LETTERS
Nicaragua: I Editors: Juan E. Corradi's article "Nicaragua—Can It Find Its Own Way?" places this Central American country in a clear perspective. Corradi could not be more correct in claiming...
...That isn't to say we can't learn from their criticism, as I suggest in several examples...
...Politics —and especially revolutionary politics—shall remain for me the art of the possible...
...On the other hand, I fear that neoliberals were deaf to those claims partly because they hadn't the courage of their own latent Editors: I would like to announce in your pages the launching of Readers International, a new nonprofit publishing program that will bring into English outstanding works of contemporary literature from outside the developed West...
...It consists of novels from South Africa, Nicaragua, and Chile, short stories from Prague, a banned novel by the head of the Palestinian Writers' Union, and a memoir of the Chinese Cultural Revolution...
...Ironically, it is the federal government— Congress and the courts—on whom union members have to rely for their basic rights...
...Nor is it to minimize the achievements of such great poets as Dario—although when the modernist Dario was singing to white marble in Paris and Buenos Aires, his homeland wallowed in mud and malaria...
...We found strong support for the Sandinistas from Catholic leaders of the Christianbased communities—the Maryknolls, Jesuits, Capuchins...
...Are you aware that Anne Frank was the way she was because she attended a good (they're few) Montessori School...
...It's our small contribution to the battle against the apathy so prevalent today...
...He calls for the countervailing power of an "Arab political entity," a "sovereign entity," to look after the economic welfare of the Palestinian population of the West Bank and Gaza...
...We're heading straight for nuclear war and you seem to be back in some other, blander century...
...The term "cultural backwardness" is not used to dismiss the achievements of folk culture—although in dependent Third World nations much of it is phoney and condescendingly glorified by outside profiteers and consumers...
...Both the magazine and I will be better served if I play the role of active contributor rather than inactive editor...
...1 think you're stuck in two dimensions...
...Even when such bureaucracies take the form of outright dictatorships, ruling by violence, the leaders of the AFL–CIO have not been particularly forceful in taking steps to remove such officers...
...Forman, what I think my lengthier analysis in the article makes plain to other readers...
...Give Juan E. Corradi a place to stand, and he can analyze the Nicaraguan revolution— and where he's standing is the place of bourgeois privilege...
...We need new thinking and new ideas, and you don't seem to have any...
...What Joanne Forman objects to is objectivity...
...I do not find it "awful" that toothpaste is not available to "a peasant family": I merely report that the foreign visitor is besieged by urban workers in search of such simple consumer goods...
...It can be made less oppressive for the Arab residents by the creation of some sort of federation 143 status with Jordan—a solution that could also lessen the moral tension for Israeli liberals that Ben-Porath recognizes as being created by the nature of the present relationship—but a sovereign Arab political entity exercising the sort of full independence that could lead to a severing of ties between the West Bank and pre-1967 Israel is not in the cards...
...That we can own cars and homes because unions have helped us earn more does not negate our sense that we are also consumers, part of the "public," as the newspapers tell us...
...JOANNE FORMAN Taos, New Mexico q JUAN E. CORRADI Replies It is nearly impossible for an author to satisfy a critic who, more through inability than mischief, entirely misreads his text...
...Unfortunately, it was also unclear on some central points and thus remains unconvincing...
...I'm not sure I blame them entirely, given the often formulaic, self-enclosed, and sometimes self-indulgent nature of the campus left's claims to broader social vision...
...As for Cooper's only substantive point, which is that I'm wrong when speaking of "the chilly Harvard College of the 1970s" as an incubator of neoliberal sensibility, I was there during those years and observed the socialist courses and activities he mentions...
...I am perfectly willing to live with that and even to consider it progress for Nicaragua...
...Activists bemoaned this depressing spirit all the time...
...I do not for a moment foster the illusion that the Nicaraguan bourgeoisie, as it is presently constituted, is either strong or mature enough to be counted on to guarantee democracy...
...Last spring we spent a week in Honduras and two weeks in Nicaragua, including three days with the Witness for Peace program at Jalapa on the frontier...
...For information about subscriptions, please write to Consider, 4317 Michigan Union, Ann Arbor, Michigan, 48109...
...And this is the class that Corradi counts on for democracy in Nicaragua...
...I call this a "sham democracy"— but one with some chances for improvement...
...We found the leadership of the Protestant consortium in strong support...
...They read Mirabehn and Martin Buber and Jane Roberts...
...What did disturb me was that, upon delivering a tube of toothpaste, I had to sign an affidavit stating that it was a personal gift, so that the person to whom I gave it would not be fired and/or arrested...
...Despite the interest in a few prominent foreign writers, little contemporary literature from outside Western Europe is published here in the U.S.—less than 1 percent in the latest available translation-count by the Library of Congress...
...ON THE ISSUE of the prospects for democracy in Nicaragua, I will restate succinctly, for the benefit of Ms...
...Forman has—unbeknown to her—a point: the attempt to correct "cultural backwardness" may lead to arrogant excess in the hands of revolutionaries who have little respect for native customs and rights...
