WASHINGTON REPORT: The Immoralists

...a process of evolution is going on inside the PLO, he thinks, that might lead to a "smaller solution" than the old die-hard PLO position...

...At Chicago there were no audible regrets, although Irving Howe, a most distinguished speaker, brought the house down by pointing out that some of Carter's recession remedies were "no more than Gerry Ford disguised as a peanut...

...The PLO is a long way from bearing an olive branch, of course, but there are increasing signs of a factional rift inside the organization in which it would be helpful for the United States to encourage the moderates...

...Duties, traipsing the world in his flapping galoshes, believed passionately in the morality of what he and the et seq...

...The dissenters from the Carter concern for human rights, who for convenience can be called the Immoralists, claim that morality has no place in foreign policy, will more often than not get in the way of the professional pursuit of legitimate foreign policy goals, and besides all that is profoundly embarrassing to Immoralists who like to think themselves at least as sophisticated in these matters as their Soviet colleagues...

...Such later developments as the election of Sam Brown in Colorado and the near success of Tom Hayden in California have persuaded even some on the New Left that this may be the smart strategy...

...This was a matter that never concerned the Immoralists, whose administrations of both parties took for granted the government's right .to restrict our freedom of travel: Cuba, for examp!e, had resisted our beneficent effort to replace Castro by Howard Hunt in his comic red wig, therefore no American could travel to Cuba...

...The place was simply the name of the last place that two big cheeses of the two big-cheese countries had met...

...who are pro-Israel should not take such a stance as being in any way antagonistic to Israel...

...COMING MAURICE R. BERUBE writes on "The Revolt Against College": "The recession of the seventies has also affected college graduates and diminished the value of a degree...

...For the first time PLO leader Yasir Ararat has announced that his movement now accepts the idea of Palestinian state on the West Bank and in Gaza, although without explicitly repudiating, at least so far, its earlier insistence on a secular Arab-Jewish state in all of Palestine, which implied .the disappearance of Israel...

...But .the rest of us have nothing to lose, much to gain, if the two governments take to pointing out publicly how abysmally each is treating its citizens...

...The great post-Lenin split between Stalin and Trotsky, while easily interpreted as a fairly pure example of personal aggrandizement on Stalin's part, was nevertheless conducted on both sides in doctrinal terms...

...FRANK GETLEIN 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 DEMOCRATIC SOCIALISTS TI IE FOR STOCK- T KING "'Every valley shall be raised, the mountains and hills shall be brought low, and the crooked ways made straight...

...Its embodiment in The Free World was a collection of more or less democratic states in Europe all hanging grimly on to their overseas possessions as long as they could and by whatever means they could, ~ t h American help of various kinds, to the total disregard of the desires for selfgovernment by those hung onto...

...hence, anything not called Communism was moral, anything called Anti-Communism positively beatific...

...One constant in United States policy is our insistence on the existence and security of Israel, and this is not negotiable...

...Why not give human rights a try for the next round...

...The dissenters from Carter's statements and gestures on the subject decry what they refer to as "moralism" in foreign policy, aver that it is not the right of the United States to attempt to interfere with the internal affairs of other nations, least of all with those of the Soviet Union, our fellow-colossus bestriding the world without whose surreptitious cooperation, the world might not be as well bestridden as it is by the two of us...

...The second great public irony attending the Immoralists' call for amorality in international relations is that, of course, the Soviets have been no less passionately moralists and moralizing in their own foreign policy than was the Dulles-to-Nixon line in ours...

...suecession all called The Free World, no less passionately in the inherent immorality of the Soviet Union and all its works and all its pomps...

...Most DSOC members worked for Fred Harris and/or Mo Udall, but in November the policy was to vote for Carter...

...At this point officials of the outgoing government in Israel are dubious about reports of growing PLO moderation, and this is certainly understandable...

...The difference is this: whereas both John Foster Dulles and Leonid Brezhnev regarded morality as something to be inflicted upon others from outside and above, Carter, thanks no doubt to his being the first seriously religious person to occupy his position since I'd hesitate to say when, regards morality as primarily something that governs ,the individual, or the individual nation, from within, something one conforms to, rather than something imposed upon one from without...

...In any ease, time is not on Israel's side, and the United States can best show its traditional friendship for and support of Israel by working for compromises that will lead to a lasting peace in the area...

