The Chinese Intellectuals
Goldman, Merle & McLaughlin, Thomas & Meiss, Steve & Komisar, Lucy & Roane, Stephen & Hux, Samuel
Like those who knew about the Holocaust, my colleagues in the China field and I did not speak out loudly and publicly about the persecution of intellectuals in China's Cultural Revolution in...
...What gives us Strike Force also gives us Hill Street Blues' air of tough-minded liberalism...
...He's planning to be in a position of having to make that decision at the start of his prescription for the consolidation of Spanish democracy: "A moderate left government for 25 or 30 years...
...This means that while we show appreciation for China's achievements, we should not hesitate to speak out against its terror...
...TV works as propaganda, but it functions in a more subtle and amoral way...
...Before there was Barry Goldwater there was the National Review, and before there was the National Review there was the idea of the National Review in the mind of Bill Buckley...
...otherwise the secret could not have been kept so well...
...The conspiracy in the army was not wider than has been published, he told me...
...That produces a situation of disequilibrium," he said...
...Some Chinese intellectuals say that our protests would make their situation even more vulnerable...
...or, rather, an unachieved art, since it had barely been there to be lost before the Franquista unity was imposed...
...My job is to insure that the executive power, although it is not ours, is strong enough to defend itself from the attacks of democracy's enemies," Gonzalez said...
...GONZALEZ BELIEVES that the government's eco nomic failures, the PSOE's statesmanlike reaction, and disputes over democratization within the Communist party have boosted his own party to where it could win the 1983 elections...
...Now he's an aging but preternaturally tough policeman who disdains the computer and relies on his "nose for police work...
...On the day of the rightist military assault on the house of parliament last year in February, Felipe Gonzalez, general secretary of the Spanish Socialist Workers' party (PSOE), was taken out of the chamber at gunpoint and brought to an anteroom, where he was to spend 15 hours...
...There are aspects of Confucian tradition that uphold an authoritarian government and the status quo, but there are other aspects that can support a liberal government and dissent...
...And (3) together they decided that the "rule of factions" must end...
...A whole generation of Westernized intellectuals were decimated...
...Only later did we realize that our delegation may have been used in a power struggle by Deng and the bureaucratic leaders against the Gang of Four...
...I think I'll call it God and Man Aboard Looking Glass...
...THESE SHOWS, THEN, are dramatic allegories of domestic, new right ideology...
...If he won he would be awarded an appropriate prize, such as six free house calls, a free operation or, where warranted, a free funeral...
...then everything he says must be true...
...And there were parliamentary intrigues, public scandals, governmental crises (11 governments in 5 years if one counts only prime ministers and caretakers), strikes, all that's usually called "social unrest," and political violence...
...In this way TV differs importantly from film, which, having to sell no product other than itself, can have as its very function the dissemination of a political allegory...
...Millions of people were not killed systematically...
...It was too horrible...
...As normalization appeared imminent and as it appeared possible that China scholars would be able to see their country of study, from which they had been barred since 1949, most did not want to jeopardize their chance to get a visa...
...It cashes in on the popularity of the Doctor programs, and at the same time draws on the Quiz fans...
...After the Strike Force saves the latest victim, we break for the last round of Bayer commercials...
...We point out the complexities and ambiguities in human affairs...
...This does seem like a reasonable fear—unless one could prove that Jesus is a laissez-faire capitalist...
...In one episode a friend of McClain's falls victim to another sort of monster—the vicious armed robber who preys on decent, hard-working small businessmen...
...But again we remained virtually silent...
...To the Anglo-American sensibility, the conglomerate Democratic and Republican, Labor and Conservative parties seem the height of political reason...
...Buckley is so dense that he can't see that political freedom and economic freedom are interdependent...
...The enemy is the hardened criminal of the underclass...
...And that character, most analysts and historians of Spain have agreed, is individualist, often to the point of self-absorption...
...Cemeteries and funeral homes would probably want a piece of the action, though they would add a note of unwelcome morbidity to the program Morbidity would be a mistake...
...Waterborne" wouldn't be a very snazzy title, though...
...Factionalism" has two meanings: affiliation with one of several groups, and dissension...
...Gonzalez said the government thereby "changed a policy that had been neoliberal, according to the best Manchester school and the postulates of the president of the United States or Mrs...
...He displays a disturbing penchant for confusing the symbols of reality with reality itself...
...Since China wanted something from us, we might have had leverage on the issue of human rights as we had in the Soviet Union during the period of detente...
...And it is not the army that holds the greatest potential danger for Spain, he observed...
...Yet this congregation will still yearn for ordeal, for sanctification...
...Safer, none too subtly, implied that Ronald Reagan is in fact a creation of William F. Buckley, Jr...
