- Chapter 24






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Editor's Introduction To:Nicaragua: A Speech To My Former Comrades On The Left
David Horowitz
 

Western diplomats seem to have forgotten long ago that the objective of negotiation is to wring concessions from their opponents.It may seem too casually cruel to lampoon intelligent, patriotic men whose only fault was a shortage of ideas they needed to understand what was, to them at least, a new political phenomenon: totalitarianism. Precisely because they were intelligent, we see their errors not so much as personal lapses, but as reflections of a fundamental lack of an interpretative framework. More serious is the fact that after the war, we still lacked this framework for understanding Communist totalitarianism, despite the price paid by the West for those "pioneers of detente" who considered Munich a response to Nazi totalitarianism.Misunderstanding of communism stamped all postwar Western statesmen. They could not grasp its particularity, the laws by which it functions. They persisted in explaining it by its leaders' psychology. Or they likened it to the forms of political power with which they were familiar: czarism, the French Revolution, "socialism minus freedom." Some simply thought of it as a preliminary to freedom. "Roosevelt never understood communism," Averill Harriman said. "He viewed it as a sort of extension of the New Deal." Perhaps the veteran diplomat should have noticed this when he was in a position to do something about it.
—Jean-Francois RevelHow Democracies Perish,Doubleday, 1983

The lessons learned so painfully about Hitler in the '30s were not applied to Stalin in the '40s and '50s. When I was an undergraduate in the '50s, it was fashionable for the professors to say that "Whereas the Nazis were purely criminals, Communism, for all its faults, is within the Western progressive tradition." In other words, all that was needed was reform: there wasn't anything fundamentally wrong with the communist system.
It is remarkable how few political leaders are influenced by evidence. During the '30s there was plenty of evidence for the famines in the Ukraine, but as George Orwell observed, "Huge events like the Ukraine famine of 1933, involving the deaths of millions of people, have actually escaped the attention of the majority of the English russophiles." Those events escaped most of the American left as well.
So, apparently, has the slaughter in Cambodia, the pitiable condition of the Boat People, and Yellow Rain. To a great many tenured professors on U.S. campuses, there is still no enemy to the left, nor can there be.
You can prove anything if you can make up your data; the corollary is that you can prove almost anything if you can ignore the data that won't fit.
David Horowitz was a founder of the Vietnam Solidarity Campaign, and editor of Ramparts magazine. He was solidly for Castro after the Cuban Revolution.
 
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