LETTERS
The following have asked that their names be added to the "Democratic Vistas" statement published in the Fall 1991 Dissent. ROBERT DELSON SIDNEY MORGENBESSER New York, N.Y. Columbia University,...
...Authoritarian and protofascist tendencies can undoubtedly be detected in contemporary German politics, but least of all among the people that I went out on the streets with last winter...
...Dissent could make no greater contribution in the coming period than to be a forum for developing depth to the currently sparse and fragmentary theory of market socialism...
...We have seen devastation of large parts of El Salvador's environment by the brutally repressive government...
...Anson Rabinbach wastes no time in repeating these views in his misleading discussion of the German debate on the Gulf War (Dissent, Fall 1991...
...How do we counter the "vested interest" problem in a democratic system...
...We welcome this letter from two friends...
...In any case, the criticism of American policy that I heard didn't step beyond these bounds...
...in fact, if Rabinbach and others had bothered to listen to what people were saying, they might have noticed that there was extensive criticism of simpler pacifistic positions at meetings and demonstrations...
...In fact, at the largest antiwar demonstration in Bonn (ca...
...Was National Socialism solely the consequence of excessive militarism (as Mr...
...This statement confirms the proverb that saying half the truth is the worst type of lie...
...Editors: In his interesting piece, "The Communist Collapse," Irving Howe states, in discussing the generations of idealists inspired and betrayed by communism, that the "communist experience has represented an incalculable waste...
...Communism—remember?was supposed to usher in a "new world...
...By warning the gullible—as did some on his left like Irving Howe—Berlin performed, in Scialabba's words, "an important service...
...Editors: I want to protest against the obvious falsification of historical facts about the past of Yitzhak Shamir (and consequently also about his present political faith) in Jonathan Frankel's article "Into Year Four of the Intifada" (Dissent, Summer 1991...
...Without going farther into the details of the disgusting missive which was sent by an organization of which the present Israeli prime minister was a member (something of which he is very proud) to the Nazis, I am enclosing the Lehi "Principles of Renaissance" drafted by the then leader of Lehi, Yair Stern, and published by "Lehi veterans...
...To personalize it, did Bill Foster and Elizabeth Gurley Flynn do more harm to America than J. Edgar Hoover and Joe McCarthy...
...never again Auschwitz...
...Nor does the extensive research and scholarship on the history of the American party support such a verdict...
...Can they become a major sector...
...and much else that can interpret Shamir's real policies, including the building of the Third Temple...
...CHARLES KNIGHT S. M. MILLER Cambridge, Mass...
...How much and what types of capital mobility do we want to regulate...
...Our "children's crusade" was unconvinced that bombing the Iraquis into smithereens could change anything fundamentally in the region, and we refused to accept the claim that the primary lesson of the fascist experience is that citizens should jump into line whenever the drums start beating for the latest ill-defined messianic crusade...
...Emissaries of Lehi were sent to Beirut, then under the rule of the Vichy regime and containing a consulate of the "Third Reich," who humbly delivered this proposal to the appopriate Nazi diplomatic dignitary...
...Would Howe agree that anticommunism has done far, far more wasteful damage to the fabric of American life than communism...
...I prefer to believe that this is but another case of the habitual behavior of Dissent, namely of trying always to cover up all the worst aspects of Jewish chauvinism, racism, and religious fanaticism...
...I find no justification for the statement that "an extermination of the Arabs" was a "logical," presumably meaning a necessary or at least likely, conclusion inherent in the Lehi program...
...But even among those whose views I could not share, anti-Americanism and hostility to Israel were the least of problems...
...He states that Shamir "in 1940 chose to join the extreme splinter faction, the Lehi, which alone during the Second World War refused to declare a truce in the armed struggle against the British in order to allow the Allied campaign against Hitler to proceed unhindered...
...Do producer co-ops and community enterprise have a bright future in the market system...
...but it is really a bit much to be attacked for writing on a subject of one's own, rather than the critic's, choice...
...Although I generally agree with Scialabba's critique, may I make one counterpoint in defense of Berlin...
...what political movement of the left hasn't...
...On this point they were unmistakably correct...
...ISRAEL SHAHAK Jerusalem, Israel I can understand being attacked for what one writes or even, perhaps, for what one omits...
...If writers in Dissent could put a finer point on the answers to these questions, we believe the left would have a lot more to offer the political discourse...
...For any stray newcomers to this terrain, it may be necessary here to insert that many in the socialist left who would happily accept the label of "anticommunist" equally abhorred Hoover, McCarthy, and their ilk and, it must be said, were far more principled than the communists in opposing all persecutions under the anticommunist legal weapon, the Smith Act...
