Correspondents' Correspondence

...The last point is particularly significant...

...In the very chanceries where denunciations of the U.S...

...Italian Amnesia Rome—The Italian Fascist regime collapsed in 1945, but judging from the seemingly endless stream of books, essays, articles, interviews, and films about Hitler's and Mussolini's dictatorships, the country is still fascinated by that era...

...Only the conservative Rome daily // Tempo has run a long and favorable review...

...Thus on the relatively rare occasion when something on Bolshevism's less glorious days is published in Italy, regardless of its fairness and thoroughness, it is quickly re-pected as grist to the Right wing's mill...

...Even the creators of porno-cinema, seeing their chance in the current theory that couples Fascism with sexual aberrations and impotence, are exploiting the anti-Nazi lode...

...It would be an undeniable injustice to forget that Pietro Nenni declared the crimes revealed by Khrushchev to be the result not of one man's madness, but of the degeneration of the Soviet politioal and legal system...

...Though many of them were leading a clandestine existence at the time or living as refugees in foreign countries, the fact is that bv 1939 men like Angelo Tasca and Ignazio Silone had already rejected Stalinism...

...Interestingly, the intelligentsia isn't restrained by the same feeling when it comes to keeping alive the memory of McCarthyism?mac-cartismo" as the local press calls it —in the United States...

...These are positive steps, and they have been greeted with approval...

...Stalinism, on the other hand, is not a popular topic...

...One cause of the confusion is the loudly proclaimed reintroduction of morality into American foreign policy...

...More than the recalling of the Soviet dictator's terror, however, Mattei has in mind the author's reminding the public of the PCI's record on Stalinism...

...But as Averardi's book vividly demonstrates, it is approval democratic forces can only give critically and conditionally.—Silvio F. Senigallia Europe in Confusion Brussels—That Western Europe is perplexed by the Carter Administration has become a fashionable truism, a staple of diplomatic conversation...

...So we must agree with reviewer Enrico Mattel's claim that "under the present circumstances author and politician Averardi's initiative is nothing short of an act of courage...

...And this paradox feeds French and German suspicions that although Washington's concern about proliferation is probably genuine, some American interests may also be attempting to shut out West European engineering firms from the lucrative reactor markets.—Eliahu Salpeter...

...Predictably, the press has devoted little attention to the volume...

...edicts on plutonium reprocessing have further accentuated the problem, leaving officials here wondering how to reconcile exhortions to "reduce dependence on Middle East oil" with measures that make a shift to nuclear energy even more difficult...

...wagering does not make sense except as part of a self-fulfilling prophecy...

...They are admirable, but they make normal conduot of diplomacy rather difficult...

...Yet most of them, too, are conditioned by the old slogan, "pas d'enemis a gauche," (no enemies on the Left)—despite the fact that the Right is today weak and in disarray...

...The latest U.S...

...Beneath the cliche, though, lies a complex situation...

...Since then, there have been dramatic changes: The PCI has departed from the doctrine that proclaimed Moscow's right to lead the Communist world...

...But then there is the concern about what effect the cooling of superpower relations will have on political realities in Central Europe...

...Given this atmosphere, former Social Democratic deputy Giuseppe Averardi's new book on the 1936-38 Moscow trials, / Grandi Processi di Mosco, containing some official documents hitherto unpublished in Italy, was a welcome surprise to many old-fashioned liberals here...

...A third distressing element, at least for France and Italy, is the impression that Cyrus Vance's State Department has switched tracks on the question of U.S...

...Although the press, including the Communist papers, has criticized Soviet repressions of dissent in Eastern Europe, there have been no new appraisals of the mass murders during the Stalin years...

...At the same time, most international-minded Europeans are pleased with Carter's firm human rights stand...

...the deepening tics between the formerly anti-Communist Italian democratic Left and the Italian Communist party (PCI...

...In addition, since Europe's reactors depend on the Western Hemisphere for fuel, the recent American and Canadian bans on uranium supplies are now beginning to hurt...

...and a persistent tendency to view Fascism as the sole threat to democracy...