...And, since the leadership of the Arab world has explicitly excluded Jordan from representing the Palestinian people, it is not even a solution that is available unless and until the rest of the Arab world changes its political and diplomatic views...
...Forman totally misconstrues some of my accounts...
...I do not find it "awful" that basic foodstuffs are rationed: there is scarcity and a war emergency...
...I was neither surprised nor appalled: I have yet to visit a "socialist" country with no black market for such items...
...You're as dull as Freud...
...So did embryonic neoliberals, but they weren't much drawn to the community of progressive scholars and students as an alternative...
...Annexation of the West Bank is already a fait accompli...
...Since the Palestinian liberation movement is nothing if not a nationalist movement with a long and bloody history of seeking the overthrow of the current Jordanian government, the second version of the solution is not likely to prove stable...
...The problem he outlined, the convergence of "class" (position in the work force and family income) and ethnicity, is certainly an important one...
...I am anti-Marxist-Leninist...
...Although I remain committed to the goals of the magazine, I have found myself unable to devote time to serving as a functioning member of the Board...
...I do not share in the official American hypocrisy that consists in demanding of the Nicaraguans what it does not demand of, say, the Mexicans, let alone of some of its shadier allies in Central America...
...The sooner that class goes on the dust heap of history, where it so definitely belongs, the sooner the "riff-raff ' can get on with building a new society...
...The six books, all sewn hardbacks, are available by subscription at $36.00 plus $1.00 a book for postage from 9 East 46th Street, New York, N.Y...
...Yet he himself quotes a bourgeois spokesman who is angry because of "the march of the riff-raff' (that's the Nicaraguan people) and because his "birthright" has been snatched away—that birthright being the right to exploit the people in the place of Somoza who was hated not because he was an exploiter, but because he refused to share out the loot...
...Corradi could not be more correct in claiming that "the paramount problems of Central America are those of the Third World...
...Corradi judges the revolution through the lens of bourgeois consumerism...
...Consider represents the commitment of a few students to the discussion of significant issues of the day...
...The first Readers International series of six books is starting now...
...We also found the bishops in opposition...
...Which other Central American country will put arms in the hands of its people...
...If I must be scolded for calling a spade a spade, so be it...
...q AROrlBiEnRgTto BnL,A VIRirginia q RReaders International "Neoliberals' Hesitation Dance" A Reply by Jim SLEEPER I've had some reservations about my "Neoliberals' Hesitation Dance" essay in the spring Dissent, but I can't say that Louis E Cooper's complaining letter in the summer issue helped much to clarify them...
...It is to point to such obvious facts as a staggering rate of illiteracy...
...The second factor (almost as obvious but much more difficult to deal with) is that workers are beginning to feel that the economic gains of some workers result in economic losses for the rest...
...The problems with an independent state are too well known to need repeating...
...It was in order to overcome such cultural backwardness that the San141 dinistas launched an enthusiastic and successful mass literacy campaign, as the Cubans did 20 years before...
...Nor, from a purely economic point of view, would it be preferable to formal annexation...
...To overcome poverty and backwardness is a difficult task, but one that the Sandinista National Liberation Front has placed at the forefront...
...With time and without external intrusion, Nicaragua can find its own way...
...army to shore up its privileges...
...His solution for rectifying it is unrealistic and based on moral argument rather than economic analysis...
...He finds it awful that toothpaste is not available: what does toothpaste mean to a peasant family that has never had dental care...
...She belongs to the legion of those who, facing a revolution, consider anything other than unthinking endorsement a betrayal, or at best the unconscious distortion of a "class enemy...
...It even took a subsidy to translate One Hundred Years of Solitude...
...Like Gotbaum, 1 too am confident that unions are here to stay...
...Forman, an exercise in self-obfuscation...
...We hope to help writers from the Third World and Eastern Europe fight the silence imposed on them at home...
...Zaid echoes the line of the Reagan administration that the Sandinistas are nothing but a MarxistLeninist party imposing its will on a resistant populace...
...Readers International is a unique alliance of writers, translators, and editors the world over...
...One notices he makes no mention of the tremendous achievements of, for instance, literacy campaigns or improved medical and social services—carried out with Uncle Sam breathing down...
...To her, my terms to characterize the predicament of Third World countries sound like "condescending buzz words," as if she did not hear the louder buzz of her own clichés (e.g., "bourgeois privilege"), which come from the hive of Vulgar Marxists...
...10017...
...Montessori and Tertullian discovered the same laws of formation for human character...
...His reiterations will, in all likelihood, leave the critic unruffled, and they will bore the other, more perceptive audience...
...I shall therefore be brief...
...Jews I know aren't like this...
...Ask yourself why the Sandinistas would be putting guns in the hands of the peasants close to the contras if they hated the government...
...JEFF SPINNER Ann Arbor, Michigan q What Solutions for West Bank Arabs...
...And it is to overcome such backwardness that neighborhood committees today encourage families to vaccinate their children...
