyn, a European émigré investment banker who quoted Jean Monnet at length and believes that the creation of a new international development bank, with the U.S...
...What a disappointment science has proved to be...
...The average human type will rise to the heights of an Aristotle, a Goethe, or a Marx...
...A few days later she noted in a newspaper columnthe failure of the Communist party's "great experiment in human engineering, designed to make human nature conform to its preferred model...
...The ideas of progress and evolution (which may in fact be inseparable) really have declined today...
...his voice more musical...
...In the same way a virus is strongest when there are few antibodies to counteract it...
...Cockburn's position is the more realistic, but Hitch-ens has most of the troops on his side...
...The question remains: Will our home-grown, capitalist-fed left be discouraged by the failed attempt to reform human nature in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe...
...But as the years passed, a new spirit of statesmanship and generosity began to infuse your philosophy...
...At lunch I found myself sitting between Melvyn Lasky, the long-time editor of Encounter, and George Urban, Hungarian-born, whose many outstanding interviews have been a highlight of Encounter in recent years...
...Working mothers across the nation will have occasion to remember you with gratitude . . ." A few days after the Berlin Wall was breached, I attended a conference on developments in Eastern Europe, organized by Radio Free Europe and held at the Madison Hotel in Washington...
...That is why the totalitarian project has so much appeal for clergy12 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JANUARY 1990 men who for one reason or another have lost their spiritual moorings...
...The attempt to "engineer souls," as Lenin had put it, had become more and more counterproductive, and had now been abandoned...
...For that reason, most on theleft are probably glad to see the Wall come down...
...It is essentially a religious feeling, oddly distorted...
...What Kinsley should have said is that they "especially" haven't managed to sell their own ideology to generations under their control...
...The socialist impulse is always at its most virulent in a society that has not yet been much infected by it...
...Scientific socialism" was the talk of the town...
...Nitze was awarded the Shelby Cullom Davis Award by the Ethics and Public Policy Center—one of the few conservative prizes in Washington...
...And so bitter disappointment is construed as injustice...
...Maybe there's an answer to this question, but Walesa didn't provide it...
...was the new and coming thing) that is already beginning to seem transitory...
...One understands that a Communist-run country is unable to generate wealth without stealing or begging from its neighbors, but why must this presumption of unproductivity persist after the Communists have been [mostly] deposed...
...And from the pulpit they will proclaim it...
...They still have the atom bomb...
...It is not, as some think, a disbelief in God so much as it is a rebellion against God...
...And so human nature must be done over...
...Strobe Talbott, Time magazine's chief ideologist, wrote an admiring book about him...
...Tom Bethell is The American Spectator's Washington correspondent...
...They have long regarded the Soviet Union and the Iron Curtain as an embarrassment anyway: bad advertisements for a noble dream, irresistible propaganda for anti-Communists...
...Walesa's own by Tom Bethell role in the unraveling of Communism will surely be recorded in the history books...
...At the conference, we heard from Mr...
...I hoped that Lasky might say something dramatic about the stirring events we were witnessing—events that he has tirelessly encouraged in the pages of Encounter...
...But he didn't say anything of comparable moment...
...His views are highly congenial to the American establishment, and one has heard him touted as a Treasury secretary in a Democratic administration...
...On the verge of giving up half our nuclear submarine fleet in one more madcap arms control treaty, the octogenarian Nitze eventually had to be pushed out the door by the incoming secretary of state, James A. Baker...
...still want it...
...Michael Kinsley said much the same thing in the New Republic, noting "how completely Communists have failed to reinvent humanity...
...The television pictures of East Berliners freed-at last from the prison of Communism had been moving, no doubt historic...
...But over the years, as you became more realistic and more knowledgeableabout the ways of Washington, we all recognize that you grew in office, grew in stature, grew in our estimation and respect...
...it was the socialist identification with science (when it...
...putting up $1 billion, will work wonders for THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JANUARY 1990 Eastern Europe...
...More likely it gave rise to unwarrantedly high hopes for collectivism...
...What other old cold warrior has had a university like Johns Hopkins School of International Studies name a building after him...
...In the future, we hope, your name will be inscribed on federal day care centers from coast to coast...
...Nonetheless, the junior senator from Utah received the Strange New Respect Award this year for his support of the scheme to socialize child care with massive federal subsidy and regulation (the Senate's Act for Better Child Care...
...his body will become more harmonized, his movements more rhythmic...
...Notice the tremendous emotional investment that the American left has in El Salvador...
...One had always thought that Communism would go out with a bang, not a whimper...
...Most leftists, I suspect, don't understand that Communism will dwindle down to communes unless Communists are willing to shoot people...
...He contrived to be both diplomatic and "unbuttoned" at the same time...
...American liberals, by contrast, are still disposed to dream the Communist dream of a reinvented human nature...
