PHILIP POCHODA
Philip Pochoda is a senior editor at Doubleday/Anchor Press.

In 1919, attempting to sanitize if not satirize his still very precarious revolution, Lenin boldly defined the newly emergent Communism as "soviets plus electrification." The enormously heterogeneous experience of Communism since that time has withstood encapsulation in anything like so fatuous a formulation until we were treated to Susan Sontag's recent rhetorical nugget: Communism...is fascism with a human face."

Grant the bravery of constructing a resonant aphorism purporting to convey the whole nature and history of Communism since the Russian Revolution, both in and out of the Soviet Union; grant further that at least a half (though not a three-quarter) truth is contained within that aphorism; and further admit that the sole evidence provided in its behalf is that it is articulated in the context of a recantation by a minor celebrity, then you have at least some idea of the difficulty of responding to this pretentious and portentous assertion. For while its daring and wit intimate a moral seriousness informed by chastened intellectual and political passion, its intrinsic banality, its evisceration of historical context and contest, and its collapsing of political and logical categories resurrect the crudest version of the cold-war mentality, the level of political caricature maintained so steadfastly in...the Reader's Digest, that celebratory organ of McCarthy (Joe), Hoover (J. Edgar), Whittaker Chambers, William Westmoreland and Henry Kissinger.

The God That Failed theme has worn a little thin by now; it is a long time since anyone believed that the Stalinist god did or should succeed in the West. But were all Communist aspirations, all Communist actions, all Communist ideals, without exception, fascist? Can we not preserve a valued place in our political pantheon for Imre Nagy's Hungarian comrades in 1956, Alexander Dubcek's Czechoslovak allies in 1968, Salvador Allende's Chilean forces of 1971, not to mention countless other liberationist and antifascist fighters around the world? Sontag, the converted absolutist, having now undergone the traditional ritual of public mea culpa, demands we %abandon all such qualified and qualifying illusions. communism, all Communism, is Stalinist; Communism, all Communism, all Communisms, are "utter villainy." Here we have, in undiluted form, the political mentality that characterizes the place where Reader's Digest wisdom and the Russian émigré celebrities (but not Medvedev and Sakharov) converge, and that Sontag lauds at the expense of The Nation.

With our moral sensibilities fully absorbed by the overriding issue of "utter villainy," it must seem slothful if not sinful to attend to mere "relative" villainy. Joseph Brodsky (he of "banks and tanks") warns us to forego our concern over American intervention in El Salvador--obviously a venue of mere second-rate villainy. And we remember all too well the saintly Solzhenitsyn's fervent encouragement to America in Vietnam--Solzhenitsyn the orchestra leader of the "utter villainy" theme, who sponsors rather a return to czarist theocracy.

At this late date we should not need Sontag to further enlighten us on the horrors of Stalinism or on the frequent absence of humanitarian motives in Russian activities at home and abroad. But what we do desperately require in a time of mounting hysteria and war drums is to resist the barbarous assault on valid historical discrimination and political judgment that she so cavalierly commends. Before succumbing to the Reaganite mentality of the Reader's Digest and Alexander Haig, we might at least consider that Auschwitz and Dachau were the triumph, the fulfillment, of Mein Kampf, whereas the gulag and December 13 are the unspeakable, if all too common, travesties of the Communist Manifesto. And if Rosa Luxemburg, Antonio Gramsci and even Hannah Arendt are not sufficiently persuasive to Sontag--now no doubt happily entranced by "Life in These United States"--she might spend some time reading the recent debates and condemnatory resolutions of the Italian and Spanish Communist parties regarding the military seizure of Poland. I, for one, should hate to see Sontag, long one of the most valued assets of the American left, allow herself to become caricatured as Norman Podhoretz with a human face.

CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS
Christopher Hitchens is a contributing editor of The Nation.

I was at the meeting, and I have spent ten years working for the New Statesman and The Nation. I was pleased that Susan Sontag invited the left to criticize its own record on Stalinism, and I see no sign that she has moved noticeably toward the Manichaean anti-Communism of the bad old days.

The Polish workers movement is a cause in its own right. It should be supported without any throat-clearing about El Salvador. We do not have to prove that we are not reactionaries--it was never demanded of Walesa that he denounce Pinochet (though it would have been nice if he had). Surely I am not the only socialist who finds comparisons between Solidarity and the fate of PATCO to be grotesque? The rights of highly paid Reaganite air controllers may have been violated, but the rights of Polish coal miners and ship-builders have been abolished. It is, really, casuistry to mention them in the same breath.

Having tried to open a debate on the responsibilities of the left, Sontag has done her best to close it again by ill-tempered and ahistorical remarks about fascism and the record of the Reader's Digest. (Actually, if the Bolsheviks had not won the civil war, the word for fascism would be a Russian one and not an Italian one.) Let us be charitable and assume that she was trying to galvanize an audience by deliberate exaggeration. Aren't there some people who wish that what she said was even more untrue than it is? Are there not "intellectuals" who condemn Stalinism for the sake of symmetry, or because it embarrasses the left and encourages the right, rather than because it is a deadly foe of socialism and democracy?

Actually, the real trahison in the Polish affair has come from the liberals, not from the left. It is the George Kennans, hostile to socialism as an idea, who have found the excuses of Realpolitik for Soviet conduct. But on the left, too, there are some who divert an argument about Polish self-determination into an argument about the hypocrisy of Reagan and Haig. By doing so, they devalue solidarity with Solidarity, and I think Sontag was right to say so.

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