...As immature as Jung...
...conviction that something was wrong with the way we were all being taught to perceive and master the world around us...
...We worked in the fields on a cooperative four miles from the border, with people from the co-op having guns to defend themselves against the contras...
...Most obvious is the selfperpetuating bureaucracy that sees opposition within a union as an enemy force to be dislodged rather than as a necessary part of the democratic process...
...He finds it awful that peasant and working-class families subsist on a diet of beans and rice, with insufficient meat and fish...
...As for "social disarticulation," a thoroughgoing revolution strikes the rest of the world as pretty articulate...
...but he fails to see, or at least to acknowledge, that there is a growing opposition to unions that is not caused by changes in the economy but by the actions of union leaders...
...The rewards and rigors of that mastery were attractive, and they succumbed, with the misgivings that make them neoliberals...
...Nicaraguan leaders have not attempted to shun this responsibility...
...q On Central America — and Nicaragua Editors: My wife and I are among those who feel that there are serious distortions in Gabriel Zaid's account— "Salvadorans Go to the Ballot Box," in the Fall 1984 Dissent—of the situation in Central America...
...But they are more likely to reverse their decline if their supporters, particularly their leaders, face the truth that unions are losing their influence more by their own actions than by technological changes...
...Fortunately, conversations with others, including neoliberals, have been more constructive, and I look forward to more of them...
...What does that mean to those families who are getting enough beans and rice for the first time in their lives...
...Its advisers and supporters include Dennis Brutus, Ariel Dorfman, Robert Fitzgerald, Eduardo Galeano, Gregory Rabassa, Nawal El Saadawi, Edward Said, and Josef Skvorecky...
...Zaid's, however...
...ARTHUR WIRTH Clayton, Missouri q Resigns Dear Colleagues: I hereby resign from the Editorial Board...
...not, as with Ms...
...In fact, I take the trouble to spell out a scenario for what would happen if this group were conceded all that it demands: it would result in instability and eventually in what I call "bloody reaction...
...Even when workers, both in and out of unions, recognize their common interest with those on strike, there is also a recognition that higher wages, let us say, for auto workers and teachers mean higher prices for our cars and higher taxes on our homes...
...The trip was sponsored by the Fellowship for Reconciliation, and it put us in contact with people across the political spectrum in both countries...
...What disturbed me was that, for some quite poor people, whether they got their weekly chicken or not depended on how loudly they were heard shouting officially approved slogans...
...This is acutely understood and reflected by Corradi...
...Since a job opportunity will now take me away from New York, my ability to do ongoing work as an editor will be hampered further...
...ERIC BLEDSOE West Lafayette, Indiana q Nicaragua: II Editors: "Gimme a place to stand," said Archimedes, "and I can move the world...
...LAWRENCE W. HYMAN Ridgewood, N.J...
...Social change is to be engineered not only by government leaders, but by the citizen on the street...
...Between these two iron horns, I think a compromise is, at this late hour, still possible: genuine concessions on the part of the ruling party without giving up power, and freer elections than the ones that took place last November...
...That suggests either an independent state or the incorporation of the occupied territories into Jordan (an Arab entity...
...This is evident in his condescending words about the Third World: "Cultural backwardness" dismisses all the achievements of folk culture, such as music, art, and crafts, and such Nicaraguan "high" culture figures as Ruben Dario...
...q "As Dull as Freud" Editors: Dissent runs willfully in blinders...
...But Ms...
...Nicaragua has made mistakes, but with the mistakes has come learning...
...DOROTHY CONNELL, Executive Editor 144...
...Our experience contradicted Mr...
...MARION WYLIE Oakland, California 111 Student Publication Editors: 1 would like to call the attention of your readers to Consider, a publication from the University of Michigan...
...It was as nothing compared to the dominant sensibility, which sundered all connection between most students' own upward mobility and any sense of the general welfare...
...The Sandinista revolution is the physical reflection of a whole people's desire to seek a fuller life and reject the authoritarianism of the Somoza regime...
...Had she cared to read my article to the end, she would have found in footnote 11 an account of Sandinista mistreatment of the natives of the Atlantic Coast—a fact that I deplore and the Sandinistas now regret...
...JACK CLARK q 142 "Our Unions Are Under Attack" Editors: Victor Gotbaum's defense of unions ("Our Unions Are Under Attack," Dissent, Spring 1984) is cogent as far as it goes...
...Editors: Yoram Ben-Porath's essay, in the Fall 1984 issue, on economic relations between Jews and Arabs—especially West Bank Arabs—was most interesting and raised several important issues...
...Forman wishes in her outworn rhetoric, to "the dust heap of history," the chances for real democracy are foreclosed entirely...
...More serious is his analysis "no bourgeois, no democracy...
...The class that, in a New York Times magazine article last August, was willing to welcome the U.S...
...But I also believe that if that group— which even the Sandinistas concede has an important and legitimate function in Nicaraguan society —is sent, as Ms...
Vol. 32 • January 1985 • No. 1