...The words were the words of Isaiah, but the voice was that of a large black man, Cleveland Robinson, a national officer of District 65, Distributive Workers of America, speaking to the third national convention of the Democratic Socialist Organizing Committee held in Chicago a few weeks ago...

...larger-scale unemployment has ~hreatened the college degree as an essential passport .to the middle class...

...There are situations where doing nothing is the best course, but the Middle East .today is not one of them...

...Arms and war, it used to be genially agreed, must give way to competition in economics, agriculture, industry--read those last three words in ital...

...But until Michael Harrington (not the Congressman, the other one) and DSOC came along, there was no organization that retained a distinctly socialist, leftleaning identity and still committed itself to the idea that the correct path for socialists in America lay within the left wing of the Democratic Party...

...Anything called Communism was immoral...

...nevertheless, the Brezhnev Doctrine on its face was appropriately doctrinal, a matter of preserving the purity of the deposit of faith as handed down from Marx, Engels and Lenin, a remarkably close approximation of the doctrine of papal infallibility, theological in its ultimate concerns, moralizing in its immediate ones...

...But this does not mean that the U.S...

...Rigidity is .the enemy of peace, and sometimes Israeli leaders need firm U.S...

...But if a settlement is ever to be reached in the Middle East, a beginning must be made, and there can be no peace until the Palestinian problem is solved, even by some sort of union with Jordan, perhaps...

...Thus there is cause ,to be grateful for the discussions, or at least expressions of dissenting opinion, taking place here over President Carter's reiterated support for human rights in all nations, with some stress so far on the condition of human rights in the Soviet Union, a condition which has not been I April 1977:196 notably flourishing since 1917, nor, if the truth be known, in Russia and its fiefdoms within historical memory...

...There are a number of ironies floating about the situation...

...Periodically SP members would split away, usually calling themselves Social Democrats and eventually supplying theoretical support for George Meany, Lyndon Johnson, the Vietnam war, welfare capitalism and the notion that guns and butter are both politically possible and desirable...

...It was a new form--and, of course, a new meaning-----of Nominalism, but it was deeply moralistic...

...The first, of course, is that moralism in foreign relations is exactly what has been practiced by the Immoralists since at least the epoch of John Foster Dulles, perhaps since Dean Aeheson, the latter being arguable, the former et seq...

...That's what the Brezhnev Doctrine was all about...

...Liz McPike, an AFSCME union organizer, said she was glad she voted for Carter if only because he had the heart and the guts to send Amy to an integrated public school in Washington, but she warned that "Carter and 1 April 1977:198...

...The difference is that these old moralists whose descendants are now proud to be Immoralists pretty well reduced the matter of morality to names...

...this automatically made opposition .to Communism not only holy, but, in some mystical way, American...

...The DSOC, founded in 1973, has lived long enough and accomplished enough to mark itself as a unique organization in the history of American politics...

...Hence, after the remarks and gestures objected to by the Immoralists, Carter proceeded to execute an act of governmental morality by restoring the right of Americans to .travel freely throughout the world...

...should approve of every position expressed and every action taken by particular Israeli governments and statesmen, and those in the U.S...

...not so in the least...

...For Israel, survival is always at stake...

...The Soviet Union has, of course, responded to Carter's allegations about human rights by pointing out, quite correctly, that the situation of human rights in the United States still leaves quite a bit to be desired...

...Well, as things have worked out, the economic competition hasn't been all that competitive nor all that productive, nothing at all, for example, compared to the arms competition...

...caps...

...They were encouraged in this by the success of the McGovernites in winning control of the '72 convention...

...At any rate, morality in foreign policy is hardly an invention of Jimmy Carter's insofar as the two great powers are concerned...

...WASHINGTON REPORT THE IMMORALISTS It's unusual enough to have a debate, however desultory, going on United States foreign policy...

...That's splendid...

...The Chicago convention was a time for stock-taking on this strategy...

...This is not to say that negotiations will 'be easy...

...If Carter continues in this remarkable interpretation of Commonweal: 197 morality as something that governs the conduct of the person professing the morality, even if he happens to be a chief of state, who knows, he may get around to halling the CIA's reading of our mail, the FBI's disruption of the legitimate political activities of groups that believe in universal medical care available to all and other wild-eyed Socialist schemes...

...Robinson is blind and his blindness seemed to add a peculiar power to the words of the prophet, you don't have to be religious to feel the wave of faith and hope that moved around the hall...

