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Current Events • Sociology

HOLLANDER
“Paul Hollander, one of our most distinguished political sociologists, has written a wide-
ranging, personal, and trenchant set of essays about America and its adversaries, at
home and abroad. With reflections on his own fascinating journey from Hungary to
America, Hollander provides unique and thought-provoking perspectives.”

THE ONLY
—Norman J. Ornstein, American Enterprise Institute

“The distinguished Hungarian-born sociologist Paul Hollander has a uniquely Central

European perspective on the foibles of American life and especially on its intellectual milieu.
These fast-paced essays are smart, provocative, and sometimes amusing snapshots of our
wonderfully imperfect universe.” —Norman Naimark, Stanford University

THE ONLY SUPERPOWER

“Paul Hollander is one of the few critics who seriously address how celebrity culture has
deeply altered the role and function of intellectuals. He reexamines his ideas about
America’s adversary culture, born of the 1960s, and provides ample illustrations of its
continued vitality in new forms and voices.” —Jonathan Imber, Wellesley College
SUPERPOWER
“In this beautifully written, understated, and powerful collection, Paul Hollander brings his
acute powers of observation and analysis to bear on a variety of important themes in
American culture and society, including the discontents of modernity, the cult of celebrities,
the pervasive entertainment orientation of mass culture, and the responses to global anti-
Americanism and the manifestations of Islamic fanaticism. His observations illuminate
recent trends and contain wise and sobering insights for the present and future of our
country.” —Jeffrey Herf, University of Maryland, College Park

“In this fine collection of essays Paul Hollander continues his lifework of documenting the
misperceptions and misrepresentations of ideologues and those under their influence. He
shows time and again how peddlers of anti-Americanism are bent on undermining the
political system whose advantages they enjoy and abuse. By juxtaposing their claims and
plain facts he exposes their indifference to truth and reason.”
Paul Hollander
—John Kekes, author of The Art of Politics

“I have been reading Paul Hollander for many years—often agreeing with him, sometimes
disagreeing, and always profiting from his knowledge and acuity.”
—Paul Berman, author of Terror and Liberalism and Power and the Idealists

Paul Hollander is professor emeritus of sociology at the University of Massachusetts at REFLECTIONS ON STRENGTH, WEAKNESS,
Amherst and a center associate of the Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies at
Harvard University. He is the author of Soviet and American Society: A Comparison, AND ANTI-AMERICANISM
Political Pilgrims, Anti-Americanism, Political Will and Personal Belief: The Decline and
Fall of Soviet Communism, and The End of Commitment: Intellectuals, Revolutionaries,
and Political Morality.

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The Only Superpower
 The Only Superpower
Reflections on Strength, Weakness,
and Anti-Americanism

Paul Hollander

LEXINGTON BOOKS

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LEXINGTON BOOKS

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Hollander, Paul, 1932–

The only super power : reflections on strength, weakness, and anti-Americanism / Paul
Hollander.
p. cm.
Includes index.
ISBN-13: 978-0-7391-2543-4 (cloth : alk. paper)
ISBN-10: 0-7391-2543-5 (cloth : alk. paper)
ISBN-13: 978-0-7391-3133-6 (electronic)
ISBN-10: 0-7391-3133-8 (electronic)
1. United States—Civilization—21st century. 2. United States—Social conditions—
21st century. 3. United States—Relations—Foreign countries. 4. Political culture—
United States. 5. Anti-Americanism. I. Title.
E169.12.H637 2009
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Printed in the United States of America

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 Contents

Acknowledgments vii
Introduction: The Pleasures of Hate and the New Anti-Americanism 1

PART I: THE NEW ANTI-AMERICANISM

1 Anti-Americanism and a World-Class Hate Crime 33
2 Anti-Americanism: Murderous and Rhetorical 36
3 The Politics of Envy 41
4 Anti-Americanism and Moral Equivalence 49

PART II: AMERICANA

5 Our Society and Its Celebrities 59
6 Watching Celebrities 62
7 Michael Moore: The New Political Celebrity 65
8 SUVs and Americans 71
9 The Chronic Ailments of Television News 73
10 Stereotyping and the Decline of Common Sense 77
11 Tawana Brawley and the “Exotic Dancer” at Duke 81
12 An Islamic Requirement on Campus 85
13 Rehabilitating the Great Books: Literature and Life 88

v
vi Contents

14 The Counterculture of the Heart 102

15 Old and Busier Than Ever 118

PART III: FOREIGN MATTERS

16 American Travelers to the Soviet Union 123
17 Alexander Yakovlev 141
18 Violence of Higher Purpose 150
19 The North Korean Gulag 164
20 Admiring North Korea 167
21 The Fiftieth Anniversary of the Hungarian Revolution 170
22 Crossing the Moral Threshold: The Rejection of Communist
Systems in Eastern Europe 174
23 Ambivalent in Amsterdam 184
24 Travel in the Peloponnesos 189

PART IV: THE SURVIVAL AND REPLENISHMENT OF

THE ADVERSARY CULTURE
25 The Resilience of the Adversary Culture 203
26 The Chomsky Phenomenon 216
27 The Banality of Evil and the Political Culture of Hatred 225
28 The Left and the Palestinians 229
29 The Personal and the Political in Lessing’s Fiction 233
30 Haven in Cuba 237
31 Demystifying Marxism 242
32 Public Intellectuals and the God That Failed 246

PART V: IN CONCLUSION
33 From a “Builder of Socialism” to “Free-Floating Intellectual”:
My Politically Incorrect Career in Sociology 257

Index 281
About the Author 291
 Acknowledgments

I gratefully acknowledge the assistance of the Bradley Foundation, longtime

supporter of my work, in contributing to the expenses associated with the cre-
ation of this volume. Erika Pfaff, (formerly of Smith College) was an exem-
plary research assistant and performed with exceptional competence a variety
of tasks required for collecting and producing these essays. Raquel Man-
zanares (also of Smith College) was similarly helpful in the preparation of the
index.
In some instances the titles were modified either to restore the original ti-
tle (changed by the publications concerned) or in order to better reflect the
contents of the piece.
A number of the chapters in this book were originally published elsewhere.
I gratefully acknowledge those publications and the permission to reprint my
material.
“It’s a Crime That Some Don’t See This as Hate.” Washington Post, October
28, 2001.
“Anti-Americanism: Murderous and Rhetorical.” Partisan Review 1 (2002).
“The Politics of Envy.” The New Criterion (November 2002).
“On Moral Equivalence.” Special pamphlet, The New Criterion (2005).
“Our Society and Its Celebrities.” National Review Online (October 11,
2002). Copyright © 2002 by National Review, Inc. Used by permission of
the publisher.
“Watching Celebrities.” New York Sun, January 2007.
“Just Who Really Needs an SUV?” Daily Hampshire Gazette, January 18–19,
2003.
“Chronic Ailments of Television News.” FrontPage, November 18, 2002.

vii
viii Acknowledgments

“Stereotyping and the Decline of Common Sense.” FrontPage, July 19, 2002.
“Tawana Brawley and the ‘Exotic Dancer’ at Duke.” FrontPage, December
29, 2006.
“Requiring Islam.” FrontPage, April 27, 2002.
“The Counterculture of the Heart.” Society 41, no. 2 (January/February
2004). Copyright © 2004 by Springer. Used with kind permission of
Springer Science and Business Media.
“Old and Busier Than Ever.” New York Sun, December 27, 2006.
“American Travelers to the Soviet Union in the Cold War Era.” Society 44,
no. 3 (March/April 2007). Copyright © 2007 by Springer. Used with kind
permission of Springer Science and Business Media.
Preface to A Century of Violence in Soviet Russia. By Alexander Yakovlev.
New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2002. Copyright © 2002 by
Yale University Press. Used by permission of the publisher.
Introduction to From the Gulag to the Killing Fields: Personal Accounts of
Political Violence and Repression in Communist States. Edited by Paul
Hollander. Wilmington, Del.: Intercollegiate Studies Institute, 2007.
“Inside the Aquarium.” New York Sun, February 11, 2004.
“Pariah Lies.” National Review (February 9, 2004). Copyright © 2004 by Na-
tional Review, Inc. Used by permission of the publisher.
“Hungary for Personal Freedom.” New York Sun, October 26, 2006.
“Crossing the Moral Threshold and the Rejection of Communist Systems in
Eastern Europe.” In Resistance, Rebellion, and Revolution in Hungary and
Central Europe: Commemorating 1956, edited by Laszlo Peter and Martyn
Rady. London: UCL SSEES, 2008.
“Ambivalent in Amsterdam.” The National Interest (November–December
2006). Copyright © 2006 by The National Interest. Used by permission of
the publisher.
“Travel in the Peloponnesos.” Modern Age (Winter 2007). Copyright © 2007
by Intercollegiate Studies Institute. Used by permission of the publisher.
“The Resilience of Adversary Culture. “The National Interest (Summer
2002). Copyright © 2002 by The National Interest. Used by permission of
the publisher.
“The Chomsky Phenomenon.” Society 42, no. 3 (March/April 2005). Copy-
right © 2005 by Springer. Used with kind permission of Springer Science
and Business Media.
“The Banality of Evil and the Political Culture of Hatred.” FrontPage, June
27, 2002.
“The Left’s Love Affair with the Palestinians.” FrontPage, November 6,
2003.
“Aspiration and Reality.” The New Criterion (March 2003).
 Acknowledgments ix

“A Tombstone for Utopias.” New York Sun, October 31, 2005.

“Clinging to Faith: Public Intellectuals and the God That Failed.” The Na-
tional Interest (Spring 2006). Copyright © 2006 by The National Interest.
Used by permission of the publisher.
“From a ‘Builder of Socialism’ to ‘Free-Floating Intellectual’: My Politically
Incorrect Career in Sociology.” The American Sociologist 32, no. 3 (Fall
2001). Copyright © 2001 by Springer. Used with kind permission of
Springer Science and Business Media.
 Introduction: The Pleasures of Hate
and the New Anti-Americanism

The writings that follow reflect both recent and longstanding interests.1 They
include worldwide anti-Americanism, American culture, and mass culture; the
persisting political influence of the 1960s; and the controversial relationship be-
tween the personal and political realms. Also prominent among these interests
are the emotional components of political conflicts (hatred foremost among
them), the peculiarities of Islamic fanaticism, and finally, the remnants and re-
verberations of former communist systems and their supporting ideologies.
American society and its perceptions cannot be understood without re-
minding ourselves that from its earliest days it has been marked by high and
questionably realistic hopes and expectations; it is these expectations that
lend a distinctive quality to American society and culture. These qualities
have been reflected in both the attitudes and activities of an unusually large
number of idealistic and decent Americans as well as in those of a violent, un-
scrupulous and amoral disposition. Quantitative support for these assertions
can be found in the vast number of voluntary organizations and the activities
of their members, in the largesse of charitable foundations, in the readiness of
all such organizations (as well as of U.S. government agencies) to make their
presence felt around the globe whenever disaster strikes, in the admission of
refugees of various kinds from all corners of the world, and in the countless
social, political, and legislative efforts undertaken over time to improve
American society. American idealism also found expression in the prolifera-
tion of churches and do-it-yourself religious sects and in the expansion and
accessibility of educational institutions. Last but not least, the idealism here
noted is also manifest in the behavior of the proverbial “ordinary” Americans,

1
2 Introduction

in their trusting and helpful attitude toward strangers (unless short-circuited

by racial or ethnic bias).
Notwithstanding the more recent denunciations it has stimulated around
the world, this country remains the focus of attraction and hopeful curiosity
of countless millions seeking to gain entry to it. These multitudes persist in
seeing the United States as the land of promise and opportunity. If all of these
immigrants and would-be immigrants have been suffering false conscious-
ness, it is a historically unique and unprecedented case of mass delusion. (At
the time of this writing, Congress and public opinion are preoccupied with
finding ways to control the relentless influx of millions of illegal immigrants.)
As to the darker sides of America and its residents, the most obvious evi-
dence comes from crime statistics, ranging from the large number of brutal
and matter-of-fact killings to rape and robbery and zestful and often imagi-
native schemes for defrauding consumers, especially the poor and the old,2
prompted by dreams of wealth. Equally prominent has been white-collar
crime, especially in recent times, committed by CEOs of huge corporations
with huge incomes, further illuminating the elasticity of human wants and the
part played by amassing wealth in the pursuit of a positive and expansive self-
conception. There is also the long list of social pathologies that are not by
themselves criminal: alcoholism, drug addiction, homelessness, illegitimacy,
dropping out of school, and a wide variety of mental illnesses.
American individualism—“radical individualism,” if you will—can be
held responsible for both a good deal of unscrupulous behavior and for some
of the high-minded varieties. The frenzied efforts of Americans to make and
remake themselves cut both ways: they find expression in ruthless competi-
tion, unbridled ambition, and grotesque, egomaniacal status-seeking as well
as in praiseworthy efforts to earn respect and self-respect by helping others.
Celebrities are an interesting example of this polarity, as their behavior oscil-
lates between feverish self-aggrandizement and idealistic, if often uninformed,
noblesse oblige.3 They are morbidly fascinating products of American-style
modernity stimulating sociological and social historical thought.4
Anti-Americanism has always been associated with the contradictory as-
pects of American society. In the new century it combines murderous vio-
lence with lofty and heartfelt religious and political sentiments and justifica-
tions. The most striking attribute of the new anti-Americanism is its origin in,
and fusion with, an exceptionally pure and intense hatred and the apparent
pleasure that hatred provides to those consumed by and acting on it. Rarely
before (in more recent times, at any rate) have the pleasures of hatred been so
openly displayed, indeed flaunted, and the rhetoric of violence so elaborate
and explicit.5 Islamic terrorists and their supporters proudly and cheerfully
proclaim their murderous beliefs, intentions, and actions; Arab crowds joy-
ously display these sentiments in their body language and facial expressions
 Introduction 3

contorted by hatred. Arab political culture reliably supports these attitudes. As

a British journalist remarked, “There would be few if any suicide bombers in
the Middle East if ‘martyrdom’ were not glorified by Imams and politicians,
if pictures of local ‘martyrs’ were not proudly displayed in West Bank gro-
cery stores, if Muslim banks did not offer special ‘martyrdom’ accounts to the
relicts thereof, if schools did not run essay competitions on ‘Why I want to
grow up to be a martyr.’”6 These attitudes have been exemplified by, among
others, “Mariam Farhat the mother of three Hamas supporters killed by Is-
raelis. She bade one son goodbye in a home-made videotape, before he
stormed an Israeli settlement killing five people, then being shot dead. She
said later . . . that she wished she had 100 sons to sacrifice that way. Known
as the ‘mother of martyrs’ she was seen in a campaign video toting a gun.”7
Farhat was elected to the new parliament in Gaza. Closer to home, an Iran-
ian-born graduate of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill rented a
Jeep for the explicit purpose of “taking some kind of retaliatory action”
against the United States by running down as many people as he could on the
same campus: “he said he was disappointed that more people were not in the
commons crowd around noon when it is typically crowded and he told a de-
tective . . . that he rented the four wheel drive vehicle so he could inflict as
much damage as possible.” He injured nine people and was arrested. He
told the judge that he was “thankful for the opportunity to spread the will of
Allah. . . .”8
Once a group is branded “infidels,” questions of guilt and innocence linked
to actual behavior cease to arise. In this, as in some other respects, present-
day Islamic political culture has much in common with both Nazi and com-
munist totalitarian ideologies and the practices they had inspired and sanc-
tioned. Each of these belief systems has sweepingly categorized and
classified human beings, persecuting or killing them not for what they did but
for what they stood for, what they symbolized: various imputed incarnations
of evil. As a commentator put it

the lesson of today’s terrorism is that if God exists, then everything, including
blowing up thousands of innocent bystanders, is permitted—at least to those
who claim to act directly on behalf of God, since, clearly a direct link to God
justifies the violation of any merely human constraints and considerations. In
short fundamentalists have become no different from the “godless” Stalinist
Communists, to whom everything was permitted since they perceived them-
selves as direct instruments of their divinity, the Historical Necessity of Progress
Toward Communism.9

As David Brooks also noted, “today’s jihadists have a lot in common with
the left-wing extremists of the 1930s and 1960s. Ideologically Islamic neo-
fundamentalism occupies the same militant space that was once occupied by
4 Introduction

