Ramblings 

Allan C. Brownfeld

Allan C. Brownfeld covers Washington, D.C.

Remembering the Enduring Enchantment with Communism of Many American Liberals

       Throughout the world, Communist regimes have crumbled. There can now be no doubt about what the people of Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, East Germany, Romania, Hungary, Czechoslovakia and other states upon which Marixism-Leninism was forcibly imposed, including Russia itself, think of Communism.

      Indeed, it was Communist leaders, such as Mikhail Gorbachev, who proclaimed the horrors which previous leaders inflicted upon their countries. As we assess Communism’s bleak record, the tens of millions of innocent people who lost their lives at the hands of Stalin, Mao and lesser tyrants, and the degraded lives thrust upon hundreds of millions of men and women, we should reflect on a chapter of the Cold War for which we in the United States and elsewhere in the West are ourselves responsible.

      That chapter deals with the Western intellectuals, clergymen, journalists and other opinion leaders who did not resist that Communist tyranny but embraced it, defended it, and apologized for it.

      Consider the German playwright Bertolt Brecht, who created the modern propaganda play. When he visited the Manhattan apartment of American philosopher Sidney Hook in 1935, Stalin’s purges were just beginning. Hook, raising the cases of Zinoviev and Kamanev, asked Brecht how he could bear to work with the American Communists who were trumpeting their guilt.

      Brecht replied that the U.S. Communists were no good—nor were the Germans either—and that the only body which mattered was the Soviet party. Hook pointed out that they were all part of the same movement, responsible for the arrest and imprisonment of innocent former comrades. Brecht replied: “As for them, the more innocent they are, the more they deserve to be shot.” Hook asked: “Why, why?” Brecht did not answer. Hook got up, went into the next room and brought Brecht’s hat and coat.

      During the entire course of Stalin’s purges, Brecht never uttered a word of protest. When Stalin died, Brecht’s comment was:

The oppressed of all five continents . . . must have felt their heartbeats stop when they heard that Stalin was dead. He was the embodiment of their hopes.

      And consider the French philosopher, Jean Paul Sartre. In a July 1954 interview with Liberation, Sartre, who had just returned from a visit to Russia, said that Soviet citizens did not travel, not because they are prevented from doing so, but because they had no desire to leave their wonderful country. “The Soviet citizens,” he declared, “criticize their government much more and more effectively than we do.” He maintained that, “There is total freedom of criticism in the Soviet Union.”

      Some years later, Sartre admitted that none of this was true:

After my first visit to the Soviet Union in 1954, I lied. . . . I wrote an article . . . where I said a number of friendly things about the Soviet Union which I did not believe. I did it partly because I considered that it is not polite to denigrate your hosts as soon as you return home, and partly because I didn’t really know where I stood in relation to both the Soviet Union and my own ideas.

      Sartre, however, continued along the same path repeatedly. Of Castro, he said “The country which has emerged out of the Cuban revolution is a direct democracy.” Of Tito’s Yugoslavia: “It is the realization of my philosophy.”

      Another intellectual defender of tyranny was Lillian Hellman, the American playwright. She visited Russia in October 1937, when Stalin’s purge trials were at their height. On her return, she said she knew nothing about them. In 1938 she was among the signatories of an ad in the Communist publication New Masses which approved the trials. She supported the 1939 Soviet invasion of Finland, stating

I don’t believe in that fine, lovable little Republic of Finland that everyone gets so weepy about. I’ve been there and it looks like a pro-Nazi little republic to me.

There is absolutely no evidence that Hellman ever visited Finland—and her biographer states that it is highly improbable.

      In a recently published book, Useful Idiots: How Liberals Got It Wrong in the Cold War and Still Blame America First, Mona Charen, a syndicated columnist who wrote speeches in the Reagan White House for Nancy Reagan, carefully examines the manner in which so many American liberals misread the Cold War and the nature of Communism.

      Many liberals, she writes, were

. . . inclined to excuse, justify, or ignore the grave sins of our adversaries while always calling down the harshest possible judgment on America. Lenin is widely credited with the prediction that liberals and other weak-minded souls in the West could be relied upon to be “useful idiots” as far as the Soviet Union was concerned. Though Lenin may never have actually uttered the phrase, it was consistent with his cynical style. . . . Liberals managed, time after time during the Cold War, to live down to his sour prediction.

