Responses

...Can it be easier to apologize to the millions of dead than, say, to your mother, your child, your colleague...

...Is Genovese apologizing...

...rather, he was a college professor in the United States, teaching, writing and debating primarily matters of American history...

...Genovese cites chapter and SUMMER • 1994 • 383 The Responses verse of the Bible, always a useful source for humility, but for something more contemporary, I treasure the Eastern Europeans — Michnik and Konrad among them—who write from the very heart of devastation, not with recrimination and a new set of certainties but with irony, mild manners, an acute awareness of human frailty, and an absolute refusal of heroism, including the heroics of failure...

...to subordinate ethnic rivalries to the requirements of coherent national entities still surface as vague and confused nostalgia...

...Above all, I recommend to Genovese the Polish poet Zbigniew Herbert and his persona Mr...

...And to whom...

...How does his acknowledgment of what were once called "errors" change his understanding of the justice of his ferocious attacks on those who disagreed with him in matters of history, since he habitually drew on Marxism and the connections between politics and intellectual work to buttress those attacks and condemnations...

...The millions of dead...

...In his life as a supporter of international revolution, Genovese neither worked in the service of the KGB, nor in the torturers' cells, nor on the judge's bench meting out sentences, nor on the killing fields slaughtering rivals...

...I am suspicious of a mea culpa whose main purpose is to castigate others...

...Old dogmas about the high quality of social services in the socialist countries and the communists' abilities—whatever their problems...

...It's the absence of any second thoughts on the latter that bothers me...

...I very much appreciate the manifest content of Eugene Genovese's piece, although I'm impatient with its deeper import...

...George Konrad: "Peacemaking is not a phrase . . . it implies reflection, introspection, and cultural criticism of the most intensive kind...

...A literature of conscience, which Genovese rightly believes critical to renovating the American left, need be, to my mind, founded in reflection and humility...

...There is a vanguardist and self-important cast to his polemic, an elision of personal recantation with the great drama of world revolution that seems to me entirely of a piece with familiar, worn, moral narratives of the left, old and new...

...Whatever checks he wrote, petitions he signed, positions he endorsed about world and domestic affairs need to be placed along this everyday work in the academy...

...Adam Michnik: "We must trust the voice of our conscience more than that of all abstract speculations and not invent other responsibilities than the one to which the voice calls us...

...But how much does it cost to apologize to the millions of dead, an abstraction—if a moving one—especially if you have never in actuality (at least insofar as the author tells us) killed one of these detainees, camp inmates, dissidents, or running dogs, never actually raised a hand to give the signal, dealt a blow, pulled the trigger...

...Whether his piece moves toward a new sort of politics or replicates the very structures of authoritarianism he now repudiates is another matter...

...Would he like to say he was wrong about anything closer to home...

...So Genovese has done us all a service by raising these questions...

...Are there amends to friends, students, co-workers he wants to make...

...Cogito, bumbler, weakling, and anti-hero, who ducks for cover when he finds himself in the proximity of: those who are standing at the top of the stairs know they know everything .. . . . .who clench their fists brandish chains talk and ask questions in a fever of excitement .. . 384 • DISSENT...

...As for the first, I agree entirely that it remains difficult, often impossible, to discuss publicly within the sociable circles and academic settings that are the strongholds of the American left how wrong most of us were in even our tepid tolerance of the communist dictatorships and our distrust of anticommunism—even that articulated by dissenters from within the Eastern bloc—as inherently right wing...

...Energetically political people well into the 1980s spoke of these states as worthy places, despite some regrettable abuses of human rights, and then after 1989, without missing a beat, slipped into the Opposition to cheer on workers' uprisings...