Worlds in Revolt
DUDMAN, RICHARD
BOOKS Worlds in Revolt Subversion of the Innocents, by Dan Kurzman. Random House. 570 pp. $6.95. ?? Ta, Tan Tan, by Valentin Chu. W. W. Norton. 320 pp. $4.95. Reviewed by Richard...
...Reviewed by Richard Dudman TTIifteen years of covering wars, revolutions, riots, coups, and the other crises that fill the life of a foreign correspondent—these are the basis for Dan Kurzman's new book...
...Kurzman seems to agree that Iran is ripe for revolution for reasons quite apart from Communist pressure or subversion—the corruption of the ruling class, the misery of the masses, and the misuse of the country's vast oil wealth and additional aid funds from the United States...
...Even in Southeast Asia, where Communists backed by Peking are in a good position for subversion, their power and their methods, short of direct aggression, rest on joining and manipulating the forces already there...
...Chu's detailed picture of misery, famine, killing overwork, and utter incompetence of leadership, if taken at face value, would prove conclusively that the Communist regime could not last another minute—in fact, that it could not possibly have lasted this long...
...Chu's all-black picture and his confident prediction of revolt and successful invasion contribute to the myths that stand in the way of a sensible United States policy toward China...
...Since 1956, he has been on Time's staff in New York...
...Khrushchev told Lippmann: "You will assert that the Shah has been overthrown by the Communists, and we shall be very glad to have it thought in the world that all the progressive people in Iran recognize that we are the leaders of the progress of mankind...
...Through most of the underdeveloped countries of the world he has walked jungle trails and desert tracks, learned to know the capital cities, talked with humble villagers and top political and military leaders, studied the most flamboyant propaganda utterances and many learned analyses...
...His title and his subtitle, "Patterns of Communist Penetration in Africa, the Middle East, and Asia," describe the framework on which he has chosen to weave the results of his work...
...It relies mainly on refugees, on publications that have been sent out openly or smuggled out, and on a deep love for pre-Communist China that Chu brought out with him fourteen years ago...
...He calls his book (whose title means "Fight fight, talk talk") "the inside story of Communist China...
...Rather than stressing Communist penetration, Kurzman could better have stressed anti-Communist vulnerability—colonialism and its vestiges, continuing great disparities between poverty and wealth, the bolstering of harshly undemocratic and unpopular regimes, the maintenance of military alliances that draw would-be neutrals into the cold war...
...In the Congo, the Communists have failed, at least for the present, for lack of reliable puppets who understand and accept their ideology...
...The Soviet Premier, Kurzman recalls, predicted in an interview with Walter Lippmann in 1961 that the people of Iran would soon revolt against Shah Reza Pahlevi, their Western-aligned ruler...
...He seems unaware of the upturn in the last year, on both fronts, or of the present prospect that China can begin feeding its people rather soon and may well become a major industrial power by the end of this century...
...A statement that he quotes from Nikita Khrushchev suggests another framework that would have been just as coherent and perhaps more appropriate to the facts of the world as he has observed it...
...The Middle East, says Kurzman, does not appear to be in any immediate danger of fatal Communist penetration, although the customary unexpected political upheavals in the area make prediction difficult...
...Actually, it is an outside story...
...He has woven his own experiences and observations into their historical background to provide a meaningful and readable appraisal of the recent and current political situation in half the world...
...Similarly, in Angola, he notes that the rebels have a savage impetus of their own, grown out o? five centuries of oppression and degradation under Portuguese colonial rule...
...He ridicules as naive the observations of Western visitors to Communist China who have seen no outright starvation, who have found some industrial and scientific achievements to admire, and who have found some Chinese in sympathy with the regime...
...He has had thousands of conversations with prime ministers, taxi drivers, emperors, witch-doctors, peasants, students, professors, ambassadors, workers, businessmen, presidents, and fellow news correspondents...
...But this objection is a matter of organization, not of reporting or even analysis...
...Valentin Chu was a newspaper man in China until 1949, when he fled to Hong Kong and became a correspondent for Time and Life...
...He does not make clear that the planned shift of farmers to the cities for the industrialization drive halted necessary agricultural production and that their abrupt shift back to the farms brought the industrial crash...
...Their alleged devotion to the Soviet Union, even if genuine, dwells on hopes for arms aid rather than interest in Communism —and no Communist guns have been found there...
...Iran could well have its revolution, he says, and "the chances of keeping a reformed neutralist Iran out of Communist hands would appear at least as good as the chances of keeping a precariously pro-West Iran, subject to revolutionary convulsions, on our side...
...Chu knew the old China, and he draws a vivid picture of the new China's disastrous agricultural miscalculation in 1958 and 1959 and its resultant industrial collapse in 1960...
...Kurzman, a first class reporter, is now covering Latin America with energy and ability for The Washington Post...
Vol. 27 • June 1963 • No. 6