...One sign of agreement is the editorial line of In These Times, the socialist weekly founded last fall by an interesting group of Old, New and Newer Leftists...

...It's unusual enough, for that matter, for the United States to have something that might reasonably be referred to as a foreign policy...

...help...

...with exclamation points and visualize appropriate symbols of American enterprise, Soviet peasants and workers, that's it...

...At the end of his recent Middle Eastern trip, Secretary of State Vance reported that although he found a strong desire for peace among all concerned, the Arabs and the Israelis remain deeply divided on how to resolve the key issues that have blocked a settlement...

...In that dim and distant epoch, there was always much talk about the means of competition between the two...

...a collection of selfcreated military dictators in Spanish- or Portuguesespeaking countries on both sides of the Atlantic...

...What the Dullesian-Nixonian moralizers were moralizing about was the absolute evil of Communism...

...The Lebanese debacle shows what can happen in the region, and not only in Lebanon...

...Interesting in this connection is the reaction of UN Secretary General Kurt Waldheim who also recently returned from the Middle East...

...In an effort to break the diplomatic impasse in the area, President Sadat proposed that the Palestinians should form "an official and declared link" with Jordan even before a Geneva couferenee is reconvened - - a move that might restrain the hard-liners in the PLO...

...In the past eight years, the proportion of college-age youngsters attending college has dropped from 44 percent to 33 percent...

...Meanwhile, even Norman Thomas lost faith in the usefulness of tilting at windmills and running for president...

...The counterparts of such Israeli hard-liners, of course, are those Arabs who will not face the fact that if Israel is to give up territory, it must get something firm in the shape of peace in return...

...It was certainly easy enough for cynics in the West, including myself, to point out that in practice the Brezhnev Doctrine simply cast a cloak of dialectical legitimacy over the Soviets doing what they wanted to do, namely, invade Eastern European nations at will, shoot up the citizens and retire in good order filled with the pleasant feelings of Great Power status reasserted, the same good feelings we ourselves got, at so much higher costs, from slaughtering the peasants of Southeast Asia...

...Vietnam had similarly resisted our efforts to establish peace and justice there through bombing, therefore no Americans...

...The hardness of their time was in no way softened by American Stalinists who took the appeal out of "production for use and not for profit" by tying it to a Russian dictatorship...

...Frances Knight of the Passport Office as to which nations are good and which bad...

...All in all, a determined effort to achieve some kind of settlement in that troubled area seems certain, indeed imperative if we are to avoid either another war or another oil embargo...

...Aside from this, what should be the U.S...

...Abruptly, Americans are delivered from the capricious judgments of Ms...

...Badly battered in Lebanon, the PLO is under severe pressure from its Arab allies to scale down its political objectives...

...The situation does indeed leave much to be desired, though there is certainly no comparison between conditions in the two superstates...

...Still, there is a profound difference and it is one from which the rest of us, ordinary citizens of both superstates, as well as those of our clients, may eventually profit...

...Ever since Roosevelt and the New Deal took the starch and the membership out of the Socialist Party by borrowing much of its program, socialists in America have had a hard and lonely time...

...finally, Saudi Arabia has made it plain that it expects the United States to take positive action in the Middle East in exchange for its efforts to hold the line on oil prices and avoid another oil embargo...

...Moreover, the Brezhnev Doctrine, although it established a locus for the source of doctrinal purity, was hardly the first moralizing expression of Soviet polio] either abroad or at home...

...Israelis and Arabs alike could receive no better gift...

...Consequently, many youngsters are rethinking the prospect of attending college...

...Nonetheless, one hopeful fact is that negotiations this time will begin with a radically changed position for the Palestinian Liberation Organization...

...stance in the coming negotiations...

...Faith and hope, in fact, were conspicuous qualities throughout the convention...

...and in Asia a corresponding collection of military dictators in great part created by ourselves in the name of freedom...

...There was a period--now hardly recallable--when Soviet-American relations were dominated by a constantly changing spirit of a place: Vienna, Camp David, Glassboro, N.J., wherever...

...It's a small thing, but a significant one...

...to protect them from the pressures of hard-liners a t home--those who imagine, for instance, that they can refuse even to negotiate about the territorial gains of the 1967 war...

...There were unkind words for some of Carter's appointments and kind words for some of his appointments...