REVIEWS
Levi, Jeffrey & Coser, Lewis & Clark, Joseph & Spitz, Elaine
THE ROMANCE OF AMERICAN COMMUNISM, by Vivian Gornick. New York: Basic Books. 333 pp. $10. A FINE OLD CONFLICT, by Jessica Mitford. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. 265 pp. $10. THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF AN...
...Many of these prison transfers were made for cosmetic reasons: to show foreign visitors that the prisons dating from Batista's rule were being shut down, with no mention that the prisoners had simply been moved elsewhere...
...No certainty about their fate in democracies can be vouchsafed, for we have nothing to depend on besides fallible human judgment...
...his experience made him more aware of the manner in which Castro manipulates foreign impressions...
...Schools would be closed over night if students dared to protest some government policy, though the official reason for the closing would be a period of labor in the countryside...
...The French Communists under George Marchais adopted "Eurocommunism" and unanimously "rejected" the dictatorship of the proletariat in the same way that they had accepted Stalinism and the dictatorship of the proletariat before...
...Even though members of The New Class may never have harbored the drives and designs Kristol attributes to them, his attack against them, though this may not be his intention, makes them sitting ducks for vicious assaults by all those anti-intellectual forces that have for long awaited an occasion to attack the spirit of modernity and its proponents...
...How suitable the phrase, "renunciation of the mind" in the light of Peggy Dennis's Moscow experiences...
...q Two CHEERS FOR CAPITALISM, by Irving Kristol New York: Basic Books...
...AT TIMES Kristol's insensitivity reaches positively Victorian proportions...
...Sitting in the offices of the federal bureaucracy, in the common rooms of major universities, in editorial offices and in the plush seats of media control, they attempt to wrest power from the denizens of executive suites, and so help undermine the legitimate authority of our business civilization...
...Tell this to mothers on welfare, to the millions of women who scrape for a meager living on inadequate paychecks, or to the elderly for whom the cost of false teeth may indeed be a vital matter...
...10.95...
...This was a loyal British Communist writing about the Soviet fatherland as a devil, if perhaps not quite as terrible as pictured...
...Golendorf sought to participate in some of these field experiences but could never obtain official permission...
...In legislative assemblies, after all, experience matters as much as theoretical knowledge, and in democratic theory he whom the shoe pinches properly prevails over any educated elite...
...Cambridge, London, New York and Melbourne: Cambridge University Press...
...If there are mysteries that Gornick must probe it is not the Crossman quote, but how people accepted such renunciation of mind...
...You wouldn't even learn the name of the organization when it was transformed under Browder...
...This was the message of the review in Newsdav, a paper of considerable circulation and solid capitalist paternity...
...The revisionism of Togliatti in Italy was applied rigorously by Gates in America and then extended into the experience of the Spanish Communists under Carrillo...
...Boris and Musa disappeared never to be seen among the living, and Valerie must not be approached...
...There was a rebellion against the Soviet regime by the workers and sailors of the Kronstadt naval base in 1921...
...Everyone believes that rights should be taken seriously...
...2 Matos was arrested in October 1959 and is still in prison 18 years later: Castro's revenge for Matos's sin of seeking to resign his position as Chief of the Second Military District in Camaguey because of his concern over growing Communist influence on Castro...
...His wife and daughter were not permitted to leave with him...
...although he was entitled to one, the prosecutor who conducted the intensive questioning advised him against it...
...Stalinism and Stalin were the fault of Joseph Stalin...
...Why was all this happening...
...Fascist" types, such as Anna Kethly, the Hungarian socialist leader who declared in November when Russian tanks were ranging everywhere to put down the rebellion: "The Hungary of tomorrow will be a socialist state...
...The ideology of The New Class, the author argues, is an "un-American' thing" that has only fairly recently been imported from Europe...
...Whatever the Communist experience was, it is touching to see how some—in what we once lovingly called the capitalist press—have taken the Gornick description to heart...
...But in the Mitford version of "a fine old conflict," she prettifies the regime against which the entire Hungarian people arose in 1956...
...Further, rights involve a relationship, a claim of one person upon another...
...The "law" of baseball, for example, must be understood to include not only a "statute" that prohibits a player from physically intimidating an umpire but also a moral code that makes clear what counts as physical intimidation (e.g., making a fist versus sticking out one's tongue...
...In the practice of rights as we know it in this country, certain rights—the great civil liberties—have been deemed so valuable that it is almost always considered wrong to qualify them in any way...
...If rights are more inviolable than other prerogatives, privileges, or freedoms, that is only because in some communities people have agreed to treat them that way, perhaps only for the moment, and as a matter of social policy, not necessarily as a fundamental moral tenet...
...he has the courage of his convictions and is hence prepared to offer his advice to the much maligned business classes on how to refurbish their tarnished image so as to be properly armed in the coming struggle for power with socialist levelers, those opponents of the Protestant virtues and the spirit of enlightened capitalism...
...Yet Dworkin entrusts moral decision-making to these (mostly corporate) lawyers in black robes rather than to democratically elected legislators...
...In order to protect an area of action withheld from the community, to guarantee a concern for self along with subordination to the general good, Flathman realizes he must go beyond a defense of the individual's satisfaction of his private needs...
...would be for corporations to give support to those elements of the 'new class'—and they exist, if not in large numbers—which do believe in the preservation of a strong private sector...
...According285 ly, when decisions require additional rules (e.g., to determine, in baseball, what constitutes intimidation), the discretion of the umpire, and in law of the judge, is held to be paramount...
...Deleting the phrase from Dennis's article solved no problems for Pravda or for anyone else...
...Neither of these books, indeed, successfully drives from the field those who seek to establish a good society solely on the basis of people's unfettered wills, and not on some external and "objectively" right standard...
...But as we know ever since W. I. Thomas's famous dictum, "If men define situations as real, they are real in their consequences...
...What could have been a better time than the year when Molotov told the Communist world that fascism was "a matter of taste," when Stalin leered at the world standing by the side of Herr von Ribbentropp...
...It consists of "some millions of people whom liberal capitalism has sent to college in order to help manage its affluent, highly technological, mildly paternalistic `post-industrial society...
...This must end...
...utilitarianism provides no sure ground for holding rights inviolable...
...Now all this might be dismissed as a kind of paranoid fantasy...
...But their voices were lost in the tundra...
...H. L. A. Hart and the reigning school of legal positivism opt for the first alternative: a right is whatever a valid law says it is...
...Mitford is still enthusiastic about the "exhilarating experience" of discovering the sumptuous food enjoyed by the collective farmers...
...Such proof would depend upon a ranking of people's interests and desires, objectives and purposes, so that, when in conflict, those that would accomplish the most good would prevail...
...The discussion goes on and on about Communists in America after World War II, when they became the excuse for the blight of McCarthyism...
...Their accomplishments are incredible, if Castro's figures of the number of schools, factories, and amount of farm work these camps have produced are to be believed...
...The voice may be Kristol's but the spirit is that of Mr...
