Grasping for Straws
KELMAN, STEVEN
LETTER FROM SWEDEN Grasping for Straws By Steven Kelman Stockholm ? A significant power factor is the bureaucratic American trade union movement, with George Meany at its head. He and his racist,...
...Black Power stands for justice...
...In all of the bookstores of Stockholm, I saw a total of five books dealing with race problems in the United States: translations of the Kerner Commission Report and Martin Luther King's Chaos or Community, Stokeley Carmichael's Black Power, Tom Hayden's Revolt in Newark (Hayden was identified on the book jacket as "a Newark social worker"), and a collection of essays by Eldridge Cleaver, Rap Brown, and others on Black Power...
...It would be simple—and too simplistic—to argue that this is due merely to misinformation about the United States...
...no urge is felt to consider whether the tactics of Black Power will retard or speed up the day of justice for black people...
...The article also strongly implied that Humphrey was a conservative Presidential aspirant against John F. Kennedy in 1960...
...his "idol is LBJ...
...If you press them on their feelings toward America, they will admit that in their sympathy for black and student extremists they are grasping for straws—because they don't know about any other alternatives...
...Many think, for instance, that Jimmy Hoffa is the leader of the American labor movement...
...To back up the impression from the headlines, there are all the admiring books obligingly written by various New Left intellectuals, just waiting for translation into Swedish...
...is a capitalist democracy...
...A book published early this year entitled Indoctrination in Sweden, which repeated verbatim most of the arguments in Herbert Marcuse's essay on "Repressive Tolerance" (at that time still untranslated into Swedish), was met with a blistering rebuttal in Frihet...
...Black Power stands for justice" is viewed as a complete intellectual formulation...
...These enable the Swedes to avoid having to go much beyond the headlines...
...The reporter, of course, was not aware of these activities and so could not question him about any of them...
...But to understand the situation one must go a step deeper into the reasons why the democratic Left in Sweden—and much of Europe—accepts the extreme Left's views about United States political developments...
...The same day Aftonbladet featured a sympathetic interview with "the man every white American fears," that great revolutionary, Floyd McKissick...
...It's been there the whole time...
...instead it came up with a story that he had sought to compromise on civil rights with the South in 1952 in order to get the Vice Presidential nomination...
...The majority of our Leftist intellectuals and authors—especially among those who are writing books on current problems—are not democratic Left intellectuals, but New Leftists...
...found in the Swedish Social Democratic press this past summer...
...The book, it was charged, had "attacked democracy and the labor movement in our land with the help of a false argumentation often built on directly false facts...
...The result becomes on one side power concentration and overflow, on the other desperate need...
...It is in this case not those who are revolting who have started the violence...
...Thus people with certain ideas and outlooks are accepted as the source of political gospel from the United States, while Swedes with the same ideas are rejected...
...Criticism that the local New Left levels against the Swedish labor movement—virtually the identical criticism the American New Left makes of the American labor movement—is ridiculed as "Left-wing snobbism...
...Any manifestations of the New Left on the Swedish scene itself are pounced upon with vigor...
...He said nothing, for example, about his advocacy of Negro capitalism and his flirtation with Richard Nixon...
...Even in America, a democratic Left critique of, say, Black Power has been confined to articles in publications like Commentary, Dissent or this one—and has not appeared in books...
...When the situation becomes totally oppressive, riots and violence develop...
...What is paradoxical about these attitudes is that they are the products of ignorance rather than malice...
...Furthermore, the Social Democratic party has consistently rejected any form of cooperation with a Swedish Communist party that is considerably less Stalinist than the American one...
...That is a quote from a European newspaper discussing the forces backing the Presidential candidacy of Hubert Humphrey in the Democratic party...
...But only millionaires can become Presidential candidates...
...He and his racist, undemocratic unions are one of the leading causes for the fact that millions of American workers today are still poor and oppressed...
...An enormous chasm between rich and poor...
...The people may vote every four years for a Presidential candidate...
...Here is an editorial supporting "Black Power" from Ung Mening...
...And, it seems to them, they need look no further than the headlines for those groups...
...They need only read of the riots in the streets and the occupation of the universities—and presto, it looks as if a group is rising up to challenge radically the direction of American policy...
...Humphrey was "not the people's man, but Lyndon Johnson's...
...And that is typical...
...This was typical of the coverage of the American scene that one Steven Kelman has recently returned from several months in Sweden...
...And, despite the ring of crude Communist propaganda, it comes from Aftonbladet, the largest daily of the dominant, moderate Swedish Social Democratic party and labor movement...
...Frihet, official publication of the Social Democratic Youth Federation, headlined an article, "while 250 students made an uproar, 2,500 workers were discussing reforms...
...In the final analysis, therefore, the attitudes of the Swedish Social Democrats is in large measure the fault of American intellectuals...
...Most intelligent Swedes admit that they do not know very much about the American scene...
...Anti-Semitism, militarism, cooperation with corporations in fostering "black capitalism" in the Black Power movement—all go completely unnoticed, because they do not make the headlines like the riots, and the American intellectual hangers-on of the New Left keep silent...
...Both represent big finance...
...For the benefit of the interview, McKissick sounded extremely militant...
...To be sure, misinformation exists to a very sad extent...
...That American intellectuals have not provided them with these alternatives is somewhat pathetic...
...And between the two political parties there are no ideological dividing lines...
...Arbetet of Malmo published a history of Humphrey's career that did not mention his role at the 1948 Democratic Convention...
...Steady political work—the takeover of local Democratic party clubs by McCarthy people, or the desegregation of the building trades unions—never makes the newspapers the way the riots do...
...When a group of students occupied the Student Union of Stockholm University last May, Social Democrats young and old denounced the demonstrators for opposing democracy and free speech...
...The European democratic Left, meanwhile, is rightly disturbed by recent policy trends in the United States, and is trying to find some group on the American scene that looks like it is doing something to change things...
...Alone of all the Swedish political parties, the Communists demanded that Sweden "freeze" relations with the Soviet Union in protest against the invasion of Czechoslovakia...
...Behind this kind of journalism lies a general view of the situation in the United States common among many, if not all, Swedish Social Democrats...
...organ of the Stockholm branch of the Social Democratic youth organization: "The U.S.A...
Vol. 51 • October 1968 • No. 19