...That last, however, can hardly be considered new to Spanish history and peculiar to the early 1930s...
...singles bars, pick up unsuspecting girls, torture, mutilate, and murder them...
...Deng wanted to bring back more 361 conventional university education, while the Gang of Four insisted on continuing the politicized education of the Cultural Revolution...
...This is all the more disturbing when one considers that Buckley apparently attaches far more importance to being precise in his own mind than to communicating his ideas to others...
...He spent the whole hour expressing not only a willingness to risk Armageddon, in pious defense of his cherished ideals, but I got the impression that he is somehow actually looking forward to risking it...
...The show is filled with their leering faces, caught by the freeze before each commercial as they begin their three-day ritual of cruelty with a new victim, just as film lovers of a more innocent time faded away during their first passionate embrace...
...But in the mid-1950s, when intellectuals also were persecuted, China wanted contact with the outside world...
...Each has a wholesome black cop in the background...
...Gonzalez is more critical on the subject of government handling of rightist violence...
...The punks dominate and destroy women by a violence that the cops abhor, but the cops themselves reaffirm traditional male power over women, which includes the duty to protect them...
...The center/right-wing politicians of the Union of the Democratic Center (UCD), partly because of their roots in the old franquista regime, are unable, or unwilling, to remove these people from power...
...Perhaps it's helpful that he be able to take small steps toward a sense of responsible community with a small group, that he come to identify with a small party (relative to our standards), an autonomous faction, which in turn is headed by a council of people with sufficient capacity for abstraction to join that faction with a larger alliance...
...Other souls living in fear of their good fortune will join his church...
...Fridays, ABC), starring Robert Stack who used to battle the mob as Elliot Ness in The Untouchables, offers us a trio of sadistic rapist killers who cruise L.A...
...As in the Holocaust, we knew but we didn't want to believe...
...Reprinted with permission from the Radcliffe Quarterly...
...Not long ago I treated myself to an hour and 20 minutes of Buckley...
...We are to be skeptical, even-handed, and understanding...
...The day before, a group of youths putting up street posters for a fascist rally had thrown rocks and a Molotov cocktail at three buses carrying Basque children on a socialist-sponsored visit into Madrid...
...Although the idea of doctors reading history may seem ludicrous to some, it is not an impossibility...
...The institutions they helped to create—the universities, research institutes, journals, libraries, and other creative enterprises—were also decimated...
...It seemed strange that such a high-level university delegation would be invited to visit China's universities at the time when the radical Gang of Four, Mao's wife and her allies, dominated them...
...The idea of passing moral judgments is alien and counter to our training as historians and professionals...
...These shows reaffirm the received values of their audience, but that is a means to an end, not the end itself...
...We certainly cannot prescribe for China...
...The parties also have negotiated an autonomy plan that sets up 16 federated states, with elections scheduled for 1983...
...A mental arrogance seems to afflict us when we consider Spain...
...My greatest concern is not to win the elections, but that there be democracy in Spain," said Gonzalez...
...The Communists I do not trust...
...Politics became a lost art in Spain...
...it must be serious," Gonzalez joked...
...Just in time the police save him, of course, and McClain shares a moment of understanding with him—two men who have been forced to kill and have survived the horror because of their unshaken sense of justice...
...Unemployment stands at 14.4 percent, inflation at 14 percent...
...Before there was Ronald Reagan there was Barry Goldwater...
...Is it invariably fatal...
...I entered the seven-story building through one-way mirrored doors that were buzzed open by a guard...
...So the God of his upbringing will not grant him the absolution he so desperately wants...
...Socialists fear this could create a destabilizing vacuum of power...
...To criticize government misdeeds was not the literati's right, as in the West, but their responsibility...
...When the bourgeois left government of Prime Minister Santiago Casares Quiroga, Galician Autonomist senator—formally supported by a Popular Front that comprised approximately 60 percent of the elected Cortes—was challenged by an open rebellion of militarists, monarchists, Falangists, and assorted conservatives and reactionaries, that could hardly be called Republican suicide...
...The title of the program will be What's My Disease...
...Does it cause pain in the region of the Nuciform Sac...
...Rather, (1) another group of Spaniards who had never bought the idea of a Republic in the first place and had plotted against it from its inception— who were mortally offended by its existence and would have been even if there had been no strikes, no seizures of church property, no restrictions upon the prerogatives of the officer corps, no violence, no nothing—this group came together with (2) yet another group who were ambivalent about the Republic's existence and would stand representatives for election to the Cortes without pledging allegiance to the republican ideal, but were not ambivalent about the unrest the Republic could be blamed for...
...But after the coup attempt, socialist policy took a 180-degree turn, and its earlier pounding criticism became a muted opposition...
...For some of us, there were some practical considerations...
...Several children were hurt...