Marxism.”10 In both cases there is room for disputing the precise nature of the
relationship between theory and practice. Just as it has often been said by ad-
vocates of Marxism that the Soviet Union and other “actually existing” so-
cialist states had little or nothing to do with Marxism (or “true Marxism”), it
has been argued that the Islamic terrorists claiming to implement Muslim re-
ligious commandments through violence had misappropriated and distorted
their religious heritage. Both denials are questionable: there was a connection
between Marxism and the policies of communist states, and there is one be-
tween Islamic beliefs and the activities of Islamic terrorists. What can be dis-
puted is the extent of these connections or the specific ways in which these
ideas influenced behavior or policy.
Further parallels may be found between the Western disputes about the
threat the Soviet Union and its allies used to represent and present-day posi-
tions taken toward the threats of Islamic terrorism and expansionism. The So-
viet Union was, of course, a superpower outfitted with nuclear weapons and
ballistic missiles and commanded armed forces numbering in the millions;
Osama bin Laden has fewer divisions and no nuclear weapons so far but—as
has often been pointed out—his followers and supporters may be a greater
threat than the Soviet Union used to be, given bin Laden’s supporters’ deeper
and more irrational commitment to the destruction of the West. These groups
also enjoy support in the growing Islamic communities in Western Europe and
large portions of them are disinclined to adopt Western cultural and political
values and practices.
It is of particular significance that Islamic fanatics are fortified by the
serene conviction that their murderousness (often combined with unhesitating
self-destruction) is divinely sanctioned and rewarded—as was the gunman in
Jordan shooting at Western tourists while shouting “Allah-u akbar” or God is
Great.”11 These terrorists rejoice in their destructiveness because it rests on
the determination to wipe out the evildoers identified as responsible for all the
ills and corruptions of the world. Contrary to the “root cause” argument12
these attitudes are held by many who are far from destitute but are well-
educated and of middle- or upper-middle-class background. Education does
not provide immunity to the rise and indulgence of the murderous fanaticism
here discussed. The violence-prone include those “looking to strike a vague
blow against the system and so give their lives (and death) shape and mean-
ing.”13 Hostility to Western values and societies is not necessarily a result of
unfamiliarity with them; many prominent Islamic terrorists have been radi-
calized by living in the West, by their encounter with modernity and secular-
ity and by the difficulty of finding an identity defined by neither tradition nor
modernity.14 Pankaj Mishra, the American Indian author observed, “Uprooted
from societies that were once small and close-knit, trying to organize them-
 Introduction 5

selves into large collectivities; a people falsifying their past and turning a pri-
vately and diversely followed faith into political ideology; focusing their rage
against such imagined entities as ‘America’ and the ‘West’ and working to
rouse people the world over for the sake of revolution—it was hard not to see
these men as trying to find their being within history and only floundering in
vast empty spaces.”15
This “rage against imagined entities” finds expression in the demonstra-
tions, protests, and rampages of Arab or Muslim crowds protesting alleged of-
fenses to their religious sensibilities, as for example the notorious Danish car-
toons. These protests, as recorded by television, suggest that their major,
indeed singular, purpose is the venting of a deep, underlying hatred and re-
sentment shaped by a political culture and only marginally related to some spe-
cific grievance or precipitating event. A major theme of these outbursts is the
demand for “respect” and outrage over being “disrespected.” These outbursts
are reminiscent of the violent behavior of American juvenile gangs displaying
an extreme sensitivity to alleged slights and expressions of disrespect to which
they respond with instant, retributive violence intended to salvage honor. Nei-
ther these Arab mobs nor American gang members can claim an abundance of
compelling reason for the respect they demand or could boast of demonstrable
accomplishments to bolster the claim. In both cases the demand for respect is
compensatory, its intensity and emotional quality proportional to the lack of
realistic grounds upon which respect or deference could be granted.
The pleasure human beings take in the location, specification, and denun-
ciation of evil cannot be overestimated. A major source of this pleasure is the
gratification of the scapegoating impulse that appears to be universal and
timeless and signals a determination to hold others—individuals, groups, so-
cial, or political forces—responsible for personal difficulties, whatever they
are. Human beings appear to have a marked preference for not taking re-
sponsibility for those of their actions or attitudes which have unpleasant con-
sequences. Nor is it sufficient to blame bad luck, impersonal social forces, or
genetic factors for personal failures or misfortunes; it is far more agreeable to
locate a specific human being or group or personalized abstraction that can be
blamed with gusto, directly and fully. Identifying evil and evil-doers offers
the additional, quasi-spiritual gratification of feeling that there is an ordered
and meaningful moral universe where good can be readily distinguished from
evil, and in which evil—when located and unmasked—can be crushed with-
out hesitation or regret. Most human beings are deeply averse to moral rela-
tivism including the sophisticates who claim to subscribe to it, mostly intel-
lectuals (in our times the so-called postmodernists) whose views and beliefs,
on closer examination, also turn out to have a pronounced moral-judgmental
component.
6 Introduction

In contemporary Western societies the scapegoating impulse is connected

to the belief in the social-environmental influences shaping personal lives and
to the often-exaggerated connections discerned between the personal and the
public or political realm. If society, culture, social forces, the ruling class, the
power elite, the military-industrial complex, and so on (take your pick) are re-
sponsible for the bad things that befall us, then our personal responsibility for
unhappiness is gratifyingly diminished. Blaming social forces or entities is
insufficiently gratifying unless human faces or forms can be affixed to them;
evil must be personified in order to be hated and destroyed. The nature of po-
litical propaganda and its visual images of “the enemy” bear out this propo-
sition.16
Somewhat counterintuitively, hatred and compassion are often comple-
mentary. Radicals and extremists of all stripes legitimate their hatred by their
professed or genuine compassion for the downtrodden and victimized; the
victimizers, real or imaginary, inspire fierce hatred on behalf of their victims.
Jews have been hated and held guilty of exploiting and corrupting the world
of upright gentiles; capitalists for victimizing the poor; whites for the subju-
gation of “people of color”; men for the inferior social status of women; and
so on. At the present time it is the fate of Palestinians that opens the flood-
gates of anti-Israeli sentiment, and, some would argue, of anti-Semitism.
The complex relationship between compassion and hatred and the part
played by intensely personalized hatreds in social-political conflicts have not
received the social scientific or historical attention they deserve. Why is the
capacity to dehumanize human beings so readily forthcoming? Why is the
public infliction of pain and even death entertaining, as indicated by the his-
torical popularity of public executions, tortures, and humiliations? Why do
brutal athletic events invariably draw large audiences? Why is so much of
popular culture devoted to displays of violence? Those entertaining a benign
view of human nature cannot easily dismiss such phenomena or blame them
on the “environment” since, after all, the latter is composed and shaped by
human beings. While at the present time Islamic political movements and cul-
tures excel in the public endorsement and celebration of righteous hatred and
violence—both in their embrace of terrorism and in the continued perform-
ance of public executions and mutilations—many other political systems and
movements around the world, from Srebrenica to Rwanda, have made use of
the same human potential for hate and dehumanization. From the smiling SS
executioners on the edge of mass graves (their photos displayed in the Holo-
caust Museum in Washington, D.C.), to the youthful mobs of the Chinese
“Cultural Revolution” thrilled by the violence and humiliation they inflicted,
to the cheerful American lynch mobs further in the past, there is ample evi-
 Introduction 7

dence that political objectives sanctioning violence are nurtured by the sub-
jective enjoyment of inflicting it or observing its infliction. In recent times
even children have been enlisted in armed conflicts (mostly in Africa and
Palestine), and many seem to enjoy such participation. Juvenile gangs in the
United States and other modern societies further illustrate the appeal and en-
joyment of violence deployed matter-of-factly in criminal enterprises and in
the building of reputation and positive self-conception.
Che Guevara, a cult figure of our times, prompts further reflections on the
blend of attitudes that nurture and sanction political violence. In 1964 when
he witnessed the overthrow of the Arbenz government in Guatemala he wrote,
“It was all a lot of fun, what with the bombs, speeches, and other distractions
to break the monotony I was living in.” In 1987 he extolled “hatred as an el-
ement of struggle: unbending hatred for the enemy, which pushes a human
being beyond his natural limitations, making him into an effective, violent,
selective, and cold-blooded killing machine.” When he gained power he or-
dered the execution of many alleged or real enemies of the revolution. Fol-
lowing a tour of communist states in 1960, “Kim Il Sung’s North Korea was
the country that impressed him the most.”17 Neither his pronouncements on
hatred and violence nor the actions and policies testifying to their authentic-
ity have discouraged the rise of the Guevara cult (and its commercialization)
in the West. He remains to this day a curious amalgam of secular saint and “a
quintessential capitalist brand. His likeness adorns mugs . . . key chains, wal-
lets, baseball caps, denim jeans, and . . . [the] omnipresent T-shirts. . . .”18 He
may be seen as both a champion of ideologically sanctioned political violence
and an emblem of Western projections of secular sainthood resting on seem-
ingly inexhaustible reservoirs of ignorance, gullibility, and wishful thinking.
Reverence to Che Guevara has not been limited to Western intellectuals. The
president of Bolivia, Evo Morales, following his swearing-in ceremony
“asked for a moment of silence for Inca martyrs, for . . . Che Guevara.” He
averred that there was a continuity between “the fight of Tupuc Katari” and
“the fight of Che Guevara.”19
While the massive, institutionalized violence and repression communist
states carried out is now mainly of historical interest (not that Western histo-
rians have shown much interest), the regimes in North Korea and Cuba
demonstrate the survival of the genre and its distinctive characteristics dis-
cussed in some of the writings in part III of this volume. Particularly note-
worthy is the largely intact preservation of totalitarian repression in North
Korea and the modest moral indignation and condemnation it has inspired in
the West among liberal intellectuals, churches, investigative journalists, and
all those concerned with human rights violations around the globe.
8 Introduction

II

A paradox underlies a great deal of anti-Americanism: it is the contradictory

perception of the United States as both powerful and weak. Its power prompts
fear, the weakness moral indignation.
The power of the United States is self-evident deriving from its size, pop-
ulation, unsurpassed economic and military strength, and a global political,
military, and cultural presence. So much power, and especially its singular su-
perpower status (attained since the fall of the Soviet Union), is conducive to
apprehension. The fearsome superpower image is bolstered by another long-
standing perception of the United States as a country that is morally, ethically,
or civilizationally underdeveloped, populated by barbarians of sorts or by im-
mature, childish human beings who blundered into an excess of power,
wealth, and technology but lack the proper cultural restraints or guidelines for
using these assets wisely. An observation made decades ago about American
military pilots captures this point of view:

To the observer outside the fences, a major U.S. airbase is a strange, different,
alien and menacing world. . . . In the officer’s mess at Mildenhall [in Britain], a
champagne brunch is laid on . . . a young pilot clad in a very zippy flying suit
festooned with bright badges, flashes, emblems, decals, numbers and bars, sits
at a table covered with fine linen eating a giant cream puff with a silver fork. He
has champagne there and three other types of cream cake, and, as he quaffs at
both, he is deeply absorbed in the pages of a child’s comic.20

The quote aptly encapsulates the image of the awesome power incongru-
ously possessed by childlike, simple-minded pilots who read comics and de-
vour pastries. Even George Kennan, not given to thoughtless stereotyping, en-
tertained similar notions of the American character: “Here it is easy to see that
when man is given . . . freedom from both political restraint and want, the ef-
fect is to render him childlike . . . fun-loving, quick to laughter and enthusi-
asm, unanalytical, unintellectual . . . given to seizures of aggressiveness,
driven constantly to protect his status . . . by an eager conformism. . . . South-
ern California together with all that tendency of American life which it typi-
fies, is childhood without the promise of maturity.”21
The weakness of America is usually located in the moral-ethical, charac-
terological realm; American society in this perspective is seen as decadent,
hedonistic, morally depraved, undisciplined, and riddled with social
pathologies such as crime, drug addiction, family disintegration, declining
standards of education, and moral relativism; it is a society symbolized by
gangsters, cowboys, ruthless capitalists, and corrupt preachers and politi-
 Introduction 9

cians. Once more George F. Kennan memorably expressed such sentiments

during the Cold War:

Show me first an America which has successfully coped with the problems of
crime, drugs, deteriorating educational standards, urban decay, pornography and
decadence of one sort or another—show me an America that pulled itself to-
gether and is what it might be, then I will tell you how we are going to defend
ourselves from the Russians. But as things are I can see very little merit in or-
ganizing ourselves to defend from the Russians the porno-shops in central
Washington. In fact the Russians are much better in holding pornography at bay
than we are.22

The concept of the “great Satan” current in the Islamic world and among
the most avid haters of the United States also captures the threatening com-
bination of power and evil, that is, power and moral depravity.
The resurgent anti-Americanism in Europe (and its domestic version in
the United States) can be readily distinguished from the Islamic variety by
its secular and far less violent quality. It has largely been a response to the
emergence of the United States as the only superpower following the col-
lapse of the Soviet Union.23 The United States as the singular superpower
and ubiquitous cultural presence24 has become an inviting target of both dif-
fuse scapegoating impulses and specific grievances around the globe. The
European anti-Americanism, “once no more than an expression of the Old
World’s condescension toward the New . . . has soured into a deep-seated re-
sentment . . . ultimately fueled by the long-term decline in European
power.”25 This new anti-Americanism has also been bolstered by the intense
anti-Americanism radiating from the Islamic countries and the Muslim pop-
ulations in Western Europe, while in the United States it feeds on feelings of
guilt, on the plausible notion that “if we are so much hated there must be
good reasons for it.”
The collapse of Soviet communism and the decline of global revolutionary
fervor deprived those on the radical left of the apparent promise of alternative
social-economic systems but did not dislodge their deep and embittered anti-
Americanism. Harold Pinter in England and Noam Chomsky in the United
States, as well as their audiences and followers, exemplify these attitudes. On
the occasion of receiving the Noble Prize Pinter said, “The crimes of the
United States have been systematic, constant, vicious, remorseless but very
few people have actually talked about them”—a strange proposition given the
huge volume of denunciations of the United States in recent times. Perhaps
he meant that these utterances were insufficiently virulent or venomous. He
further added, thereby illuminating an important theme of anti-Americanism
(and more generally of political hatreds), “It [America] has exercised a quite
10 Introduction

clinical manipulation of power worldwide while masquerading [my empha-

sis] as a force for universal good . . . brutal, indifferent, scornful and ruthless
it may be but it is also very clever.”26 Pinter probably wished to convey that
evil is particularly detestable when it is concealed, conspiratorial, and manip-
ulative. The fervent social critic finds particular satisfaction in denouncing
evil that is hidden and requires his services to unmask and expose it. The by
now venerable notion of “repressive tolerance” (devised by Herbert Marcuse)
also appeals to the conspiratorial mindset by suggesting that repression is
more sinister and reprehensible when it is masked as tolerance.
As for Chomsky, already in 1966 he believed that unsurpassable misdeeds
were integral to American culture and institutions: “[American] schools are
the first training ground for troops that will enforce the muted, unending ter-
ror of the status quo in the coming years . . . for the technicians who will be
developing the means for the American extension of power; for the intellec-
tuals who can be counted on . . . to provide the ideological justification for
this particular form of barbarism. . . .”27
The old and new anti-Americanism share a major tool of denigration,
namely the attribution of moral equivalence between the United States and its
enemies, or between the United States and some other, widely acknowledged,
self-evident embodiment of evil. In the 1960s and 1970s the Soviet Union
was such an entity, and for the most radical anti-Americans, Nazi Germany.
Most recently Arab terrorists became morally equivalent. After 9/11 Gore Vi-
dal wrote, “The awesome physical damage Osama and company did to us . . .
is as nothing compared to the knockout blow to our vanishing liberties—the
Anti-Terrorism Act of 1996. . . .” He also suggested that American pretexts
for “the unremitting violence of the United States against the rest of the world
. . . might have even given Hitler pause. . . .”28 Chomsky, in turn, proposed
that “in comparison to the conditions imposed by U.S. tyranny and violence,
East Europe under Russian rule was practically a paradise.”29 More recently
Lewis Lapham, editor of Harper’s Magazine, explained with heavy-handed
irony, why the United States is a fascist state:

It does no good to ask . . . “Is America a fascist state?” We must ask instead . . .
“Can we make America the best damned fascist state the world has ever seen,”
an authoritarian paradise deserving the admiration of the international capital
markets. . . . We’re Americans; we have the money and the know-how to suc-
ceed where Hitler failed. . . . We can count it as a blessing that we don’t bear the
burden of an educated citizenry. The systematic destruction of the public-school
and library systems over the last thirty years, a program wisely carried out un-
der administrations both Republican and Democratic, protects the market for the
sale and distribution of the government’s propaganda posters. . . . Thanks to the
diligence of our news media and the structure of our tax laws, our affluent and
 Introduction 11

suburban classes have taken to heart the lesson taught to the aspiring serial
killers rising through the ranks at West Point and the Harvard Business School—
think what you’re told to think. . . . we are blessed with a bourgeoisie that will
welcome fascism as gladly as it welcomes rain in April and sun in June. . . . We
don’t have to gag the press or seize the radio stations. People trained to the cor-
porate style of thought . . . have no further use for free speech. . . . Who better
than the Americans to lead the fascist renaissance. . . .”30