...The Cooper Union, N.Y...
...With all its sins, that experience surely helped raise national consciousness on civil rights, played an acknowledged large role in the building of industrial unionism, helped bring the need for unemployment insurance to the fore, made contributions to literature and the arts, and acted as a persistent gadfly in a society that certainly needs gadflies...
...How do you phase out subsidies that have served their purpose...
...I can appreciate Mr...
...In any case, it's a pretty sad defense of the old communist leader Foster to argue that he did less damage to America than Joe McCarthy...
...In any case, thank God that there were people in Germany who realized that war, though sometimes ugly, can also be fun...
...economic or geopolitical interests...
...Please write to the Environmental Ministry and other responsible authorities of the current Nicaraguan government, with a copy to the Rainforest Action Network, 301 Broadway, Suite A, San Francisco CA 94133...
...Take for example the suggestion (from a rather prominent left-wing journalist) that had the Jews staged a sit-in on the ramp at Auschwitz, they might have been spared their fate...
...Honestly now, isn't there some trade-off between environmental protection and economic growth...
...shouted intellectuals, many of whom only twenty years ago were recklessly comparing American crimes in Vietnam to Auschwitz...
...Even Costa Rica, relatively untouched by violence, is one of the most deforested societies of the peninsula...
...Far more representative of opinion within the movement were its repeated expressions of solidarity with the Israeli people during the Iraqi bombings, clear support for supplying Israel with defensive weapons (which, as Rabinbach surely knows, many prominent Greens and Social Democrats endorsed), and, of course, incessant criticism of Saddam Hussein's brutal dictatorship and the invasion of Kuwait...
...The only defensible conception of "Americanism" that I can conceive of could only refer to the set of formal principles articulated in the Constitution (free speech, equality before the law, and so on...
...As for waste I was referring to the waste of energy and idealism within the left, or what passed for the left, that Stalinism entailed—the millions of people throughout the world who quit the Communist parties embittered, disillusioned, broken...
...The controversy tore that consensus in half by pitting one part of the sentence against the other...
...Similar problems are encountered with public subsidies...
...population exchange," that is, expulsion, of all "aliens" of that huge territory...
...Which doesn't mean that we shouldn't try...
...128 • DISSENT...
...It would surely be rejected by many in Italy, where a vital, relatively sensible CP kept the Christian Democrats from having their undisputed way, and where even today the party governs municipalities (such as Bologna) with enough success to keep winning elections...
...The Sandinista government was properly criticized for its mistreatment of the Miskito Indians, although it must be said that plans for the logging of virgin forests were abandoned, apparently in deference to the attitudes of the U.S...
...Can we develop a new array of macro tools that will promote high employment, equitable growth, and price stability...
...Clearly there is little equity in labor market outcomes...
...They seemed quite happy with my modern-day rendition of Thomas Paine...
...Are work rules the best way to protect worker interests in large firms or are they relics of a different industrial era, incompatible with high productivity in the new flexible production firm...
...Here in Bremen, I gave a speech at a rally where I reminded my German listeners of the virtues of a very "American" tradition of political dissent...
...Whether or not these were heartfelt expressions of both a pro-Israel and an antiwar position, or whether they were simply the tactical manipulation of symbols is another matter...
...PAUL BUHLE Providence, R.I...
...But these left anticommunists unfortunately had marginal or no impact on national life compared to the virulent anticommunists with power...
...How do we navigate this...
...We don't know why most left academics have so little interest in real economic life, but it seems to us that in the absence of serious new thinking socialism is very fast approaching irrelevancy...
...How do we influence or regulate them effectively...
...What has been most frustrating to us in the recent period of dramatic change in the East has been the absence of a credible economic program put forward by the democratic left...
...What this meant was that most of our demonstrations took place with the Israeli flag waving in the background—strange indeed for a bunch of antiSemites...
...Waste means to spend uselessly, without any positive return...
...Time is running out, and the murderers of the earth are at the door...
...Editors: Here are some thoughts on whither Dissent...
...BILL SCHEUERMAN Bremen, Germany/Cambridge, Mass...
...My main point, however, was that whether one points to the peace movement's image of a global Armageddon or to the opposing claim that Saddam is Hitler incarnate, the German debate was entirely self-referential...
...Rather, it can be seen through undeniable advances in health, education, and living conditions as giving a glimpse into the possibilities of a more rational and humane way of life...
...WINTER • 1992 • 125 The accusation of anti-Americanism is even more farfetched...
...This tragedy should have a special resonance with American progressives...
...How do we determine the social benefit on a state, national, and global level of restricting capital flows...