...So they will choose from among their ranks some simple-minded fellow—perhaps one who has lived his whole life in the fantasy land of movies, TV, and the General Electric Corporation, to lead them to a purifying trial...
...They will worship together while yachting off Newport...
...I shall cast my lot with the smaller Popular Socialist party...
...Still, a certain amount of precision was sacrificed here for the sake of pizzaz, unless Mr...
...that what characterized Spanish politics before the Civil War, and led to it, was precisely the factionalism I now find so hopeful...
...The rest is left to the horrified imagination of the audience...
...There would be danger if this group should win over sectors of the army...
...Shared Values OWING in part to the missionary influence and to our own scholarly efforts, we have tended to see China as we would like it to be and not as what it is...
...A boat is not supported by air...
...while (4) an antiparliamentary extreme left did all it could to fulfill the prophecy that a "bourgeois" republic could not work...
...True, China does not have a tradition of human rights in our legal and institutional understanding of the term...
...Eventually my hero will abandon the God he knew as a child and will immediately replace Him with another God whom he will call Natural Law...
...They come from the kinky affluent California that represents the depths of our moral collapse to many Americans...
...The program staff would try to find contestants with rare or unusual diseases...
...But it does have a tradition of responsibility, especially for the literati, to speak out against abuses of power...
...Then they will give their dim-witted automaton the purifying flame, the man-made incarnation of the sun god's fiery heart...
...Then the blind Judas goat, thinking he's only playing a role in an elaborate Audie Murphy western, will lead those troubled souls and the rest of the world to the altar in the nuclear abattoir to be purified...
...Are we not arrogant when we apply our standards of human rights to others with very different traditions...
...Either the underclass is competing for the audience's jobs and privileges, or it is indulging in legalized theft by welfare and Food Stamps...
...The shows are similar in a number of ways...
...By remaining silent we not only would have harmed our Chinese colleagues, but we also would have hindered the emergence of the intellectual and political forces in China that would benefit our nation as well as China...
...367 Buckley's notions of liberty and freedom are even weirder than I had thought...
...An added bonus: the stations could chalk up the program against the time the FCC requires for programs of an educational or informative nature...
...One was a clip of Buckley confessing, in what he himself seemed to regard as a moment of self-deprecating humor, that he had lost $6 million on the National Review...
...The program could be livened up by the introduction of "distinguished guest panelists...
...There is no one socialist party in Spain but several...
...If severe sentences are handed down in the trial of the plotters, that will have some impact on army attitudes...
...he thought so too...
...Buckley devoted his show to an attempt at convincing the Reverend William Sloane Coffin that America's most pressing need is to build more and bigger nuclear weapons and that our second most pressing problem is curing ourselves of the idea that nuclear war is both unthinkable and insane— though I may have his priorities backward...
...Buckley thinks that the word is indeed real...
...While some radical scholars praised the Cultural Revolution as the model for future societies in which there would be true participatory democracy and some right-wing scholars denounced it in order to show the perfidy of the Communists in contrast to the Guomindang, most of us mainstream historians remained detached...
...But a truth shared with no one is no truth at all, so he will proselytize and will bear witness to his God—in public, loudly...
...He has, to my mind, spent his entire adult life defending his right to wallow in luxury amidst oceans of poverty, defending the indefensible...
...In 1973, shortly after Nixon's first visit to China, John Fairbank reviewed Prisoner of Mao by Jean Pasqualini, which described prison camps in China...
...There's another way to put this...
...We wanted normalization of United States relations with China, a country of nearly a billion people...
...Any doctor who had read medieval history would have no trouble with it...
...Gonzalez is the son of a livestock handler for a Seville landowner, joined a clandestine socialist youth group in 1962, studied law and became a labor lawyer, and was arrested for political and union activities ten times before he was 30...
...Nevertheless, the situations were comparable in that the intellectuals were persecuted primarily for what they were, rather than for what they did...
...It was not a pretty picture, indeed it was ugly...
...Even pre-Gaullist France could hardly rival it...
...Many months later, in his party headquarters, the memory of that awful day was still fresh...
...We are shown a victim who will not accept his vulnerability, who trains himself to handle a gun and kills the same punk who had terrorized him...
...If Jesus would be advocating a "free market" then you could spend $6 million writing your own letter of indulgence, and your salvation would be assured...
...I would like to lodge a small protest...
...vets are good with patients who cannot describe their symptoms...
...The worst that could be said is that the Republican 363 factions "offended"—by action, by inaction, but mostly by their being there—and thereby "invited" their own murder...
...The argument is sophistical...
...But on TV the political allegory is always a function of the economic needs of the medium, and for this reason the medium necessarily supports the very social inertia that it reflects...
...I got the impression that he agreed with it...
