Communism and the Left (Page 4)

ARYEH NEIER
Aryeh Neier is a member of The Nation's Editorial Board.

Like Susan Sontag, I read Czeslaw Milosz's The Captive Mind in the 1950s. My reaction was different. Milosz seemed to me then to be telling the truth about Communism. I don't recall a time when I had a different view of Communism. There have been many times since the 1950s when I have been angry at friends and colleagues on the left who have seemed willfully to ignore or to try to explain away Communist tyranny. That anger has been tempered, however, by the awareness that mainstream American anti-Communists have given anti-Communism a terrible name. I find it uncomfortable to associate with their anti-Communism, and while this has not deterred me from frequently and vehemently expressing my own anti-Communist views, it has forced me to exercise care about when and where I do so. I have expressed these views in the pages of this magazine, but I would not care to in the Reader's Digest.

As Sontag is well aware, mainstream anti-Communism is not concerned with promoting liberty. Far from it. Rather, it has been a pretext for suppressing liberty at home through loyalty investigations, political purges, surveillance and dirty tricks, and for doing worse abroad through the bombardment of Vietnam and Cambodia, the "destabilization" of Chile and the arming of murderers in El Salvador. The atrocities committed by anti-Communist's do not mitigate in the slightest the evil of Communism. Nor do they excuse those among us who have been apologists for Communist oppression. But they do explain the reluctance of many on the left to shout "me too" when mainstream anti-Communists proclaim the evils of godless Communism.

The tragedy, of course, is that because mainstream anti-Communism is not really concerned with promoting liberty, it reacts tepidly to such assaults on liberty as the Jaruzelski regime's attempt to crush the freedom movement in Poland. Some mainstream anti-Communists may even be pleased that Communism has revealed its repressive character in Poland, since this exposes the hypocrisy of Communist denunciations of US actions in El Salvador. By the same token, one guesses, that General Jaruzelski and his friends in the Kremlin are glad that the United States is so compromised in El Salvador that it lacks the credibility to rally world opinion against martial law in Poland.

I applaud Sontag's effort to recapture anti-Communism from Reagan, Haig and Thatcher. As she knows very well, of course, this has been tried by others without notable success. Even so, the stakes are high enough to make it worth another try.

DANIEL SINGER
Daniel Singer is a freelance writer born in Poland and based in Paris. He is the author of The Road to Gdansk (Monthly Review Press).

I had crossed the ocean for nothing. Here I was back in Paris five years earlier, listening to the recantations, rhetoric and crude oversimplifications of the new philosophers. There was, however, a difference. The Parisian Columbuses discovering the gulag in the 1970s were unknowns requiring Madison Avenue methods to get into the limelight. Susan Sontag needs nothing of the kind to capture attention. But the following notes are not about Sontag the writer and critic, merely about the strange, or maybe not so strange, speaker with whom I shared a platform at the Solidarity meeting at Town Hall in New York City.

As a good nouvelle philosophe, Sontag used the tactics of collective guilt. We had turned a blind eye to Soviet inhumanity, she argued, addressing an audience of which part was too young to be accused of such sins, while another part had spent a great deal of Its energy denouncing Soviet crimes in the name of socialism. Being myself the son of a zek, I gained no merit from knowing about Russia's concentration-camp universe. I am in the more comfortable position of assuring Sontag that the problem of fellow travelers is not as simple as it is now being painted by ex-Stalinists converted to the capitalist creed; assuring her too that it was most difficult for a socialist to remain critical and unattached during the years of the cold war. Today, fortunately, it is easier to proclaim a plague on both their houses, though she may no longer be interested. Having discovered the root of all evil in "Communism," she has, I fear, chosen her side.

In any case, she has assimilated the peculiar logic of Parisian turncoats. Because we were stupid, we are wise; because we were blind, we are seers; because twenty-seven years earlier she did not take the book of Czeslaw Milosz in earnest, Sontag is now entitled to preach about Poland and the nature of Communism. Not even a decent interval of modest silence? Converted sinners tend to show too much zeal. Her Parisian predecessors had chanted "Marx, Engels, Lenin, Stalin, Mao and Lin Piao," and then, just reversing the order and arguing in equally primitive fashion, they presented Marx as the founder of the gulag. Sontag has improved the device. Her whole speech was designed to hammer home the unexplained and unqualified message: "Communism is successful fascism."

Thus Brezhnev, Jaruzelski, Reagan and Sontag agree on at least one point, namely, that what is being built in the countries of "really existing socialism" is called Communism. They apparently also agree that there can be no other Communism than that. Sontag made it plain that she was not only referring to Stalinism old and new. Her other catchy definition, "fascism with a human face," was obviously meant for stubborn suckers like myself who refuse to swallow the cheap, fashionable equation between Marx and the barbed wire.

Yet let us be serious for a moment. Susan Sontag, as far as I know, does not come from a working-class family. If, on getting involved in politics, she chose the left rather than the right, it was, I suppose, because like so many of us, she had certain aspirations toward equality and social justice. She, too, must have dreamed of a classless society of equals, of immediate producers taking their destiny into their own hands, of the vanishing division of labor and the withering state. I did not hear the faintest echo of such preoccupations in her speech, and this was not because she was improvising in a fit of indignation over Poland. Hers was a carefully worded statement. Indeed, I was taken in by her adroit Introduction and naïvely applauded as she claimed to be glad to speak at a meeting so different from Reagan's show. The meeting was different, but her speech was not. If I recollect it correctly, what followed the introduction could easily be printed in, say, Commentary. As she recited her written text, the title of an essay kept running through my mind: "Heretics and Renegades." Heretics, I still think, are the salt of the earth.

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