The sentiments shared by Lapham, Chomsky, and Pinter belong to what an

author called “fundamentalist anti-Americanism”31 that finds expression in
the sweeping and impassioned denunciation of what is seen as a comprehen-
sively and fundamentally evil and corrupt entity rather than one characterized
by specific and potentially corrigible failings. Paul Trout linked this kind of
anti-American rhetoric to the prophetic tradition of “righteous fury” and the
conviction that “wealth corrupts” and “acquisitiveness is the root of much
evil.” He further observed, “These vituperative accusations . . . are nothing
like the routine, predictable complaints and gripes that arise from partisan
politics and from the chronic conflicts of a heterogeneous and dynamic soci-
ety. These accusations vilify the nation as a whole: its institutions, its history,
its basic values, its very existence.”32
A noteworthy feature of the new anti-Americanism is its growing conflu-
ence with anti-Israeli attitudes and sentiments not only in Arab countries but
also among Western intellectuals. Andre Markovits wrote, “Anti-Zionism, to-
gether with anti-Americanism is a new litmus test of progressive politics. . . .
If one is not at least a serious doubter of the legitimacy of the state of Israel . . .
one runs the risk of being excluded from the entity called ‘the left.’”33 Boy-
cotts of Israel have been proposed and enacted.34 Such sentiments can also be
found among Israeli academic intellectuals who developed a rejection of their
society comparable to sentiments of American intellectuals in the 1960s and
1970s including “passions of anger and indignation, bitterness and repudia-
tion. . . . Israel in their eyes is guilty of a great betrayal and should be pun-
ished.”35 Their disappointment is strikingly similar to the longstanding Amer-
ican belief that the United States failed to live up to its founding promises and
hopes. Similarly disposed Israeli intellectuals support, in effect, the dissolu-
tion of Israel by proposing to make it a binational state (in which the Arab
population would soon submerge the Jewish portion). These attitudes also re-
semble the leftist support for “multiculturalism” in the United States that is
hoped to dilute and eventually submerge white, Western, Eurocentric culture.
There has been a commingling in recent years of anti-American and anti-
Israeli attitudes among both American and Israeli intellectuals. Some of
the most prominent Western anti-Israeli voices have been Jewish, such as
Chomsky and Eric Hobsbawm. They and other Western intellectuals abhor
12 Introduction

Israel because it is an ally and protégé of the United States and because it is
a Western outpost in the third world and a major military power in the region.
It is difficult to determine to what degree undercurrents of anti-Semitism
merge with and nurture these anti-Israeli attitudes in the West.
It is a notable paradox that this new and strident anti-Americanism in the
West has unfolded against a cultural background saturated with moral rela-
tivism. If this relativism had been serious and consistent its upholders, post-
modernists and deconstructionists, would have refrained from the frequent,
highly judgmental denunciations of American society, U.S. foreign policy,
capitalism, and globalization. But the “deconstruction” of reality (or of cer-
tain texts) has always been selective and governed by political-ideological
preferences: “theory was seen as a political weapon with which to challenge
the status quo. . . . The hope was to revolutionize the world” observed Stan-
ley Fish,36 who in his earlier philosophical incarnation had contributed to the
proliferation of these attitudes and theories. What these theories actually pro-
moted was a selective relativism allied to identity politics, multiculturalism,
and antirationalist positions. Richard Wolin wrote, “An entire generation of
post-Communist thinkers on the left have rushed to embrace ‘difference’
ethics, identity politics and other celebrations of ‘heterogeneity’ at the ex-
pense of . . . universal principles. They have been only too eager . . . to blame
reason itself . . . for the multiple catastrophes of the twentieth century.”37 The
roots of this “neotribalist ethos” were discernible in the protest movements of
the 1960s, in their preoccupation with and overreaction to the evils of ho-
mogenization, uniformity, and conformity, as well as in the quest for com-
munity that paradoxically combined with assertions of radical individualism.
It is a further paradox that many if not most intellectuals consider the foun-
dation of their moral identity their social critical activities that are hardly
compatible with moral relativism.

III

The moral relativism here sketched has also been boosted by and is reflected
in the relentless entertainment orientation of American culture, mass as well
as elite. The New York Times, once considered the voice of reason and seri-
ousness has joined the scramble for diverting, attention-getting stories and
formats; increasingly it fills its op-ed pages and book review section with
“cute” illustrations wasting space and sacrificing content. In 2005 its front
page included lengthy articles about stuffed toy animals decorating long dis-
tance trucks and a floating island in an unremarkable small pond in Spring-
field, Massachusetts. The magazine section introduced cartoons and suppos-
 Introduction 13

edly entertaining (very) short stories in addition to regularly featuring articles

about athletes, fashion designers, and popular entertainers. The magazine also
took it upon itself to acquaint its readers regularly with the “favorite take-out
food,” “the morning routine,” the “clothing item he cannot live without,” and
other indispensable information about assorted celebrities such as Drew
Nieporent, “the force behind 15 restaurants.”38 In turn the Sunday style sec-
tion was apparently designed to cater in its entirety to the more mindless
forms of consumerism, status seeking, and celebrity cult.
Another remarkable example of these trends was the prominent coverage
by the New York Times and the major television networks (ABC, CBS, and
NBC) on their evening news of the story of a man whose Corvette sports
car stolen thirty-seven years ago was “miraculously” recovered.39 It was
meant to be a heart-warming report of lifelong attachment, albeit attach-
ment to a piece of machinery, with a happy ending. Each of these stories
took for granted that there was nothing peculiar about harboring feelings to-
ward a car that used to be reserved for human beings or at least pets; lav-
ishing such affection on an inanimate object was considered perfectly nor-
mal and preeminently newsworthy. It did not occur to the reporters of this
story (or to their editors) that people who allegedly “love” a machine may
have difficulties with human attachments and it is the latter difficulty that
may deserve discussion.
The entertainment orientation of the mass media also reflects relativism
and the diminished capacity of the American public to make important dis-
tinctions, moral or aesthetic. Our system of education has made a substantial
contribution to this state of affairs through its campaigns against “elitism”
and “judgmental” dispositions and by increasingly distancing itself from
Western cultural traditions. One result has been the spectacular decline in lit-
erary reading especially among the young influenced by the educational re-
forms inspired by the 1960s. As a critic of these trends wrote “young Ameri-
cans today are not encouraged to love their . . . tradition, their language, their
literature, for fear that they will offend someone who does not ‘identify’ with
them. . . .”40 The politically colored rejection of the cultural traditions in ques-
tion provides further explanation of these trends.
The search for maximizing audiences or readership undertaken by televi-
sion producers and publishers is helped along by the idea that everything is a
matter of subjective interpretation and the pursuit of objective truth is point-
less as well as unhelpful for attracting larger audiences. The best-selling and
much discussed memoirs of a former drug addict and petty criminal (James
Frey), which misrepresented and embellished his life to make it more dra-
matic and saleable, is a case in point. It is easier to erase the distinction be-
tween fact and fiction when the belief in objective truth and a hierarchy of
14 Introduction

moral and aesthetic values is shaky or nonexistent. As the critic Michiko

Kakutani wrote,

By focusing on the “indeterminacy” of texts and the crucial role of the critic in
imputing meaning, deconstructionists were purveying a fashionably nihilistic
view of the world suggesting that all meaning is relative, all truth elusive. . . .
When people assert that there is no ultimate historical reality an environment is
created in which the testimony of a witness to the Holocaust . . . can actually be
questioned. . . . Postmodernists do not merely acknowledge the obstacles that
stand in the way of objectivity but also celebrate those obstacles, elevating rel-
ativism into a kind of end in itself.41

Of the broader significance of these trends Daniel Mendelsohn remarked,

“Perhaps the most dismaying response to the James Frey scandal was the
feeling on the part of many readers, that true or false, his book had given them
the feel-good ‘redemptive’ experience. . . .” Mendelsohn also noted that the
notion of a subjective reality, or “‘my reality’ raises even more far-reaching
and dire questions about the state of our culture, one in which the very con-
cept of reality seems to be in danger.”42
A different kind of attack on objective reality and, arguably, on the enter-
prise of making differentiated moral judgments was mounted by the novelist
Nicholson Baker in his purported history of World War II (Human Smoke).
The volume sought to convey that there was no moral distinction to be made
between the Nazis and the Allies or between Hitler and Roosevelt. Anne Ap-
plebaum wrote, “He [Baker] has used his license as a ‘novelist’ to excuse
himself from all of the tedious work of genuine knowledge. By way of re-
search he has read back issues of the New York Times and New York Herald
Tribune. . . . From them he has plucked bits of information . . . that he finds
compelling. . . .” He accumulated an arbitrary “set of anecdotes” as a basis of
his pronouncements and insinuations.43
Also characteristic of the trends discussed here is the fact that on occasion
intellectuals themselves (especially those considering themselves public in-
tellectuals) take the role of entertainer and become willing participants in, or
purveyors of, popular culture. Cornel West records rap CDs and appears at
benefits with movie starts and famous athletes; the late Jean Baudrillard (de-
scribed as “one of France’s most celebrated philosophers”) “some years ago
. . . appeared on the stage of Whiskey Pete’s, near Las Vegas, wearing a gold
lame suit with mirrored lapels, and read a poem.”44 George Galloway, the
British member of parliament and prominent critic of the United States and
his own society (a public figure, if not exactly an intellectual) appeared on a
British television game show called Celebrity Big Brother, “imitating a cat,
nuzzling and purring on all fours and licking imaginary cream from the hands
 Introduction 15

of . . . [an] actress. . . .”45 Norman Mailer and Gore Vidal appeared in movies
in cameo roles; Susan Sontag made movies.
Two explanations may be suggested. One is that such individuals yearn for
publicity and celebrity status that can be furthered by exposure in the more
accessible mass media. The other explanation may be found in the embrace
of the relativism that erases the distinctions between entertainment and intel-
lectual expression, entertainment, and social criticism.
If supposedly serious public intellectuals sometimes act like entertainers,
even more frequently entertainers act like serious public intellectuals, porten-
tously offering their opinions on a wide range of political, social, economic,
and cultural issues and policies. They have been encouraged to play this role
by the respectful public attention they receive and the frequent invitations to
appear before various congressional committees.46 Politicians seeking to en-
large their own visibility rejoice in the association with popular entertainers.
As Leon Wieseltier observed, “Not since the 1960s have so many entertain-
ers believed that they can rescue the world.” While their uninformed idealism
is not in doubt, their influence is a good measure of the flaws of American po-
litical culture. Again, Wieseltier wrote, “they [celebrities] corrupt the con-
sciousness that they raise, because they confirm them in their belief in the
moral authority of fame. . . . Nothing more disfigures personal authenticity in
America than the veneration of celebrities. . . . It teaches Americans to live
vicariously passively, alienated from the possibilities of their lives, in slavish
imitation of people luckier than themselves.”47
Celebrities thus play multiple social roles: they dominate popular enter-
tainments, pronounce on weighty social, political, and economic issues, and
are also intimately involved in the world of commerce through their partici-
pation in advertising, endorsing a wide range of products and services.
The celebrity phenomenon brings together three major strands in American
culture: individualism, egalitarianism, and relativism. Individualism propels
people to engage in the single-minded pursuit of success (testified to by both
material rewards and recognition), and it underlies the desire to emerge from
anonymity; it also encourages the pursuit of one’s “true self.” The importance
placed upon the self, the craving for personal fame and success, has been in-
strumental in the rise of the public relations “industry,” dedicated to the un-
bridled pursuit of publicity. Egalitarianism and antielitism in turn promote the
quest for celebrity status by promising that it can be accomplished by virtu-
ally anybody, that no specific talents, qualifications, or prerequisites are
needed. Finally, relativism muddles the criteria as to the grounds on which a
person may deserve acclaim and admiration; it provides assurance that it mat-
ters little for what reason, on what grounds celebrity status is acquired and
promoted. Thus the self becomes a product to be sold, promoted, invented,
16 Introduction

and reinvented. Celebrity status is not merely gratifying for those who attain
it, it is also highly marketable in advertising and political campaigns.
While most celebrities are entertainers, broadly defined (including those in
competitive sports), no occupation is immune to the phenomenon: academics
like Cornel West may qualify, as does the real estate operator Donald Trump;
models and “supermodels” too can join their ranks, as do TV anchormen and
women of no discernible qualification or talent, as well as wealthy hostesses ap-
pearing on the society pages of major newspapers—anybody capable of gener-
ating and commanding publicity for virtually any reason. The proliferation of
celebrities also reflects the demand for novelty in the entertainment business
and popular demand for the “services” they provide as short-term role models
and objects of vicarious gratification. Celebrities fulfill fantasies of being beau-
tiful, rich, famous, powerful, and recipients of vast amounts of attention.
Celebrity worship has something in common with the fleeting and artificial
sense of community conjured by the shared support of a football or baseball
team. It is not a uniquely American phenomenon but one of the by-products
of modernity stimulated by the convergence of mass entertainments, dimin-
ished social ties, eroding communities, high expectations, and aspirations un-
supported by genuine talent or ability.
Popular culture, although primarily dedicated to entertainment, is not
wholly apolitical. It has been influenced by political correctness during the
last decades of the past century, especially in its presentation of “role mod-
els” for minorities, women, and those of alternative sexual orientation.

IV

A collection of my writings published twenty years ago was entitled The Sur-
vival of the Adversary Culture. There are many indications that this culture
has endured in the twenty-first century, replenished by new causes, move-
ments, and grievances while some of the old ones refuse to fade away. Jerold
Auerbach wrote, “arguments over American politics and culture still divide
along fault lines that opened during the sixties. . . . The sixties are long gone,
but the struggle over their meaning endures.” The revival of the adversarial
attitudes of the 1960s in recent American movies was shown by Ross
Douthat. In turn Wendy Kaminer observed that “New Age rhetoric . . . per-
meates our culture.”48 There are no better indicators of the connection be-
tween the present and the not-so-distant past than the persisting reverence for
the problematic idealism of the 1960s. For Studs Terkel, unrepentant Weath-
ermen activist Bill Ayers personified this lost idealism. Terkel characterized
Ayers’s memoirs (Fugitive Days) as “a deeply moving elegy to all those
young dreamers who tried to live decently in an indecent world.”49
 Introduction 17

