LETTERS
How strange it is to find that a new pamphlet (hardly a book), whose authors Daniel Cantor and Juliet Schor repeat much of an attack I launched on the AFL-CIO leadership some twenty years ago,...
...RUTH R. WISSE Montreal, Que...
...Anyone who cares about the health of the labor movement today has taken sides in this debate, which is why this little book has caused such a commotion...
...Corrections In my essay "Conservatives Stumble into the Future" (Fall 1988), I say toward the end, "Podhoretz, for his part, compared Gorbachev to Hitler...
...As the Communist guerrilla leader Shafik Handal recently explained in a new twist on Lenin, "[T]he labor movement, . . . when unconnected to revolutionary armed struggle, will degenerate into trade union economism or simply stagnate...
...It is in this context that AIFLD and the AFL-CIO have acted to support democratic trade unionists in CUS and the CTN, who are defending the rights of workers and against all odds are trying to keep alive free trade unions...
...How strange it is to find that a new pamphlet (hardly a book), whose authors Daniel Cantor and Juliet Schor repeat much of an attack I launched on the AFL-CIO leadership some twenty years ago, is praised in Dissent (Summer 1988, Tunnel Vision: Labor, the World Economy, and Central America) for "asking all the right questions" and for examining "them with the rigorous and honest intelligence they deserve...
...In their slim volume, Cantor and Schor treat European socialists and social democrats as pro–Wall Street conservatives, while the "left wing unions" in postwar Europe supposedly had a "vision of a better world...
...Commentary, May 1988) discussed the success the Arabs enjoy in their anti-Israel propaganda war, which remains largely unopposed by Jewish intellectuals both in Israel and America...
...Where were the teach-ins, books, articles, and demonstrations...
...I will never forgive the left for its almost complete silence over Afghanistan...
...Having recently returned from giving a speech to the San Francisco regional conference on international affairs sponsored by the DIA, I can report that its policy is one based on opposition to all regimes that suppress workers' freedom—be they totalitarian states of the left or right-wing authoritarian regimes such as that of Pinochet in Chile...
...In my article, "Dependent Individualism" (Fall 1988) I referred to Roger Simon and should have written Jonathan Simon, a member of the Berkeley Center for the Study of Law and Society...
...The difference is that while Radosh's scholarly tome, American Labor and United States Foreign Policy, attacked progressive leaders like Walter Reuther for not thinking more like Ronald Radosh, Tunnel Vision demonstrates a sensitivity to the pressures and concerns that the heirs of that progressive tradition face today...
...The reality of Sandinista rule, ironically, has been most aptly described by the veteran Communist leader of the construction workers, who told Stephen Kinzer that "the Sandinistas have achieved the impossible...
...My sympathy with its outlook is relevant, as are Radosh's cross-country jaunts on behalf of the DIA...
...and people whose misery is also cultivated by their fellow Arabs and used as an offensive weapon against the Jews...
...How else to explain his professed outrage at the notion of the DIA looking favorably on the exploits of Ronald Reagan's contra "freedom fighters...
...Most recently, in July of 1988, the Sandinistas banned a major protest march led by trade unions, arrested CTN leader Carlos Huembes, and tear gassed and beaten demonstrators engaged in nonviolent peaceful protest...
...The facts are that CUS's chief, Louis Medrano Flores, was assassinated by the Somocista Guard in 1979, and its current head, Alvin Guthrie, was a member of the first Sandinista Council of State...
...It is, morever, scandalous and completely false for Howard to assert that "the DIA signed up early in the Reagan administration's crusade against Nicaragua, trying like the devil to pull together an opposition labor front to work in conjunction with the contras to bring down the Sandinista government...
...people who suffer as in Shylock's "Doth not a Jew bleed...
...Indeed, two labor organizers were killed when Sandinista patrols fired at protesters marching to a labor rally in rural Matagalpa last March...
...I should have said: "Podhoretz, for his part, compared Gorbachev's Russia to a sanitized Nazi Germany...
...On the basis of the very same single sentence cited by Cockburn, and with no reference to the article or the argument in question, they not only accuse me of racism and "that dehumanization of the adversary that has been a curse of our century," but they accuse Commentary, the magazine of which I am proud to be a contributor, of intellectual vulgarity and political reaction...
...Because this pressure from the left already succeeded in the 1930s in demoralizing Jewish intellectuals—forcing them to distinguish between themselves, the good Jews, and the Zionist bad Jews—it is not difficult to trace, and even to predict, the attempt of left-leaning intellectuals today to distinguish once again between themselves, the good Jews who want only the "legitimate Israel," and the Zionist bad Jews who want an illegitimate Israel, in response to a new campaign of delegitimation...
...It's hard to believe he missed those full-page New York Times and Washington Post ads signed by AIFLD Director William Dougherty and other AFL-CIO officials calling for aid to the contras...