...Most majority-rule systems, with or without a practice of rights, will probably respect civil liberties ("the great rights") because of the necessary requirements of a rational social contract...
...Such objections must be logically consistent...
...A case can be made for the absolute standing of a principle, and for its appropriate weight, Dworkin says, by appealing to "an amalgam of practice and other principles in which the implications of legislative and judicial history figure along with appeals to community practices and understandings...
...Rakosi and other Hungarian leaders had been summoned to Moscow after Stalin died in 1953...
...3) The enthronement of Herculean reason, that is, of those who reason best, leads Dworkin to affirm another familiar conservative tenent...
...Not really, the paradox is only apparent...
...Rights, he says, are social phenomena because they depend upon socially defined rules and roles...
...Nor does Peggy Dennis, 21 years later, summon up the candor or courage to relate how Pravda mutilated her husband's article...
...If an insoluble crisis developed among Communists in the middle 1950s, we still must face up to a great paradox: there is every reason to believe that Communist power, in the Soviet Union, China, and Communist satellite nations will be with us for a long time...
...But even at that time, after Stalin, the word Jewish was an alarming sign of impending heresy to those who had survived in Soviet leadership...
...Of the four authors, only Trepper confronts the issue...
...What then was the Communist experience...
...On the page before, Gornick writes about Lanzetti: For, if you meet him today and in his presence you attack the Party or Stalin or the Soviet Union, he flies into a passion and cries: "Don't talk to me about the atrocities of Stalin...
...Gradgrind...
...such rules are always normative...
...This century has brought forth two monsters, fascism and Stalinism, and our ideal has been engulfed in this apocalypse...
...And he writes, "I am no exception to this verdict...
...There seems to be a paradox here: Irving Kristol, editor of the Public Interest, Wall Street Journal columnist, and Henry Luce Professor of Urban Values at New York University, seems by all counts to be a member of the class on which he heaps so much obloquy...
...By a careful analysis of what rights mean in ordinary language, Flathman avoids many of the pitfalls that entrap Dworkin...
...Golendorf was accused of being a CIA agent—a charge based on notes found in his diaries that were critical of his experiences in Cuba...
...Dworkin's analysis is open to several lines of criticism...
...The extraordinary thing about the 1956 events was the extent of support from workers in the most farflung parts of Hungary...
...He was in prison for 38 months, and was in solitary confinement for most of the six months preceeding his trial...
...Here Flathman gives the rebel firmer support than Dworkin does, because dissent in his liberal principle derives from that irreducible individuality that is proclaimed by the very notion of rights...
...Take the simple assertion: I have a right to do (or not to do) X. Is this a legal or a moral claim, or both...
...It can only be hoped that when stories such as these are told often enough, even Castro's friends will tell him that if he hopes to gain better relations with the United States (and whatever economic/political benefits may accrue as a result), then some strong gesture regarding political prisoners must be made...
...Indeed, when Dworkin defends the Vietnam war-resisters, he acknowledges that they would never have put their claims in defensible form...
...they may simply have mentioned considering the idea and their boastful talk was reported to the security police...
...Whatever else rights may be, for Dworkin they are not claims dependent on an individual's knowledge and will for their exercise...
...If only she had shared with her readers what she meant by "moral imagination," there might have been far more than the singularly cluttered, but uninformative contents of her account...
...To 286 tie morals, especially their weight and significance, to law as Dworkin does is to equate morality with a national and historically specific set of practices and arrangements...
...III FROM THE STORMS that blew over the Communist countries and through the Communist movements in 1956 came a reaffirmation of a basic fact of contemporary political experience—there's a "Kronstadt" in every Communist movement...
...She admits that the struggle of the Hungarian people had started as a "people's rebellion" but then adds that "the fascist elements grouped around Cardinal Mindszenty had turned the people's rebellion into a blood bath...
...When he finally did work, teaching or preparing exhibitions, he found himself encumbered by seemingly capricious changes of regulations or policy as to which artists were politically acceptable, as to where and when he was to lecture...
...Shortly after they left, the people rebelled— everywhere...
...It was not an antisocialist rebellion, as the Communists said at the time...
...Unlike Plato's philosopher-kings, Dworkin's new guardians of morals are not placed beyond the obvious temptations associated with families and wealth...
...II THE SUBJECT MATTER of all these books has acquired an insistent timeliness, whatever the shortcomings of the books themselves...
...They do not fall outside the scope of legitimate social agreement and hence of restraints...
...Golendorf received "only" ten years...
...The manner in which the Cubans handled Golendorf's case and imprisonment is worthy of anything the Soviet system has to offer...
...Paris: Editions Pierre Belfond, 1976, 320 pp...
...A rereading of John Reed's Ten Dais That Shook the World might cause some wonder among those who were enthusiastic about Reed and about Trotsky's explanation that "the closing of the newspapers is a legitimate measure of defense...
...But of what value are rights...
...But between the egg roll and the fortune cookie she apparently concluded that I was not among those who "walked the wire successfullly and remained whole and strong...
...While paid the same as regular workers, they toil under harsh conditions, are overworked and underfed, and are forced to achieve huge quotas—in the vague hope of receiving a reduced sentence...
...These educators, journalists, city planners, social workers, editors, and civil servants constitute, so Kristol argues, a clear and present danger to the good, that is the business, society...
...Golendorf estimated that there are 20,000 political prisoners in Cuba, and 8,000 to 9,000 of them in Havana province where he was held...
...Obviously, it had to be many different things...
...Kristol is, to be sure, a gentle and civilized man, yet one cannot help but feel that Nixon and his entourage of blackguards may have learned much from him when they established their "enemies list...
...It is the policy of the Carter administration to make human-rights issues an important part of its foreign policy...
...On his return to Moscow after his war service he "sat" ten interminable years in Soviet jails...
...If there were truly ecstatic moments in the Communist experience they came when the mind was suddenly freed from the obligation to conform to a "higher" verity...
...Dworkin uses this approach to defend "reverse discrimination," desegregation, and civil disobedience...
...To defend old-fashioned individualism, the author, in a new fashion, grants the essential communalism of rights...
...Flathman's answer, which he calls "the liberal principle," roots the defense of rights in the fact that they enable individuals to "pursue interests, satisfy desires and achieve objectives...
...He was visited by an official of the French embassy on several oc283 casions, but with little accomplished and always in the presence of the prosecutor or a guard...
...Judges do not ignore or create these principles...
...Her husband Bob, born in Hungary, "was particularly struck by the evident prosperity and sense of progress we found everywhere...
...The early signs of that crisis first appeared when the tyrant died in 1953...
...Stalinism was the fault of the "cult of the individual...
...Lenin and Trotsky ordered the machine-gunning of the Kronstadt rebels...
...If the Spanish Communists under Santiago 276 Carrillo have moved further than any other CP toward revising the tenets of both Leninist and Stalinist tyranny, it is because the Spanish Communists have carried even further than the Italians the evaluation of Stalinism, and to an extent of Leninism, begun by Togliatti in Italy in 1956...