Faith in the essential innocence of the Rosenbergs (executed for spying for
the Soviet Union) is another illustration of the durability of these attitudes—
a faith that has withstood the accumulation of all evidence to the contrary. A
recent Fordham University Law School Forum was devoted to them and their
supposed “artistic influence.” Tony Kushner, one of the featured speakers, ar-
gued that they were “murdered” while E. L. Doctorow proposed that the
Rosenberg case was fabricated to fan the flames of the Cold War and to im-
pose on the American public “a Puritan, punitive civil religion.” The moder-
ator warned the audience that they must not ask “disrespectful” questions.”50
In December 2005 a “landmark” conference on the state of American psy-
chotherapy took place in California attended by nine thousand psychologists,
social workers, and students. In the opening convocation “Dr. Hunter ‘Patch’
Adams—charismatic therapist played on screen by Robin Williams—dis-
played on a giant projection screen photos from around the world of burned
children, starving children, diseased children. . . . He called for a ‘a last stand
of loving care’ to prevail over the misery in the world . . . and ‘our fascistic
government.’ Overcome by his own message, Dr. Adams eventually fell to
the floor of the stage in tears.”51
If the casual attribution of “fascistic” to the U.S. government by the
keynote speaker provoked neither protest nor astonishment it might have
been because for many of those in the audience the atmosphere brought back
happy memories of the 1960s. Said one participant, “this is like a rock con-
cert for most of us”—offering another illustration of the entertainment orien-
tation of our times. A similar emblematic incident occurred at the Modern
Language Association meeting in December 2006 when Ariel Dorfman de-
livered what he called a “whimsical literary invention” intended as a parable
of what might happen in the United States if it were hit by “an even more dev-
astating and lethal terrorist attack” than that of 9/11. The “whimsical literary
invention”—that is, Dorfman’s imagined mistreatment by an already well-
established American police state—“had tapped into a deep paranoia”: his
“fictional account of detention . . . had resonated with unbridled fantasies” of
his audience. “Not one of my friends and associates at the convention . . . dis-
missed my tall tale as patently absurd. . . . My fraudulent yarn was apparently
all too terrifyingly plausible. . . .”52 That is to say, the assembled academics
were convinced that they already lived in a police state; they were the type of
people who (as Christopher Hitchens put it) considered John Ashcroft (or his
successor) a greater threat than Osama bin Laden.53 It may be recalled here
that in the 1960s too it was conventional wisdom among many on the left that
the United States was a police state.
The victim culture as a whole remains well and alive. Its more unusual
manifestations include a long confessional article of Naomi Wolf, the popu-
lar feminist author, recalling an incident twenty years ago that traumatized
18 Introduction

her for life: one of her professors in college put his hand on her thigh. Anne Ap-
plebaum commented: “Wolf’s article is not merely about that event (a secret that
she ‘can’t bear to carry around anymore’). The article is also about the lasting
damage that this single experience has wrought on a woman who has since writ-
ten a number of bestsellers, given hundreds of lectures, been featured on dozens
of talk shows and photographed in various glamorous postures. . . . Not that she
mentions her achievements. On the contrary she implies that this terrible expe-
rience left on a lasting mark on her . . . career.”54 Such wallowing in the victim
role is apparently fueled by self-pity and an evident satisfaction derived from
magnifying and nurturing the sufferings experienced. The attachment to vic-
timhood also rests on the moral distinction conferred by the acknowledged
victim status and, at another level, the tangible benefits of preferential treat-
ment accorded to those in the certified victim categories. Persisting in the self-
conception of victim yields further benefit by reducing responsibility for one’s
life and especially its difficulties; it also helps to legitimize the rejection of the
entire social system and perpetuate the role of the righteous social critic that
would be undermined by admitting to personal successes and accomplishments.
Alongside the attachment to victimhood (or at any rate, its politically cor-
rect varieties), “the inequality taboo”55 has also retained its prominence, es-
pecially in educational institutions as was manifest in the furor the president
of Harvard University created by cautiously entertaining the possibility that
the unequal scientific achievements of women may in part be explained by
genetic dispositions.56 The “inequality taboo” finds further expression in the
continued aversion to the rigorous evaluation of student performance in both
colleges and schools since such evaluations reveal substantial differences be-
tween the performance and aptitudes of students; it is also objected to on the
grounds that it enhances competition and penalizes minorities. A manifesta-
tion of this aversion has been the abandonment in many high schools of class
ranking, in order to “cut down on competition” as some school administrators
saw it. A school principal observed that “when they don’t rank, then they have
to look at the total child.”57 He did not explain how the “total child” was to
be evaluated and by what criteria. Such hankering “for the total child” (or the
total human being)—entailing the reluctance to recognize differences among
human beings and the aversion to making critical evaluations of them—was,
of course, also emblematic of the 1960s.
“Multiculturalism,” another article of faith of our times, can also be linked
to egalitarian values given its alleged belief in the equality of all cultures—
“alleged” because it routinely deprecates Western culture, produced by “dead
white males.” Closer inspection also reveals that the egalitarian-relativist mes-
sage of multiculturalism is contradicted and outweighed by affirmations of pride
in group identity based on some unique cultural heritage. In the final analysis
 Introduction 19

multiculturalism has little to do with culture; it is a political rather than cultural

phenomenon: “the multiculturalist’s real interest is not pedagogy but power, not
teaching but advocacy, not the history of the past but the politics of the present.”
Moreover, the “multicultural belief in the impossibility of transcending your
point of view applies in particular to . . . moral and political preferences.”58
In the final analysis, the declarations of an impartial relativism supporting
a nonjudgmental multiculturalism are negated by strongly held, and highly
judgmental, beliefs and convictions.
A recent expression of multiculturalism has been a new solicitousness on
campuses toward Islamic religion and culture. Following 9/11 faculties and
administrators often appeared to evince greater concern with a possible anti-
Islamic (or anti-Arab) backlash than with the dangers and threats of Islamic
terrorism. A notable manifestation of such attitudes was the newly required
freshmen reading assignment of the Koran at the University of North Car-
olina (discussed in one of the writings in part II of this volume).
Identity politics is another legacy of the 1960s and a prominent feature of
the current political and cultural landscape. It rests on the belief that political
attitudes and allegiances are, or ought to be, rooted in a shared group iden-
tity—racial, ethnic, or sexual. This belief is linked to a compensatory pursuit
of identity (“black is beautiful,” “gay pride”) on the part of racial, ethnic, and
sexual minorities who used to be (and sometimes still are) devalued and who
suffered discrimination. The victim status (former, current, or avowed) is an
important contributor to this sense of identity. Even physical handicaps can
be enlisted in this pursuit. Deaf students at Gallaudet University in Washing-
ton, D.C., consider “ deafness not a disability but . . . an identity” and many
reject implants and hearing aids “arguing that they undermine a strong deaf
identity and pride.” Such technologies are further rejected since they suppos-
edly imply that “deaf people are not good enough, they need to be fixed.”
These students insist that sign language is the only authentic communication
among the deaf compatible with their culture and identity.59 There were
protests against a new president not considered “deaf enough,”60 a notion
similar to the critiques of some black politicians not considered “black
enough.” The Gallaudet trustees eventually gave in to the protestors “in the
forefront of deaf-rights movement” who viewed the appointment as “an as-
sault on deaf culture and deaf identity.”61
The transformation of deafness from an affliction or disability into a “cul-
ture” and source of prideful identity illustrates not only the rise of identity
culture and its affinity with victimhood but also a desperate, and somewhat
confused, quest for identity and community in modern American society in
which a sense of identity and community has become increasingly difficult to
attain or retain.
20 Introduction

The attempts to change one’s sexual identity (with or without surgery) is

another manifestation of the same phenomenon—the problematic pursuit of
identity—most recently demonstrated by a proposal in New York City that
“would have allowed people to alter sex on their birth certificate without sex
change surgery.”62 These beliefs and attitudes are also closely related to cul-
tural relativism and the notion that sexual identity is “socially constructed”
and has a negligible or irrelevant biological basis. Thus identity becomes a
matter of personal (or group) definition and preference.
At last, the protests against the current war in Iraq also bring back memo-
ries of both the anti-Vietnam war protests of the 1960s and 1970s and those
against the 1991 Gulf War. All these antiwar protests rapidly mutated into
broad and impassioned critiques of American society and its major institu-
tions and often into expressions of warmth toward the adversaries of the
United States: the Vietcong and communist North Vietnam during the 1960s
and 1970s and, to a lesser extent, Sadam Hussein’s Iraq during the two Iraq
wars. An observer of a major antiwar demonstration in October 2005 wrote,
“the sheer number of grievances on offer overwhelmed the only one that
counted, what Washington endured this weekend wasn’t exactly an antiwar
march. It was anti-everything: Israel, the U.S. military, capitalism, colonial-
ism, Wal-Mart. . . . [A] catalogue of fringe causes and well-advertised sym-
pathy for dictatorships. . . .”63 Similar attitudes were apparent during the
“counterinaugural events” sponsored by the International Socialist Organiza-
tion that offered its support to the insurgents in Iraq.64 Characteristic of the
anticapitalist animus of the recent protests (recalling similar sentiments from
the 1960s and 1970s) has been the slogan and imagery of “blood for oil.” The
symbolic use of blood in the recent antiwar protests (as in the 1960s) was re-
vived by left-wing Catholic activists who “poured vials of their own blood . . .
onto the walls, windows and American flag” [in an Army recruiting center in
upstate New York]. They had activist parents of the 60s generation and mod-
eled themselves on the Berrigan brothers.” Frida Berrigan, daughter of the
late Philip Berrigan (famed 1960s protestor) was among them.65
Reminiscent of the radical Vietnam war protestors, Cindy Sheehan, promi-
nent present-day war protestor (and mother of a soldier killed in Iraq), was
led to embrace, literally and figuratively, Hugo Chavez of Venezuela, a
prominent enemy of her enemy (President Bush) as she appeared with him at
a rally in Caracas. Chavez assured her, “Cindy, we are with you in your fight.
. . .” As the New York Times noted, “Mr. Chavez has become a voice for many
opponents of the Bush administration policies who are drawn to his self-
styled socialist revolution and his close alliance with . . . Fidel Castro.”66 Pre-
sumably Sheehan, radicalized by the loss of her son, gave little thought to the
propaganda services she rendered to Chavez or to the kind of political system
he has been creating in Venezuela. She is among the growing number of new
 Introduction 21

political pilgrims who discovered Venezuela under Chavez as the current em-
bodiment of their hopes for a new socialist-revolutionary society. Cuba too
continues to claim the loyalties of many Western intellectuals and entertain-
ers including Harold Pinter, Nadine Gordimer, Harry Belafonte, and Tariq
Ali, who “signed a letter claiming that in Cuba ‘there has been not a single
case of disappearance, torture or extrajudicial execution since 1959. . . .’” 67
Even North Korea was occasionally given the benefit of doubt. In the spring
of 2006 the Harvard Alumni Association organized a tour of North Korea
(costing $636 per night), unlikely to be a critical fact-finding mission since
all such tours are strictly controlled by the North Korean authorities. The tour
memo instructed the tourists that they “will be expected to bow as a gesture
of respect at the statue of Kim Il Sung” and explained that such bowing is the
normal thing to do because “North Korea like every country, has its unique
protocols.”68 It is unlikely that the Harvard Alumni Association would have
organized a tour of apartheid-era South Africa and advise the travelers to ob-
serve apartheid since it was part of the “unique protocols” in that country.
As to my own views of the war in Iraq, I was pleased by the removal of
Sadam Hussein and his regime from power—an exceptionally brutal and re-
pressive dictatorship presided over by an exceptionally repellent human be-
ing.69 I was inclined to believe that almost anything that replaced his system
would be an improvement, including an Iraq splintered along ethnic lines.
Events following the initial American military success made clear that the
United States did not properly plan and conduct this intervention. Not enough
troops were used for keeping the peace after the victory, borders went un-
guarded, there was easy access to leftover military equipment; the insurrec-
tion was not anticipated, nor the pouring in of suicidal Islamic terrorists. The
proverbial unintended consequences have overwhelmed praiseworthy goals
(which might have been unrealizable to begin with) as the human and mate-
rial costs of this war continued to erode its initial accomplishments.70 There
also remains the difficult and unresolved question of whether it is possible to
bring democracy to places like Iraq where intolerant political-religious cul-
tures and traditions and ethnic hostilities are deeply entrenched. At the same
time, the elections held since the overthrow of Saddam have been accom-
plishments and Iraq currently appears to have a democratically elected gov-
ernment of otherwise dubious credentials and modest accomplishments. Un-
like in Vietnam, where the forces opposed to the United States had (at least
initially) substantial popular support, the Saddam regime was widely detested
except on the part of the Sunni minority, beneficiaries of his rule. There re-
mains a remote possibility that the recent troop “surge” could accomplish
something. In short I am not yet willing to conclude that the U.S. invasion
was a totally misguided effort, although at times (depending on the daily
news) I feel so.
22 Introduction

Some of the writings in this volume (mostly in part II) should make clear that
notwithstanding my longstanding critiques of the adversary culture I am well
aware of numerous flaws of American culture and society and of various poli-
cies of George W. Bush’s administration. I find its energy and environmental
policies particularly irresponsible, although it must be acknowledged that
they are congruent with widespread popular attitudes and preferences. These
popular attitudes find expression in indifference to conservation, specifically
in the popularity of SUVs driven by approximately half of the American pub-
lic. And while I do not consider capitalism the source of all, or most, evil, cap-
italism’s tendency to glorify consumption and its encouragement of the re-
lentless pursuit of material gain (recently testified to by the notorious
corporate scandals) taint many accomplishments of American society. I also
find misleading and wrongheaded the notion—zealously promoted by the ad-
vertising industry—that a solution for every human need and problem can be
found in the purchase of the appropriate goods or services.
While I do not believe that human beings are inherently or potentially
equal in their abilities or ethical dispositions, or that a wide range of inequal-
ities among them can be erased by well-intentioned government policies, nei-
ther do I believe that the survival of democratic capitalism requires or justi-
fies the exorbitant income differentials that exist in our society. The
astronomical incomes of the CEOs of major corporations and popular enter-
tainers (including athletes) seems to have little moral or economic justifica-
tion. At the same time I do not believe that these excesses and the underlying,
apparently insatiable, human desires are peculiar to Americans or the times
we live in. It may be, however, that American society provides more favor-
able conditions and greater incentives for the unfettered expression of these
impulses and inclinations by encouraging a notion that there should be no
limitation placed upon the material rewards reaped by successful individuals.
The pursuit of self-expression by elaborate consumption is as old as the end
of subsistence economy or access to a discretionary income. What is new is
that in this society (and some others in Western Europe) such impulses can be
expressed and gratified by larger numbers of people than in the past and that
people are routinely provided with an extraordinary range of choice in the
realm of consumption that was not available at other times, nor was such
choice available in other realms of life unrelated to consumption.
“Self-realization” pursued by owning and driving a Hummer (the large,
gas-guzzling vehicle originally designed for military use) and other similar
vehicles is a good example of the misguided expression of these impulses. It
represents not just conspicuous consumption and status seeking but also a
longing for at least symbolic power. Such yearnings found expression in the
 Introduction 23

apparent craze for the Toyota Land Cruiser, “the vehicle of choice for the Tal-
iban . . . and for Hollywood honchos like Tom Hanks and fashion executives
like Millard Drexler of J. Crew. . . .” One of these enthusiasts, “on his third
Land Cruiser,” was quoted saying, “If there’s a car to be crazy about, this is
it. . . . It’s easy to park because you can just push the other car out of the way.”
The article I quote from also discussed the great expenses incurred in the ac-
quisition of these vehicles, even when used and dilapidated. The writer con-
fessed with some pride to having bought one and getting it transported from
Los Angeles to New York at great expense, followed by spending “the equiv-
alent of a month’s rent on a studio apartment to park it in a 24-hour garage.”
She “felt this kind of desire before—for, say, a pair of Prada sandals.”71 There
was no attempt to explain what exactly accounted for the veneration of these
vehicles; it was implied that such devotion to a hunk of movable metal was a
romantic whimsy, something not fully rational but nonetheless to be readily
understood and indulged.

VI

Most of the pieces in this volume were written after I retired from teaching,
and the first draft of this introduction was written while I was staying tem-
porarily in a retirement community called “Leisure World” in Laguna Woods,
California. These circumstances were conducive to musings about living and
growing old in American society and about the advantages and disadvantages
of aging in a modern, as opposed to a more traditional, society.
Insofar as most traditional societies were (and are) poor, life expectancies
were much shorter and medical care inferior, which made aging more unpleas-
ant from the physical and material point of view. While the ranks of the old in
America continue to include many who are poor, most of them are far from des-
titute; tens of millions of the old can afford to pursue a life of leisure and at-
tempted personal fulfillment that was not available earlier in their own lives or
for similar age groups at other times. The “Leisure World” mentioned above is
an example of such comforts and conveniences. It is a gated community for
slightly over 20,000 people who must be over fifty-five; it was established in
the early 1960s, thoroughly and well planned, attractively landscaped, pro-
vided with several clubhouses and workshops offering a wide range of recre-
ational opportunities and the pursuit of hobbies. There are numerous large
swimming pools, golf courses, and tennis courts and a well-equipped com-
puter center, as well as scores of clubs and associations. Just outside the gates
are a large hospital, medical offices, and shopping malls. The children and
grandchildren of the residents live elsewhere but come to visit. Few of the
residents were born in the area. In this setting the old are as comfortable and
24 Introduction

carefree as can be; the inhabitants of Leisure World have been freed of the
routines and exertions of work; leisure is indeed in unlimited supply. In some
ways the place reminds one of the half-baked notions of Marx and his suc-
cessors of what communist society would be like and (in Soviet terminology)
its projected fostering the “all round development” of the lucky people who
will live in it.
While medically and economically far more deprived, it appears that the old
in traditional societies fared better in regard to more intangible benefits. They
occupied a more generously defined social space, had higher status, and were
accorded respect on account of their age—quite possibly undeserved on ra-
tional, meritocratic grounds but nonetheless agreeable for those upon whom it
was bestowed. The second great advantage these elders enjoyed in more tra-
ditional societies was the possession of religious beliefs and certitudes that
made the approaching end of life easier to accept. By contrast, I strongly sus-
pect that—notwithstanding widespread affirmations of belief in God, heaven,
and hell (repeatedly found in survey research)—most Americans, indeed most
of those living in modern secular societies, have no similarly comforting be-
liefs and correspondingly are poorly equipped to deal with their own death and
the deaths of those close to them. Quite possibly a large, deeply religious mi-
nority of Americans believes, and takes solace in the belief (as most people did
and still do in traditional societies), that death is not the irrevocable and mean-
ingless end and that there is some kind of continuity between life, death, and
afterlife. Notwithstanding the beliefs of this minority, modern American soci-
ety is replete with death-denying propensities and a youth cult; it is the setting
of the frenzied and often unseemly efforts of the old (under pressure by this
culture) to act and appear young. The latest notable addition to the long list of
these overreaching exhortations and assurances has been the (2006) book by
Gail Sheehy entitled Sex and the Seasoned Woman, which attempts to persuade
and reassure readers that aging is no obstacle to superb sexual performance
and fulfillment and that nothing should prevent Americans from endlessly
reinventing themselves. As Daphne Merkin observed, Sheehy is a virtuoso “in
keeping with the desires of a culture frantically dedicated to the pursuit of sil-
ver linings—ever on the lookout for evidence that life is not hard, death is not
final and it is never too late to make another, better choice. . . .”72 In a similar
spirit Eric Cohen and Leon R. Cass pointed out that

there is something weird about treating old age as a time of life when things
should always be “getting better.” While aging affords some people new possi-
bilities for learning and “growth” it also means—eventually and inevitably—the
loss of one’s vital powers. Some people may ride horses or climb mountains in
their seventies and eighties, just like in the commercials for anti-arthritis med-
ication but such . . . images offer a partial and misleading picture of the realities
 Introduction 25

of senescence. . . . Endless chatter about “healthy aging” is at bottom a form of

denial. . . . The nursing home refutes the dream of limitless progress toward age-
less bodies. . . .”73

Death and dying are still largely taboo topics; the old in America are en-
couraged to frolic and mimic the young; extending one’s life remains a major
preoccupation. Increasing numbers of people exchange or renovate body
parts for aesthetic and psychological, rather than medical, reasons. Selling
medications, cosmetics, and recreational services to the old and aging is a big
and growing business. The prevalent denial of death is, of course, a contra-
diction in a supposedly religious society. But Americans manage to combine
a robust, acted-out secularity with a less than fully convincing spirituality.
The paradoxes and incongruities of American social and cultural values
and practices mirror those of human nature. Like human beings, and espe-
cially those shaped by modernity, American society seeks to reconcile a wide
range of contradictory values, impulses, and desires. It is the most highly
evolved embodiment of these contradictory and mutually exclusive human at-
tributes and efforts, as well as the most determined to bridge the gaps between
them; therein lies its historical distinctiveness, strength, and weaknesses.