      Every Communist society—from the Soviet Union to China to Cuba to Vietnam and beyond—has found its defenders in the U.S. Susan Sontag, Charen writes,

. . . was among the first to succumb to the charms of the North Vietnamese. She traveled there during the war, one of a legion of “political pilgrims” (the phrase is Paul Hollander’s) who journeyed to Communist countries in search of earthly paradise, and nearly always persuaded themselves that they’d found it. In Vietnam, Sontag was “struck by the grace, variety, and established identity of the Vietnamese. . . . Our primary impression of an effectively organized society, with its own genuine character, was deepened as we flew over the Chinese border into Vietnam. Below rolled miles of delicately manicured fields.” But Sontag was also explicit about why she traveled to North Vietnam: “Vietnam offered the key to a systematic criticism of America.”

      In Cambodia, as the Khmer Rouge were shooting their way towards Phnom Penh, the Washington Post editorialized that, “The threatened ‘bloodbath’ is less ominous than a continuation of the current bloodletting.” New York Times correspondent Sydney Schanberg filed dispatches heaping scorn on the notion that a Communist victory was anything to dread. On April 13, 1975, just a week before the Lon Nol government fell, the Times ran a front-page story by Schanberg saying,

. . . for the ordinary people of Indochina . . . it is difficult to imagine how their lives could be anything but better with the Americans gone.

Schanberg described the Khmer Rouge as a coalition of disparate elements, some Communist and some not. Even after the Khmer Rouge took the capital, Schanberg continued to ridicule the idea of a bloodbath:

Another prediction made by the Americans was that the Communists would carry out a bloodbath once they took over—massacring as many as 20,000 high officials and intellectuals. There have been unconfirmed reports of executions of senior military and civilian officials, and no one who witnessed the takeover doubts that top people of the old regime will be or have been punished and perhaps killed or that a large number of people will die of hardships on the march into the countryside. But none of this will apparently bear any resemblance to the mass executions that had been predicted by Westerners.

      That report was filed from Bangkok on May 8, three weeks after the Khmer Rouge takeover of Phnom Penh, an event Schanberg had witnessed with his own eyes. Charen writes:

Even if Schanberg did not see any of the thousands of peremptory executions carried out in the opening days of Khmer Rouge rule, didn’t the wholesale evacuation of the capital, a war crime according to the Geneva Convention, give him pause about the nature of the Khmer Rough? Evidently not. . . . In fact, Schanberg would have despised anyone who wrote such a thing. Yet for movements calling themselves “revolutionary,” any crime—no matter how repulsive—could at least get the benefit of an open mind from the correspondent from the New York Times. Mr. Schanberg was also rewarded with a Pulitzer Prize for his Cambodia reporting.

      When Richard Nixon traveled to Communist China, “the gushing reporting was outsized,” notes Charen. James Reston, a columnist for the New York Times, wrote:

China’s most visible characteristics are the characteristics of youth . . . a kind of lean, muscular grace, relentless hard work, and an optimistic, and even amiable outlook on the future. . . . The people seem not only young but enthusiastic about their changing lives.

The economist John Kenneth Galbraith was even more impressed, saying that,

Somewhere in the recesses of the Chinese polity there may be a privileged Party and official hierarchy. Certainly it is the least ostentatious ruling class in history. So far as a visitor can see or is told, there is—for worker, technician, engineer, scientist, plant manager, local official, even, one suspects, table tennis player—a truly astonishing approach to equality of income. . . . Clearly, there is very little difference between rich and poor.

      From the first days of Communism, many Americans and others in the West were impressed. “In the early days of the Soviet Union’s existence,” writes Charen, “Americans and Europeans of liberal inclination swooned.” New York Times correspondent Walter Duranty, who was stationed in Moscow during Lenin’s, and part of Stalin’s, reign, offered this assessment of Lenin in 1921:

Lenin has a cool, far-sighted, reasoned sense of realities. . . . He is willing to put aside what experience has shown to be impracticable theories and devote himself to rebuilding Russia on a new and solid foundation.

Of Stalin, Duranty wrote

Stalin is giving the Russian people—the Russian masses, not Westernized landlords, industrialists, bankers, and intellectuals, but Russia’s 150,000,000 peasants and workers—what they really want, namely joint effort, communal effort.