...If I corrupt society," said the revolutionary Socrates at his trial, "tell me, who improves...
...His "Marxism," she writes, "is, indeed, not so much a political doctrine as it is a philosophical perspective, a piece of truth that lives inside him with such sure knowledge it is not necessary for him to sacrifice reality to theory...
...The coherence of the legal system is guaranteed, in Dworkin's view, by its alleged embodiment of an Ideal, a fundamental standard implicit in "the amalgam" and extractable by reason...
...He does this, moreover, without any consideration of the proverbial wisdom that warns against the tendency of power to corrupt, and that calls attention to the role of reason as the servant rather than the master of the passions...
...We kill everyone...
...But all this is only camouflage...
...All his other activities, starting with his first trip, were interpreted as part of a grand design to infiltrate Cuba and establish a network of informants...
...Foundations and universities," says Kristol, "are the idea-germinating and idea-legitimizing institutions of our society" and they hence need to be protected from the designs of modern levelers...
...Commentators and statesmen debate Eurocommunism...
...and the validity of a law is determined not by the rightness of its moral content but by the fact that a properly constituted authority enacted it...
...Finally, something must be said of the security apparatus, the secret police that manage to fill up these political prisons...
...Do social norms yield a monolithic set of principles...
...it only pointed up the universal feeling about a secret police that had even pulled out the fingernails of Janos Kadar, later installed as the head of the Hungarian government by the Russians...
...Here the term "rights" is connected with action that is irreducibly individual in some way, and is also believed to be good in some respect...
...Call it whatever you will, there is this built-in spark of rebellion against Communist tyranny and betrayal in almost every Communist heart...
...How else is one to describe a sentence such as the following: "A nation whose politics revolves around such issues as day-care centers or school lunches or the `proper' cost of false teeth is a nation whose politics is squalid, mean-spirited, debasing...
...When presented in public, prisoners were seen in civilian clothes and without handcuffs—to give the impression of a happy, well-treated lot...
...Peggy Dennis discovered that, "In the purges of the Comintern in 1937 and 1938, the very international activity and foreign travel demanded by the Comintern became the basis of charges of `foreign agent' that sent hundreds of Soviet and European Comintern workers to labor camps and firing squads...
...No one could give me a plausible reason why this was so," she writes...
...WITHOUT MORAL UNDERPINNINGS, Dworkin argues, many laws are unintelligible...
...Golendorf was moved to La Cabana, a prison run by the military, after Principe was closed...
...The uprising that followed was as spontaneous and broad-based as the revolution that overthrew the Czarist regime in Russia in March, 1917...
...Unlike John Rawls's ideally rational man, they are not hidden behind a veil of ignorance—so that they do not know their appetites, skills, and resources, and will consequently judge principles solely in terms of abstract reason, not in terms of their existing status and interests in society...
...Some 15,000 Kronstadt sailors and workers demonstrated on March 1, 1921, in solidarity with some of the demands of the workers of Petrograd who were striking not only for economic demands but for free elections to factory committees and soviets...
...Though she admits that terrible revelations were made by Khrushchev, Mitford stands by the "socialist" achievements of pre-1956 Hungary despite everything that even the current rulers of Hungary have admitted...
...He argues that a system of law that recognizes moral rights and also arouses dissidence over policies allegedly violating rights will almost always have a doubtful proposition on its hands...
...Which illuminates an aspect of "Kronstadt" that makes it such a stunning part of the Communist experience...
...442 pp...
...Herculean feats of reason are obviously required to fashion a coherent and consistent entity out of all the moral principles, rules, statutes, and judicial decisions of a legal system...
...In the United States, this guiding Ideal is (for Dworkin) the principle of equal respect and concern for all...
...I can find no evidence whatsoever that social workers or city planners, popular journalists and public-interest lawyers share a 281 coherent ideological stance or aspire to bring The New Class to power...
...One such moment is halfdescribed in Peggy Dennis's book...
...What a wonderful time it was for some who spoke their minds when the Moscow trials took place in the '30s...
...This should make us modest, but not necessarily afraid—for rights or for any other aspect of human welfare...
...The Hungarians could say little when the Russians accused them of bringing the Hungarian economy to the verge of collapse...
...Judges find that answer as best they can and then secure that right...
...He lived in the same Comintern Hotel Luxe in Moscow where Peggy and Gene Dennis lived...
...Golendorf received a large living stipend but had to beg for productive work...
...In this country, innocent people don't spend ten years in prison...
...He finally did so without official sanction...
...He sought to become part of Cuban society and to contribute to the revolution working as a photographer, teacher, and translator...
...Westport, Conn.: Lawrence Hill & Co...
...To claim a right is to claim respect for one's personal interests or objectives, especially from those inclined to disregard them...
...He only killed Russians...
...It has been accurately noted that Stalin killed far more Communist leaders and far more rank-and-file Communists than Hitler did...
...3 The evidence Golendorf presents thoroughly contradicts such a generalization...
...Her chronology is all wrong...
...She and Gene developed warm friendships with others at the Luxe...
...Leopold Trepper, a Polish Jewish Communist who worked for Soviet intelligence and indeed organized the Soviet espionage network in Western Europe when it was occupied by Hitler, performing incredible feats in behalf of the Red Army battling against the Nazis, has also written about the Communist experience...
...The reader of the Mitford book would learn as little about CP history and politics, but a little bit more of what an experience it was to fight for Negro rights and to go to the Deep South in the fight to save the life of Willie McGee...
...IT IS NOT just wide-eyed American congressmen who are being unduly impressed with Castro and 284 his revolution...
...First, of course, there was the rationing of all basic food commodities, despite Castro's claims that the successes of agricultural planning and reform had increased production phenomenally...
...He says to his oldest son, "I am your father...
...It was a protest against the betrayal of those promises that were made immediately after the Bolsheviks seized power...
...all, he says, are collectively responsible...
...Everyone believes in rights...
...She then implored her comrades to tell her what had happened and she learned that Bob had been executed...
...The political prisoners were also divided by degree of counterrevolutionary obstinacy...
...What the game is really about is power...
...THE PRACTICE OF RIGHTS, by Richard Flathman...
...This time they could find no trace of Boris or Musa, Bob or Valerie...
...But he was a reporter, and he was with the Hungarian workers at the huge Csepel and Dunapentele steel and machine works...
...Brought to a violation of the human condition and of human rights the individual, even the Communist as individual, discovers that "the only part of the conduct of anyone, for which he is amenable to society, is that which concerns others...
...Flathman devotes his book to these twin tasks...
...Like parrot fever, it is an infection that did not grow on native soil but was brought over from corrupt Europe...
...A more positive step...
...For students of political philosophy, many of Flathman's careful distinctions—e.g., the distinct social roles that the practice of rights bestows upon holders of rights, government enforcers of rights, the general public, and those against whom rights are claimed—will undoubtedly become a source of fruitful discussion and further exploration...
...Hence, the law must always allow latitude for testing the rules and should always be lenient with dissenters...