NOTES

1. See Paul Hollander, The Many Faces of Socialism (New Brunswick, N.J.: Trans-
action, 1984); The Survival of the Adversary Culture (New Brunswick, N.J.: Transac-
tion, 1988); Decline and Discontent (New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction, 1992); Dis-
contents: Postmodern and Postcommunist (New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction, 2002).
2. See, for example, Charles Duhigg, “Bilking the Elderly, with a Corporate As-
sist,” New York Times, May 20, 2007.
3. The Annual Oscar Award ceremonies in Hollywood (still awaiting an in-depth an-
thropological or social-psychological study) manifest some of these polarities. On these
occasions audiences and participants are treated to veritable orgies of implausible
humility, outpourings of fellow-feeling, affirmations of devotion to family, as well as
gratitude and love of mankind—all this against a background of the fierce competi-
tiveness, envy, backbiting, unrelenting ambition, and status-seeking prevalent in these
circles.
4. Daniel Boorstin’s reflections on celebrities remain unsurpassed after almost half
a century. See The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America (New York: Harper
& Row, 1961). For a recent instructive summation of the phenomenon, see Joseph Ep-
stein, “The Culture of Celebrity,” Weekly Standard, October 17, 2005.
5. For some chilling examples and examination of this rhetoric see Daniel Jonah
Goldhagen, “The New Threat: Radical Politics of Islamic Fundamentalism,” New Re-
public, March 13, 2006.
26 Introduction

6. Mark Steyn, “Islam Does Incubate Terrorism,” Daily Telegraph, July 12, 2005.
7. Ian Fisher, “Women, Secret Hamas Strength, Win Votes at Polls and New
Role,” New York Times, February 3, 2006, 1.
8. Brenda Goodman, “Defendant Offers Details of Jeep Attack at University,”
New York Times, March 8, 2006.
9. Slavoj Zizek, “Defenders of the Faith,” op-ed, New York Times, March 12, 2006.
10. David Brooks, “Trading Cricket for Jihad,” New York Times, August 4, 2005.
11. Suha Maayeh, “Gunmen Kills British Man and Wounds 6 in Jordan,” New York
Times, September 5, 2006. As to the belief in killing and redemption, an Arab suicide
bomber candidate explained, “by pressing the detonator, you can immediately open
the door to Paradise—it is the shortest path to Heaven.” In a training video for suicide
bombers the trainer asked, “Are you ready? Tomorrow you will be in Paradise.”
(Nasra Hassan, “An Arsenal of Believers,” New Yorker, November 19, 2001, 36, 37;
see also pp. 39, 40, 41). Young suicide bombers proudly display their “martyr pic-
tures” taken before the appropriate action. See, for example, Jeffrey Goldberg, “The
Forgotten War,” New Yorker, September 11, 2006, 45. Further illustration of this men-
tality may be found in the distribution of a half a million “small plastic keys” by the
Iranian authorities during the Iraq-Iran war to the young, including children of twelve,
who were used to clear minefields with their bodies. “Before each mission one of
[these] keys would be hung around each child’s neck. It was supposed to open the
gates to paradise. . . .” (Matthias Kuntzel, “Ahmadinejad’s Demons,” New Republic,
April 14, 2006, 15).
12. The gist of the root cause argument is that Islamic terrorism has been a prod-
uct of the dire conditions in the Arab world for which the United States or Western
countries are responsible. Gore Vidal (among many others) subscribed to this idea
and even suggested that “our ruling junta might have seriously provoked” both the
Oklahoma City bombing in 1995 and 9/11 attacks. See his Perpetual War for Per-
petual Peace (New York: Nation Books, 2002), x. For a critical discussion of the root
cause theory, see “Walter Reich: The Poverty Myth,” Wilson Quarterly (Winter
2008). See also Adam Garfinkle, “How We Misunderstood Terrorism,” Orbis (Sum-
mer 2008).
13. Brooks, “Trading Cricket for Jihad.”
14. I discovered subsequently that Francis Fukuyama made the same observation:
“Radical Islamism is a by-product of modernization itself, arising from the loss of
identity that accompanies the transition to a modern, pluralist society.” “After Neo-
conservativism,” New York Times Magazine, February 19, 2006, 67. The resistance to
assimilation to modern Western societies (on the part of Islamic populations) is illus-
trated by “imans petitioning National Health Service hospitals [in Britain] insisting
that patient’s beds be turned to Mecca five times a day . . . [and] female Muslim sur-
geons refusing to scrub their bare arms” (Michael Burleigh, “Some European Per-
spectives on Terrorism,” Foreign Policy Research Institute, Philadelphia, May 22,
2008, available online).
15. Pankaj Mishra, An End to Suffering (New York: MacMillan, 2004), 394.
16. Aldous Huxley provided a classic analysis of these processes in political propa-
ganda. See his “Words and Behavior” in his Collected Essays (New York: Harper, 1959).
 Introduction 27

17. Quoted in Alvaro Vargas Llosa, “The Killing Machine,” New Republic, July 11
and 18, 2005, 26, 25, 29.
18. “With all the shirts adorned with the solemn face of . . . Che Guevara being
sold in the city’s souvenir shops, one would think he had once adopted New York and
not Cuba as his home. . . . More than 45 years later . . . Che is all over as fashion state-
ment.” (David Gonzales, “A Cuban Revolution, Forged in the Reading Room,” New
York Times, February 22, 2005.) At an auction in Dallas, Texas, an admirer paid
$100,000 for a lock of Che Guevara’s hair (Mark Lacey, “Lone Bidder Buys Strands
of Che’s Hair at U.S. Auction,” New York Times, October 26, 2007). Another idealized
presentation of Che Guevara was the movie “Che” by Steven Soderberg that “sought
to preserve the romantic notion of Guevara as a martyr and an iconic figure, an ide-
alistic champion of the poor and oppressed” (“Cannes Journal,” Entertainment Sec-
tion, New York Times, May 23, 2008).
19. Juan Forero, “Indians in Bolivia Celebrate Swearing In of One of Their Own,”
New York Times, January 23, 2006, A5.
20. Duncan Campbell, “U.S. Bases in Britain,” Sanity [London], May 1984, 16.
21. George F. Kennan, Sketches from a Life (New York: Pantheon, 1989), 49–50.
22. Martin F. Herz, ed., Decline of the West? George Kennan and His Critics
(Washington, D.C.: Ethics and Public Policy Center, 1978), 32. For a far more bal-
anced view of American culture see Salman Rushdie, “Rethinking the War on Amer-
ican Culture,” New York Times, op-ed, March 5, 1999.
23. For a further discussion of the apparent sources of the resurgence of anti-
Americanism, see the introduction in Paul Hollander, ed., Understanding Anti-Ameri-
canism: Its Origins and Impact at Home and Abroad (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2004).
For massive quantitative evidence of this resurgence, see Andrew Kohut and Bruce
Stokes, America against the World: How We Are Different and Why We Are Disliked
(New York: Times Books, 2006).
24. Josef Joffe wrote, “Between Vietnam and Iraq, America’s cultural presence has
expanded into ubiquity, and so has the resentment of America’s soft power. . . . These
American products shape images, not sympathies, and there is little, if any relation-
ship between artifact and affection. . . . The relationship is . . . one of repulsion rather
than attraction . . .” (“The Perils of Soft Power,” New York Times Magazine, May 14,
2006, 15–16).
25. Daniel Johnson, “America and the America-Haters,” Commentary, June 2006,
29, 30. See also Andrei Markovits, Uncouth Nation: Why Europe Dislikes America
(Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2007).
26. Sarah Lyall, “Playwright Takes a Prize and a Jab at U.S.,” New York Times, De-
cember 8, 2005.
27. Noam Chomsky, “Some Thoughts on Intellectuals and the Schools,” Harvard
Educational Review, no. 4 (Fall 1966): 485.
28. Vidal, Perpetual War for Perpetual Peace, 20–21, 25.
29. Quoted in Alexander Cockburn, The Golden Age Is in Us: Journeys and En-
counters (London: Verso, 1995), 149.
30. Lewis H. Lapham, “We Now Live in an Fascist State,” Harper’s Magazine,
October 2005, 7–9.
28 Introduction

31. Daniel Johnson, “America and the America-Haters,” 28.

32. Paul A. Trout, “How Countless Your Sins: Anti-American Rhetoric and the
Prophetic Tradition,” Texas Review (Fall/Winter 2005): 97, 99.
33. Quoted in Alvin Rosenfeld, “Modern Jewish Intellectual Failure,” Society
(November–December 2005): 16. An outstanding example of these anti-Israeli senti-
ments has been the much discussed piece “The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy”
by John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt (London Review of Books, March 23, 2006).
For three critical discussions of the article in the New Republic, see Benny Morris,
“And Now for Some Facts” (May 8, 2006), Martin Peretz, “Oil and Vinegar” (April
10, 2006), and Michael B. Oren, “Quiet Riot” (April 10, 2006). For a defense of the
Mearsheimer/Walt argument, see Tony Judt, “A Lobby, Not a Conspiracy,” op-ed,
New York Times, April 19, 2006. For a comprehensive rebuttal, see Ben Fishman,
“The ‘Israel Lobby’: A Realistic Assessment,” Orbis (Winter 2008).
34. “World Briefing: Britain: Journalists Vote to Boycott Israeli Goods,” New York
Times, April 17, 2007; and Alan Cowell, “Largest Labor Union in Britain Joins Call
for a Boycott of Israel,” New York Times, June 1, 2007.
35. Rosenfeld cited, p. 21. For an outstanding example of the rejection of Israel by
a prominent Israeli politician/intellectual (Avraham Burg), see Hillel Halkin, “A
Wicked Son,” Commentary, September 2007.
36. Quoted in Emily Eakin, “The Theory of Everything, R.I.P.,” Week in Review,
New York Times, October 17, 2004. More recently (further repudiating his earlier po-
sitions), Fish proposed that “academics should teach not proselytize” and declared
“the invasion of political agendas into the classroom . . . extremely dangerous.”
(Rachel Donadio, “Revisiting the Canon Wars,” New York Times Book Review, Sep-
tember 16, 2007, 17.)
37. Susan Shell, review, “Richard Wolin: The Seduction of Unreason: The Intel-
lectual Romance with Fascism from Nietzsche to Postmodernism,” Society (January–
February 2006): 95.
38. “The Restaurant Mogul’s Retreat,” New York Times Magazine, February 11,
2007.
39. Michael Wilson: “A Stolen Love Is Found, 37 Years Down the Road,” New
York Times, January 17, 2006. The editors considered the story so important that they
put it on the front page, with a photo of the vehicle. Its continuation on page 19 had
two more photos of the happy owner as a young man and at the present time. The
three television networks each had the story as the last item on the evening news in-
tended as the heartwarming “human interest” conclusion.
40. Carol Ianone, “Reading Literature: Decline and Fall?” Academic Question
(Summer 2005): 14. A study in 2004 found that 53 percent of Americans surveyed had
not read in the previous year a single novel, play, or poem (Steve Wasserman, “Good-
bye to All That,” Columbia Journalism Review [September–October 2007]: 20). For
a recent book-length discussion of such trends, see Susan Jacoby, The Age of Ameri-
can Unreason (New York: Pantheon, 2008). See also “To Read or Not to Read: Sym-
posium,” Academic Questions (Spring 2008).
41. Michiko Kakutani, “Bending the Truth in a Million Little Ways,” New York
Times, Arts Section, January 17, 2006, 8. In another similar literary fraud, author Mar-
 Introduction 29

garet Seltzer invented her “life as a foster child in gang-infested South-Central Los
Angeles.” See Motoko Rich, “Lies and Consequences: Tracking the Fallout of (An-
other) Literary Fraud,” New York Times, March 5, 2008.
42. Daniel Mendelsohn, “Stolen Suffering,” op-ed, New York Times, March 9,
2008.
43. Anne Applebaum, “The Blog of War,” New Republic, May 28, 2008, 42.
44. Deborrah Solomon, “Questions for Jean Baudrillard,” New York Times Maga-
zine, November 20, 2005, 22; “Men of Letters: Baudrillard On Tour,” New Yorker,
November 28, 2005, 62.
45. Alan Cowell, “Britain Is Watching ‘Big Brother,’ for an Eccentric Politician’s
On-Screen Escapades,” New York Times, January 14, 2006, A6.
46. For an illuminating examination of “the Hollywood foreign policy establish-
ment,” see Richard Grenier, “Hollywood’s Foreign Policy: Utopianism Tempered by
Greed,” National Interest (Summer 1991).
47. Leon Wieseltier, “The African Queen,” New Republic, October 24, 2005, 34.
For a remarkable report on the excesses of the celebrity cult and the media see David
Samuels, “Shooting Brittney,” The Atlantic, April 2008.
48. Jerold S. Auerbach, “Means and Ends in the 1960s,” Society (September–
October 2005): 13. Ross Douthat, “The Return of the Paranoid Style,” The Atlantic,
April 2008. Wendy Kaminer, Sleeping with Extra-Terrestrials (New York: Pantheon
1999), 13.
49. Quoted in Ronald Radosh, “Don’t Need a Weatherman: The Clouded Mind of
Bill Ayers,” Weekly Standard, October 8, 2001, 38. More surprisingly, Barack Obama
could not bring himself to renounce his friendly relationship to him: “Asked about his
friendly relationship with the former Weather Underground anarchist William Ayers
. . . Obama defended him with a line that only eggheads orbiting his campaign could
appreciate. Ayers, he said, was ‘a professor of English in Chicago.’” (Maureen Dowd,
“Brush It Off,” New York Times, April 20, 2008.) Ayers is closely examined in my
book The End of Commitment: Intellectuals, Revolutionaries, and Political Morality
(Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2006).
50. Joseph Rago, “Rosenberg Reruns,” Wall Street Journal, January 27, 2006.
51. Benedict Carey, “Psychotherapy on the Road to . . . Where?” Science Section,
New York Times, December 17, 2005.
52. Ariel Dorfman, “It’s No Joke Anymore,” Los Angeles Times, January 15, 2006,
M3.
53. Christopher Hitchens, “Taking Sides,” Nation, October 14, 2002, 9.
54. Anne Applebaum, “I Am Victim,” Washington Post, February 25, 2004.
55. Charles Murray, “The Inequality Taboo,” Commentary, September 2005. See
also Linda Chavez, “Let Us by All Means Have an Honest Conversation about Race,”
Commentary, June 2008; and John McWhorter, “Against Reparations,” New Repub-
lic, July 23, 2001.
56. See, for example, Martin Peretz, “Summer’s End,” New Republic, March 6,
2006.
57. Alan Finder, “High Schools Avoid Class Ranking, Vexing Colleges,” New York
Times, March 5, 2006.
30 Introduction