...Perhaps Buckley's abuse of the king's English is part of the answer...
...Should they ever formally unite with the Socialist Workers, I'll see how I feel about that...
...He urged that historians consider all evidence and interpretations, but that they not hesitate to take the next step—to make judgments, focus on questions, and draw conclusions based on their own values...
...It's a sure winner...
...There won't be another coup, he said, but added that he wouldn't have predicted the attempt of February 23, 1981...
...With the aid of some conversations I recall from four years ago, I try to imagine myself a Spaniard, asserting my special distinctions ("I, who am as good as you are . . ."—an ancient Spanish code...
...If one of the doctors guessed the disease, he would be awarded a prize, such as free legal defense at his next malpractice suit...
...Thus China has a tradition of intellectuals criticizing their governments precisely in periods of despotic rule...
...Maybe they don't, but they give me an idea for a byzantine novel...
...It seems to me that the Spaniards, who have faced enough political difficulties in the past, are being advised to do not merely what is difficult, but impossible...
...The destruction of China's cultural life may take generations to repair...
...Medicaid mills and drug companies would be naturals...
...I'm setting aside the inevitable loonies of antiparliamentary left and right, who reject the Cortes—the Spanish parliament—anyway...
...So it has to be learned—and can be learned better if it feels 362 "natural," not a violation of character...
...If American China scholars could not have had an impact because relations between our two countries were severed, the voices of our European colleagues might have been heard...
...Observers believed his removal signified a death sentence...
...But I think that protest itself, and it's a pretty standard one, reveals a poor memory...
...We need the Strike Force's power—and the reassuring certainty and swiftness of its investigations—to cope with that chaos...
...Something like Henoch-SchOnlein's Purpura, for example...
...Throughout most of the show we are watching NRA propaganda—the reason for possessing a gun is the failure of government to protect innocent citizens...
...So what is it with this guy...
...But he rejected the notion that the government was afraid to lean too hard on the military...
...But what could have been worse than the millions of people killed, purged, or imprisoned in the Cultural Revolution...
...There is only one God and Milton Friedman is His prophet...
...Virtually all intellectuals and their families, whether on the right or the left politically, were subjected to attack...
...Perhaps I'm an albanil (a bricklayer or a mason) and member of a bricklayers' union...
...Each is centered around its audience's fantasies of victimization, sexual or economic...
...We feared that if we pointed out and criticized the darker side of the Communist rule, we would impede the movement toward normalization We can rationalize our silence with the excuse that it would have been futile to have criticized China during the Cultural Revolution of 1966-69 because China had cut itself off from the outside world, both East and West...
...Another reason for the coup's failure, Gonzalez added, was the opposition of the business and financial world...
...the Spanish accent is not given to understatement...
...Gonzalez won't say he would take Spain out of NATO if he came to power, but he would follow the dictates of a popular referendum...
...Sponsors would be no problem...
...As for the strikes and unrest: well . . . it was the 1930s and things were not greatly different elsewhere...
...We feared a return to the McCarthy era of unthinking opposition to Chinese communism and to anyone who spoke positively about its achievements...
...q 365 On Fridays the tough cops take over on TV...
...They are being advised to practice a "democratic" politics of a sort that can't exist in a parliamentary democracy, and to which the closest approximation is what Franco always said he was doing...
...The CoaliciOn Democratica (formerly the Alianza Popular) is a parliamentary alliance of several parties...
...Witness the title of his book on how the filthy rich while away their spare time puttering about in boats...
...Strike Force allows the audience its fearful and sadistic fantasy and at the same time flatters its values and institutions...
...It is willing to enact almost any political fantasy—it can turn any faction into a market...
...And if one tells the Spaniards not to be factional, one's telling them, following the first meaning, to have a Cortes that isn't a Cortes and, following the second meaning, not to be Spanish...
...Earlier, at 9:00 PM on NBC, there's McClain's Law, starring James Ames, who in Gunsmoke brought law to Dodge by sheer courage and moral integrity...
...Their analogy is not entirely correct...
...We scholars of China are enamored of its history, culture, and people...
...The anticorporate messages of Jane Fonda's recent movies are their reason for being...
...Having spent a fair amount of time in Spain, I have little trouble in yielding to Senor Menendez's observations...
...I realize that, with the Cortes now a real parliament, the albaniles are better served if they have some punch in Madrid—which means a labor party...
...A number of well-known writers have been accused of "bourgeois liberalism...
...And that's a fact to remember when judging factionalism today...
...The first hour was his own Firing Line (interesting metaphor), the last 20 minutes a puff-ball cutesie-poo profile of the great man by Morley Safer...
...The show isn't nearly as crude as Strike Force—here you can feel the influence of the same network's hit, Hill Street Blues, layered over a thousand formula cop shows...