...Even the hard-nosed realist George Elaine Spitz Kennan wrote recently: A number of Americans have recently returned from Cuba favorably impressed in a number of respects, with what they have seen there: with evident improvements in the lot of the people at large, with the degree of support the regime appears to enjoy, with the absence of Soviet-type security precautions, with the relaxed and friendly way they themselves were received...
...So it was that the early but burgeoning tyranny of Lenin and Trotsky (only a few concentration camps, only hundreds and then several thousand killed in reprisals) became the monstrous tyranny of Stalin...
...But that is what she has done, and it emerges in painful detail...
...Call it revolt of the damned at Kolyma, call it Trotskyism, Bukharinism, a right-wing, a left-wing, a left-cum-right deviation...
...Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press...
...Still another book, by Peggy Dennis, widow of 275 Eugene Dennis, the former general secretary of the American CP, turns out to be far more significant than Gornick's or Mitford's, but in a way that the author, alas, never intended it to be...
...Are not principles congenitally controversial...
...His son replies: "Only one, Why were you sentenced...
...His expanded version of individualism certainly strengthens any utilitarian defense of rights...
...Utilitarians who do not share Bentham's view that push-pin is as good as poetry will contest the adequacy of Dworkin's attack on their doctrine and insist that the principle of utility can and does successfully protect rights by looking, as John Stuart Mill insisted one should, to "the permanent interests of man as a progressive being" rather than to the satisfaction of immediate or short-term concerns and to the neglect of higher values...
...That was why 1956 was such a singular year for many of us...
...In the camps, their conduct was admirable...
...From the Gornick book, precious little...
...Kristol is not content with denouncing the evil designs of The New Class...
...The law," replied his accuser...
...A number of "capitalist" journals now print reviews of books on the Communist experience, which twit former Communists for daring to entertain bitter recollections and give them good marks only if they remember that experience without regret or recrimination...
...Dworkin rejects this notion that the discretion of the judge explains the infusion into law of moral principles not already in the statute...
...or that equality meant to the Founding Fathers more than the restricted notion of all being considered equally able to be a free and independent people (no less than, say, the English), or all being equally able to assent to or dissent from a social contract establishing the civil society...
...We must be watchful so that the results of the Revolution do not disappear, as was the case in 19.19...
...Gene and Peggy finally left Moscow, but they were back for more in 1937...
...But which set of moral principles—yours or mine—does the judge invoke...
...What a pleasure it was for the Daily Worker editor, Gates, and for his foreign editor, myself, to spread the dispatches from the Csepel factories across five columns above the masthead...
...When Vivian Gornick presents her scurrilous portrayal of her arch villain, the man she calls Bitterman, the man who wanted to deprive her of the "romance of Communism," she quotes him as saying, "The things we did, the lies we told...
...Jeremy Bentham and certain of his disciples would judge such legal claims by a moral standard, but since their moral standard is utilitarianism (the greatest happiness of the greatest number), no alleged right would seem to be safe from attack where the infringement upon that right is believed to promote the common good...
...This brings us to a fascinating failure of both Mitford and Dennis to review some of the factual information the Daily Worker and the People's World were getting from Budapest in that fall of 1956...
...This revisionism was deepest in Spain, but more massive and meaningful in Italy, and no more than a facade in France...
...Suppression feeds on itself...
...Defiance of the law in order to safeguard rights always remains a possibility...
...Despite these evident achievements, however, it is not clear that Flathman has provided rights with a secure place in the political firmament...
...He contends that it is not a matter of discretion at all...
...Those principles (and the rights and duties they prescribe) that best fit in with the whole legal system are, and ought to be, recognized as the correct principles...
...Peggy learned about that in Moscow at the time but she had made that renunciation of mind, that relinquishing of conscience, and there was always Gene to explain it to her...
...FLATHMAN'S OPTIMISTIC READING of Western experience with rights (shared with Dworkin) may be mistaken...
...To secure rights, then, it becomes necessary to justify, (1), the idea of self-directed individual activity within a group, and, (2), actions by some that may have unpleasant consequences for others...
...Golendorf was held at two prisons: Principe and La Cabana...
...Thus, foreign visitors see only what Cuban authorities choose for them to see...
...Gornick also quotes Richard Crossman as an early culprit in this regard, for he had written: "Once the renunciation has been made, the mind, instead of operating freely, becomes the servant of a higher and unquestioned purpose...
...Dissent readers might be disquieted, however, by the curious fact that, for all its advocacy of radical solutions to contemporary problems, Dworkin's book is rooted in profoundly conservative doctrines...
...The prosecution asked for a 25-year sentence...
...Call it revisionism, a Kronstadt, Titoism, nationalism, workers' control, democratic centralism, the Workers' Opposition, self-determination...
...302 pp...
...To deny the truth is an act of service...
...In Flathman's view, a right is not an esoteric, semilegal, semimoral precept to be extricated by a society or a specialized elite from the communal bedrock...
...But it flared up everywhere in the Communist world after Khrushchev's speech in February 1956...
...What it comes down to is that our nuovi uomini are persuaded they can do a better job of running our society" than the business elite...
...Golendorf's experience, along with thousands of similar ones, provides ample evidence of gross violation of human rights in Cuba...
...There are no witches, of course, but if people believe in witches they have been known to viciously kill old women so perceived...
...In other words, preserve the sanctity of academic freedom and just starve those who think otherwise than the business community and are "inimical to corporate survival...
...But Peggy Dennis censors the account of that article as it appeared in Pravda...
...Those positivists and utilitarians who believe the question of human rights, as all political questions, involves claims in competition with other claims, to be resolved by agreement, still have what appears to be the strongest arguments...
...Golendorf never consulted a lawyer throughout the case...
...From these figures, Golendorf estimated there were from 20,000 to 30,000 workers in such camps...
...THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF AN AMERICAN COMMUNIST: A PERSONAL VIEW OF A POLITICAL LIFE, by Peggy Dennis...
...Trepper describes how Stalin ordered the murder of every member of the Central Committee of the Polish Communist party...
...General rules, he says, are always necessary to the interpretation of laws...
...As Cuban-American relations move toward normalization, Pierre Golendorf's account of his experiences in Cuba and its prisons from 1967 until his expulsion in 1974 offers a sobering perspective on the "success" of the Cuban revolution...
...Each thinks he has a better way to defend the notion of rights, to take them seriously...
...Dworkin might find it difficult, if not impossible, to show that equality has traditionally been understood in America as the supreme value from which all others are derived...
...Togliatti suggested that this was a mockery of Marxism, let alone of common sense, the latter being far more powerful a force for reason and logic than the former...
...By the time of the great purges, they could only shout their rebellion in the freezing wastelands where they had been dragged in order to be exterminated...
...Young people growing up in such a society will find in it little to be respected, nothing to be revered...
...Consequently, he appeals to a particular conception of citizenship, one in which the individual requires the protection of rights in order to participate effectively in public affairs...
...Only on her third visit to Moscow in 1941 did she see Valerie walking in her direction on Gorky Street...
