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From: janw@inmet.UUCP
Newsgroups: net.politics
Subject: Re: Irving Kristol's plan to save Russia
Message-ID: <7800960@inmet.UUCP>
Date: Sun, 2-Feb-86 06:12:00 EST
Article-I.D.: inmet.7800960
Posted: Sun Feb  2 06:12:00 1986
Date-Received: Thu, 6-Feb-86 21:42:55 EST
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Nf-From: inmet!janw    Feb  2 06:12:00 1986


>[Ron Rizzo rrizzo@bbncca]
>most of the expose's, intelligent criticisms, and
>awareness of Communism's actual nature, although few in number in 
>the West, have come from the political left-of-center:  Irving Howe
>and his DISSENT magazine, Simon Leys, George Orwell, Victor Serge,
>Susan Sontag, the French "new philosophers", etc.  Exceptions to
>this rule tend to be people who began life under Communism
>(neoconservative Paul Hollander, Solzhenitsyn, quite a few others).

Add also ex-Communists like Arthur Koestler and Whittaker Chambers.
Orwell, too, as an ex-Trotskyite, had an inside understanding
of Communism.

>For that matter, the most prominent Russian critics, the Medvedev
>brothers and even Solzhenitsyn himself, began their intellectual
>lives on the "left", as true believers of the reigning "Marxism-
>-Leninism" of the USSR.

Medvedevs stayed there.  Their  professed  views  are  communist;
their  criticism is very circumspect. They also have some kind of
accommodation with the KGB which different people interpret  dif-
ferently.  Prominent  Russian dissidents span the political spec-
trum; they all share an intimate understanding of totalitarianism
that is hard to obtain outside the Communist world. E.g., each of
them reads 1984 as a portrait of a very particular society, warts
and  all,  and  not  as an abstract anti-utopia, or projection of
Western trends etc. (Possessing this book, of course, is a  crime
in Russia).

>Kristol claims that "ideological reformation" is the key.  And he
>asserts that the "established religion" of Marxism-Leninism on which
>Communist Party hegemony rests, crucially depends on the success of
>Soviet foreign policy!  If a series of defeats are inflicted on the
>USSR's international aims, the regime, according to Kristol, will
>crumble.

>The utter fatuity of this claim reveals an innocence of the most
>rudimentary facts of either Communism or totalitarianism so complete
>that it's startling, especially coming from the self-avowedly "anti-
>Communist" right.

It *is* naive, and I agree with your criticism. But where is
the harm of it ? Defeating Soviet international aims is a worthy
goal in itself, even if it does not reform the USSR. 

Your indictment of Neoconservatives in general is new to me,  and
I have no opinion yet. Could you formulate a positive position ?
What should be done about Communism and the USSR ?

		Jan Wasilewsky