...auspices, everything would be all right, apparently...
...But if international planning could be restored under U.S...
...That is, they thought that human nature was already changing under the influence of evolution...
...The word "even" in that last sentence is wrong...
...American liberals and leftists have not given up yet on the dream of remaking human nature...
...Today, as the philosopher Michael Novak has noted, the secular and ecclesiastical left are moving closer and closer together...
...The irony is that evolutionism was supposed to have sired the unwelcome offspring, laissez-faire capitalism (or Social Darwinism...
...The recent, interesting little tiff between Alexander Cockburn and Christopher Hitchens in the Nalion, with Hitchens wittily and ironically "defending" Cockburn against the charge that he is a Stalinist, seems to express the disagreement between those on the left who still dream of a non-coercive socialism (Hitchens) and those who know force will always be needed (Cockburn), but are understandably reluctant to say so openly...
...Then again, if it really is true that Communism can only be attained by force, so that its realization is not to be expected in a democratic world, the collapse of will in the East has to be discouraging to those on the left who recognize man's stubbornly intractable nature...
...For that reason the American left is now (probably has been for some time) at the frontier of world socialism...
...predicted, they haven't even managed to sell their own ideology to generations that have grown up completely under their control...
...Not that you have abandoned those principles, we hasten to add...
...a rebellion against creation...
...Maybe it will yet...
...That's the big news," she said, "and it's very important...
...Knowing that history is not on their side could make the Communist remnant far more dangerous...
...It is their frustration: the country was "due" to go Communist, but so far it has not...
...This has driven many mothers out of the home and into the workplace...
...The forms of life will become dynamically dramatic...
...The proletarians of Russia and Eastern Europe have been the human rats in the Communist laboratory, and as such have been especially well placed to suffer through the whole experiment...
...Orrin Hatch, a bishop in the Mormon Church, opted for the latter...
...Orrin Hatch get in the heart of Hiveland...
...Both Lasky and Urban live in England...
...Today the left is disenchanted with science, which has given us atom bombs, pollution, and nuclear power stations (read Jeremy Rifkin for the details...
...Child care" can thus be restored in one of two ways...
...But he too had fund-raising on his mind—following an unexpected withdrawal of support (for Encounter) by Conrad Black of the Daily Telegraph...
...Some of them (Michael Kinsley, for example) are inclined to believe that male-female differences are not essential but cultural, so that if we institute affirmative action programs, induct women into the Army, require the expenditure of large sums of money on female athletic programs, and repeat the mantra "he or she" often enough, these merely cultural gender differences will disappear...
...Possibly the left can make no headway without them...
...When you came to Washington in 1976, Orrin, I don't mind, telling you that we were all alarmed," Senator Edward Kennedy said at the awards ceremony in Clark Clifford's office...
...I speak for all of us inside the Beltway, Orrin, when I say that you have won a permanent place in our hearts with your support of this compassionate legislation...
...today it is unthinkable...
...still hunger for it—with a hunger that normal people cannot imagine...
...They still believe in it...
...A t the request of a reader in Maryland, a special Strange New Respect citation will be given this year to Paul H.Nitze, once the leading spokesman for the Committee on the Present Danger, who resigned from the Carter Administration in protest against its weak defense policies...
...Lech Walesa, in the midst of a whirlwind tour of the States, came to the podium and answered questions with the wit and repartee of a cracker-barrel philosopher...
...Republicans with principles are always the toughest to crack," Kennedy continued, with a bemused Hatch by his side...
...It is in the rectory and the sanctuary that the socialists will continue to draw up their blueprint for a new society...
...Nitze's strange behavior in the latter Reagan years serves only to remind us of what the Vatican has known for years: like Catholic bishops, Washington policy-makers should be made to retire at age seventy-five...
...He seemed more interested in dilating on the "irrational" tactics of the East German Communists than in expatiating on the Big Picture...
...His mission was more mundane: fund-raising on behalf of the new Polish government...
...Always affectionately regarded by those on the right, you reached out to a more inclusive constituency—one that is poor as well as rich...
...We will know that they have done so only when they abandon the use of force or implicit force (laws that carry real penalties for those that disobey them) in order to attain it...
...Compared with many other countries in the twentieth century, the American exposure to socialism has been mild...
...Jeane Kirkpatrick, former ambassador to the United Nations, came closer to the truth when she said we were witnessing "the abandonment of the totalitarian project...
...In 1890 this did not even seem controversial...
...This should be seen historically as a reversion to the norm...
...Not only have they failed to remake human nature as...
...A hundred years ago the socialists thought they had not merely "science" but nature itself on their side...
...No economist (or biologist) would say any such thing...
...W hat is the source of this hunger for a remade human nature...
...My guess is: not greatly discouraged...
...And above these heights new peaks will rise...
...But it will be back in the new year...
Vol. 23 • January 1990 • No. 1