...Now she had written a book on her experiences in the American Communist party, a more amusing and a better crafted book than Gornick's, but equally lacking in candid recollection and equally barren of political appraisal...
...Work camps were designed as an intermediary step between prison and release...
...Now I know why I flunked the test given by Vivian Gornick at lunch in a Chinese restaurant...
...But even more intriguing is the correspondence that came to the Daily Worker and People's World from Freyer's successor, Sam Russell, who covered the events in Budapest after the second Soviet tank invasion starting on November 4. Russell was chosen because of his political reliability and indeed he remained in the British CP long after these events...
...True, there is an enormous gulf between the theory and practice of Lenin and of Stalin...
...If you decide to go exploring for oil you find a competent geologist...
...15.95...
...Clearly, both her thesis and ideology were so neatly packaged in advance that she did not want to add my experience to that of an old, departed friend and comrade whom she had already interviewed...
...He tried to put the best face possible on the Russians, and in one dispatch he described a worker delegation that had gone to the Russians to negotiate and though the Hungarians remained unpersuaded, they suggested that possibly "the devil was not as black as he was painted...
...Why indeed, unless of course, they are just power-hungry intellectuals and humanitarian sob sisters...
...The ideologists'of The New Class claim that they are appalled at the inequalities of American society, at the scandal of poverty in the midst of affluence...
...It included high idealism and passion, self-sacrifice, and often a great brotherhood among its adherents...
...THE CASE against Golendorf was not so readily revealed...
...Candor, not suppression, is called for...
...This struggle is largely conducted, so our author avers, under the banner of equality...
...In fact, most of the time he talks in a 282 suavely modulated voice about our modern predicaments...
...New York: McGraw-Hill...
...The very first foreign Communist article critical of Stalin ever to appear in the Soviet press was written by Eugene Dennis...
...Ten years ago I returned to Russia, and for ten years I have been in prison...
...Johnson, his "stratagems of well-bred malignity...
...This was the same analysis conducted in the middle 'S0s by the John Gates faction of the American CP...
...Golendorf felt that preferences were given to common criminals, since the regime saw more hope of "reforming" them...
...Nevertheless, his book excites admiration for its fearless plunge into controversial matters, for its brilliant arguments, and great erudition...
...We have come to recognize that even the most outlandish definitions of the situation may have consequences if people come to believe them...
...On October 23, 1956, student demonstrations in Budapest led to the placarding of the city with demands for evacuation of Soviet troops from Hungarian soil, elections by secret ballot in the Hungarian Workers' party, and a long list of requirements adding up to a free and democratic socialism for Hungary...
...No outsiders can or should force change on Cuba...
...It was a careful, oh so restrained criticism of Stalin...
...or all being equal before the law...
...Self-criticism was the only way out of prison...
...The arguments in this resolution suggest singularly the point of view of the old Black Hundreds and the censors of the Czarist regime—for they also talked of `poisoners of the mind of the people...
...In June 1969, when Golendorf sought exit visas for himself and his family, he was (deliberately) sent from agency to agency, and repeatedly told that someone else was responsible...
...Coleridge, it is true, dreamed of a "new clerisy" to provide guidance for a society that had lost its religious moorings, but he would hardly have thought kindly of the idea that it be endowed by General Motors and the American Enterprise Institute...
...q TAKING RIGHTS SERIOUSLY, by Ronald Dworkin...
...Surprisingly, Golendorf found that most Cubans believed the bureaucracy was working against the intentions of, rather than for, Fidel...
...That Western countries have a (continued on page 360) 288 BOOKS (continued from page 288) comparatively good record on human rights issues is incontestable...
...When asked about these problems, his Cuban guides would not acknowledge any of them—whether political, economic, or ideological...
...Golendorf maintains that the security police penetrate every part of Cuban society—aided by the Cuban propensity to talk quite freely—and even within prison, surveillance does not stop...
...Is this a case of self-hatred...
...He did note that many of the secret police who were universally hated had been killed during the uprising, but that this had in no way deprived the uprising of its popular character...
...Trepper rejects the notion that his was a wasted life...
...250 pp...
...Similarly, if you wish to make a productive investment in the intellectual and educational worlds, you find competent intellectuals and scholars--dissident members as it were of the "new class" to offer guidance...
...A signal merit of Flathman's work is the intriguing description of individual rights as a social practice...
...But what precisely are rights, and what does it mean to take them seriously...
...Each participant in this social activity must make unique choices and judgments about the appropriateness of applying commonly supported rules in a particular situation...
...Some of it dovetails neatly with the Dennis book...
...Nevertheless, both Jessica Mitford and Peggy Dennis view the Hungarian uprising as a dark manipulation of "fascist" forces...
...So, in printing the Dennis article, Pravda cut out the reference to the murder of all the leading Jewish literary figures...
...Its reviewer, Jessica Mitford, was the author of that witty satire on the American funeral business, The American Way of Death...
...The demands of the Kronstadt demonstration were also for new elections to the soviets by secret ballot and with unrestricted political freedom...
...The 1950s saw many "Kronstadts," notably in East Germany, in Poland, above all in Hungary...
...What strikes one about this book is the human callousness it displays throughout...
...If [these institutions] are indifferent to the good opinion [of any particular segment of the population] they will just have to learn to be indifferent to the money too...
...A French Communist, Golendorf moved to Cuba in 1967 to participate in what he saw as a true revolution...
...Even if the practice of rights forms a secular pattern in democratic states, it is still not certain that the treatment of rights differs significantly from that of other well-established social policies, e.g., the graduated income tax...
...THE GREAT GAME, by Leopold Trepper...
...At these camps, prisoners labored ten hours a day...
...Taking a leaf from his Marxist opponents, he is not content with theory but wishes to weld it to Praxis...
...But here it is, 21 years later when she should have been able to go back and review Hungary's tragic history, and all she sees is confirmation that the Hungarian Freedom Fighters were "grasping, neo-fascist types...
...It is instructive to see how Vivian Gornick manages to cast those who supported the 278 Hungarian rebellion and sought to eradicate Stalinism from the American CP as the ugly Communists who did not manage to maintain the "wholeness," the "passion" and the "moral imagination" of the clear-cut hero of her interviews...
...Not least among its virtues, it contributes to our understanding of rights by correcting some popular misconceptions...
...But to starve out your enemies isn't enough, you must also reward your friends...
...Of course, these were not claimed to be ordinary prisons...
...He writes: "We wanted to change man, and we have failed...
...more important, it was written for and appeared in Moscow's Pravda...
...Even in the prisons, he found Cubans arguing that if only Fidel would hear their case things would be different and they would receive justice, and refusing to see the bureaucracy as an instrument of Fidel's personal power...
...He says there were up to 10,000 political arrests per year...
...Don't talk to me about Vietnam, the energy crisis and Watergate, and then dare to tell me what is wrong with the people and the Party and the movement that I represent and will belong to with honor as long as I live...
...Thus, the practice of rights presupposes autonomous individuals with justifiable spheres of activity upon which others may not intrude, as well as a community that supports rights or, in some cases, supersedes them...
