Guest Editorial
Methvin, Eugene H.
Guest Editorial/Eugene H. Methvin Who Is the Trojan, and Who the Horse? • • Among other notable revolutionary anniversaries, 1976 brings us to the twentieth anniversary of Nikita Khrushchev's...
...The facts rebel," in George Paloczi-Horvath's classic phrase, forcing ideological adjustments, compromises, betrayals...
...In th middle of the night in 1961 they took th corpse of Stalin out of that marble torn on Red Square...
...But it would be worse than a folly in our continuing confrontation with the world's totalitarians to brush off the French CP' s action as just another Bolshevik twist, a gambit to fake the unwary into buying the bogus package...
...A concession to opportunism may sometimes yield some temporary advantage but will ultimately be damaging to the party...
...In short, until they deleninize...
...Among other notable revolutionary anniversaries, 1976 brings us to the twentieth anniversary of Nikita Khrushchev's famous "Crimes of Stalin" speech...
...but to permit the liberty of the cudgel to go with it pan' passu...
...Jean-Francois Revel, political philosopher and L'Express columnist, stirred a storm with a new book, The Totalitarian Temptation, arguing that the Socialists are committing suicide by working with the Communists because "the essence of communism is Stalinism...
...The French Reds are playing with their capital pieces, and may be gambling more than they know...
...Granted, the French anti-Communists are right...
...It is quite clear that Lenin, when he wrote State and Revolution, really did believe that on the morrow of his glorious revolution Rousseau's noble savage would leap forth from the Russian proletariat and peasantry, transforming Russia into a socialist-anarchist wonderland in which the state would wither away...
...Their official ob server at the Paris congress, Politbur member Andrei P. Kirilenko, grumble that "A new attempt is being made t slander the reality and ideals of socialis and confuse the progressive forces...
...He took three paranoid inmates of a Michigan insane asylum who each believed he was the Christ, put them together, and watched the incredible adjustments of their belief systems as they were confronted with fundamental contradictions: if you are Jesus, I cannot be Jesus...
...Someone must repeat the rote justifications, and someone may stumble in the process and murmur the thought, "This really is a bunch of baloney...
...Snake-oil salesmen often come to believe, really believe, in at least some of the powers of their marvelous product...
...Hooray for the French Communists...
...Such acts are in no way an obligatory consequence of socialism...
...We should welcome their denunciations of the Soviet Ward ; system, where political dissenters are given drugs that destroy their cerebra cells and convert them into cringing zom hies...
...They control about twenty percent of the French vote, and the Socialist Party about thirty percent...
...After Khrushchev' destalinization speech twenty years ag Eugene Lyons proposed an America fund-raising campaign to help Khrush chev erect a suitable memorial to all Sta lin's victims, among whom were the en tire Old Bolshevik guard...
...The French Communists, long among the most servile parrots of the Moscow line, find their orthodoxy an increasingly itchy handicap as their prospects for electoral success improve...
...3 comrade, Guy Plissonnier...
...And Comrade Marchais, in his address to his congress, attacked the Soviet Union for -repressive measures that infringe on freedom of opinion, expression, or creativity" of Soviet citizens: "We cannot accept in effect that the Communist ideal, whose object is the happiness of man and for which we ask the workers to fight, should be stained by unjust and unjustifiable acts...
...An from his podium two weeks later at hi (continued on page 29) 4 The Alternative: An American Spectator May 1971 GUEST EDITORIAL (continued from page 4) own Party Congress, Brezhnev thundered condemnation: "There can be no question of compromise on matters of principle or reconciliation with views and actions contrary to the Communist ideology...
...He repeated and repeated, "The scientific meaning of the term 'dictatorship' is none other than unlimited power, unrestrained by any rules whatever, based directly on violence...
...In Est & Ouest, Claude Harmel suggested Communist moves feigning criticism of the Soviet Union and independence of the Kremlin are actually done with Moscow's permission, perhaps even on its orders...
...Democracy is inconceivable without discipline and a sound social order...
