LEADERSHIP FOR A WORLD IN REVOLUTION
Lens, Sidney
Leadership for a World in Revolution by SIDNEY LENS Tn a whimsical flight of fancy, I like to imagine President Lyndon Johnson, carrying his own suitcase and unaccompanied by security guards,...
...Then there are the totalitarian Communist societies, living under whip and sword, subject to slave labor camps, purges, and bitter economic conditions, aggressively oriented toward "burying" the free nations either through internal revolution or military invasion...
...This sounds idealistic, but in reality it is the only pragmatic solution...
...The Turkish government seems "safe" right now...
...The same thing is happening and will continue to happen in Asia...
...Five years ago there were almost no Communists on the continent (except in jail in Egypt and South Africa...
...air and naval support...
...The United States, one must remember, had similar fears about Britain and Europe in the late Eighteenth and early Nineteenth Centuries...
...itary or subversive aggression against their fellow nations...
...Neutralist Indonesia, under Sukarno's "guided democracy," has nationalized much less, and permits Western oil companies in Sumatra to function and prosper...
...In the Communist world, there no longer is any such thing as a Soviet bloc, or monolithic unity of Communist parties...
...And the Seventh Fleet would still be here to help us return to the mainland...
...A nation that is internally conservative cannot be liberal abroad...
...All this demonstrates how little consistency there is in American foreign policy when tested against moral terms officially voiced in Washington...
...people in the so-called backward areas were irrelevant...
...Now our fears center around nationalism, Communism, revolution...
...That's also true, but there are circumstances under which America would change its mind...
...Communism has spread only because the "respectable" powers refused to do something about the burning problems of poverty and oppression...
...But the Inonu government is weak, and its control tenuous...
...The "free world," like the Communist world, is developing polycentric tendencies of sizable force...
...It is aware that Viet Cong soldiers show heroism in battle, while government troops tend to be lethargic...
...I had a talk with the vice-minister of Foreign Affairs, H. K. Yang, a polished gentleman, who received me cordially...
...The whole world looks different— and infinitely more complex—when seen through the eyes of peoples in a score of countries on a 30,000-mile travel route...
...The economy, which lagged seriously after the "great leap forward" is now on the upswing...
...The United States refuses to give you such support...
...We helped Indonesia gain its independence in 1949-50...
...We are losing because we are trying to win the war first, rather than win the people—or, rather, we ally ourselves with a government which is incapable of winning the people...
...Now there are Communists or near-Communists in the government of Tanzania (Tanganyika-Zanzibar), in the Sudan, and in parts of the Congo...
...But in Jakarta, with colorful propaganda posters everywhere, people see it differently...
...President Roosevelt warned the nation in those dark days of the Thirties that we had nothing to fear "but fear itself"—the fear of domestic economic collapse...
...We invite it to become part of our network of military alliances and to grant us military bases...
...Do you really think it could come to your aid under such circumstances...
...But in India we have to accept the socialist Lai Bahadur Shastri and his Congress Party because the free-enterprise parties have no chance of forming a national government...
...What policy can the Johnson Administration devise to "keep us out of war...
...This is precisely what has been wrong with U.S...
...The United States would have been destroyed as a functioning society...
...They are not democracies, but except for Albania and East Germany, people are losing their fear to speak up...
...For instance, in 1949 everyone thought we were finished because the United States would not help us...
...He might visit a recently-released political prisoner in Saigon and find out why this non-Communist must organize a clandestine political party instead of a legal one...
...People make a mistake," replied Mr...
...We would recognize that the recipient nation cannot be strong unless it does something constructive for its people and wins their allegiance...
...This is precisely what is happening in Africa...
...The status of American business investment often seems the criteria for choosing allies, rather than the degree of their democracy...
...We would still grant billions in aid to developing nations, but instead of extending aid in return for "safe" governments, military bases, and acceptance of our investments, we would offer it as a quid pro quo for social reform...
...Yugoslavia, by contrast, has doubled living standards from 1957 to 1963...
...If Mr...
...What, then, must America do...
...policy, however, is not morality, but strategy...
...In the negotiations to end the revolutionary war Benjamin Franklin demanded from Britain that it get out of Canada and cede it to the United States...