...Gonzalez sees his prime task not in working for radical economic change but for the modernization of the state, "transformation of the authoritarian state into a democratic state, and of a centralized state into a state of autonomies...
...the user of a gun must be trained and responsible...
...But though the majority of the army didn't act in favor of the coup, most would have had a hard time acting against it—were it not for their loyalty to the king...
...The PSOE helped draw up a pact with the socialist union to ban strikes for two years and limit pay hikes to 11 and 13 percent in exchange for a government pledge to create 350,000 jobs and provide subsidies for unemployed heads of households, who were not all getting aid...
...But as we all know, there is no such 360 thing as value-free scholarship...
...Might not Mr...
...TV wants to satisfy any constituency that it can discern...
...And the victims of this horror are the daughters of that anxious audience...
...Of course, nothing like this could ever occur in real life...
...The poll gave the UCD 23.6 percent, the rightist Democratic Coalition 8.9 percent, and the Communists 7.9 percent...
...The big thing would be the popularity of the program...
...At the end it is the police who save the hero, and their responsiveness to his dilemma turns the show into a more hopeful fantasy of the government finally come round, at least serving the citizens it had deserted in the name of reform and equality...
...Some are regional parties affiliated with national parties...
...The Spanish Civil War began through a rebellion to end factionalism...
...Violence, it suggests, is inevitable in this corrupt world, but the good citizen resorts to it only as a last alternative—in the void left by government irresponsibility...
...Though it would be comforting to find Buckley stupid, he obviously isn't...
...It is difficult to know the proper time and most effective way to express our concern...
...But the cunning of the episode is its one deviation from the formula...
...The greatest capacity for conspiracy against democracy isn't found among the military," said Gonzalez, "but in the group of civilians that has lost its political power and privileges of franquismo...
...Nevertheless, the advocates of human rights who emerged from the underground in 1978-79 have been imprisoned and silenced...
...Nor is it likely that Mr...
...What Strike Force does with sexual fears, McClain's Law does with economic anxiety...
...HOW DO ALL THESE PIECES FIT together to explain Bill Buckley's dizzy antics...
...In our new, short history of democracy, one can detect that the army thinks democracy will not favor it as an institution, though there is a minority among the military that believes democracy is better than dictatorship for a modern European state...
...Why all the newspeak and doublethink...
...This novel is going to be about some Irish-American kid who is born into great wealth and spends the rest of his life trying to justify his fortune and privilege in the eyes of a God who demands humility and charity from His children...
...Reagan's advisers have offered, what you see is what you get, what we got was a cowboy version of Jerzy Kosinski's character Chance, the gardener, a genial buffoon molded like so much putty by men who think they've seen the word of God held aloft by His invisible hand...
...When the PSOE does run, it won't be, a la francaise, in coalition with the Communists, who got 10.5 percent of the vote in the last election, although the parties cooperate on the local level when they share a majority...
...Moreover, the Western traditions of individualism, legality, and democracy were introduced into China in the early decades of the 20th century...
...The contestant-patient then is brought in, to face the doctors...
...Gonzalez greeted me cordially—a handsome man, casually dressed, with dark, longish, wavy hair, 40 years old...
...some are independent...
...This brings me to the one thing about Buckley I have always overlooked and that is the religious baggage he carries around...
...One shouldn't criticize too readily," he said...
...The post-Mao leadership, like China's 19th-century Westernizers, wants to adopt Western science and technology, but keep out Western liberal, humanistic values because these values threaten political control...
...He reminds me of Lewis Carroll's caterpillar...
...Each, most important, relies on the old frontier virtues and on police violence to save us from a world gone off its axle, as one of the cops calls it...
...The show is obviously horrified at the atrocities, but the horror is neither feminist nor puritanical...
...I know that this is a ridiculous plot...
...Since we were guests of the Chinese, we would be considered impolite if we were critical...
...Nuclear war then is indeed "winnable...
...Copyright 1981 by Radcliffe College...
...Just by writing on a particular question or by quoting a particular passage, we focus attention on an issue we regard as important...
...Fairbank's review focused attention on the darker aspects of the Chinese system...
...The doctors, by asking the contestant clever questions, diagnose his disease, or try to—such questions as "Is your disease caused by a known micro-organism...
...Like those who knew about the Holocaust, my colleagues in the China field and I did not speak out loudly and publicly about the persecution of intellectuals in China's Cultural Revolution in the late 1960s...
...A distinguished panel of physicians is introduced and seated at a long table, facing the audience...
...This sector continues to be powerful, not because it has much popular support or even much economic power—but because the Spanish political process in recent years has been an evolutionary process of reform, without a definite rupture with the past...
...Each is set in California...
...but why settle for being the king-maker when you might be king...