...What are realistic and desirable goals...
...It should be added that Shamir still expresses the greatest veneration for Stern, the ceremonies of whose anniversary of death he is careful to attend every year...
...Certainly for most Americans who were part of the communist experience, that is not an acceptable characterization...
...I did so in order to back up my contention that in the last resort it is possible to understand Yitzhak Shamir's present-day policies only in the context of his full biography...
...It was entirely possible to campaign for civil rights, industrial unionism, and so on, without lying about the Moscow trials, without denying the reality of the Gulag, and without praising Stalin, one of the two great mass murderers in this century of mass murder...
...BOGDAN DENITCH ANSON RABINBACH New York, N.Y...
...I also opposed the Gulf War, but still, a fine statement...
...True, I did write one parenthetical sentence about the Lehi during the Second World War...
...Berlin built his case against leftist utopianism (without ignoring "the hard faces to [the] right") over a lifetime during most of which the claims of Leninist, Trotskyst, and, most dangerously, Stalinist variants of Marxism to having found the correct "scientific" road to a better world were taken very seriously by many Western intellectuals...
...Yet, such reactions were themselves the result of the debate set off by those "cranky" ex-68ers who had learned enough about the complexities of the Middle East to warn against such oversimplifications...
...Frankly, I am not quite sure what the hell "anti-Americanism" means anyhow...
...Left-wing politicians who never had a moment's doubt about arming third-world insurrections were suddenly overcome by pacifist emotions when it came to sending Patriots to Israel...
...What really happened then was that Lehi not only waged war, including personal terror and political assassination, against the British during World War II, but it also actually offered an alliance to Adolf Hitler, whom it addressed in a formal letter in the most flattering terms...
...In spite of the democratic left's bad history with the ideologically rigid CP, and more importantly having its own appeal muffled and distorted by the very existence of a relatively strong American party espousing socialism while supporting the Stalinist Soviet Union, one wonders if Howe would want to subtract from this country's history the entire "communist experience...
...Now that the pendulum has swung so far in the other direction that it is often hard for anything resembling socialism to get a hearing, Scialabba performs a service by warning us of how easily defenders of the status quo can misuse Berlin's words and ideas as cudgels to bash any advocacy of real social-economic reform...
...It is also obvious that an extermination of the Arabs (regarded by Lehi merely as "aliens" who inhabit the Jewish homeland) is a logical consequence of any serious attempt of realization of Lehi principles...
...Scheuerman apparently believes) or of insufficient vigilance in confronting dictatorship, as the "sixties-era ex-leftists" argued (why the ex...
...In his view, the German movement was "anti-American," "indifferent" to "the fate of Israel," a mere "children's crusade" with "greenishHeideggerian" overtones...
...As reported by National Public Radio, the World Rainforest Report and, most recently, Bianca Jagger in the New York Times, the Nicaraguan government has signed an agreement with the Taiwanese to eradicate a precious section of the endangered Central American rainforest...
...But it should be added that a similar letter could have come in, and with equal cogency, regarding the politics of America today or the breakup of communism or the rise of nationalism...
...Of course, there was widespread and legitimate criticism of Israeli repression of Palestinians, but I would hope that this doesn't make such critics necessarily "anti-Israeli" or even "anti-Semitic" in Rabinbach's view...
...250,000) there was a speaker from the Israeli peace movement...
...Nowhere do we find pragmatic solutions to modern economic problems coming from this perspective...
...Elsewhere in the world, the proposition of total waste does not hold...
...Anti-American...
...The war revealed the fragility of the postwar political consensus summed up by the slogan "Never again war...
...If Joe McCarthy did more damage to America than Bill Foster, no McCarthy could have done as much damage to the left through external intimidation as did Foster and his colleagues through internal falsity, cynicism, and corruption...
...Yanks were invited to express their views in as frank a manner as possible about the movement's alleged "anti-Americanism" at major demonstrations in Frankfurt, Bonn, and many other places...
...And, of course, many of the movement's leaders had criticized German arms sales to Iraq long before any of the saber-rattlers decided to make an issue of it...
...solidarity movement...
...The record of the Lehi during the World War was and is, in my view, entirely damning, and in describing it there is no point in straying from the facts into wild speculations...
...LESTER RODNEY Walnut Creek, Calif...
...The reasons which Lehi gave for its request for an alliance with "Herr Chancellor Hitler" were not only political but also ideological, since in the opinion of Lehi, which they freely stated to "Herr Hitler," the two ideologies, the Nazi and their own, were quite close...