...Yet we call him and his government "peace-loving" and we have lavished upon them $2.5 billion in economic aid, and an even more massive amount of military aid...
...In this view there are the" upstanding nations of the free world, ever-responsive to the will of their people, democratic, freedom-loving, constantly raising living standards, and eschewing any milSIDNEY LENS has just returned from a globe-circling trip gathering material for a series of articles for The Progressive...
...How, I asked him, does his government expect to get back to the mainland of China...
...The British, the French, the Italian people no longer care about the cold war...
...The strategy will function once the basic principles are formulated...
...Yet we speak of Iran as a "free" nation, and Hungary and Poland as "totalitarian satellites...
...In 1963 alone, 566,000 Hungarians were given passports, and 127,000 of them traveled to Western Europe, 10,000 to the United States...
...and we prefer a mildly-socialist government to a left-of-center or Communist system...
...In June, 1963, the Shah's secret police and army slaughtered 1,000 to 2,000 people during spontaneous demonstrations reminiscent of those in Hungary in 1956...
...our goal has been negative rather than positive, and we have failed to understand the relationship between nationalism and Communism, and nationalism and ourselves...
...These groups were not Communist, but they eventually subordinated themselves to Communist leadership when they had no other choice...
...In another era this might not have mattered...
...Our policy will not succeed, in the long run, in Iran or elsewhere because it is anti-Communist, instead of—as it should be—pro-people...
...The Soviet Union itself is adopting economic innovations similar to the Yugoslav system, which will soon enlarge the area of individual freedom within Russia...
...They are re-evaluating Tito, studying his thesis of self-management, and together with other Communist parties showing an independence that was impossible only five years ago...
...The CIA even fomented the overthrow of non-Communist regimes in Iran and Guatemala, and it financed the colonels' rebellion in Sumatra, Indonesia, in 1957-9...
...Every serious person in Taipei knows that Chiang Kai-shek cannot achieve his purposes without plunging the world into total war...
...Chiang's whole policy is based on escalating every minor crisis—such as Tonkin Gulf—into a major one...
...Furthermore, how do we conclude that Taiwan is "peace-loving...
...No one can tell what will result from a crisis over Cuba such as the one in 1962 or a Tonkin Gulf incident...
...A visit to the two-room apartment of my Catholic friend in Warsaw would give the President a non-Communist view of what is going on in the Communist countries...
...It has all kinds of intelligence about scores of nationalist movements...
...As in Hungary, the protest ended in a bloodbath...
...By what standard do we call one our ally and the other our enemy...
...For eighteen years U.S...
...Freedom, in the sense of self-determination, is a worthy objective, but if granting self-determination to the Algerian rebels entails sweeping that area into the Sino-Soviet orbit, then Algerian freedom must be postponed...
...Yugoslavia is flourishing...
...In any case, the unqualified U.S...
...President Johnson was a New Dealer and a friend of Franklin D. Roosevelt...
...If the cold war were the result of such a clear-cut division between "good" nations and "bad" nations, there would be many contradictions and inconsistencies to explain...
...Communism is enlarging its sphere because the West sought "safe" anti-Communist allies—a military dictatorship in the Sudan, an unpopular sultanate in Zanzibar, the conservative Adoula and then the reactionary Tshombe in the Congo—rather than friends from among the more radical nationalists...
...A mild leader of the Indonesian Protestant Party, certainly not a Communist, explained the present crisis to me in these terms: "Indonesia does not intend to become another Hungary...
...Now we are angry with Indonesia because Sukarno is pushing further— to subvert the government of Malaysia...
...In South Vietnam we have sought out the Diems and the Khanhs, not because they were good nationalists, "responsive to the will of the people," but because they were "strong" anti-Communists, pro-free enterprise, pro-West—even though, as a Christian union leader expressed it, they are also "anti-people...
...Our Central Intelligence Agency restored him to power in 1953, against a decent neutralist, Mohammed Mossadegh...
...Since the Truman Plan began pumping billions into its economy in the late 1940s, it has been "solidly" pro-West...
...By any reasonable standard, Communist Yugoslavia has been more responsive to the wishes of its people than has "free" Turkey...
...He is the author of a number of books on national and world affairs and his articles have appeared in many major publications in this country and abroad...
