A Distance Of Centuries
Eckstein, George
A NEW TYPE of political leader has developed in the last few decades. He is a figure both fascinating and ominous, at times attractive for his raw vigor and at other times frightening in his...
...And yet, honestly, do we really comprehend the fever that has attacked the Arab world, the wave that threatens to engulf the Bourguibas, our intellectual kin, and is producing men like Nasser, a new and different type of political leader...
...He is a figure both fascinating and ominous, at times attractive for his raw vigor and at other times frightening in his distance from modern assumptions...
...Let us not forget: Western socialism is ideologically a descendant of liberalism (whose static logic it tried to transcend in a dynamic dialectic, but from whom it retained its optimistic belief in ultimate progress...
...Thanks to the constant wars and political upheavals between 1910 and 1930, these feuds, brigands and partisans sometimes adopted a political coloring, but this seemed little more than an accidental veneer over the underlying tribal bond or enmity...
...Where rational accounting is unknown, the failures are overlooked and the cost in human terms is not measured...
...This society is supported by universal education and a highly organized industrial system which dispose its participants toward rational if also unimaginative behavior...
...Its equally primitive solidarity was that of the family, the clan, the tribe, the national minority...
...The big question is whether it will yet be possible to connect the underlying drive for human values—justice, a decent living, independence—with the human and material resources of the West in a manner acceptable to these new nations...
...No question of a "Russial soul" here: the Mensheviks, a Trotsky, a Bukharin—we have no difficulties in understanding them, they speak (or rather spoke...
...The Western socialist movements by and large mirrored these experiences, and by and large they proved helpless—ideologically as well as practically—when with World War I and its aftermath of dissolved val ues, revolutions and dislocations of power, altogether new forces appeared on the social scene...
...11 There are a good many such countries in the world today, there are many po tential Djilases who have had to jump into the 20th century right out of the absolutism of the 16th, without passing through the Enlightenment of the 18th and the gradual development of science and industry of the 19th century...
...our language...
...We can gain some insight into this new type by glancing at the life and work of Milovan Djilas, as it has been sketched out in his autobiography, Land Without Justice...
...The fabric of this society was brute force in its most naked form: clan feuds...
...whether it is possible to have a fraternal dialogue with people whose very categories of speech are radically different from your own...
...with bloody vendettas between clans continuing from generation to generation...
...with Robin Hood outlaws roaming the mountain fastnesses...
...We have learned a bit since then...
...It is a society and an economy close to nature, and subject to its whims: soil, weather, animals are things you live with closely, and which have deep and direct influence on your life...
...This socialism was shaped in the experience of Western industrial capitalism—a well organized society with fairly orderly channels in which social forces normally could find expression: parliament, political parties, trade unions, press, literature...
...I don't think it is an accident that in none of these countries—Burma per haps excepted—has the traditional social ist movement played a dominant or sig nificant role...
...not the more sophisticated one of the trade union or the rural cooperative...
...We are paying the price for the long history of Western imperial ism, exploitation and neglect...
...And we are facing the question of whether it is possible for men separated by a distance of centuries to communicate with each other...
...Perhaps John Foster Dulles is not the only one in the Western World who is unable to grasp the full significance of the social and national movements of our day, and to comprehend the sources on which they feed...
...III I submit that one of the basic reasons for our failure of comprehension is that these new men and these movements have been shaped by an entirely different social environment: in predominantly agricultural countries, with or without feudal landlords, but in any case with a desperately poor peasantry, largely illiterate and hence subject to different forms of communication and reasoning (the spoken word always being much more suggestive, more inflammatory than the written one...
...He grew up in a society which was basically tribal in its organization, with the king little more than the chieftain of the most powerful tribe...
...In their work and their daily existence they are much more dependent on irrational factors—the weather...
...But it would be a self-deception to suppose this any easy task, or a task that can be handled merely by generous programs of economic aid and generous quantities of good will—necessary as both of these are...
...Communism has become for many in these new nations the symbol for the achievement of industrialization by a poor agricultural country on a nationalist basis...
...But undoubtedly, too, Communism as it has developed in Russia, is in its structure and its emotional sources closer than the West to the life experience of these new nations, exactly in the measure as it has shed its Marxist origins...
...Those of us whose thinking has been shaped by Marxist social theories and the experience of leftist movements, may have a better notion of the social forces set in motion since World War I, but how well do we really grasp the nature of the nationalist tide that has taken hold of millions from Casablanca to Celebes...
...A proud, independent people living in a remote barren mountain coun try with few roads and no mineral resources, poor peasants producing at most for a regional market, a thin class of small merchans in the larger towns, a bureaucracy (including army and police) too large for the poor country to maintain, but—and this is important— with the beginnings of an educational system that created an articulate educated or half-educated youth...
...we have graduated into the 20th century...
...A NEW TYPE of political leader has developed in the last few decades...
...the outlaw-partisan hunted or hunting in the hills...
...irresponsible and often irresponsive political powers, domestic or foreign...
...For that matter, how well do we really understand a Khrushchev...
...The usual notion of "reaction against imperialism" or "re volt against feudalism" is too pat...
...police torture...
...lynching expeditions against villages ox tribes...
...subtropical or tropical climate in many instances, in others the vastness or barrenness of the land where—without adequate technical equipment— man feels helpless and exposed...
...In all these respects the Soviet Union after 40 years of communist industrialization is not or no longer in the same category as the underdeveloped lands of Asia and Africa...
...Not that there isn't a lot of truth to it, but it does not go to the heart of the mat ter...
...His native land, Montenegro, probably the most backward part of Yugoslavia, was at the time of his birth in 1911 an independent mountain princedom...
Vol. 6 • January 1959 • No. 1