      In the 1930s, Duranty played a critical role in debunking the “propaganda” that the Soviet Union was experiencing a famine. Malcolm Muggeridge, the foreign correspondent for the Manchester Guardian, was the only Soviet sympathizer in the USSR who reported on the famine at the time. No prizes were issued to him. Instead he was often branded a liar. He wrote:

I had to wait for Khrushchev . . . for official confirmation. Indeed, according to him, my account was considerably understated. If the matter is a subject of controversy hereafter, a powerful voice on the other side will be Duranty’s, highlighted in the New York Times, insisting on those granaries overflowing with grain, those apple-cheeked dairymaids and plump contented cows, not to mention George Bernard Shaw and other distinguished visitors who testified that there was not, and could not be, a food shortage in the USSR.

      Mona Charen notes that:

At the end of the twentieth century, it was learned the Duranty had been not a dupe but a blackmail victim. The Russians had apparently discovered his sexual proclivities and used this to control him. This makes Duranty neither more nor less guilty historically, though it does suggest that he was not as stupid as those who swallowed Soviet lies credulously. Muggeridge, whose openness to the clear evidence before his eyes diminished his reputation in “progressive” circles, later rejected Communism completely. Among those who were not blackmailed by the Soviet secret police, but wrote as if they were, was famed American novelist Theodore Driser, who penned worshipful reports of the egalitarian society he thought he saw. Soviet leaders, he marveled, earned no more than “225 rubles per month” while “among the Communist workers I could not find any who were earning less than 50 rubles and thousands upon thousands who were receiving 150, 175, 200, 225, or more” Literary critic Edmund Wilson . . . called the USSR the “moral light on top of the world.”

      Leading American economists hailed the alleged success of the Soviet system. In the 1985 edition of his popular college textbook on economics, Paul Samuelson wrote this of the Soviet command economy: “What counts is results, and there can be no doubt that the Soviet planning system has been a powerful engine for economic growth.” Four years later, just before the Soviet Union went bankrupt, MIT economist Lester Thurow praised the “remarkable performance” of the Soviet economy and asserted that, “Today it is a country whose economic achievements bear comparison with those of the United States.” Sovietologist Seweryn Bialer of Columbia University confidently asserted in 1981 that, “The Soviet Union is not now, nor will it be during the next decade, in the throes of a true systemic crisis.” A decade later, the Soviet Union was dead.

      In the battle between freedom and tyranny, sadly, many in the U.S. and other Western countries used their considerable abilities to advance not freedom but tyranny. Those who did so, Mona Charen properly declares, should not be forgotten. 

      And, she laments, few have paid a price for the role they played:

One of the most celebrated heroes of American history, Charles Lindbergh, saw his reputation shredded due to his failure to perceive the monumental evil of Nazism. Yet American liberals who committed the identical sin vis-à-vis the Communists—and demonstrate in ways small and large on an almost daily basis that they still do not get it—have paid no price for their appalling judgment.

Lack of Follow-through Characterizes U.S. Efforts at Rebuilding and Stabilizing Afghanistan

      After more than 18 months of a transition government under the pro-Western President Hamid Karzai, much of Afghanistan is still dominated by regional warlords, southeastern provinces are haunted by armed remnants of the former Taliban regime and economic reconstruction has hardly begun outside the capital of Kabul.

      It is more than a year since President George W. Bush pledged something similar to the Marshall Plan for Afghanistan. The reconstruction was to be a massive effort similar to American generosity to Europe after World War II, he said, a way to “give the Afghan people the means to achieve their own aspirations.”

      Thus far, the rebuilding of Afghanistan has been a disappointing enterprise, short of results, strategy and money. Writing from Afghanistan for The New York Times Magazine, Barry Bearak reports that,

Afghanistan has been in atrophy for a generation, with institutions in decay, education in eclipse, the entire society tossing and turning in a benumbing nightmare. Like so many of its people, the nation is missing limbs. There is an overabundance of guns but only the beginnings of a national army and a police force. Elections are scheduled for next year, but there are no voter-registration rolls, nor is there even a working constitution. Entrepreneurs want to think big, but there are no commercial banks to make loans. Much of the land is fertile, but the only major export is the raw opium used in the criminal drug trade. Civil servants have again begun to collect salaries, but pay remains a mere $30 to $40 a month, and many workers rely on tolerated corruption to feed their families.