58. Max Hocutt, “Black Teachers for Black Studies? A Philosophical Critique of
Multiculturalist Pedagogy,” Independent Review (Summer 2004): 130, 131. For a
cognate discussion of “therapeutic alienation” see John McWhorter, “Americans
without Americannes,” National Review, April 16, 2007.
59. Diana Jean Schemo, “Turmoil at Gallaudet Reflects Broader Debate over Deaf
Culture,” New York Times, October 21, 2006.
60. “National Briefing,” New York Times, October 7, 2006.
61. Diana Jean Schemo, “At Gallaudet Trustees Relent on Leadership,” New York
Times, November 30, 2006.
62. Damien Cave, “No Change in Definition of Gender,” New York Times, De-
cember 6, 2006.
63. Lawrence F. Kaplan, “Mall Rats,” New Republic, October 10, 2005, 10.
64. T. A. Frank, “Washington Diarist: Left Out,” New Republic, February 7, 2005.
65. Michelle York, “After Hung Jury, 4 Who Poured Blood at Army Center Face
Federal Trial,” New York Times, September 18, 2005; Clyde Haberman, “Carnage
There but Not Much Happens Here,” New York Times, March 21, 2006.
66. “Antiwar Campaigner Speaks on Chavez Broadcast,” New York Times, January
29, 2006. See also Juan Forero, “Visitors Seek a Taste of Revolution in Venezuela,”
New York Times, March 21, 2006; Ian Buruma, “Thank You, My Foolish Friends in
the West,” Sunday Times [London], May 15, 2006; and Franklin Foer, “The Talented
Mr. Chavez,” The Atlantic, May 2006. Tariq Ali, the aging British “new leftist,” also
joined the admirers of Chavez (see his “Diary” in the London Review of Books, June
21, 2007) as have the Hollywood celebrities Sean Penn, Danny Glover, and Harry Be-
lafonte (“Celebrity Fans,” Newsweek, September 3, 2007).
67. Quoted in Buruma, “Thank You, My Foolish Friends in the West.”
68. Deborah Orin, “Harvard Loves a Thug,” New York Post (online edition), May
1, 2006.
69. See, for example, Kanan Makiya, Republic of Fear: The Politics of Modern
Iraq (Berkeley: University Press of California, 1989).
70. For an example of thoughtful soul-searching regarding Iraq, see Michael Ig-
natieff, “Getting Iraq Wrong,” New York Times Magazine, August 5, 2007. For a cri-
tique of what has been often been called “triumphalism” and its contribution to Amer-
ican involvement in Iraq see the introduction and chapter 22 in Tony Judt,
Reappraisals (New York: Penguin Press, 2008).
71. “Why a Truck? And Not Just Any Truck,” Alix Browne “On the Cult of the
Toyota Land Cruiser,” New York Times, Style, February 20, 2005.
72. Daphne Markin, “What’s So Hot About 50? Sex and the Female Boomer Is
NOT Booming,” New York Times Magazine, February 12, 2006, 17.
73. Eric Cohen and Leon R. Kass, “‘Cast Me Not off in Old Age,’” Commentary,
January 2006, 34.
 I

THE NEW ANTI-AMERICANISM

 Chapter One

Anti-Americanism and a World-Class

Hate Crime

The September 11, 2001, suicide attacks on the United States were the purest
hate crime imaginable, and the vast majority of Americans have responded to
them with unalloyed pain and anger. But among a significant minority, another
response has made an appearance. Conditioned by a venerable anti-American
impulse, it seeks not only to find explanations for the terrorists’ actions but to
make the United States responsible for its own misfortune. And it is especially
in evidence on the campuses of American colleges and universities, and in the
communities that surround them—the very places, ironically, that routinely
promote the idea that hate crimes belong to a special category of offense that
deserves no sympathetic understanding and the strictest punishment.
At Harvard, students hoist a sign that declares “War Is Also Terrorism.”
One of my colleagues at the University of Massachusetts sends out an e-mail
pleading that we find “ways to reduce those alienating actions whereby we
create our own enemies.” In a widely circulated e-mail, feminist poet Robin
Morgan excuses the attacks as not just the work of madmen or monsters, but
as tactics that “come from a complex set of circumstances, including despair
over not being heard.”
Unfortunately, it is not true, as writer George Packer recently argued in the
New York Times magazine, that September 11 destroyed “the notion . . . that
to be stirred by national identity, carry a flag and feel grateful toward some-
one in uniform ought to be a source of embarrassment.” Far from it. Writing
only days after the attacks, the Nation’s Katha Pollitt, for example, declared
her conviction that the American flag “stands for jingoism and vengeance.”
The champions of global peace and social justice readily rise to moral indig-
nation and anger against the United States but appear incapable of similar sen-
timents against the terrorists. Concern for the unintended victims of American

33
34 Chapter One

action against the terrorists and the nations that harbor them greatly outweighs
compassion toward the actual and wholly intentional victims of September 11.
Historian Eric Foner, writing in the London Review of Books, cannot decide
“which is more frightening: the horror that engulfed New York City or the apoc-
alyptic rhetoric emanating daily from the White House.”
At the core of these attitudes is anti-Americanism, which I define as a his-
torically specific expression of a universal scapegoating impulse, a type of
bias similar to racism, sexism, or anti-Semitism, and a largely irrational, of-
ten visceral aversion to the United States and its government, domestic insti-
tutions, prevailing values, culture, and people fueled by a variety of frustra-
tions and grievances. It culminates in the feeling, memorably expressed by a
Hamas leader, that “America is the problem that lies behind all other prob-
lems.” Those within our shores who harbor these sentiments have seized on
the events of September 11 to express renewed hostility toward our society.
America’s homegrown critics hold the peculiar conviction that if hatred of
the sort that led to the destruction of the World Trade Center is directed at the
United States, there must be good and justifiable reason for it. Yet these same
critics never seem to take such a position in regard to victims of other hate
crimes. Many of those habitually critical of this society (and claiming a de-
sire to “understand” why it is hated while simultaneously believing that such
hatred is fully justified) support severe punishment for hate crimes without
seeking to understand the grievances and resentments that produce them.
They do not ask what battered women have done to justify their mistreatment,
or what it is in the behavior of homosexuals or blacks that stimulates virulent
hatred. Nor do they seek to “understand” or to plumb the “root causes” be-
hind the actions of the wife beater or those who assault or murder gays.
These critics take for granted that certain groups of people are hated and
assaulted for no good (that is, moral or ethical) reason, that consuming hatred
culminating in violent actions is not necessarily something justified by
weighty, extenuating social causes. It is only when people have some sympa-
thy with the violent act and its perpetrator that they start looking for root
causes, to “understand” the aggressor and something in the behavior or atti-
tude of the victim that shifts at least some of the responsibility from victim-
izer to victim.
It is an unhappy fact that some groups and individuals thrive on hatred, on
holding others responsible for their grievances, whatever they may be. Most
people have such tendencies in moderation: It is far more satisfactory to find
the source of our problems outside ourselves. In most instances such inclina-
tions do not culminate in obsessive hatred and violence against the alleged or
imagined source of the grievances. But they did in the case of the attacks on
the United States. Those attacks (as well as recent suicide bombings in Israel)
 Anti-Americanism and a World-Class Hate Crime 35

originate in intense, irrational anti-Americanism and in the hatred of Israel

and Jews. What inspires these hatreds is modernity. The United States has be-
come a symbol of and scapegoat for modernity—which is at once liberating
and destabilizing.
The problems modernity creates are not primarily those of poverty (which it
more often alleviates than aggravates) but loss of meaning, the erosion of a co-
herent worldview, and the anxieties created by personal freedom. Traditional
societies, though poor, used to be capable of providing their members with a
stable, religiously grounded worldview. Modernity undermines this worldview
and the sense of certainty and community associated with it. The cultural rela-
tivism and moral uncertainty that modernity unwittingly stimulates lie at the
heart of the protest against globalization, the West, and the United States. In the
Arab world, Israel is hated as much for being an outpost of modernity and West-
ern values as it is for occupying lands claimed by Palestinians.
It is an interesting question as to why the anger and resentment over these
developments have been particularly intense in Islamic societies. Clearly, the
expectation of suicide bombers and pilots that great otherworldly rewards
await them has a connection with their religious beliefs. But it is also true that
history abounds with examples of ruthless assault on the targets of murderous
hatred inspired by other kinds of perverted idealism, from Stalin’s purges to
the Holocaust.
The pathology of such hate crimes does require a better understanding—
but not a new round of self-flagellation. To help us determine how to combat
the terrorists who attacked us, it is certainly worthwhile to learn what they
have in common in regard to motivation, personality type, life experience, ed-
ucation, social class, and so on. We already know that many of these individ-
uals come from settings where violence is glorified and legitimated, where
suicide bombing is seen as a sacred mission and people dance in the streets at
the news of mass murders (such as those committed in New York and Wash-
ington), where individual killers joyously show their bloody hands on televi-
sion (as did the killers of two Israeli soldiers on the West Bank), celebrating
violence against their enemies unembarrassed.
These and other socio-historical conditions do not provide moral license or
mitigation for indiscriminate mass murder by individuals who, from all indi-
cations, choose their actions freely, with utmost deliberation and under no
compulsion other than the prodding of their beliefs. Hard as it may be to ac-
cept, the recent suicide attacks are the purest expression of a pathological ha-
tred, fanaticism, and irrationality that deserves no sympathetic understanding.
 Chapter Two

Anti-Americanism:
Murderous and Rhetorical

I was in Budapest, Hungary, on September 11, 2001, and learned about the at-
tacks in a new shopping center where TV sets were tuned to CNN. I was, of
course, unprepared for the news and thought that this was some kind of docu-
drama using the title “Attack on America.”
Once more a major historical event was totally unanticipated. Other forms
of terrorism had been discussed over the years, but not the use of hijacked
planes against buildings. The actual devastation was less disturbing than the
easy triumph of evil. As a social scientist, I am not supposed to think of “evil”
as an acceptable concept. We know that desirable and undesirable traits are
part of all human beings, that a sharp delineation between good and evil is a
primitive notion. Yet I could not help thinking of evil, even though the use of
such an archaic concept without underlying religious beliefs is problematic.
But some phenomena compel its use, for instance, the gas chambers, torture
to extract false confessions (as in the Communist show trial), the Gulag, the
lynching of blacks in the United States, as well as nonpolitical crimes in-
volving gratuitous brutality and the apparent pleasure in its display. Surely the
deliberate, carefully planned mass murder of civilians whose only “crime”
was being Americans qualifies as an act of evil.
In contrast to the moral outrages of the past century, the latest was not the
product of some impersonal design committed in the spirit of “obedience to
authority” by people indifferently playing their roles in an elaborate division
of labor. These were a handful of highly motivated individuals under no com-
pulsion except their beliefs and hatreds, inspired by a mixture of religious-
political ideas and a willingness to destroy themselves for the sake of de-
stroying thousands of others. They were moved by a consuming hatred and
determination to deal a staggering blow to their perceived enemies and their
material incarnation.
36
 Anti-Americanism: Murderous and Rhetorical 37

This was a classic hate crime against the United States and all that it sym-
bolizes: modernity, global power, Western values, and support for Israel. Such
intense hatred can only be appeased by murderous violence, and those con-
sumed by it do not mind destroying themselves. That is what distinguishes
this act from other acts of terror. Members of the Red Brigades, the Baader-
Meinhof gang, the IRA, the Basque terrorists, the Weathermen, and the Black
Liberation Army were not animated by religious beliefs promising generous
otherworldly rewards. By contrast, the suicide pilots (and suicide bombers in
Israel) expected paradise to await them for their good works of killing.
Religious beliefs, although powerful, are only a part of the explanation;
there is also a political culture of murderous hatred that Arab countries pro-
duce and maintain. In Palestinian refugee camps and religious schools, chil-
dren are taught to hate Israel and its supporters; the mass media routinely dis-
seminate this hatred—blessed by religious authorities—even in more
moderate Arab countries like Egypt and Saudi Arabia.
In these political cultures violence is glorified, suicide bombing is a sacred
mission, and people dance in the streets at the news of mass murders such as
those committed at the World Trade Center. A good visual representation of
this political culture may be found in pictures (often seen on television) of
Arab crowds demonstrating with faces contorted with hatred, wildly gesticu-
lating and screaming for the blood of their enemies.
In Hungary, a former communist country, it was especially tempting to
speculate on the connections between “theory and practice,” that is, Islamic
beliefs and the violence they seemingly inspire. I think there is a similarity
between the relationship of Marxism to communist states and Islamic reli-
gious teachings’ relationship to the political violence they apparently in-
spire and legitimize. To be sure, Marx cannot be held responsible for Stalin,
the KGB, the purges, and the Gulag. But there was some connection be-
tween the great ideals he articulated and the ruthlessness employed on their
behalf by the communist leaders seeking to implement them. Likewise, Is-
lamic beliefs may not explicitly demand or justify the indiscriminate killing
of noncombatants, but they certainly encourage crusades, merciless strug-
gles against the numerous incarnations of the enemy. They certainly do not
encourage tolerance toward the infidel. Furthermore, the allure of sacred
martyrdom is a religious notion, not one invented by the individuals in
question. Moreover, the families of suicide bombers are very well taken
care of by various Arab states and organizations and enjoy a privileged sta-
tus in their community. Thus, both moral and material incentives are in
place to motivate terrorists.
In the days following September 11 I spent much time watching CNN and
Hungarian television, reading the whole spectrum of newspapers, and re-
flecting on the disturbing questions these events raised. After my return to the
38 Chapter Two

United States on September 22 I continued to ponder both the Hungarian and

American responses.
In Hungary, as in this country, the vast majority condemned the atrocities
without reservations. There was astonishment that this powerful country
could have proven to be so vulnerable. Some intellectuals could not resist the
notion that if the United States inspired such murderous hatred there must
have been sound reasons for it. One Hungarian columnist wrote,

We must reflect on the causes. Behind the irrational, unrestrained evil there must
be rational reasons. . . . It is impossible to overlook that this world is unjust and
lacking in solidarity; that there are intolerable differences between the free and
rich world and the starving millions who live like pariahs. . . .
When someone is impoverished for years and decades, his children dying of
hunger or the diseases of poverty, in despair he can reach for violence looking
for scapegoats. . . .
We must scrutinize our evil, our selfishness. The civilized world also de-
stroys, both people and nature. . . .

Not unlike some of his American colleagues, this author makes an exceed-
ingly dubious connection between destitution and the suicide pilots (and their
organizers) who were in fact well-educated, prosperous individuals of middle-
or upper-middle-class backgrounds. Their hatred had little discernible con-
nection with the bitterness that poverty generates.
The most determined attribution of American responsibility for the terror-
ist acts came from the radical right-wing party MIEP (the Hungarian Party of
Justice and Life) and its leader Istvan Csurka who said “this [event] was not
unexpected, it had to happen. The oppressed people of the world could not
tolerate without a counterblow the humiliations, the exploitation and the pur-
poseful genocide taking place in Palestine.” This same politician also had
suggested that Israeli capitalists investing in shopping malls in Hungary were
not merely interested in profit but wished to inject alien cultural influences
into Hungarian life.
Another Hungarian commentator put his finger on the anti-American sen-
timents and ambivalence coloring the responses of some of his fellow coun-
trymen: “Those who believe that this was the day when justice was done cry
with one eye and laugh with the other. . . . This was payment for Hollywood,
for chewing gum, Vietnam and the malls. For globalization that equals Amer-
ica. All those who demonized the International Currency Fund, the World
Bank, McDonalds and Uncle Sam are now content. . . .”
Upon returning to America, I also found that this horrendous atrocity could
provide an occasion for giving new expression to a long simmering, intense,
and gnawing hostility toward this society and everything it stands for. This
 Anti-Americanism: Murderous and Rhetorical 39

unprecedented outrage was seized upon by some to vent hostility not seen
since the Vietnam War. Predictably these sentiments and attitudes were most
pronounced on campuses and among academic intellectuals.
The question most frequently—and almost gleefully—asked and all too
readily answered (by critics of the United States) was “Why do they hate
us?” It was taken for granted that if people hated the United States they had
to have sound, justifiable reasons that led to the regrettable, but fully under-
standable mass murders. Often the same people were the staunchest advo-
cates of hate crime legislation (when the victims were women, homosexuals,
or other minorities) with no questions asked about the “root causes” of such
despicable behavior or about the ways the victims might have brought these
misfortunes upon themselves. In such instances it was either tacitly ac-
knowledged or vocally asserted that hate crimes are pathologies that need to
be punished without mercy and without any consideration of extenuating so-
cial circumstances.
Not so when it came to the events of September 11. In its aftermath the
search was on for “root causes,” for “understanding” the terrorists and their
actions. Attention and responsibility was shifted from victimizer to victim.
The common thread running through the critiques of the United States was
the notion of moral equivalence many of the same people used earlier in com-
parisons of the United States and the Soviet Union. Russell Mead, the Native
American activist, compared the American responses to “what I used to see
when I was behind the so called [sic] Iron Curtain touring Eastern Europe. . . .
[These responses] increased the fear I’ve always had of the ongoing depriva-
tion of individual liberties . . . by the federal government. My concern is that
the government has . . . become an outlaw.” Michael Mandel, a law profes-
sor, declared that “the bombing of Afghanistan is the legal and moral equiv-
alent of what was done to Americans on September 11.”
Another major theme, as expressed by Vivian Gornick, was that “Force
will get us nowhere. It is reparations that are owing, not retribution.” Richard
Gere, the actor, advised people to look upon the terrorists “as a relative who’s
dangerously sick and we have to give them medicine, and the medicine is
love and compassion.” The general secretary of the American Friends Service
Committee proclaimed that “Our grief is not a cry for retaliation. Terrorism
must be stopped at its root cause. . . .”
It soon became apparent that the “root causes” were American foreign pol-
icy, domestic social injustice, global insensitivity, arrogance, and greed. A
correspondent for the British newspaper the Guardian wrote, “During my
lifetime, America has been constantly waging war against much of humanity:
impoverished people mostly. . . . It is this record of unabashed national ego-
tism and arrogance that drives anti-Americanism. . . .” Edward Said made
40 Chapter Two

clear on the pages of an Egyptian newspaper that the United States is a geno-
cidal power with a “history of reducing whole peoples, countries, and even
continents to ruin by nothing short of holocaust.”
It is no mystery why the embittered domestic critics of the United States
have been so preoccupied with the question of “why they hate us.” The bet-
ter and more abundant reasons they find the more they rest assured that their
own hostility and alienation are well founded.
 Chapter Three

