LETTERS
Against Intervention Editors: In "Why We Are in Haiti" (Winter 1995), George Packer rightly attacks the implicitly racist isolationism of those right wingers who argued that Haiti is "too poor...
...How odd that such a viewpoint should find expression in a magazine called Dissent...
...With the exception of a wealthy mulatto woman, everyone said no...
...1933-34, after I had joined the Young People's Socialist League, with Sergius Ingerman, a member of the Menshevik delegation, on why the Militants of that period (such as Gus Tyler) were going "left" without realizing what had happened in the Russian Revolution...
...intervention is naive, and his mocking caricature of the leftist anti-interventionist position is unfair and unsound...
...We reserve the right to edit letters down to fit our space and to choose which shall be printed...
...So if you want to write about something that you like, or dislike, in or about Dissent, please do it quickly...
...q SPRING • 1995 • 287...
...I was sympathetic to that, for it was at that time, because of the influence of some anarchist cousins, that I had "discovered" Kronstadt, and the fact that Trotsky had ordered the shooting of the Kronstadt sailors, and the day afterward had given a speech commemorating the martyrs of the Paris Commune...
...Cedras...
...Against Intervention Editors: In "Why We Are in Haiti" (Winter 1995), George Packer rightly attacks the implicitly racist isolationism of those right wingers who argued that Haiti is "too poor and irrational" for democracy to take root...
...So this is an old story...
...Yet for all Packer's "realism," he is silent about the ties between the U.S...
...Yet his concomitant praise of the "successful" U.S...
...Readers of Dissent don't need to be told that the CIA has been a destructive force in Haiti...
...This is because, unlike American leftists, they know the alternative, they had to live under it...
...You can speak against the World Bank without getting shot...
...He sanguinely sees "the last-minute Carter mission" as "a chance to save lives," yet neglects to mention that Carter obscenely portrayed General Cêdras as "a man of honor" and voiced more concern about the murderer's human rights than those of his wretched victims...
...May I put in a word for the New Leader, of which I 286 • DISSENT Letters was the managing editor from 1941 to 1944 (at a time, in part, when Irving Howe was editing Labor Action,) which was the fons et origo of anti-Stalinism since 1924...
...As for Clinton's policy, Adler is wrong: in my article I criticized aspects of it, including the World Bank's gospel...
...He cites "President Aristide's triumphant return," yet does not point out what those "unrealistic" leftists did—that Aristide was allowed to return on condition that he follow neoliberal austerity measures forced down his throat by the Agency for International Development, the World Bank, etc...
...We are unable to acknowledge letters...
...intervention in Haiti is obliged to answer a simple question: What was the alternative...
...I asked everyone I met whether they were tired of the American presence and wanted us out...
...I remember, too, a conversation, ca...
...Letters will not be returned to senders unless they are accompanied by stamped, self-addressed envelopes...
...In other words, the popular movements that brought Aristide to power in the first place have been subverted by Clinton's "foreign policy victory...
...DAVID R. ADLER New York, N.Y...
...troops have played since September 19...
...0 To Letter Writers • We welcome succinct letters from our readers...
...Packer cites an unsophisticated slogan of the sectarian left and a pair of inconsistent lead editorials in the Nation (the inconsistency was in fact noted and criticized by several Nation readers in a subsequent letters column...
...Letters must be kept to about 500 words, typed, double-spaced, and carry the full address and name of the sender...
...But if neoliberal austerity measures are now the enemy, they're preferable to the Haitian military, which no longer exists...
...The point of all this is why did not the young zealots read and learn about the history of revolutions, and why, as Michael Walzer has put it, did one, and does one, see the continual "process of enchantment," and the aching need to embrace revolutionary romanticism, which recurs time and again...
...It is often forgotten that the Nation, the New Republic and the New Statesman, all of which I began to read, were anti-Stalinist during this period...
...His negotiations also saved lives, both Haitian and American—another fact, and a more important one than his attraction to Mrs...
...Today the vocal American left consists of a few national magazines and a scattering of semi-organized local groups, and my acquaintance with both gives me no reason to change my description of their mental habits...
...George Packer Replies: One can't criticize the right and flatter the left for taking the same position on intervening: against...
...Nothing I've read or heard from the antiintervention left has faced this question honestly...
...Haitians are a grateful people," one woman said, "and we'll never forget that the Americans rid us of these killers...
...To deny it is to prefer suspicion and theory to facts...
...Of course Carter's unctuous comments were disgusting...
...Nothing in David R. Adler's letter suggests that he has either...
...I spent January in Haiti, where there's a great deal of frustration with the slow pace of change...
...But because we have a long "lead time" for each issue, you have to send us your letter within three weeks after getting an issue of Dissent in order to get it into the next issue...
...But on the basic question of whether to intervene I supported him and still do...
...he then sweepingly concludes that "the left" lives in "a fantasy world," behind "a thick insulation of unreality," where "an abstract and reflexive habit of mind count[s] for more than actual human suffering...
...national security apparatus and Haitian paramilitary death squads, facts which were responsibly reported by left journalists such as Allan Nairn...
...DANIEL BELL Cambridge, Mass...
...q Another Question Editors: "The Question" posed by Eugene Genovese (Summer 1994), and most of the replies, as in the Winter 1995 issue of Dissent, all seem to revolve around "the question" of when each person first discovered the primal scene that created the oedipal disillusionment...
...It seems to me, therefore, that it is Packer, not "the left," who evinces a "reflexive habit of mind" by uncritically accepting the Clinton administration's selfserving account of the Haiti intervention...
...Why should that keep us from seeing the constructive role U.S...
...Anyone opposed to the U.S...
...Thus my friend Dennis Wrong writes, "I became aware of The Question just after my sixteenth birthday, when the Soviet Union invaded Finland in late 1939...
...Were you prepared to see Haitians go on suffering and dying for their democratic desires...
Vol. 42 • April 1995 • No. 2