...293 pp...
...Never forget," he said, "that you are in our hands, that no one can get you out but yourself...
...But Dennis never complained about this 279 censorship...
...He tells how he is reunited with his sons, but they cannot recognize him...
...This, too, bears emphasis because many who come to the study of Communism in a scholarly manner and with high ideals come with illusions about the purity of Leninism as compared with the absolute tyranny of Stalinism...
...Ronald Dworkin and Richard Flathman believe that human rights merit greater protection...
...The Communist world had learned a few days after Stalin died that one of his crimes had been the murder of the entire top ranks of the Soviet Union's Yiddish writers...
...and they always inject into the law of any legal system a particular set of moral principles...
...The New York Times published a section of the Gornick "passion" in its Book Review, followed by a laudatory review by a democratic socialist, whose emphasis on the crucial requirement, that socialism must above all be democratic, played a part in the departure of this reviewer from the Communist movement...
...Who else could complain about the exorbitant cost of the welfare state by pointing to the fact that "new health regulations in the cotton industry will, in the period from 1977 through 1983, cost some $3 billion...
...Though the opposition to the revolution is said to have ended, the regime still justifies the need for a security apparatus by the great number of enemies within Cuba, a contradiction on its face...
...One cannot disobey, it would seem, by appealing to another morality, for the law already incorporates the only valid morality, i.e., the only one relevant to our system...
...Consequently, rights are not sacrosanct...
...Germans and Spaniards, and the list could go on until we exhausted all the "national" parties affiliated with the Comintern...
...The prisons held both common criminals and political prisoners, though in separate sections...
...It is against them that he directs, to borrow from Dr...
...Here was a class struggle and a national liberation struggle in all its glory...
...Trepper heaps scorn on those Communist leaders who feigned astonishment after the 20th Congress in 1956...
...Rather, rights are community-defined and community-enforced norms...
...2) Dworkin puts the recognition, and hence the assertion, of one's rights outside the province of the average citizen...
...Golendorf refused to cooperate in his own undoing and thus stood trial...
...I started to greet her warmly, but she passed me with a slight flicker of recognition," Peggy writes...
...liquidators, economists, even God Seekers...
...The "revolutionary justice" he received was from a military tribunal before which he was accused by a military public prosecutor and "defended" by an attorney appointed by the military...
...She arrived there with Gene, who was to work in the Comintern, in 1931, She quickly discovered that an iron curtain separated foreign Communists from Soviet citizens, except those at the Luxe...
...He feels pride and satisfaction for the part he played in the war against the Nazis...
...Except for a brief return to solitary confinement (as punishment for having made an attempt to appeal his case) Golendorf spent his remaining time in this network...
...In sum, this ingenious, stirringly written, and provocative book claims that one political philosophy, namely our own, can simultaneously embrace inalienable rights, strict interpretation of legal rules, and ample room for rebellion...
...Majority rule, it can be argued, requires procedures that entail discussion, a respect for minorities, and a weighing of individual and social needs quite similar to the procedures necessary for any operational defense of rights...
...The hero of her "romance" is called Lanzetti...
...The prosecutor reminded Golendorf repeatedly that "we know all—we possess all the proof of your guilt...
...It was a rebellion against Lenin and Trotsky...
...call them the bearers of wreaths to Chou En-lai's memorial...
...But it did not prove to be an unbridgeable gulf...
...Reality...
...Truth...
...He condemned "the use of tortures, rigged trials...
...According to the Cuban system, the defendant is expected to establish his own guilt: he is questioned and prodded by the prosecution until he produces an acceptable self-critique, detailing his crimes against the revolution...
...A right, for example, can be insisted upon or waived, and only the holder of a right can decide...
...And what is one to make of a book such as Gornick's, which cannot fathom the gulf between a free and sovereign mind and one that is the servant of a "higher and unquestioned" purpose...
...Peggy Dennis takes strong exception to the denunciation of the Soviet invasion of Hungary in 1956 by the Daily Worker under the editorship of John Gates...
...My friend had been terribly disruptive of her idee fixe of Communism as creator of that "inner passion" and "intensity of illumination that tore at the soul," to cite a bit of her description...
...What better moment for mind and conscience than the time when the Nazi-Soviet pact unleashed World War II...
...How scornful the Leninists were of such Bolsheviks as Karelin who protested the suppression of newspapers with these prophetic words: "Three weeks ago the Bolsheviki were the most ardent defenders of the freedom of the press...
...It turned out that she was screening me for an interview to be used in a book she was writing on the romance of American Communism...
...These are similar to estimates made by other observers...
...The only reeducation that took place, according to Golendorf, was that extracted by time—the prisoners' moral, intellectual, and physical destruction...
...On a Potemkin tour Mitford might not have been able to see everything as it was then in Hungary...
...But this may be explained not by the legal and social patterns both books describe but by the impact of our Judeo-Christian heritage, notably the widespread belief in God-given rights to which it has given rise, and its religious conceptions of the unassailable human soul...
...True, Mitford attempts an explanation, the Hungarian people were "manipulated by the CIA from without and counterrevolution from within...
...But would any of these men, one may wonder, have had anything but contempt for kept ideologists of captains of industry and barons of the boardroom...
...but he argues that their "real" will (as adduced from the logic of the case) and not their actual ideas are what the courts should have considered...
...But when examining the Communist experience, far more emphasis should be devoted, I think, to the rebellion of the Communist when confronted with the betrayal of his ideal, more accurately, when the Communist perceives that betrayal...
...Since the pursuit of one's purposes may harm others, it is not always right to let people do what they want...
...Some value may be wrung from the Gornick and Mitford books because there are Americans who will discover that Communists were real live people, fed with the same food, hurt with the same weapons, subject to the same diseases...
...No less than "everywhere...
...His story is made all the more interesting because it is a critique coming from a true believer...
...These were quite large prisons, dating mostly from the Batista era...
...The prosecution alleged these notes were the basis of a book Golendorf planned to publish in France, not a private diary as he maintained...
...What is one to make of such sentences, Gornick asks...
...This discontent was quite moderately and quietly expressed...
...Golendorf reports that in Cuba the hand of the government can be felt everywhere...
...This definition suggests that rights cannot be taken seriously when, as in Dworkin, an external and allegedly objective conception of them is substituted for an individual's own perceptions, when one's "real" will is given priority over one's actual assertion of subjective desires and beliefs...
...But his book and his experience is sharply distinguished from those of Gornick, Mitford, and Dennis...
...Kristol defends virtue and the Protestant Ethic and is hence exempt from class biases as he rides into battle against those members of The New Class, evidently the great majority, who have departed from the path of rectitude by displaying "a habitual animus to the business community...
...Because individualism depends upon a social milieu for actualization, the concept of rights entails both irreducibly individual and indispensably social elements...
...Dworkin's attack on positivism and utilitarianism must indeed be taken seriously, but his Idealist substitution is not an acceptable democratic alternative...