...The tenets of his faith decree, as I read it, that wealth and pride are not high on the list of qualities God looks for in us sinners...
...The cops flirt with every girl they meet, and, as we saw, aren't above enjoying a vulgar story or a pilgrimage to a strip joint...
...Even when the government seeks to act against the right, it can't always get its own security apparatus to work for it...
...Politics is always the product of a relation of forces, and prudence is a basic element of politics in the Spanish situation...
...Asked how he can have a policy that appears so contradictory, Gonzalez says, "We are for defense of the status quo...
...The punks in Strike Force are unspeakably slimy...
...369...
...To say that the Republic, given its factionalism, could never have succeeded is to take the fact of its death and argue with presumptuous hindsight that the only conceivable death is suicide...
...It is possible to detain, try, and sentence them, but I'm afraid there will be no detention...
...Buckley's real feelings about the desirability of nuclear war, I cannot take his genuflections to it in the name of freedom at face value in light of his unceasing support of some of the world's most tyrannical regimes, such as Pinochet's Chile, Somoza's Nicaragua, and bigotry's South Africa...
...Strike Force (10:00 P.M...
...The defense of his unearned riches will no longer be sophistry...
...But now, instead of leading a sharply critical opposition, Gonzalez sees his job in strengthening the government...
...the benefit of owning a gun is an increased sense of self-reliance and freedom...
...Yet, do we have a right to make judgments and interfere in the affairs of another country...
...What worries us is a change at a time of international tension And for Spain, what does integration into NATO add to our national security and welfare...
...But China scholars should heed the advice of Stanford historian Gordon Wright, in his presidential address to the American Historical Association in 1975...
...He titled it Airborne...
...But it is in the epilogue of this gruesome story of male sexual madness that the real depravity comes through...
...That doesn't mean they like it a lot...
...Basque terrorism as well as disagreement over the future of the autonomous states continues...
...Moreover, as opposed to Russian dissidents, most Chinese dissidents have not asked for help from the outside world...
...Though Mao and his supporters set the anti-intellectual tone, the persecution of the intellectuals was due more to the chaotic nature of the time than to an organized government policy...
...A Gallup poll after the coup attempt—when people might have been hesitant about provoking the army by bringing leftists to power—gave the PSOE 42 percent, compared to 30.8 percent in the 1979 elections...
...They will spend years training this guy to be a Judas goat who will lead them to the holy place...
...No matter what the politics, the person who is watching television is participating in the system, and that is all TV asks...
...But, with the exceptions of Simon Leys and Roderick Farquhar, the same silence existed in Europe as in the United States...
...He rejects the argument that bringing the army into NATO could turn its attention away from internal politics...
...But to expect a pretty picture after nearly a decade of military dictatorship in the 1920s and after centuries of repressive cultural history is the sheerest arrogance...
...In cases where the physical appearance of the contestant might reveal his disease, the panel would have to be blindfolded...
...A fullfledged jungle witch doctor, complete with nose bone, would excite interest, as would a psychic healer...
...Buckley himself made no attempt to dispute the idea...
...Whatever Mr...
...But to regard them as overt propaganda would be to exaggerate the commitment and involvement of TV as a system...
...the neoconservatism of a film like Absence of Malice can legitimately be read as subtle and effective indoctrination...
...Beiides, I never liked Andalusians (they're very big in it...
...Literati risked death to protest against corrupt officials and propose fundamental reforms...
...Hence he is rather indifferent to the welfare of the community or its problems, but in compensation he possesses a lively perception of his own individual case as well as that of his neighbor...
...Despite their cruelties and injustices, most of us believed that the Chinese Communists were the first rulers in a hundred years to bring China out of chaos, famine, and weakness...
...Rationalizing the Silence of the Intellectuals OUR RELUCTANCE to condemn China's treatment of the intellectuals may have had more to do with American than with Chinese politics...
...There are not the large-scale, anti-intellectual campaigns and purges of the 1960s and '70s...
...The government, being of the right, has more difficulty striking at the violent extreme right than at the violent extreme left...
...Marcus Welby costume...
...To top this off he uses the wrong words on occasion...
...Security was tight...
...But Gonzalez won't let the government fall now and force early elections...
...In the early 1970s, we missed another opportunity to protest the repression of the intellectuals...
...The survivors, those fortunate enough to have been imprisoned or sent to the countryside, describe their experience as comparable to the Holocaust...
...Now it will be a liturgy, a worship of certain truth...
...And so this 4 percent is entrenched in the institutions of power...
...Thatcher in England...
...A boat is water-borne, even if it is moved over the medium that supports it by a differential in air pressure we call wind...
...For the American government, which believes the PSOE would win an election today, the key question is not internal policy but Spain's position in the Atlantic Alliance...