The Politics of Envy

Until recently, anti-Americanism attracted little serious attention among so-

cial scientists and intellectuals. Apparently it was not considered worthy of
study or close scrutiny, because it was rarely seen as a pathology that required
better understanding. Unlike other more researched, consensually reprehensi-
ble attitudes and prejudices, such as racism, sexism, anti-Semitism, and ho-
mophobia, anti-Americanism was regarded among the intelligentsia as a
more or less natural phenomenon, perhaps regrettable but easy to explain and
largely justified.
Admittedly, anti-Americanism is not easy to study given its diffuseness,
varieties, endless sources, and the difficulty in locating it on the spectrum of
political attitudes and positions. Anti-Americanism may be associated with
radical revolutionaries or with the guardians of traditional moralities and so-
cial orders. There is anti-Americanism on the left as well as the right. Intense
anti-Americanism sometimes makes the extreme right and extreme left hard
to distinguish from one another.
Anti-Americanism can be found in both highly developed, complex West-
ern societies and in the most backward ones of the Third World; it can be
found in the remaining communist states as well as the postcommunist ones.
Identification and analysis are complicated by their tendencies to shade into
ambivalence.
Anti-American rhetoric often denigrates the United States by comparing
and equating it with something self-evidently worse, such as Nazi Germany,
the former Soviet Union, or apartheid-era South Africa. During the Cold War,
anti-Americanism found expression in the moral-equivalence thesis that held
there was little to choose from, morally speaking, between the United States
and the Soviet Union. Even in this comparative framework, the United States

41
42 Chapter Three

was, as a rule, savaged with far greater relish and specificity while critiques
of the Soviet system were few and perfunctory.
Paradoxically, anti-Americanism has always coexisted with a fervent de-
sire of vast numbers of people around the world to come and live in this
much-maligned country; to this day it remains difficult to keep them out.
Even those who harbor no such aspirations widely imitate American fashions,
fads, and patterns of consumption and look to American mass culture for en-
tertainment. In light of these observations it is tempting to suggest that anti-
Americanism is mainly the malaise of intellectuals, quasi-intellectuals, and
those influenced by them. Still, even ordinary people with little education are
susceptible to it when blaming the United States becomes a readily available,
soothing alternative to confronting the real sources of their distress and tak-
ing responsibility for them.
The major dimensions or types of anti-Americanism include the long-
standing historical/theoretical version (currently intertwined with “postmod-
ernism” and “multiculturalism”) rooted in the rejection of universalistic val-
ues and especially the rationalism associated with the Enlightenment. This
form of anti-Americanism shades into a broad anti-Western disposition.
There is an anti-Americanism that is barely distinguishable from anticapi-
talism (a tributary of Marxism), viewing the United States as both the pillar
of capitalism around the world and its most repugnant embodiment.
There is a cultural anti-Americanism that focuses on American mass cul-
ture (correctly) seen as an integral part of American society. And there is a
conservative anti-Americanism that suspects all that is new and lacking in tra-
ditional legitimation.
Anti-Americanism as a by-product of nationalistic grievances, resent-
ments, and competitive disadvantage is among its most prominent incarna-
tions. Weakness is a major stimulant of anti-Americanism.
In my study of the phenomenon a decade ago, I defined anti-Americanism as
a hostile predisposition that may range from distaste and aversion to intense hos-
tility, rooted in conditions and circumstances that are often largely unrelated to
the actual qualities or attributes of American society, institutions, values, or for-
eign policy. I compared anti-Americanism to other hostile predispositions such
as racism, anti-Semitism, sexism, or various kinds of ethnic prejudice. Stereo-
typing that involves exaggeration, distortion, and contempt is an integral part of
anti-Americanism, especially as regards (what is seen as) the American national
character, cultural norms, tastes, manners, and ways of life.
In my original definition I failed to note that anti-American sentiments may
culminate in political violence; at the time most forms of anti-Americanism
appeared largely rhetorical or otherwise expressed in ways short of mass
murder.
 The Politics of Envy 43

The scapegoating impulse is central to anti-Americanism, followed by

envy and ambivalence. It is not difficult to explain why the United States has
become a symbol, the entity upon which a wide range of grievances and re-
sentments can be projected. Not only has the United States been powerful and
wealthy, it has also generated high expectations both at home and abroad,
promises of opportunity and fulfillment that cannot be fully realized.
From the sociological and historical points of view, anti-Americanism may
best be understood as a diffuse, ongoing protest against modernity—its ma-
jor components and unintended consequences. These include secularization,
industrialization, urbanization, bureaucratization, mobility (both social and
spatial), and the decline of community and social-cultural cohesion. Less ob-
vious is how and why modernity nurtures anti-Americanism even in societies
that are stable, democratic, wealthy, and thoroughly modernized—as opposed
to those societies that are in the throes of uneasy and ineffectual moderniza-
tion that undermines old certainties and social organizations while yielding
few tangible material benefits.
The most obvious and clear link between anti-Americanism and modern-
ization is encountered in Islamic countries and other traditional societies
where modernization clashes head on with entrenched traditional beliefs, in-
stitutions, and patterns of behavior and where it challenges the very meaning
of life, social relations, and religious verities. What becomes of the world
when women can go to work and show large surfaces of skin to men they are
not related to? In a recent case, the indignant male members of a Kurdish
family in Sweden were “provoked” by the transgressing female of their fam-
ily who had the temerity to have a job and a boyfriend and dress in Western
ways. She was finally killed by her father. According to the New York Times
correspondent reporting the matter, “[her] desire for independence . . .
turn[ed] her into the tragic emblem of a European society’s failure to bridge
the gap . . . between its own culture and those of its newer arrivals.” These
comments also exemplify the guilty, antimodernist impulse of the journalist
seeking to implicate a Western society in the kind of criminality traditional
morality sometimes sanctions.
In Arab countries and among Muslim populations, anti-Americanism is not
only the monopoly of intellectuals but also a widespread disposition of the
masses. In these areas, traditional religion, radical politics, and economic
backwardness combine to make anti-Americanism an exceptionally wide-
spread, virulent, and reflexive response to a wide range of collective and per-
sonal frustrations and grievances—and a welcome alternative to any collec-
tive or individual self-examination or stock-taking.
More generally, it is the rise of alternatives, ushered in by modernization,
that threatens traditional societies and generates anti-American reaction. The
44 Chapter Three

stability of traditional society (like that of modern totalitarian systems) rests

on the lack of alternatives, on the lack of choice. Choice is deeply subver-
sive—culturally, politically, psychologically.
The recent outburst of murderous anti-Americanism has added a new di-
mension to the phenomenon, or, at any rate, throws into relief the intense ha-
tred it may encapsulate. The violence of September 11 shows that when anti-
Americanism is nurtured by the kind of indignation and resentment that is
stimulated and sanctioned by religious convictions, it can become spectacu-
larly destructive. Suicide killings have not been unknown in history, but usu-
ally they were directed at important military and political targets—not at
symbolic ones (such as buildings) or at undifferentiated noncombatants who,
like other victims of political mass murders in recent history, have been killed
for what they are (Americans, or Jews), not for what they did. Anti-Israeli,
anti-Jewish violence has become intertwined with anti-Americanism; in the
minds of Islamic fanatics, Israel, Jews, and the United States are a closely
linked evil entity.
A new stage has been reached in the development and history of anti-
Americanism when the United States and all things American are identified
with a religiously defined, transcendent Evil and not merely with social in-
justice, moral corruption, economic exploitation, or the abuse of power as
used to be the case until recently.
One would expect anti-Americanism to be mainly a phenomenon outside
the United States, but this also is not the case. Domestic anti-Americanism
has for a long time been as vigorous as its foreign varieties, although it is
largely limited to the intelligentsia. Even the events of September 11 became
for them an occasion for vilifying the United States and for taking a new, ex-
panded inventory of its numberless misdeeds, past and present. Hostile crit-
ics claim that the attacks originated in “root causes” (all of which had some-
thing to do with the folly or evil of American society and U.S. policies) and
that these attacks were fully understandable responses to the many wrong-
headed, selfish, irresponsible, and corrupt American policies and postures.
These include U.S. support for Israel and repression of Palestinians, for up-
holding global inequality, for exploiting the poor, for plundering the resources
of the world, for conducting militaristic policies, and for erecting provoca-
tively tall buildings that symbolize American capitalistic greed. The preemi-
nent French anti-American intellectual Jean Baudrillard found these buildings
no less horrific than the terrorist attacks on them: “In terms of collective
drama we can say that the horror for the 4,000 [sic] victims of dying in those
towers was inseparable from the horror of living and working in sarcophagi
of concrete and steel.” Noam Chomsky, never prey to such uncertainties, has
long been convinced that the United States is the “leading terrorist state.”
This is a conviction he shares with Gore Vidal, who wanted “readers seriously
 The Politics of Envy 45

to consider that the Oklahoma City bombing was a conspiracy by federal

agents . . . to justify further strengthening of the American terror-police state.”
Domestic or native anti-Americanism is a more mysterious and puzzling
phenomenon than the foreign varieties, but it too can be linked to the prob-
lems and afflictions of modernity, and especially to the spiritual emptiness
and social isolation associated with it.
“Inauthenticity” is a key component of the criticism directed at American
society and culture both at home and abroad. It is linked both to spiritual
emptiness and more specifically to mass culture, the consumer ethos, the
fraudulence associated with commerce, the pursuit of profit, and capitalist
competitiveness. German poet Rainer Maria Rilke captured these sentiments
in the early twentieth century, speaking of

the American way of life in which all products have lost their connection with
anything real or human. . . . [F]or our grandparents . . . a house, a well, a famil-
iar tower, even their own pieces of clothing [were] something intimate and
meaningful. . . . Now is emerging from out of America pure undifferentiated
things, mere things of appearance, sham articles. . . . A house, in the American
understanding, an American apple, or an American vine has nothing in common
with the house, the fruit, or the grape that had been adopted in the hopes and
thoughts of our forefathers.

In our times, similar anti-American sentiments generate protests against Mc-

Donald’s and Wal-Mart, “ticky tacky” houses in the suburbs, the omnipres-
ence of plastics, or the difficulty of finding organic produce in the nearest su-
permarket.
Complaints about inauthenticity and standardization illuminate the roman-
tic, individualistic components of what (I call) cultural anti-Americanism
found in the United States and other Western societies. Romantic anti-
Americanism has much in common with romantic anticapitalism, which in
turn is an integral part of the aversion to the rationalistic ethos of the French
Enlightenment.
Another remarkable convergence may be discerned between the Marxist
critiques of capitalist modernity and those emanating in our times from tradi-
tionalist societies and their spokesmen who attack Americanization—that is
to say, the power of American capitalism to erode, degrade, and demystify all
that is sacred, unique, and time honored:

uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and ag-

itation distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones. All fixed, fast-frozen
relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions are
swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated. . . . All that is solid melts
into air all that is holy is profaned and man is at last compelled to face with sober
46 Chapter Three

senses, his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind. (from the Com-
munist Manifesto [1848])

Anti-Americanism was also a centerpiece in the vast propaganda cam-

paigns of communist systems, especially in the former Soviet Union. These
states sought (some still do) to capitalize on spontaneous anti-Americanism,
and they devoted substantial resources to stimulate it wherever possible. As
far as their own peoples were concerned these campaigns were quite ineffec-
tual, since citizens of communist countries mistrusted official propaganda and
often had alternative sources of information about the world outside. The of-
ficial anti-Americanism—like much of the official propaganda in general—
backfired: what the authorities denounced, the populace approached with
sympathetic curiosity.
The communist campaigns of anti-American disinformation probably had
more of an impact outside these countries. For example, Soviet allegations
that the United States created and disseminated the AIDS virus to decimate
third-world populations were not rejected out of hand in these countries, and
a good deal of antinuclear propaganda seeking to disarm the West had some
influence in Western Europe.
It might have been plausible to expect a decline of global as well as do-
mestic anti-Americanism in the wake of the collapse of Soviet communism.
On the one hand, a major source of anti-American propaganda ceased to ex-
ist; on the other, at least in theory, the juxtaposition of the fall of state social-
ism with the survival of vigorous democratic capitalism could have conclu-
sively discredited the apparent and alleged alternatives to Western democracy
and capitalism the United States has represented. This, however, did not hap-
pen. Anti-Americanism has persisted and, arguably, increased in Western Eu-
rope, in postcommunist Russia, and, above all, in the Islamic world.
The “last remaining superpower” status doubtlessly contributed to the recent
upsurges of anti-Americanism, making it more plausible to blame the United
States for a wide variety of problems all over the world. Its ability and willing-
ness to intervene in conflicts abroad (in Afghanistan, Kosovo, and Iraq) lent
more plausibility to the image of the United States as a reckless, irresponsible,
militarist superpower throwing its weight around. There have also been trade
disputes between the European Union and the United States that suggest that
the current administration sometimes prefers to support American farmers and
steelmakers at the expense of upholding the principles of free trade. These are
matters that invite reasonable criticism but at the same time also feed anti-
Americanism, which by (my) definition has a large irrational component.
The personality and qualifications of our current president have also con-
tributed to recent manifestations of anti-Americanism; like Reagan, George
 The Politics of Envy 47

W. Bush invites stereotypes of the “cowboy,” the “airhead,” and, with better
justification, the critique that he is an all-too-eager supporter of big business.
His environmental policies and indifference to conservation to a more pru-
dent use of energy, appear to derive from an excessively pro-business men-
tality that he and much of his cabinet share.
Dwelling on aspects of American society that invite criticism of a more ra-
tional kind almost inevitably leads to some somber reflections about American
mass culture. No friend of America, domestic or foreign, can easily dispute
that mass culture enshrines mindlessness, triviality, the cult of violence, a shal-
low sentimentality, and a pervasive entertainment orientation that has had dis-
cernible effect on the whole society including its political, educational, artis-
tic, and religious institutions. I am well aware that American mass culture is
popular all over the world and that it does not represent a coercive imposition
upon the masses yearning for cheaper CDs of Bach cantatas or Beethoven
string quartets. Nonetheless its existence and influence make a substantial
contribution not only to anti-Americanism but also to more informed cri-
tiques of American society.
Much of what people fear or dislike about American society and culture is
synonymous with modernity, or aspects thereof. Americanization is the ma-
jor, perhaps the only, widespread form of modernization. The process—as we
all know—involves gains as well as losses. The anti-American reaction
dwells on the losses and ignores the gains. Anti-Americanism is a reaction
against the same process of modernization most people yearn for, but that
when advanced or attained leads to second thoughts, to doubts, and to reser-
vations and irreconcilable desires and demands that cannot be met or, when
they are, create disappointment. I am reminded here of what Daniel Boorstin
wrote almost half a century ago about Americans and their attitude toward va-
cation travel:

We expect our two week vacation to be romantic, exotic, cheap and effortless.
We expect a faraway atmosphere if we go to a nearby place; and we expect
everything to be relaxing, sanitary and Americanized if we go to a faraway
place. We expect the contradictory and the impossible. . . . Never have people
been more the masters of their environment yet never has a people felt more de-
ceived and disappointed. For never has a people expected so much more than
the world can offer.