      Senior members of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee are voicing frustration over what they see as a lack of follow-through in Afghanistan. The worried lawmakers believe it has troubling implications for reconstruction in Iraq.

      Senator Joseph Biden (D-DE), ranking Democrat on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, said rebuilding Afghanistan

. . . doesn’t seem to be much on administration’s radar screen. My colleagues are very concerned. We all think there has to be a lot more attention paid to Afghanistan.

This assessment in shared by Senator Richard Lugar (R-IN), the committee chairman.

      At a hearing before the House International Relations Committee, the panel’s chairman, Rep. Henry Hyde (R-IL) said,

Concerns about persistent insecurity and a slow political and economic reconstruction process are prevalent throughout Afghanistan, as well as among friends of that country.

      Senator Biden’s spokesman, Norm Kurz, noted that,

In most of Afghanistan, warlords are in charge, and in many areas the Taliban are on the rebound. If you look at the reason we went into Afghanistan, which was to prevent it from being a safe haven for terrorists, we haven’t accomplished that mission.

      In a letter to colleagues, Senator Barbara Boxer (D-CA), who is a member of the Foreign Relations Committee, wrote “neither the president’s budget requests nor congressional appropriations have kept pace with the authorization or the needs of Afghanistan.”

      Last December, Congress passed the Afghan Freedom Support Act. It authorized $3.3 billion in assistance from 2003 to 2006. These were meant to be additional funds to help make President Bush’s promise of a Marshall Plan for Afghanistan real.

      The Senate committee report for the bill state,

In the light of the special circumstances of the United States’ commitment to Afghanistan, expressed by President Bush’s reference to the Marshall Plan in describing American’s role in the reconstruction of Afghanistan, the funding authorization in this act is intended to supplement—not replace—any additional funds devoted to Afghanistan from other accounts.

      The $3.8 billion figure was decreased to $3.3 billion. The administration spent $686 million in 2002, and estimates it will spend $711.3 million in 2003. It has requested $657 million for 2004. Senator Boxer notes that the increase in 2003 and 2004 spending for Afghanistan envisioned under the act has not materialized because the administration did not request the money. Senator Boxer pointed to a shortage of schools, a healthcare infrastructure in shambles and the scarcity of clean water and electricity even in Kabul. “Despite repeated calls by UN officials, humanitarian organizations and human rights groups,” she continued, “the U.S. still refuses to take action to expand international peacekeeping forces.”

      Rep. Tom Lantos (D-CA), ranking Democrat on the House International Relations Committee says that,

As the U.S. and its allies attempt to restore order in Iraq, let us not forget the other country that still suffers from rampant insecurity—Afghanistan. The U.S.-led effort to liberate Afghanistan from chaos is in danger of failing. We are simply not putting enough military boots on the ground to fulfill the Afghani people’s hopes for a stable society free from fear or terrorism, warlordism and repression. The U.S. has declared that the “combat phase” of the Afghan war is over and we will now focus upon reconstruction and stability operations. Combat persists, however, against American and Afghani forces nearly every day. Basic security is still lacking in major cities and along key highways. Afghans remain under serious threat from terrorism, insurgency, widespread crime, banditry, intimidation, rape, suppression of minorities and women, and other grave violations of human rights, especially in areas without a significant presence of U.S. or foreign troops.

      In recent months, there have been more than 20 attacks on U.S. and Afghan military forces and civilians as well as on international relief workers. The U.S. government’s own aid workers are nearly captives in their own compounds, unable to venture out into the countryside except for brief periods under heavy guard. Training of an Afghan National Army is seriously behind schedule and will not be at full strength for several years. Police training is lagging, and disarmament of warlords’ militias has not even begun. The International Security Assistance Force, soon to be taken over by NATO, will not increase in size or capability nor operate outside Kabul.

      Rep. Lantos notes that,

Without adequate security, reconstruction is a pipedream in Afghanistan, as well as Iraq. Unless we address these security gaps immediately, Afghanistan will slide back into chaos and again become a sanctuary and training ground for global terrorists. The administration has said it will not forget Afghanistan; let us hope the rest of the world will not remember it as a failure of American commitment.