...With an electoral victory so close, the traditionally orthodox French Communists are clearly embarrassed by their totalitarian image...
...We should never underestimate the influence of Lenin's basic Rousseauist anarchism and his dream of a workers' utopia...
...The current Kremlin comrades, to save their own skins, have made some efforts to destalinize...
...ing of "The Internationale," Marchais chided them: "The raised fist is not in the French tradition...
...it was not for nothing that tears streamed down the beefy Brezhnev cheeks at the 1971 CPSU Congress as the delegates sang "The Internationale...
...help him erect his Moscow monument...
...Well, they might have to analyze their own history a little when Enrico Berlinguer, the Italian renegade, can stand in the Kremlin's Palace of Congresses and tell five thousand Soviet Party delegates: "The working class can and must perform its historical function in a pluralistic and democratic way...
...What Comrade Korolenko was trying to tell the Great Proletarian Dictator of 1920 was that the multiparty system and freedom of the press are not mere "bourgeois prejudices" and expressions of class differentiation, but a method of inquiry...
...with the conduct of such writers...
...But after a worldwide campaign by scientists, the French CP did indeed appeal in his behalf, and the Soviets released him in January...
...And the Soviets may have to do some rethinking when the French party violates protocol by keeping Marchais at home and sending its No...
...And when some old curmudgeons insisted on waving clenched-fist "solidarity" salutes during the sing...
...Comrade Brezhnev can recognize a dangerous ideological heresy when he sees one...
...We should explait that we understand the agony that facini such realities causes them, for the refusa of the promised kingdom to come is in deed a terrible burden for modern Pro methean man, and those who have flee the painful reality of the human predica ment into the false nirvana of revolution ary utopianism are due some understand ing as they suffer withdrawal pains...
...When such men find themselves having to shoot down workers, as in Prague in 1968 and Poznan in 1970, or to debate the "dictatorship of the proletariat" doctrine with their French comrades, or to justify sending a balky mathematician to the linty hatch, we can expect some consequences in their crania...
...Why not in struct Dr...
...And someone may go back to read the letters of Vladimir Korolenko, the venerable old revolutionary who, with but a few months to live, bitterly complained to Lenin of the growing Bolshevik tyranny...
...The French CP is particularly embarrassed when it receives formal appeals for help from the likes of Ukrainian mathematician Leonid I. Plyushch...
...The Gallic party, under its leader Georges Marchais, became the first of the major Bolshevik parties founded under the Communist International to take such a formal step...
...In Paris, however, the anniversary was marked by a Bolshevik declaration of independence, of sorts—and a faint stab at "deleninization...
...It deserves a reburia too...
...Clearly, the French CP action is a mile stone, albeit a tiny one, in the process c change set in motion by Khrushchev' "Crimes of Stalin" speech...
...Benjamin Franklin closed mind, and anything that opens it to let in a little light and fresh air is healthy...
...Other speakers explained that the word "dictatorship" offends 1976 sensibilities, having been dirtied up by fellows like Hitler and Mussolini...
...And to see, at the end of his speech, the brief television picture showing many delegates sourly in their seats during the "standing ovation" which protocol dictates for each foreign Communist Part) leader...
...This, he said, "will symbolize our party's unfailing loyalty to the great cause of proletarian internationalism...
...We should not make too much of such "contradictions," just as we should not kiss them off as "just another gambit...
...These French CP actions have visibly disturbed the Soviets...
...After all, as any bunco squad sergeant in any urban police department in America will tell you, most con men con themselves first...
...A society can have valid, responsive, relevant government only when the press is free and the feedback loop totally unclogged by censorship and fear, and when oppositionists can coalesce and openly express grievances...
...We were treated a few years back to the spectacle of Khrushchev, then the Great Proletarian Dictator, half ordering and half begging the scientists and technicians to criticize him when he was wrong about little details like growing corn and wheat with the wrong fertilizers or soils...
...We are fighting for a socialist society that would guarantee respect for all individual and collective liberties, liberties of religion and culture, arts and sciences...