...In my article I acknowledged that there were peace movement sympathizers who cautioned against the implications of slogans like "No Blood for Oil" and tried to explain that the war could not be reduced to U.S...
...How do we measure (value/price) the public benefit of subsidies or, for that matter, any other public expenditure...
...q Editors: Here we go again...
...But perhaps I don't understand Rabinbach's point...
...Undoubtedly, the German movement had its fair share of cranks...
...If Professor Shahak had bothered to read that sentence, which he quotes, with more attention he might have noticed that it describes facts probably even more alarming than those which he discusses WINTER • 1992 • 127 in his letter...
...The vehemence of the debate and, I might add, the analogies themselves, say far more about how Germany is coping with reunification than they do about the war, which was all but lost in the din of apocalyptic rhetoric...
...Were Howe referring only to the communist experience 126 • DISSENT in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe—in other words, Stalinism in power—it would be hard to argue with his sweeping conclusion, even though the precipitate nature of the collapse does lend itself to some ahistorical shorthand...
...STUART E. COLIE Ocean Springs, Miss...
...Perhaps a concrete example will best illustrate the point: here in the northern industrial city of Bremen, the fourteenth-century city hall was decked out for much of the war with Israeli flags by the local SPD government, which opposed the war...
...particularly the reality that subsidized sectors or populations often become the most reliable bases of support for left parties...
...Scheuerman's sincerity, and I do not doubt his claim that Israeli flags flew at German peace rallies or from the Bremen Town Hall...
...Some examples of what needs addressing: • Socialists are fond of market regulations, yet we are not aware of much serious investigation of the optimal mechanisms that will minimize negative regulatory side effects...
...Unfortunately, simplification, world-end rhetoric, and worse fueled the intensity of the debate in the first place...
...My article dealt with Israel in the years 1988-1991, not, as Professor Shahak apparently would have wished, with Palestine in 1940...
...Last winter, an unholy alliance of right-wing politicians and cranky sixties-era ex-leftists in Germany rushed to denounce that country's burgeoning movement against the Gulf War...
...And even now, as Nat Hentoff 's piece in the same issue (" 'Speech Codes' on the Campus") reminds us, if reminding be needed, Berlin's concern about "the violent irrationalism of dervishes on the left" should still be heeded by democratic leftists...
...Columbia University, N.Y...
...But pendulums swing back and forth...
...Dissent is one of the few places where you can find a broad discussion of the issues, but certainly from a pragmatic political point of view the left has had very little to offer the public in either the East or the West...
...q Editors: Nicaragua, severely damaged by more than a decade of civil war, now faces potentially catastrophic environmental depredation...
...Contra Rabinbach and the "expert discourse" of the German intellectuals, opposition to the war for most of the protesters whom I met didn't stem from a neutralistic or crudely pacifistic position...
...JOHN COAT Nahant, Mass...
...The parallels between Lehi principles and those of German Nazism as it existed until about 1940 (when the Nazis also spoke merely about the expulsion of the Jews as the way of "solving the Jewish problem") are quite clear...
...It can be reasonably argued that in China and Cuba, despite the lack of democracy that blights and limits their achievements, the communist experience was far from a waste to millions who had suffered Batista fascism and Chiang Kai-Shek feudal warlordism...
...All this is well-known in Israel, and I refuse to believe that Jonathan Frankel can be ignorant of this aspect of Yitzhak Shamir's past and consequently of its influence on his present ideology...
...Editors: Re the "Democratic Vistas" statement: I did add a note to the effect that I dissented from the sentence on abortion rights, so I would ask you to add my name to that of Nat Hentoff on that point...
...Not surprisingly, the dealmaking middleman is thought to be a former Somoza family aide...
...So, thanks...
...Editors: George Scialabba makes some telling points in his review (Dissent, Fall 1991) of Isaiah Berlin's The Crooked Timber of Humanity —and of the main line of Berlin's thought throughout his career...
...This is a moment of enormous and sometimes bewildering change, and it is impossible to confront every problem...
...eternal war...
...The problems they raise are genuine and urgent, and we hope, with our limited material and intellectual resources, to discuss them in forthcoming issues—or at least some of them...
...You will note in those principles the one about the enormous territorial expansion, which includes (in current terms) an Israeli conquest not merely of Palestine and Jordan but of the whole of Lebanon, most of Syria, and huge chunks of other countries...
...Now the Sumos and Miskitos, desperately opposed to the logging, face the ultimate repression: destruction of their habitat...
...Although Violeta Chamorro promised to protect the environment, Chief Minister Antonio Lacayo has proceeded to offer logging of more than one-sixth of all forest lands in the country...
Vol. 39 • January 1992 • No. 1
