Remembering Irving Howe

...I remember expressing at some length my ideas about the deep ideological regression characteristic of the present climate everywhere, and Irving urging me to write a piece on this theme for Dissent, which, unfortunately, I have not yet found the time to do...

...Then, in August and September of 1990, Octavio Paz and his friends at Vuelta organized an international symposium in Mexico City on the theme "The Twentieth Century: The Experience of Freedom," bringing together writers and intellectuals from Europe, East and West, and the Americas, to discuss the collapse of communist totalitarianism and the new political and ideological configuration...

...We promised to keep in touch and, two years later, I had the pleasure of meeting Irving and his wife in Paris...

...The proceedings of the symposium have since been published in seven volumes by Vuelta under the title La experiencia de la libertad, Mexico, 1991...

...I will always regret that I only had the opportunity of meeting this exceptional man so late in his life, and in mine...

...We found ourselves again in broad agreement concerning the main (gloomy) traits of the world situation...

...These people would not tolerate any criticism of the Western economic, political, and social regimes...

...They include talks and commentary by Irving Howe...

...they had seen the light of "free markets" and defended an unadulterated Thatcherist theology with the same dogmatism and crude demagoguery they had been using some months or years before to glorify the communist orthodoxy...

...I was very much impressed during these discussions by Irving's pugnacity, his intellectual rigor, and the wealth of his argumentation...

...Irving and I fraternized immediately —both spontaneously, so to speak, and under the pressure of the "objective situation...

...Indeed, we were almost the only ones to stand up against the new converts to capitalist "liberalism" from the East, especially Russia...