...Arabs and Racism Editors: In the May 7 issue of the Nation I was accused of moral insensitivity by Alexander Cockburn, which is like having been accused of murder by Stalin: People might be expected to know that either the charge was fabricated or the crime was justified...
...Guilty as the phrase may be of facile alliteration, its obvious point was to introduce the power of Palestinian Arab reality—people who multiply just as the demographers say they do...
...FRED SIEGEL Brooklyn, N.Y...
...I seem to be almost alone in crediting them with very high intelligence in waging their war against the Jewish state...
...Any labor protest is met with the charge that trade unionists are CIA agents or, as Daniel Ortega put it, "servile lackeys of the bourgeoisie and American imperialism...
...Let us hope those days are gone...
...It did not occur to me to respond...
...I consider myself a liberal, not a radical...
...He would prefer that the AFL-CIO stop helping unions like CUS and instead come to the aid of the Sandinista-front union, the guerrilla-backed UNTS in El Salvador, and the procommunist KMT in the Philippines...
...The equation of Zionism with racism was a brilliant offensive weapon since it not only obscured continuing Arab opposition to Israel but held the Jews responsible for the very evil they had been trying to alleviate...
...Nothing less would have been accepted from an American president...
...The Department of International Affairs' (DIA) position is not that claimed by him...
...KATHLEEN VULLIS Flushing, N.Y...
...Admitting that these unions were "politically subservient to Moscow," they nevertheless praise them for being composed of "militant unionists who fought hard to protect jobs and wages," rather than support the Marshall Plan, which caused them to be isolated from "progressive causes...
...Cantor and Schor, whose facts Howard accepts, twist the truth when they accuse CUS of being "identified with Somoza" and of being a "company union" because it is part of the coalition of civic opposition to the FSLN...
...The adoption by the Arabs in the early 1970s of the language of the left rather than the language of the right reopened the whole question of Jewish national legitimacy that the creation of the State of Israel had briefly put to rest...
...As Dissent has been kind enough to bring my writing to the attention of its readers, those who still think for themselves may take the trouble of reading and, if they wish, of challenging my argument for themselves...
...But like the Sandinistas, whose logic he seems to have adopted, Howard prefers to repeat the slander that vigorous opposition to the Sandinistas is akin to support of the contras and an attempt to overthrow the government...
...Were it only a matter of alliteration...
...CUS, as Guthrie states, "gave without reservation our support to that war waged by the FSLN...
...As a recent DIA publication puts it, "the AFL-CIO is guided by a single standard" whether it comes to aiding "the black South African trade union movement, or assisting Nicaraguan unions under attack by the Sandinistas, or giving Poland's Solidarnosc union printing presses, or assisting Salvadoran labor against assaults by rightist death squads and leftist guerrillas...
...In treating the issue as solely one of AFL-CIO perfidy, it is Cantor, Schor, and reviewer Howard who truly have displayed tunnel vision...
...It is 126 • DISSENT Letters predictable that the authors now oppose the same kind of aid to democratic unions in Central America that the AFL-CIO gave to their counterparts in Western Europe at the end of World War II and write as if the "left" unions are models of democracy...
...IRVING HOWE Replies: It is sad that our correspondent sees nothing wrong, let alone repugnant, in the sentence about the Arabs that she wrote...
...JOHN B. JUDIS Washington, D.C...
...Professor Kilson's piece needs correction on an important fact: Despite the fact that Bernard Epton, who WINTER • 1989 • 127 Letters ran against the late Mayor Washington (in Chicago) was Jewish, 40 percent of the Jews voted for Washington—the highest percentage the Mayor received from any white group in the city...
...It is because Dissent doesn't share this kind of mentality either that I have decided to take out a subscription...
...Now the editors of Dissent have leveled at me the identical accusation, in language even more reminiscent of the purge years...
...To the contrary...
...As the New York Times reported last April, "[L]abor conflict . . . is reaching its highest level since the 1979 revolution...
...aid to the contras as counterproductive" (my emphasis...
...ALAN HOWARD Replies: Ronald Radosh must think people are awfully stupid...
...Student Voice Editors: I was too young to have participated in the events of the 1960s...
...I guess I just don't have the mentality that becomes outraged when Russia is called an Evil Empire and yet can sit quietly in an auditorium while the United States is called everything under the sun...
...And while chastising DIA for citing a changing list of "good" and "bad" unions in El Salvador, Howard says little about the ways in which revolutionary dual unions are created not to defend workers' rights, but to destabilize a fragile political structure in order to promote insurrection...
...Radosh fares no better with his regurgitation of the DIA line on El Salvador...
...One suspects that Howard's real agenda is not to urge a more tolerant and broad definition of what a legitimate union is upon the AFL-CIO, but to gain acceptance and legitimacy for revolutionary dual unions that pose as bona fide trade unions...
...The real charge of dehumanization should be leveled at those who patronize the Arabs by pretending that they are liberal Jews...