...Plissonnier performed the remarkable feat of quoting Lenin on the necessity for democracy "right to the end" and explained, "For us, this implies the guarantee of all individual and collective liberties...
...He instructed the drafters of a new criminal code in 1922, "The courts must not ban terror...
...If they come to power, their mask will drop...
...we should in moderation content ourselves with tarring and feathering and tossing them in a blanket...
...Nor should we think it mere stagecraft that at this latest Congress Brezhnev's voice cracked with emotion for the only time in his five-hour speech as he reThe Alternative: An American Spectator May 1976 29 buked the French national Communist ploy by proposing a monument in Moscow to "heroes of the world communist movement who fell at the hands of the class enemy...
...All the French anti-Communists were quick to denounce the Communist maneuver as just another Leninist deception, on a par with Fidel Castro's unredeemed pledge of free elections...
...The Soviet mentality is a Great American Series My proposal then is to leave the liberty of the press untouched, to be exercised in its full extent, force, and vigor...
...therefore something must be the matter with you and let me explain it to you and to myself...
...We should invite the Frenchmen" attention from Plyushch, who is free, to Bukovsky, who is not...
...Only you who have never fully known these freedoms nor learned to use them jointly with the people can call them 'bourgeois prejudices.' " The Soviets have recently discovered cybernetics, the science of automation, information feedback, and systems control...
...Lenin himself defined the proletarian dictatorship as "an unlimited power, sustaining itself by violence and not by law...
...That means the various parties interested in its construction wil take part with equality of rights anc duties...
...In this lovely detente era, we shoul also regard Brezhnev's proposal for Moscow monument to the martyrs o world Communism as an opportunity fo further convergence...
...For gambits may backfire and lead to checkmate...
...The idea seems to be that few capitalists are left, and that if only the French electorate unites under Communist leadership to finish them off peacefully, there will be no need for a dictatorship...
...I]f the public should ever happen to be affronted...
...This worthy, albeit a devout Marxist, was carted off three years ago to a Kiev booby hatch for such mild tergiversations as proposing basic civil liberties in the workers paradise...
...30 The Alternative: An American Spectator May 1971...
...It would be a blunder...
...The men who rule the Kremlin are men who lived through the Stalin era, debasing themselves during the terror in the interests of animal survival, and they have not yet been able to look easily within, to analyze their own history, to understand their own motivations and crippling handicaps, for the process is too painful...
...The French move cuts so deeply to the heart of Soviet ideology that even for the Politburo to have to discuss the matter opens windows in the Kremlin that have been shut for years...
...Yet if one has even a scintilla of faith in the ultimate rationality of man (a faith that requires almost as much squirming adjustment and exclusion of uncomfortable contrary evidence as that of the three Christs or the Kremlin czars), one cannot help but welcome the French CP's small challenge...
...By accepting the principle of opposition parties, and by challenging the dogma of the dictatorship of the proletariat, the French are threatening the very foundation-stone of the Soviet regime—the legitimacy of Russia's "new class" autocracy...
...Let challenge them to celebrate their delenin ization with hymns to civil liberties ant the virtues of yielding power peacefully after electoral reverses—and we shoulc join their chorus...
...But they won't truly be safe, they won't be able to solve their production problems or build a creative, modern, humane state, until they return to the "rule of law" and individual civil rights...
...Perhaps the French and Italian CPs are Trojan horses, but whose wall is being breached...
...It must be formulated in the broadest possible manner...
...We offer it to all whc want to struggle with us for building better society, to defend national inde pendence...
...The sixty-year record shows that the Bolshevik clique has managed to overcome such problems often enough...
...So last November, in Rome, they joined their traditionally unorthodox Italian comrades in a remarkable statement, declaring that the way to power was through the democratic systems of their countries...
...you may go to him as openly and break his head...
...Well, I for one, a notorious, unrepentant cold warrior, say hooray...
...Socialist leader Franvis Mitterand last May ran in the presidential election under a "Union of the Left" banner with Communist support and won 49.7 percent of the vote, barely losing to centrist Valery Giscard d'Estaing...