...The Italian Socialist party does not have an illustrious history in this respect either...

...The Italian "way to Socialism" endorsed by Togliatti after the 20th congress of the CPSU has gradually evolved into Enrico Berlinguer's support for the sovereignty of the individual Communist parties, the "historic compromise" strategy, and the birth of Eurocommunism...

...But to Valery Giscard d'Estaing and Raymond Barre, or to Giovanni Leone and Giulio Andreotti, such U.S...

...This is true not just of those who grew up in the late '20s and '30s, whose lives were disrupted by Germany's brown and Italy's black shirts...

...It may seem a safe bet to establish relations with Georges Marchais and Enrico Berlinguer, particularly if one believes they will eventually enter their respective governments in Paris and Rome...

...relations with Western Europe's Communist parties...

...Economic matters are another source of European ambivalence...

...This is especially the case with the West Germans: Their professed uneasiness with Washington's policy toward the Soviets actually reflects a fear that chilly winds from the East might slam the few small doors Willy Brandt's Ostpolitik opened toward relatives and friends in East Germany...

...No mention, though, of an event that took place in Czechoslovakia at about the time of McCarthy's famous investigations—the Slansky trial...

...A similar attitude exists among the young, who have not themselves experienced Fascist oppression and unlike their elders cannot look back upon the Resistance years as their nation's finest...

...The Communist, and to a lesser extent the Socialist, complicity with the perpetrators of the Soviet purges lasted at least 18 years, from 1938-56...

...involvement in Vietnam, "support for reactionary South American regimes," and "blind eye to racial discrimination in South Africa" were once thrown about at the least provocation, now the "naivete" of the new President has become the preferred subject...

...Until Ni-kita Khrushchev's 1956 speech to the 20th Party Congress of the CPSU, the PCI aggressively defended every policy of the Soviet Union, no matter how barbaric...

...Yet their colleagues in the economic and foreign ministries are dismayed when Washington lines up with Bonn against easy-money policies and such projects as the $3.5 billion Common Fund for less developed countries...

...Middle-aged Communists and fellow travelers do not enjoy being confronted with their long acquiescence to the travesties carefully documented in / Grandi Processi...

...And if that is not grounds for a blanket condemnation, the PCI today realizes it casts doubt on the party's moral initiative...

...Many financiers here are not much less concerned about U.S...

...Still, it is only fair to recall that before Stalin's death Nenni himself had forced Giacomo Matteotti's older son from the Socialist party because he had written a report on the Soviet Union's concentration camps...

...Henry Kissinger's interpretation of detente had been troubling them, and they note that the younger moderate-Left may find it less objectionable to maintain close military links with a United States that tries to be on the side of the angels...

...It took then-PCI chief Palmiro Togliatti and his cadre 17 more years to concede that crimes had been committed during the reign of Joseph Stalin...

...inflation or Third-World efforts to cartelize raw-material prices than are Arthur Burns or Milton Friedman...

...Or else it is dismissed as deja lu, repetitious old stuff about bygone days that have already been sufficiently reviewed and do not merit further consideration...

...But the most troubling, and ultimately the most complicated issue for Europeans to comprehend is the Carter Administration's energetic approach to the prevention of nuclear proliferation...

...Among the many reasons for this, the most important are probably the following: the fear of being found guilty of visceral anti-Sovietism...

...For there are intellectuals and politicians in this nation who are neither afraid of PCI blackmail nor seek the party's blessing to acquire academic honors and lucrative positions...

...To begin with, many countries use a substantial amount of atomic energy and have enough trouble from their own Communist-supported environmentalists without Washington's contributions to the opponents' arsenal...

...It does so at every opportunity, swelling audiences at Martin Ritt's The Front and boosting sales of Lillian Hell-man's Scoundrel Time...

...Oh, yes, America has those occasional attacks of morality," a silver-haired West European statesman remarked the other night with a somewhat patronizing smile...

...Intellectuals here, predominantly Leftist if not Communist, are unwilling to divert any of their time to also denouncing the political errors and butcheries of the other Moloch...