...As a front-page article in the Wall Street Journal by Clifford Krauss on AIFLD reported in 1985, AIFLD money has helped CUS agricultural projects and cooperatives survive, despite Sandinista attempts to strangle them...
...Finally, why can't everyone at least wait until the Soviet Union has completely withdrawn from Afghanistan before declaring Gorbachev a man of peace...
...Perhaps the praise heaped upon this new polemic by Alan Howard is not surprising, given that the authors thank him in their acknowledgments as being among those friends who "helped us to write, and rewrite, this book...
...Sadly, the Washington coalition has been undermined since his passing...
...Perfidy is Professor Radosh's word, one of many in his letter that seem calculated to poison democratic debate on this subject within the labor movement...
...The purpose of FMLN-affiliated unions was best explained by journalist Chris Hedges in the Dallas Morning News as a strategy to "foment a popular insurrection against the government in the next two years...
...128 • DISSENT...
...One must begin by pointing out that Howard's summary of AFL-CIO policy is grossly unfair...
...Not for a moment do I believe that the editors of Dissent really suspect me of racism because I wrote that "Palestinian Arabs . . . breed and bleed and advertise their misery...
...Campaign Coverage Editors: How grateful we are to have this magazine visit our home to bring its good sense and support to all we believe in during these difficult times...
...A Jewish country under siege puts great pressure on other Jews to protect it, pressure that marginal Jews (intellectuals foremost among them) resent and that even affiliated Jews regret...
...They have united the opposition against them and turned the popular classes into supporters of the right...
...My article on "Israel and the Intellectuals: A Failure of Nerve...
...I confess to being one of the sixty-three people listed in the acknowledgments of Tunnel Vision...
...Committed to waging "prolonged popular war," new proguerrilla unions attempt to exploit legitimate grievances of workers in order to promote armed struggle...
...It is also easier to resort to the intellectual vulgarity of defamation than to deal cogently with the painful questions I tried to raise...
...However, I still do not want to see its revival...
...It does indeed make many of the same telling points on the folly of the "total absorption of American labor leaders in the ideology of Cold War liberalism," in the words of a younger and perhaps more idealistic Ronald Radosh...
...Despite all that," the article continued, "the CUS opposes U.S...
...JEWEL BELLUSH Great Neck, N.Y...
...Reading these documents is to weep for the movement of Debs...
...I guess they were too busy talking about Nicaragua...
...But instead of saying this up front, the reviewer engages in a dishonest polemic that masks his true intent...
...Dissent, however, finds it more convenient to posture morally against an invented Jewish bigot than to oppose the humiliating, damaging, and overtly racist campaign that has been launched by the Arabs against Israel and the Jewish people...
...They refer here, evidently, to unions like the French CGT, which supported Stalinism, including the suppression of the Hungarian revolution, the invasion of Czechoslovakia, and martial law in Poland against Solidarnosc...
...In his article "The New Student Radicals" (Fall 1988), W. E. Scheuerman makes some good points about why a student movement today might be different...
...Indeed, that is precisely what I have been doing in the pages of Commentary for about a decade, and particularly in the article that so claimed the attention of the editors...
...Why didn't students (worldwide) take to the streets as they did during the Vietnam War...
...Professors Howe's and Walzer's essays (Summer 1988, "The Jackson Campaign") express clearly and concisely the reasons many of us did not support the Jackson candidacy...
...Since I write this on the eve of the Jewish New Year, let me wish all Jews and Arabs and the editors of Dissent only such manifestations of racism and dehumanization as mine in the years ahead...
...There is nothing slighting in my attitude to the Arabs...
...Government-organized goon squads— the so-called turbas—regularly beat up civic opposition leaders and break strikes...
...It is so curious to find this tactic of discreditation, once perfected by the Communist press, in a magazine that proclaims itself opposed to totalitarianism that one must inquire into its cause...
...Since 1985, the Sandinistas' war against their own people has broken out full fold...
...I take their declared enmity with full seriousness, not because I minimize their humanity, but because I fully understand how much they want to achieve regional hegemony...
...In Nicaragua, the Sandinistas have for some years seen free labor unions as their main opponents...
...That comment reveals his failure to understand the context of internal events in Nicaragua...
...And unlike the despair that Radosh expressed twenty years ago about the labor movement ever reforming itself, Tunnel Vision sees that change coming and is written in a way to help it along...
...If there is a company union in Nicaragua today, it is the one organized by the Sandinista party—which opposes strikes and militant action—not the few remaining unions independent of state and party control...
...Anyone interested in pursuing this sad chapter in the history of American labor's foreign policy would do well to read the recent "Labor Rights in El Salvador" (Americas Watch, 36 West 44th Street, New York, NY 10036), AIFLD's critique of that report (AFL-CIO, 815 Sixteenth Street, NW, Washington, DC 20006), and the Americas Watch rebuttal...
...It must have given offense not to the Arabs, as they pretended, but to those who recognized themselves as the subject of my analysis...
Vol. 36 • January 1989 • No. 1