...Since Franco's death until today, there has been a minority sector of society—probably no more than 4 percent of the population if the opinion polls are correct—that has tried to bring back the dictatorship...
...So the moment when the decent storeowner fires four shots into the punk gives the finishing touch to a fantasy of class revenge...
...my fiancée left me for one, fool that she was...
...Now there is Ronald Reagan...
...Although the UCD rejected the socialists' proposal for a grand coalition, the parties are working together to solve Spain's major problems...
...The ratings will be enormous...
...If we're talking about parliamentary democracy of human beings, the first meaning has to be there, and the second meaning, to some degree, will be there...
...From the moment the first bit of political awareness dawned on me I spent a lot of time being annoyed at William F Buckley, Jr...
...bases here, but they oppose entrance into NATO...
...nor are intrigues, scandals, and crises peculiar to any time or place...
...We should have been more sensitive to their plight and more aware of what was going on than the American public or even American government officials...
...The politics of the audience matter only as keys to their manipulation...
...But the sexual politics of Strike Force has more rhetorical impact than this appeal to authority...
...Lately I've been wondering why he persists in his loud and public rituals of intellectual scratching and selfrighteousness...
...The twist in the formula, the Hill Street Blues touch, is that when he gets another chance he can't do it—won't do it—he already has one nightmare to live with...
...Stack and his commanding officer sit in a chic restaurant and get started recalling what is sure to be a long series of stories about the kinkiest strippers they've ever seen...
...Most of us in the China field opposed American participation in the Vietnam War and were incensed by the depiction of China as the real enemy...
...but all the same it should make an interesting story...
...This new God will tell him everything he wants to hear...
...But if they are "sophisticated" they cluck their tongues about the democracy itself and lecture that it is time for ideological politics to cease in Spain, time for the political consensus of a Common Front (different from the right-leaning "national fronts" and left-leaning "popular fronts" of the past) that serves the nation instead of factions...
...Robert Young might be induced to appear wearing his Dr...
...Fair enough...
...Fortunately some of the presidents in the delegation did not suffer fools very well and challenged the intellectual wasteland we encountered...
...Where were the Western China scholars when this calamity befell our intellectual colleagues in China...
...The Chinese newspapers were filled day after day with pictures of intellectuals being paraded through the streets in dunce caps and being humiliated verbally and physically at mass meetings...
...It is most visible in the courts and in the ultrarightist newspaper El Alcazar...
...That is to say he has spent $6 million of his inheritance defending the right of the rich to really put it to the poor...
...The majority of the army, however, respects the force of law," said Gonzalez...
...My protagonist will really want to go for the humility and charity stuff but he can't quite draw the line between secular and spiritual salvation...
...it avoids fully affirming violence while it adopts a tone of tragic necessity...
...Here the victims are hardware-store owners, neighborhood restaurant managers, representatives of the economic system on its most intimate and local level...
...That might be true, but a lesser degree of violence is no excuse...
...To be borne is to be "supported by...
...Today the attacks on intellectuals and dissidents are different than in the Maoist era...
...Appreciation of their accomplishments overrode our concern for our fellow intellectuals...
...In an hour-and-a-half interview he talked about the political situation in Spain and the changes brought about by the attempted coup...
...In Spain, however, there are some 300 parties—a rough count and depending on when you're counting...
...Unlike the West, Confucianism did not guarantee a loyal opposition legally, but it justified one ideologically...
...Now if he can make the word real I can't argue with him about anything...
...But I'm not sure the contemporary consequence of what he observes is apparent...
...When Americans read of rightwing plots in Spain against the new democracy every several weeks or so, if they are wise they know the old Spanish right must somehow be harnessed...
...We associated passing moral judgments on political events with Confucian China, Victorian England, and, worse, the communist and fascist regimes that used history as a tool of social and political control...
...Fairbank was unable to visit China...
...NOW IT COULD BE PROTESTED that I'm showing an abysmal forgetfulness of history...
...For several years thereafter, Prof...
...The Reverend Coffin seemed to share my impression...
...It is the antithesis of the dulling Oneness of the last few decades...
...Unfortunately, not enough of us in the China field focused on what was happening to the intellectuals under Mao, nor were we forceful enough in bringing their plight to the attention of others...
...What TV wants from its audience is not belief but the proper economic behavior...
...We applauded when our colleagues in the Soviet field condemned human rights violations in Russia...
...The other is more experienced at the bars, but underneath she is a dedicated, life-affirming nurse in an old folks' home...
...The show depends on its audience's physical fear in its own businesses and homes, and more profoundly on its economic fear of that underclass...
...There were a few exceptions...
...The very factionalism of Spanish politics should be appreciated for what it is, what it promises, and what it avoids...