...We would do better to try to mediate this dispute rather than take sides...
...and with a poet in Budapest, a leader of the revolution of 1956, who now thinks Janos Kadar, the detested Soviet puppet placed in charge when the revolt had been suppressed, "is a good man...
...The Shah has survived a dozen years only by virtue of American aid, and American training of the police and the army...
...Democratic India is momentarily high in our favor, but democratic Ceylon, which has expropriated some American property, is not...
...The Italian Communist Party is openly feuding with the French over questions such as whether nationalization of industry under capitalism is a step forward...
...Many Europeans are equally or more afraid of the resurgence of West Germany than of Russia...
...Political prisoners either have been or are being released—even in East Germany, and certainly in Hungary, Czechoslovakia, and Rumania...
...f That there are profound and revolutionary economic and political changes going on in the Communist world, including China...
...Class-consciousness is declining rapidly as materialism grips the continent, and simultaneously the people lose interest in the cold war...
...It is based not on the criteria of "democracy," "freedom," or "peace," but on power...
...Thus we rely so heavily on the only lever left, the military...
...Was Mr...
...Even in far-off China—if the American experts with whom I spoke in Hong Kong are to be believed—there are "revisionist" changes taking place, at least in internal affairs...
...Today Janos Kadar, despite his role in 1956, could win an honest election in Hungary, and this is attested to not only by Communists, but Americans on the scene...
...The even more conservative Justice Party is most likely to replace it, but a newly organized leftist Turkish Labor Party is bound to grow, and one day may topple the present "safe" government in favor of a neutralist regime—as happened, for instance, in Iraq...
...The Shah will not last indefinitely, and when he is overthrown the American investment in a "free" Iran—and in a lush contract by which Americans own forty per cent of the country's oil—will be lost...
...That's true," said Mr...
...Johnson might talk with my Yugoslav friend Mila, who is not at all politically minded, about why she has developed an affection for Tito in the last few years...
...They are now enjoying a prosperity they have never had before...
...We put diplomatic pressure on Holland to yield West Irian to it a couple of years ago...
...Changes at home and changes in foreign policy are inseparable...
...In his book, Why Not Victory?, Barry Goldwater wrote: "Victory over Communism must be the dominant proximate goal of American policy . . . Peace is a worthy objective but if we must choose between peace and keeping the Communists out of West Berlin, then we must fight...
...There would be no better way to begin his first elected term in office as President than to observe first-hand the workings of America's foreign policy in the lands and among the peoples overseas...
...These people—and increasingly, their governments as well—do not want to fight wars, either total or "little...
...In Vietnam we are playing anti-Communist power politics, and we are losing...
...Its own statistics reveal an extremely slow pace of development and a living standard less than half that of Greece, and only one-third that of Yugoslavia—despite $3.9 billion of U.S...
...The Inonu regime commanded only one-third of the electorate in recent polls, and cannot possibly survive the scheduled elections in 1965...
...It is obvious, first, that what America does overseas depends in good measure on the "revolution" at home...
...we prod it rightward...
...If the Chinese do not liberalize further it is because they have severe economic difficulties to overcome (particularly without foreign aid, either from the Soviets or the West), and above all because of the constant danger of war...
...It is afraid to introduce land reform, as proposed by its more progressive planning commission, for fear it will alienate the landlords, who constitute a major part of its base...
...If we cling to the old ones, such as the determinant of friendship is "anti-Communism," then there is little hope, and war, eventually, seeims inevitable...
...I prodded him further...
...Such conclusions would demolish most of the accepted rationale of the cold war...
...If the regime responds favorably, we will support and protect it no matter how unpopular it becomes with the people...
...Taiwan is a one-party dictatorship, without free unions or a free press, just like Communist Bulgaria, and making approximately the same economic advance...
...Housewives by the millions are buying washing machines...
...The United States is worried about "Communism in Indonesia" because the Communist Party is one of eight or ten permitted to function...
...Ho Chi-minh became the leader of North Vietnam because he organized a dozen nationalist groups, including democrats and socialists, into a nationalist alliance, Viet Minh...
...Workers who owned bicycles a few years ago are buying motor scooters and then automobiles...