...Behind the French heresy lies a perfectly understandable Marxist-Leninist drive: the lust for power, and a reach for its levers...
...The 25th Communist Party Congress came and went, and Comrade Brezhnev made it through a five-how speech in good health, without anyone recalling Khrushchev's "destalinization" exploit five congresses ago...
...but must formulate the motives underlying it, legalize it as a principle, plainly, without any make-believe or embellishment...
...So let the French Communists gull thegullible among the French voters with their praise for democracy, pluralism, parliamentary rule, and promises to permit peaceful throw-the-rascals-out politics...
...Had Mitterand won, some of his Bolshevik comrades would occupy cabinet seats today...
...One of these days they'r going to have to take a new look at the r maining mummy...
...The French CP newspaper, L'Humanite, published an accurate but brief summary of Plyushch's report, though buried on an inside page...
...Stalin, may he roast in peace, was not mentioned...
...but the Soviets know it, as their sour mien testifies...
...They pledged themselves to guarantee "freedom of thought and expression and freedom of the press," and they backed "the plurality of political parties" and "the right of existence and activity of opposition parties"—although, to be sure, they neglected to promise free elections and a peaceful surrender of power if the voters so ordain...
...Mind you, I am not suggesting that we put their faith to the test anytime soon, say, by turning control of the Surer and the armed forces over to them in next week's coalition cabinet...
...And if the Kremlin did order the debunking of "the dictatorship of the proletariat" doctrine as a new wrinkle in its campaign of deception, then hooray for the Kremlin...
...Someday, th reality that a modern, creative industrk democracy requires freedom will fore the Kremlin crowd, in the interest c building their own power, to move fror destalinization to deleninization...
...One is reminded of Milton Rokeach's marvelous experiment with "the Three Christs of Ypsilanti...
...Obviously the megalomaniacs in the Kremlin can make marvelous adjustments to maintain their royal thrones...
...They just might come to believe such nonsense themselves one of these days...
...Kissinger to advise Brezhnev he will include all those martyrs, we...
...Such things as freedom of conscience, assembly, speech, and the press," he wrote, "are, for European proletarians, not mere 'bourgeois prejudices' but necessary tools which mankind has arrived at only through lengthy and not unfruitful struggle and progress...
...We are for the out• stretched hand...
...Plyushch held a press conference in Paris on the eve of the French party congress, describing the "Ward 7" horrors and tortures applied by KGB "psychiatrists" to more than sixty political prisoners, and appealing for the release of other dissidents who are being subjected to Soviet menticide...
...Like the King Tut mummies in Pharaoh's tombs, the fresh air may turn the whole kaboodle to crumbling dust, if not in minutes, then in decades, a mere tick of the historical clock...
...Thus, my fellow-citizens, if an impudent writer attacks your reputation, dearer to you perhaps than your life...
...Minister of Justice Jean Lecanuet declared that the Communists were "changing their mask but not their skin...
...Thus comrades were urged to recruit beyond proletarian ranks...
...But in Moscow, unlike other anniversary sites, there is no commemoration or celebration...
...For the French Communist Party at its own 22nd congress publicly dumped that quintessential Leninist dogma, the "dictatorship of the proletariat...
...The introspection and evolution set in motion with that speech have not yet run their course...
...It is delicious to see Berlinguer deliver an unmistakable endorsement of Italy's continued NATO membership to "contribute actively to detente and defend firmly the sovereigntyof the Italian people against any foreign interference in our internal affairs...
...At the same time Marchais announced that a fuzzy notion called "communism under French colors" would replace dictatorship of the proletariat as his party's goal...
...So here is one anti-Communist who wil join with the French comrades in their symbolic burial of the doctrine of "the dictatorship of the proletariat...
...This will be a socialism o the French sort...
...Somewhere there in the Kremlin, someone may rethink again the Leninist assumptions of 1917-22...
Vol. 9 • May 1976 • No. 8