...Call it the Hungarian rebellion of 1956, the Czechoslovak struggle in 1968, the German workers battling Soviet tanks in 1953, the children of Moscow fighting Beria's police troops in the streets on the day of Stalin's funeral...
...But drowned in blood...
...But when he sought to return to France along with his Cuban wife and child, I he was denied permission and was arrested as an agent of the CIA...
...Nor is it altogether clear why the "one right answer" to what rights we actually possess (that Dworkin insists our judges endeavor to discover) should prove so elusive on questions involving civil disobedience (so that Dworkin urges judges to be flexible) but stringent (and hence, in Dworkin's view, requiring inflexibility) in upholding cases of reverse discrimination...
...Paper, $5.95...
...He wrote about a strike without a single scab as an example of worker solidarity such as he had rarely seen anywhere else in the world...
...The high regard for rights in Western democracies offers empirical support for this theory and for the efficacy of rights in achieving the goals of what Flathman calls a civic individualism...
...In time, he became discouraged by the problems of the revolution: its huge bureaucracy, economic failures, political repression, and the cult of personality around Fidel...
...but it is the objection to letting them do as they wish that requires justification, not their pursuit of self-interest...
...Why indeed should taxpayers such as Kristol pay to protect the lungs of textile workers against occupational diseases...
...True, there were precursors of Eurocommunism that go back to the founding days of Italian Communism...
...Academic freedom, he says piously, must of course be preserved...
...Quite apart from the incongruity of comparing Stalin's killing of millions with America killing "everyone" there is the "technical" matter of Stalin killing only Russians...
...Dworkin dismisses the idea of legislative supremacy by charging that legislators are the majority's mechanical puppets on matters of moral principle (especially minority rights), and asserting that judges-despite the evident fact that as voters they also form part of the majority or the minority—reason in court as neutrals...
...Such a task is clearly beyond the competence of the ordinary citizen...
...Instead, it is an individual's "warrant for taking or refusing to take an action" that he conceives to be advantageous to him and in which he wishes to indulge even though he knows (and it is generally believed) that his actions will disadvantage others...
...According to the liberal principle, it is a prima facie good for individuals to have and to be in a position to act upon and satisfy their purposes...
...Clearly, their presence is pervasive-even if only judging from the detailed accounting they were able to give Golendorf of his own actions...
...She tells about an article her husband had written for the Daily Worker in 1956...
...From all four books there comes a realization that the 1956 revelations by Nikita Khrushchev about the horrors of Stalinism inaugurated a deep and endless crisis of Communism...
...280 Within the Soviet Union in the '30s, Trepper says, only the Trotskyists can lay claim to the honor of having resisted...
...and snuffing out of lives of more than a score of Jewish cultural figures...
...As to the prosperity that she and Bob saw in 1955, she could have used some of the 22 years since that visit to research what both the Russian and Hungarian Communists divulged about the declining economic standards brought about by the Stalinist pre-1956 regime...
...But Dworkin rejects this conclusion and insists that one may legitimately disobey...
...It can be argued that he misinterprets the American experience, especially the meaning of equality...
...It is not The New Class as such that he denounces but the values most of its members espouse and the power to which they allegedly aspire...
...Those so infected may still use the rhetoric of liberalism but they are really socialists or at least social democrats who worship before the shrine of ever increasing state intervention...
...Golendorf tells of the care taken to distance the Cuban population from foreigners: forbidding any contact with them, making sure—through the use of police in civilian clothes—that no unauthorized Cubans entered the hotels where foreign tourists might be staying...
...Thus, no social rule or law can dissolve the moral legitimacy of an assertion of rights...
...They demanded the right of peasants to own their own land and the right of all workers and peasants to assemble, to organize, to agitate—to receive the freedom that was promised to them...
...Rights can be protected only if they are attached to the truth we already know and with which we live, as that truth is expounded by the best students of our politics and morals, i.e., our judges...
...But if one must depend upon professionals—legal philosophers, lawyers, and judges—to articulate one's rights, all intimacy between a person and his rights is destroyed...
...And Communist movements will flourish in certain West European countries...
...3George Kennan, The Cloud of Danger, p. 64...
...Obligatory compliance with the laws and rules might be expected to follow from their association with justice...
...The trouble with capitalists, we learn, has been that they are oblivious of their true interests, that they have been much too indiscriminate when dispensing heir largesses to institutions such as universiti s and foundations, which sustain The New Clas Much of these monies, it appears, went to men and women who are the determined class enemies of those on whose benefactions they thrive...
...After Sialin died he was exonerated of any kind of "guilt" and allowed to return to his family in Moscow...
...Positivist jurisprudence ignores this moral element and limits law to authoritative enactments plus a few legal rules, such as the strictures about precedent...
...Making every effort not to offend the then Soviet leaders, who themselves were up to their ears in Stalin's terror, Dennis wrote of "the shocking crimes and crass violations of socialist law and ethics...
...Just before going to trial, Golendorf entered the large network of political prisons...
...Hubert Matos, one of the leaders of the revolution, was also held at Principe...
...Peggy Dennis never meant to depict the rejection of mind and reason, the acceptance of a discipline that prompted acquiescence in anything demanded from above, even to the point of leaving an only child with the Russians permanently, on orders from Communist International leaders Georgi Dimitrov and Dimitri Manuilsky...
...Just as things seemed to be working out, he was arrested...
...In fact, many of the lancheros had not even attempted to escape...
...The ethics promoted by rights, he feels, will be protected by the community because rights further a society's need for such citizen participation...
...It was a defense of the promises of the 1917 revolution in Russia...
...He sent dispatches describing the Budapest workers' councils as the real and unanimous representatives of all the workers...
...And Communists will harbor ever new "Kronstadts" because, "Over himself, over his body and mind, the individual is sovereign," whether or not he knows that the words are those of John Stuart Mill...
...Peggy Dennis's friends were murdered in the '30s, 20 years before the Khruschchev speech...
...q 'Golendorf was released from prison and immediately expelled from Cuba in 1974...
...No one who reads it will be bored...
...And they are always insufficient if they simply dismiss another's interests in the name of some alleged good, because the sphere of activity embraced by rights is also assumed to belong to the class of things called good until proved otherwise...
...They were supposed to reeducate the prisoner for reintegration into Cuban society...
...I have just been released and brought here to you—Do you have any questions to ask me...
...Golendorf's story of the horrendous prison conditions and the "revolutionary justice" of the Cuban legal system is one that could well have been told by countless others about Cuba—had they the good fortune to escape from Cuba as Golendorf did...
...RICHARD FLATHMAN'S ATTEMPT to ground rights securely is less sprightly, a more painstaking but rewarding effort...
...In retrospect, Golendorf came to see that his original 2½-month stay in Cuba in 1967 had also been engineered...
...Only days after the Bolshevik seizure of power the opposition press was banned as "poisoners of the mind of the people...
...If the charge was untrue, all Pravda had to do was to deny it...
...Jimmy Carter to the contrary, no Universal Declaration of Rights is possible, and no valid international comparison of rights can be made...