...A pro-Western free enterprise regime may be a corrupt dictatorship, but providing it is viable, it is our first choice, over socialism or neutralism...
...But they are irrelevant no longer...
...That our Western Alliance is tenuous, and Europe would gladly withdraw from the cold war, if given an opportunity...
...He might listen to a nationalist professor in Teheran, Iran, tell why he despises the Shah, with whom the United States is on most friendly terms...
...The State Department doubtless knows this...
...But whereas in Hungary the United States protested angrily—because Communist Russia was doing the murdering—in Iran we were silent, because this was an "anti-Communist" regime...
...But if we elaborate a "pro-people, pro-revolution" philosophy there is genuine hope for peace...
...Poland has had three bad economic years, in part because of adverse weather and in part because of Premier Gomulka's poor planning...
...Fired up by nationalism—like the nationalism of the thirteen colonies of America in 1775—they are willing to die to liberate themselves from poverty and foreign domination...
...But if it moves left, if it nationalizes some of our investments, if it demands that our allies or ourselves give up military bases on its soil, if it helps other nations win independence, if it tolerates a Communist political movement—then we withdraw our aid, and in some instances we organize and subsidize rebellions against it...
...We intend to prevent this before it happens...
...The Shah of Iran is another "safe" and "strong" anti-Communist...
...There has never been a legal Communist party in that country...
...The two so-called "opposition" parties, the Young China Party and the Democratic Socialist Party, are puppets of the Kuomintang and are secretly subsidized by it...
...Yang...
...It is well-informed on the high degree of nationalist fervor in Indonesia...
...The Chiang Kai-shek government in Taiwan would be ousted by a margin of four to one if there were an honest election, because— despite substantial economic progress —the two million Chinese mainland-ers who rule the island are universally hated by the eight million native Taiwanese...
...The true foundation of U.S...
...so does Indonesia today...
...Iran is a far more oppressive police state than Communist Poland...
...The United States felt insecure with foreign colonial powers close to its borders...
...Its 12,-000-man secret police, the Savak, is much more brutal than the secret police of Communist Hungary...
...Our present "practical" programs are pathetic failures...
...The West has us encircled, with Britain in the north in Singapore and North Kalimantan (Borneo), Australia and New Zealand in the south, and America roaming everywhere from Vietnam to Formosa...
...Beyond that, however, President Johnson will have to take a hard look at the philosophy behind American foreign policy...
...We offer military and economic aid to a new regime in the hope of keeping it moderate...
...The mandate to keep the peace is also a mandate to obliterate poverty and human indignity within the United States...
...They want peace to save money for an automobile or washing machine, and they know that the cold war, by allocating funds to the military, deprives them of this opportunity...
...Mohammad Yusuf, because a pro-Western and pro-capitalist government in this ancient land, which has a 1,458-mile border in common with the Soviets, would be impossible...
...In my opinion this is a highly exaggerated fear...
...Yet aligning ourselves with conservative forces rather than radical nationalism is a self-defeating course which in the end will most likely increase, rather than decrease, Communist influence...
...Whereas the United States offers resistance to people's movements, the Communists join the nationalist movements before they come to power, while they are still conducting strikes or engaging in guerrilla warfare...
...Justice is a worthy objective but if justice for Bantus entails driving the government of the Union of South Africa away from the West, then the Bantus must be prepared to carry their identification cards yet a while longer...
...They have no unemployment...
...Many thousands of students, workers, peasants, and intellectuals marched in the streets crying for "freedom...
...Yet a "safe" government cannot be secure if it confronts this kind of opposition, or if it must rely on 12,000 secret police to search out, beat, jail, and kill dissenters...
...For instance, if freedom is the criteria for our friendship, why are we friendlier to West Germany, our former enemy, than to France, our former ally, which is equally or more democratic...
...Eight years after the Russian bloodbath in Budapest, Hungary has become the most liberal of all Communist nations, except Yugoslavia...
...help...
...If he saw the slums of Istanbul, Turkey, a country into which the United States has poured $3.9 billion since the beginning of the cold war, he might ask himself, "Was it worth it...
...Yang serious...
...policy...
...The Communists prod nationalism leftward...
...Within the Communist countries there are breathtaking changes...
...By turning the matter upside down we evolve a military answer to problems that require a social response, and consequently meet only failure...