...We did not want to believe that a country that had developed such a high level of civilization could be so cruel to its intellectuals...
...I am trying to sell the TV networks on a new program...
...I am convinced that those who were putting up posters in the street were known," said Gonzalez...
...The function of Strike Force is not to indoctrinate: it is to confirm the audience in a passive state of mind so that the real job, of marketing, can proceed...
...I think this is precisely what Spaniards are doing...
...The government, run by the UCD with a parliamentary minority, now could no longer govern alone...
...We also had a two-hour interview with Deng Xiaoping, who complained bitterly of China's economic and technological backwardness...
...To the system that produces these shows, liberal and conservative ideologies have one thing in common—they can be used to sell products...
...One is a shy, lonely girl who finally works up the courage to try to meet some nice guys...
...Those who did not die of natural causes were purged or killed or committed suicide only because they were intellectuals...
...The panel would be allowed a specified number of questions, after which they would have to guess the disease, or the contestant would win...
...364 There is "not much" danger of a coup now, he said...
...The message is simply a demand to buy, to affirm the economic system in the most tangible way possible...
...He wants to democratize the economy within the framework of the market, "but without accepting its mystification...
...Now that politics is an actual issue-oriented practice, instead of Falangist pomp and a caudillo's pronouncements, that is, now that politics is possible, perhaps the Spanish individualist can learn to compromise his pursuit of self-advantage with those of several other pursuers in a union of the like-interested...
...More than most of Spain's present political leaders, he is a symbol of the new era...
...A North American company did the poll...
...If, as Mr...
...The show ends with an almost grotesque freeze of Stack's face as he grimaces a laugh at Two-Tassle Tina...
...That the Second Republic (1931-36) was factionridden is true...
...We don't intend to go to a process of nationalization as a philosophy of the party, nor do we want a statization of the economy...
...A veterinarian would be useful when contestants could not answer questions...
...Therefore, in supporting dissident intellectuals in China, we are upholding their traditions as well as our own...
...My visit to China in 1974 as the China scholar with the delegation of American university presidents illustrates the value of speaking out...
...They did a few years ago...
...RamOn Menendez Pidal (The Spaniards in Their History) has made a strong observation of Spanish individualism: The Spaniard is inclined not to feel a sense of solidarity with the community except insofar as it will bring him immediate advantages, for he will always neglect indirect or future benefits...
...Double Standard IT IS SAID that "those who study the Soviet Union hate it, while those who study China love it...
...We rationalized that the treatment of intellectuals under Mao was not as bad as their treatment under Stalin...
...Given prominent coverage in the New York Review of Books, Prof...
...Buckley fear that on Judgment Day he will be like the camel trying to pass through the needle's eye...
...Moreover, persecution of intellectuals in the Cultural Revolution was far worse than any human rights violations in post-Stalinist Russia...
...Certainly the physical fear the show exploits has its ground in real city experiences, but for the large 366 majority of the show's audience, its economic fearfulness of the underclass is more central...
...I think the government has the obligation of acting prudently with respect to what the army can do...
...Bubonic plague, for example, produces skin eruptions that are very distinctive...
...One must not assume that here were a bunch of Republican factions quarreling until they came to blows and then tore the house down in their fracas...
...In that xenophobic period, China's leaders would not have listened or cared...
...The Spanish democracy does not seem, so far, to be listening—and a good thing it is...
...When this formula is broken by the storeowner with the stricken conscience, the show manages to have it both ways...
...We had a double standard...
...There is no center party but a massive moderate front, the Union de Centro Democratic°, with constant threats of secession by member parties...
...However, if it appears that a large-scale persecution against intellectuals or any other group is underway and we restrain our protests as we have in the past, then we disregard China's humane values as well as our own...
...Both Socialists and Communists favor renegotiation of the treaty that allows U.S...
...368 IN SAFER'S SHOW, two things stuck out...
...Look, after all, at the king that has been made...
...It is difficult to change a nearly half-century tradition of fighting only the left, he observed...
...Each relies on our timetested approval of its stars, heroes from a simpler, morally clearer era...
...These are the programs of the paranoid right, strangely blended with the middle class, whose members see their values and lives threatened by crazed, vicious punks and feel betrayed by a government and judicial system that can't protect them...
...What the audience sees is an embodiment of its fearful fantasy—the innocent daughter brutalized by men from a world that has gone beyond our control...
...The Socialist Workers' party is large—which does mean power, but I feel a bit lost there...
...The propaganda power of TV does not lie in its political message, it lies in the economic behavior it stimulates...
...Spain is still suffering economically...
...There were reports that the wellknown writer Lao She, author of Rickshaw Boy, committed suicide after attacks by Red Guards...
Vol. 29 • July 1982 • No. 3