...It is hard to judge the accuracy of these reports, but they have been so frequently heard that one is obliged to suppose that the general picture they convey is a correct one...
...Though they continue to speak the language of 'progressive reform," says Kristol, in actuality they are acting upon a hidden agenda: to propel the nation from that modified version of capitalism we call "the welfare state" toward an economic system so stringently regulated in detail, as to fulfill many of the hidden anti-capitalist aspirations of the Left...
...He was led everywhere: well-received, never encountering any of the difficulties he knew Cuba was facing...
...Thus, Dworkin says of moral rights: "what an individual is entitled to have, in civil society, depends upon both the practice and the justice of its political institutions...
...He calls to account all who did not rise up against the Stalinist machine...
...Why is it worthwhile to maintain them...
...xiv and 274 pp...
...IV WHAT THEN can be gleaned from these books about the Communist experience...
...The qualifying "almost," however, is significant, for violations of individual rights in the name of social needs are not unknown, and not always unwarranted...
...She gets around that episode by omitting the fact that Pravda reprinted it...
...Though an ever advancing socialization of life imposes social responsibility and social action on the individual, it is the person who remains essential and sovereign...
...she got that wrong...
...Intellectuals, Kristol avers, should be held on a short leash lest they turn obstreperous...
...Not all that Kristol has to say is of a similar crudity...
...He tells how Togliatti sat on the Comintern tribunal that condemmed Bela Kun, the leader of the Hungarian Communist revolution of 1919, to die as an imperialist spy...
...SEPT ANS A CUBA, 38 MOIS DANS LES PRISONS DE FIDEL CASTRO, by Pierre Golendorf...
...Gornick wanted no more tampering with her dream of Communism, which spoke "with such power and moral imagination...
...I was told for her sake to leave her alone...
...In 1956 Togliatti criticized the circular reasoning that the Soviet Communists applied to the Stalin phenomenon...
...But is not this conservative acceptance of conventional morality precisely what the great Western religions and philosophies protest against...
...But to understand the quality and direction of Italian Communism under Berlinguer is to know, above all, the crisis that swept over Communist movements in 1956...
...If nothing else, freeing one's mind at that time spared many Communists the necessity of accepting the proposition that Bukharin had tried to assassinate Lenin...
...They lust for power and are greedy for influence...
...A specter is haunting Irving Kristol—the specter of The New Class...
...These included "Boris" a China expert, "Bob" whose specialty was India, Boris's wife "Musa," on the faculty of the Soviet Institute of Red Professors, and Bob's wife "Valerie" who was studying at a Party school...
...Utilitarianism cannot serve as that appropriate standard because it recognizes no individual's claim to a right against the majority's wishes—and this, obviously, cannot be squared with our Bill of Rights, which says otherwise...
...Call them Djilas, Mikhailov, Solzhenitsyn, Sakharov, Scharansky...
...Or, to be more specific, "the professional classes of our modern bureaucratized societies are engaged in a class struggle with the business community for status and power...
...What pleasure it was for me, then foreign editor of a Daili, Worker edited by John Gates, to write about the phrase that Pravda eliminated from the article...
...She rereads her dispatches to the People's World and finds them—not misleading, not refuted by events that horrified democrats and socialists—merely "rather tedious...
...First of all, the London Daily Worker correspondent in Budapest at the end of October, Peter Freyer, had refuted the reports of a fascist counterrevolution...
...Dennis complains that the Daily Worker at the time did not provide a "factual analysis" of what was happening in Budapest...
...they try to discover and apply them...
...Just ask Kristol, he will tell you how to sort out friends and enemies, and teach you how to reward men and women associated with the conservative American Enterprise Institute (with which Kristol is associated), and to punish those subversive elements that people the offices of the Brookings Institute or, worse still, the Center for Policy Study...
...For thousands of others it had come earlier...
...What are the great moments in the experience of this former Communist...
...Whether approached as a prima facie good in terms of Flathman's liberal principle, or simply argued for as wise social policy, the stringent protection of rights depends critically upon the way in which conflicts about rights are resolved and upon the manner in which enforcement mechanisms are brought into play...
...Though only a small country of less than 9 million people, and despite a revolution that allegedly swept away the machinery of the past, Golendorf encountered a mammoth, Kafkaesque bureaucracy that rendered even the simplest activities impossibly complicated...
...Much of the current discussion of Eurocommunism leaves more questions than it answers, because it pays too little attention to the central factor that emerged in 1956: a Communist rebellion against Communist tyranny...
...What one should make of them is, indeed, that those sentences quite accurately describe the minds of Pravda's editors, of Dennis and, sadly, of Peggy Dennis even now...
...Thus, in both views rights have only a precarious standing: legal positivism recognizes no rights, no moral claims, outside the explicit body of laws...
...It is surely questionable whether a legal system, with all its inconsistencies, can (or does) incorporate a single perfectionist standard...
...A few brief comments should suffice to identify them: (1) To save the law from moral vacuousness, Dworkin sacrifices the autonomy of morality...
...360...
...In the Luxe Hotel where Trepper lived and where Gene and Peggy Dennis lived, Stalin killed Finns and Poles, Italians and French...
...namely, trust in an aristocracy of the robe...
...Thus, although judges make mistakes, change their minds as new situations arise, and even disagree with one another, there is (in this theory) only one right answer as to whether or not an individual has a right...
...in fact, strong arguments can be adduced in opposition to any closed-end description of human systems...
...They demanded freedom of assembly and liberation of political prisoners, because by this time there were more dissident socialist prisoners in Soviet jails than supporters of the bourgeoisie...
...He was also briefly "hospitalized"—where he was drugged (allegedly receiving only Vitamin C injections) and again questioned...
...According to Golendorf, about 80 percent of the political prisoners were lancheros: young people, for the most part, who had tried to escape to the United States...
...It only compounds the wrong that was done in the first place...
...Yet, on the other hand, it does not follow that businessmen or corporations have any obligation to give money to institutions whose views or attitudes they disapprove of...
...unaided, he can never form a sensible opinion about his own rights...
...they are part of a pattern of interaction among members of a community who share the same language, institutions, and arrangements, and who accept and act upon the same moral norms...
...Upon close scrutiny it turns out that to take rights seriously is to invite benevolent despotism...
...2 Matos was [is] held in solitary confinement, never permitted to step outside his small cell, the window to his cell sealed off by an iron plate even under the hot summer sun...
...Never to be allowed on top, they should always be on tap...
...277 More than two decades after the Hungarian Communists themselves had admitted that their pre-1956 regime was a police state in which first Rakosi and then Gero ruled with an iron fist and with the secret police as the major instrument of political repression, Mitford writes of her 1955 visit to Hungary and reaffirms "everything we saw of socialist accomplishment...
...He counsels us to return to the wisdom of the ancients, to Plato, Aristotle, Thomas Aquinas, and to Coleridge, Carlyle, and Newman...
...That is the origin and essence of Eurocommunism...
Vol. 25 • July 1978 • No. 3