...Italian Communists, particularly the youth, are rereading Trotsky and publishing some of his works...
...Later the Monroe Doctrine sounded a warning to all European powers, especially Spain, to stay out of the Western Hemisphere...
...In Iran and Turkey, the United States is especially pleased to be allied with free-enterprise leadership which goes all the way with us, including participation in our military plans...
...Materialism grips the Communist world, too, as citizens by the millions are getting apartments for the first time, buying television sets, washing machines, scooters, and automobiles— just as in capitalist Western Europe...
...An island nation of ten million people can hardly attack a vast country of 750 million without enormous outside aid and allies...
...The Indonesian leader is pictured in our press as a rank ingrate and an imperialist aggressor...
...If the Cuban missile crisis had erupted into total war, there would have been—according to President Kennedy—300 million dead within hours...
...Everywhere the United States pursues a course of supporting governments as far removed from Communism as possible, with little or no regard for their intrinsic moral values...
...Leadership for a World in Revolution by SIDNEY LENS Tn a whimsical flight of fancy, I like to imagine President Lyndon Johnson, carrying his own suitcase and unaccompanied by security guards, traveling incognito—and economy class— around the world...
...foreign policy has been shaped by the rigid concept of a sharply defined dichotomous world—two opposing, irreconcilable groups of nations...
...Johnson will become the great President he wants to be only if he extends to the world the Roosevelt maxim, and helps America grow out of its present fears and take mature leadership in a revolutionary global society...
...But its response to the challenge is inadequate...
...embassies, the President might visit a village near Bogor, Indonesia, and ask the peasants why they belong to a Communist rather than a non-Communist labor union...
...We will support one dictator after another, and when he is threatened, we will be involved in one "little war" after another, until one escalates to total war...
...We not only can coexist with the Soviets, but ultimately we will win neutralists and Communists to our side...
...They did it with Nuri Said in neighboring Iraq, thus foreclosing all our military aid and bases there...
...If the United States were devastated some of its military units would survive independently—nuclear submarines, for instance...
...Turkey is our ally, but despite $3.9 billion in American aid it has, by its own admission, done virtually nothing for its people...
...support for Britain in Malaysia is bound to drive Indonesia closer to China and the Soviet Union (from which she buys her guns) and hence actually aids the Communist cause inside the country...
...We would stop playing power politics and begin playing human politics...
...Yang, "when they think that nuclear war can destroy a nation's total facilities...
...We have made of Communism a cause of our worldwide difficulties, whereas in reality it has been an effect of them...
...In Afghanistan we stand with the neutralist government of Dr...
...If the President were to make such a trip before he delivered his State of the Union message, he might conclude what seems to me—based on such a trip—so clear: f That we are losing ground in the developing areas not because we are "soft on Communism," but because we are afraid of radical nationalism...
...But the Korean War came along and all that changed...
...Agriculture, and industry that feeds agriculture, such as fertilizers and insecticides, are being given much greater emphasis than before...
...Away from the stilted evaluations of the U.S...
...But there is not and will not be a return to a "hard" line...
...Neutralist Burma has nationalized as much of its economy as has Communist China, yet we are fairly tolerant of the regime of Ne Win and would like to be even friendlier if he would let us...
...At the first favorable moment the West will move against us, just as Russia did against Hungary in 1956...
...An invasion obviously cannot be undertaken without U.S...
...Millions of people are being sent back to the villages to work the land...
...It certainly understands that it must reckon with this force...
...We pressure it to outlaw the Communist Party and to make the climate "favorable to foreign private investment...
...Our image of these nations as prisons, carried over from a decade ago, is pure fantasy...
...But it is a distinctive feature of the postwar era that the people have a tendency to settle accounts with tyrants...
...We are losing the cold war because, although it rejects the fraudulent militancy of the Goldwaters and the Birch-ites, America has become afraid of nationalism, afraid of people...
...yet, we are increasingly hostile to its government...
...What makes a country "free," or "peace-loving...
...Johnson could just drop into a working class pub in London—and one in Paris or Rome—he might gain a deeper insight into Europe's reactions to NATO than he could get in discussions with heads of government...
Vol. 29 • January 1965 • No. 1
