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From: janw@inmet.UUCP
Newsgroups: net.politics
Subject: (Fellow-)Travelers
Message-ID: <7800973@inmet.UUCP>
Date: Tue, 4-Feb-86 03:33:00 EST
Article-I.D.: inmet.7800973
Posted: Tue Feb  4 03:33:00 1986
Date-Received: Thu, 6-Feb-86 21:43:09 EST
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Nf-ID: #N:inmet:7800973:000:2906
Nf-From: inmet!janw    Feb  4 03:33:00 1986


Glowing reports from totalitarian countries have  a  long  tradi-
tion:  USSR, China, Cuba, Vietnam, and now Nicaragua have all had
swarms of sympathetic visitors (cream of Western  intelligentsia)
who  came  back  with  the  same kind of story, mostly quite sin-
cere. The pattern is clear; the reasons are harder to grasp. Here
is one explanation:

Ronald Radosh, a friendly critic of Cuba, wrote:

> The process was explained by Todd Gitlin back in 1968:
>   "For generations the American Left has externalized good:
>   we needed to tie our fates to someone, somewhere in the
>   world who was seizing the chances for a humane society".
> Cuba became that place for many of the New Left.

> Like the Russians, the Cubans arranged carefully guided
> tours ... But it was not the tours that produced a distorted
> judgement. The visitor saw only what he or she wanted. ...

> Like travelers to Russia in the 1920's, members of the
> group that traveled to Cuba with me revealed a familiar
> psychological attitude. To criticize Cuba, they argued,
> was to aid the Revolution's enemies. ... 

> The job of North American radicals is to "offer political
> support", not to indulge in the bourgeois luxury of independent
> criticism. ...

> The argument is an old one: refrain from criticism, lest you
> fall into the waiting hands of reactionary forces.
[The New Cuba: Paradoxes and Potentials, New York, 1976]

In my opinion, Radosh underestimates  the  importance  of  guided
tours.  The  skill  of bamboozling foreigners have been developed
into an exquisite art form in Communist  countries.  But  on  the
psychology of the visitors, he is an expert.

It is a cooperative process: one side wants to dupe, and is  very
good  at that; the other side wants to be duped, and is very good
at *that*. The results are spectacular.

>>They are unquestionably one of the wonders of  the  age,  and  I
>>shall  treasure ... the spectacle of them travelling with radiant
>>optimism through a famished countryside, wandering in happy bands
>>about  squalid,  over-crowded  towns, ...  repeating like school-
>>children a multiplication table, the bogus statistics  and  mind-
>>less slogans endlessly intoned to them. [Malcolm Muggeridge].

Another qualification: the desire to be duped is not a monopoly
of the Left. Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy had their share of
admiring foreigners. And even Communist paradises have a mixed
clientele. The Cuban lobby has been described as consisting
of "liberal senators and conservative businessmen".

Billy Graham (the famous preacher) has been on a Soviet tour
and  found  "no evidence of religious repression" and also that
"in the United states you have to  be  a  millionare  to  have
caviar, but I had caviar with almost every meal".

Which reminds me of one of Don Black's sources who saw
a dancing hall in one of Hitler's concentration camps ...

		Jan Wasilewsky