      Rand Beers, formerly a top counterterrorism adviser in the Bush White House, laments that the war in Afghanistan was a job begun, then abandoned. Rather than destroying al Qaeda terrorists, the fighting only dispersed them. The flow of aid has been slow and the U.S. military presence too small, he said. “Terrorists move around the country with ease. We don’t even know what’s going on. Osama bin Laden could be almost anywhere in Afghanistan.”

      Already under fire for underfunding the rebuilding of Afghanistan and permitting the country’s warlords to retain their power, the Bush administration is also facing charges that it is allowing Afghan drug production to boom. Production of opium, officially banned by the American-backed government in January 2002, reached 3,400 tons in 2002, according to the UN. The 2003 harvest is expected to reach a similar level, making Afghanistan the source of three-fourths of the world’s opium. Opium, a paste derived from poppy seeds, is the basic component in heroin.

      “This is just outrageous,” said Larry Johnson, a former State Department and CIA official who is now a consultant to government and business and terrorism and narcotics.

If any other country was in the position we are and allowing this to happen, we would accuse them of being complicit in the drug trade. The Bush administration is showing benign neglect.

      While U.S. government estimates are lower than those of the UN, officials of both the State Department and the Drug Enforcement Administration acknowledge that Afghan production is rising again. They contend, however, that the rise is unavoidable given the lack of overall security and central government control in the country.

      Andrew McCoy, author of the just-published book The Politics of Heroin: CIA Complicity in the Global Drug Trade, said that opium was the “ideal drug for Afghan reconstruction” since it requires a massive workforce and little water in a country plagued by unemployment and an arid climate.

      Critics say the U.S. may be backpedaling in the war against drugs because it was allied to the warlords, funding them and using them to fight the war against the Taliban and al Qaeda last year. Those same warlords control the drug trade.

      “You have a contradiction in the U.S. policy in Afghanistan,” said McCoy, a history professor at the University of Wisconsin.

You have U.S. forces chasing the Taliban and al Qaeda with the warlords-cum-drug-lords and you have an effort to build a central government . . . . So you won’t see much U.S. support for the official eradication policy of Karzai because we are in bed with the warlords.

      When he visited Washington late in June, Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf called for the deployment of tens of thousands of foreign troops in provincial capitals in Afghanistan where the rule of regional commanders threatens the country’s stability. He called for a doubling of the international security force as a shared effort to fill a power vacuum that developed after U.S. forces toppled the Taliban government in November 2001. He said regional military chiefs now “reign supreme.” He said, “Unless we occupy this vacuum, this space all around, we will not be able to extend the writ of the government and undermine the writ of the warlords.”

      The Bush administration’s response to Musharraf’s proposal has been lukewarm. The administration does not intend to mobilize such a large effort, although it would not object if another country did so. Instead, the Pentagon has begun deploying units of 50 to 100 soldiers to provincial cities while recruiting other nations to do the same.

      Of particular concern is what some have called the Bush administration’s bet-hedging with regard to the warlords, Sarah Chayes, who heads a group called Afghans for Civil Society, which sponsors democracy initiatives, states:

. . . the most dangerous form of bet-hedging has been American support for local strongmen. Eager for Afghan forces to help fight the Taliban, the U.S. brought these warlords back from exile after 9/11. What began as a relationship of convenience was cemented in a brotherhood of arms, as U.S. troops fraternized with exotic fighters they had bivouacked with. Because they had reaped weapons and cash in the bargain, the warlords were able to impose themselves as provincial governors, despite being reviled by the Afghan people . . .

      The U.S. has been spending $10 billion a year on the 9,000 American troops fighting Taliban remnants but less than $1 billion on reconstruction so far, although Congress has authorized much more. Finally, Ambassador William Taylor, Jr., the State Department’s coordinator of Afghan reconstruction, is developing plans to provide greater support for government ministries and the White House is soon expected to announce an acceleration of reconstruction aid that some reports say could double spending levels. Such an increase in aid may prompt additional contributions from Europe and Japan as well.

      As a presidential candidate, George W. Bush scorned the idea of “nation-building” as a U.S. enterprise, Now, however, with both Afghanistan and Iraq, this has become an avowed obligation. As The New York Times noted,

On Sept. 11, America paid a terrible price for not doing more to stabilize Afghanistan after the Soviet withdrawal in the late 1980s. It cannot afford to repeat that mistake.     Ω