The attitude sketched above is not confined to Americans and vacation travel,
but it is most conspicuous in this society given the high expectations Ameri-
can culture and history have always generated and encouraged. It is these
high expectations and their recurring frustration that best explain domestic
anti-Americanism, that is to say, alienation, the adversary culture, embittered
48 Chapter Three

social criticism, the reflexive rejection of the whole social system, and its
supporting values. The frustration of these high expectations also explains the
often-voiced feeling that America failed to live up to its promises and poten-
tials.
Wherever it appears, anti-Americanism is a response—however indirect—
to the burdens and conflicts of choice and freedom and to living in a world
that no longer provides the cushion of community and the web of taken-for-
granted beliefs that protect against the specters of meaninglessness and spir-
itual void.
 Chapter Four

Anti-Americanism and
Moral Equivalence

In the second half of the past century, a new intellectual-polemical phenom-

enon appeared making it more difficult to distinguish between what is hu-
mane or inhumane, politically acceptable or repugnant. It is the willful and
often ignorant equation of different political phenomena, the attribution of
similarity, that is to say, of moral equivalence, to political practices, systems,
movements, or institutions that are in fact quite different and far from equiv-
alent morally.
A book recently published by the University of California Press is a case in
point. It is entitled American Gulag—a title that obviously seeks to convey
that the American prison system is as bad as, and the moral equivalent of, the
former Soviet one that came to be known as the Gulag. The moral equiva-
lence is created by associating the Gulag—widely recognized as cruel, inhu-
man, and unjust—with American prisons, thereby automatically denigrating
the latter and by extension American society as a whole.
Mark Dow, the author, was not the only one to reach for the concept of gu-
lag to discredit American society. Bruce Cumings, a historian, suggested that
conditions in the labor camps of communist North Korea should be assessed
in light of the “longstanding, never-ending gulag full of black men in our pris-
ons,” which ought to disqualify us from “pointing a finger.” Even Al Gore,
discussing Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib, could not resist invoking the gulag
metaphor, as reported in The New Yorker.
Could these authors be truly unaware of the profound differences between
the American and Soviet or North Korean prison systems? Or do they dismiss
the differences in the belief that they are insignificant and insufficient to set
apart the two systems? Bruce Cumings and Mark Dow doubtless would also
support the idea (widespread in the 1960s and 1970s and still surviving) that

49
50 Chapter Four

all black prison inmates in the United States are by definition political pris-
oners. It was a belief upheld by the late George Jackson, who considered him-
self one of them and who preferred to compare American prisons to Dachau
and Buchenwald.
Since the late 1960s, the attribution of moral equivalence between the
United States and some self-evidently noxious political entity, force, or sys-
tem (often opposed to it) has become the most favored form of denigration of
the United States and American society. The practice began during the Cold
War and was used most widely in comparisons of the United States and the
Soviet Union. (Jeane Kirkpatrick was in the forefront of those criticizing
these attributions.) It was memorably conveyed in what might be considered
the definitive text on moral equivalence, Richard Barnett’s The Giants:

The CIA and the KGB have the same conspiratorial worldview. . . . In both
countries leading military bureaucrats constitute a potent political force. . . . The
military establishments of the United States and the Soviet Union are . . . each
other’s best allies. . . . Khrushchev and Dulles were perfect partners. . . . Both
sides have a professional interest in the nostalgic illusions of victory through se-
cret weapons. Both societies were suffering a crisis of legitimacy. . . . Military
bureaucracies are developing in the Soviet Union that are mirror images of Amer-
ican bureaucracies. . . . The madness of one bureaucracy sustains the other. . . . Each
[country] is a prisoner of a sixty-year-old obsession.

In turn, E. L. Doctorow wrote:

We and the Soviets have actually created an unholy alliance, a gargantuan inti-
macy, in which, by now, our ideological differences are less important than the
fact that we think the same thoughts, mirror each other’s responses, heft the
same bombs, and take turns committing crimes and deploring them.

In Noam Chomsky’s version of moral equivalence, the United States and the
Soviet Union were “the world’s two great propaganda states.” Furthermore,
for the Americans, “association of socialism with the Soviet Union . . . serves
as a powerful ideological weapon to enforce conformity and obedience to the
State capitalist institutions . . . the only alternative to the ‘socialist’ dungeon.
The Soviet leadership . . . portrays itself as socialist to protect its right to
wield the club, and Western ideologists adopt the same pretense in order to
forestall the threat of a more free and just society.”
Moral equivalence was widely embraced by the peace movement, the
protest movements of the 1960s (and their descendants), and by all critics of
American society who came to constitute the adversary culture. The gist of
the argument was (and remains) that the United States cannot claim any moral
 Anti-Americanism and Moral Equivalence 51

high ground in comparison to the Soviet Union (or most other societies) and,
if so, its leaders should not self-righteously lecture, chide, or oppose the So-
viet system and by doing so risk nuclear war. The argument emerged at a time
when the domestic denigrations of American society peaked and gradually
became conventional wisdom: American society was not to be contrasted fa-
vorably to any other, least of all those claiming socialist credentials. To this
day President Reagan is showered with scorn for calling the Soviet Union an
“evil empire.”
The idea of moral equivalence also gained support from the old, discredited
notion of a “convergence” between the United States and the Soviet Union or
between capitalist and state socialist societies. The idea of the “two superpow-
ers” further bolstered the notion of moral equivalence; the shared superpower
status was supposed to determine many of the social and political practices,
structures, and policies of these systems. Those who believed that such a con-
vergence between the social, economic, political, and cultural institutions and
policies of these countries was taking place inclined to diminish or dismiss the
moral-ethical differences between them. Thus Lewis Lapham could write,
“Like communism, capitalism is a materialist and utopian faith; also like com-
munism it has shown itself empty of a moral imperative or a spiritual meaning.
To the questions likely to be asked by the next century, the sayings of the late
Malcolm Forbes will seem as useless as the maxims of Lenin.”
Another form of moral equivalence, which arose during the 1960s, was the
comparison and equation of the United States with Nazi Germany—not as
widespread as the Soviet-American equation, but not uncommon, either; it even
found its way into high school texts, as Sandra Stotsky has shown in her study
“Moral Equivalence in Education” in Understanding Anti-Americanism,
which I edited. Spelling America as it would be in German (“Amerika”) was
an expression of these sentiments, as were comparisons of the FBI to the
Gestapo and the internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II to
the Nazi concentration camps.
More recently, Carlos Fuentes considered the United States comparable to
both Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union under Stalin (but more dangerous
than either) and President Bush comparable to Hitler and Stalin. A statement
made of late by Attorney General John Ashcroft reminded George Soros “of
Germany under the Nazis. . . . It was the kind of talk that Goebbels used to
use to line the Germans up.” Moral equivalence even crept into a study by
David Chandler of Pol Pot’s terror state: “Dehumanization of the prisoners [in
Cambodia] was immediate and total. Just as Lon Nol [the previous anticom-
munist leader] had seen his opponents as nonbelievers . . . and just as [!] the
U.S. Congress until recently regarded indigenous Communists as ‘un-Ameri-
can’ Pol Pot and his colleagues thought of Cambodia’s internal enemies as
52 Chapter Four

intrinsically foreign and impure.” This example of a reflexive and casual at-
tribution of moral equivalence probably intended to suggest that delving into
the horrors of Pol Pot’s Cambodia did not divert the author from an aware-
ness of supposedly similar evils in the United States, that his heart was still
in the right place from the politically correct point of view.
Ramsey Clark’s comparison of the United States to Saddam Hussein’s Iraq
went beyond moral equivalence. Discussing the Iraq war, he wrote that “the
United States, a technologically advanced superpower, has created weapons
systems and executed plans to devastate a small, defenseless country . . . first
by direct assault by fire, then with . . . enforced isolation, malnutrition, im-
poverishment. . . . [It was] a deliberate, systematic genocide of a defenseless
population.”
The most recent attributions of moral equivalence link the United States to
Islamic terrorists. It began with 9/11, which created unease among many critics
of America by casting the United States into the role of innocent victim,
morally vindicated. These critics felt compelled to find some way to implicate
and hold her responsible for the outrage. This was accomplished by the “root
cause” theory: the terrorists were products of profound grievances (the root
causes) in the Arab world for which, in the final analysis, the United States was
responsible by supporting Israel, promoting globalism (and the attendant global
inequalities), exploiting poor third-world countries, and destabilizing tradi-
tional societies with its tawdry mass culture and consumer goods.
Robert Jay Lifton wrote about a “malignant synergy” between the United
States and Al Qaeda “when in their mutual zealotry, Islamist and American
leaders seem to act in concert.” As for Chalmers Johnson, a professor at
Berkeley, “It is not at all obvious which is the greater threat to the safety and
integrity of the citizens of the United States: the possibility of a terrorist at-
tack using weapons of mass destruction or an out-of-control military intent on
displacing elected officials who stand in their way.” Professor Thomas
Laqueur, also of Berkeley, suggested that the scale of evil 9/11 represents was
not “so extraordinary and our government has been responsible for many that
are probably worse.” Gore Vidal wrote that “bin Laden was merely respond-
ing to U.S. foreign policy.” Susan Sontag believed that 9/11 was “a conse-
quence of specific American alliances and actions.”
Closer examination of the comparative critiques embedded in moral equiv-
alence reveals that the disparagement of the United States (or American soci-
ety) has been, as a rule, far more vehement and impassioned than correspon-
ding critiques of the USSR (or any other political entity involved in the
equation), which tend to be mild and perfunctory. Critiques of Soviet misbe-
havior were also tempered by frequently ascribing the latter to provocative
American policies; responsibility for the Cold War too increasingly rested
 Anti-Americanism and Moral Equivalence 53

with the United States as the Cold War revisionists saw it; Soviet aggression
(if any) was defensive and as such had to be “understood”; it was also rooted
in the misfortunes of Russian history. Even George Kennan came to adopt
this position, as his disenchantment with American society grew during the
1960s and 1970s. Soviet aggression too had “root causes.”
Moral equivalence has also been associated with what Richard Niebuhr
called “perfectionist pacifism.” The latter holds that “all things not utterly
perfect . . . are equally imperfect, and therefore morally equivalent” as for ex-
ample “the flawed good that is America” and “the pathological evil of those
who attack civilians at their work” as happened on 9/11.
There has always been a tension between the relativizing impulse associ-
ated with the attribution of moral equivalence and the judgmental, partisan
disposition at its hidden core. (Similar contradictions lurk in multiculturalism
and political correctness.) That is to say, moral relativism and the often asso-
ciated social determinism are rarely consistent; they are selectively applied to
mitigate the misconduct of political entities the critics favor but not to enti-
ties and actors the critics abhor: the policies or conduct of the latter are never
mitigated or excused by some deterministic force, they always have a choice
to do the right thing.
It should also be noted here that certain attributions of moral equivalence
have been strenuously resisted on the left. Many academic intellectuals have
rejected the concept of totalitarianism largely because it proposes moral
equivalence between the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany—a form of moral
equivalence that was politically incorrect.
The most obvious source of the attribution of moral equivalence to morally
and ethically disparate societies has been the wish to discredit American so-
ciety by equating it with others generally considered far worse. Norman
Mailer “declared his support for Mr. Rushdie because if he were not sup-
ported fundamentalist groups in America . . . will know how to apply the
same methods to American writers.” Mailer could not bring himself to con-
demn fundamentalist Islamic censorship and death threats against Rushdie
without suggesting that morally equivalent trends were also to be found in
American society.
A similar inhibition to make moral distinctions and judgments discourages
radical feminists from vocally protesting the mistreatment of women in Is-
lamic countries, or, when they do, compels them to discern similarities be-
tween such mistreatment and that which allegedly exists in the United States.
Joan Jacobs Brumberg and Jacqueline Jackson succeeded in finding moral
equivalence between “the burka and the bikini”; that is to say, between the
“constraints” placed on what women can wear in the United States and in
Afghanistan ruled by the Taliban.
54 Chapter Four

It is likely that moral equivalence is a tactical concession on the part of

those convinced that the United States is in fact much inferior to the societies
it is equated with, that it is a historically unique incarnation of evil and cor-
ruption rather than just morally equivalent to other brutal and inhumane po-
litical systems.
The phenomenon has another less ideological and polemical source,
namely the decline in the capacity to make moral, cultural, political, or his-
torical distinctions. The intention to discredit the United States may thus be
bolstered by a genuine inability to recognize differences, to make important
distinctions, say, between McCarthyism and the Soviet purges or American
prisons and the Gulag. This trend has been encouraged and nurtured by our
educational institutions, mass media, and popular culture. It can be traced
back to the 1960s and its embrace of egalitarianism, hostility to elitism,
“judgmentalism,” and rejection of almost any kind of differentiation since the
latter was branded as discriminatory and linked to the propagation of in-
equality.
Moral equivalence may also be compared to aesthetic equivalence that per-
meates “multiculturalism,” resting on the idea that nobody can or should rank
cultures or cultural products; or, as UNESCO at one point declared, “All cul-
tures are equal.” Again, as in the case of moral equivalence, closer inspection
reveals that there is at least one major exception to this proposition: Western
culture, produced by dead, white males, can be denounced and devalued.
The tendency to designate as “genocidal” almost any indignity or injustice
found in the United States (or in Western societies) is another manifestation
of a diminished capacity to make important distinctions; it also tends to be
motivated by the intention to raise levels of moral indignation: labeling some-
thing as “genocidal” is expected and hoped to legitimize and maximize moral
revulsion.
Richard Pipes suggested another cultural and social psychological source
of the unease many Americans experience when facing the task of making
important distinctions:

Americans feel uncomfortable when told that other people are “different” . . .
because it is a basic premise of American culture . . . that people are everywhere
the same. . . . This belief in the identity of human nature and human interests and
the view that conflict is rooted in ignorance, prejudice and misunderstanding is
the source of the belief that if the American and Soviet leaders only got together
they could solve all the problems dividing their countries.

At last, many people who have no political ideological axe to grind are drawn
to moral equivalence because it suggests even-handedness and rejection of
self-righteousness. These commendable attitudes often shade into (and are
 Anti-Americanism and Moral Equivalence 55

prompted by) a collective self-doubt, unease, and sense of guilt over the
shortcomings (real or imagined) of Western and especially American society.
Intellectuals on the left and representatives of the liberal churches are espe-
cially prone to this disposition.
The questionable attribution of moral equivalence may also be associated
with a generalizing impulse, often displayed by intellectuals, with their desire
to “unmask” and show that “apparent” differences conceal underlying simi-
larities.
In concluding, it must be reasserted that not all social-political systems (or
human beings) are equally flawed; it is possible and necessary to differenti-
ate among them. A measure of moral clarity—the opposite of moral equiva-
lence—need not be simplistic, arrogant, or self-righteous. We can and should
be aware and critical of the flaws of American society without succumbing to
the groundless belief that it is no better than communist totalitarianism or Is-
lamic fundamentalism.
 II

AMERICANA
 Chapter Five

Our Society and Its Celebrities

An article in the New Yorker (published September 9, 2002) chronicled the

Paris visit of Puff Daddy (Sean Combs), the renowned rap singer and fashion
entrepreneur. It was written by a reporter who accompanied him to provide a
detailed account of virtually every moment of the four-day trip. The reader
could learn a great deal about Puff Daddy, a bona fide celebrity of our times—
his way of life, beliefs, and favored forms of entertainment, consumption, and
socializing. He was introduced as “the 32 year old rap impresario, restaura-
teur, clothing entrepreneur, bon vivant, actor and Page Six regular.” His claim
to fame also rests on having been nominated by the Council of Fashion De-
signers of America as “the menswear designer of the year.” He was urgently
summoned to fly to Paris (via Concorde, First Class) to lend glamour to a Ver-
sace fashion show:

With his hip-hop credentials and his love of the spotlight, not to mention a past
that includes highly public moments of violence, Combs provided exactly what
the fashion crowd craves. . . . He wore fur and leather and draped himself in
enough diamonds to rival Princess Caroline of Monaco. . . . Donatella Versace
. . . was counting on Combs’ presence to add some adrenaline to her show. . . .
[His accessories included] a silver tie, smoke-colored sunglasses, diamond-
and-platinum earrings, a bracelet or two, a couple of diamond rings the size of
cherry tomatoes, and a watch covered with jewels and worth nearly a million
dollars.

The article also noted (without a hint of disapproval) that his “career has been
punctuated by violence. . . . In 1999 he and two others were arrested for beating
a rival record-company executive. . . . [He] was [also] involved in an incident
at a Manhattan night club in which three people were shot.”

59
60 Chapter Five

On his trip to Paris “he was traveling with a trainer, a stylist and at least
two personal assistants.” In his Paris hotel suite “there were several garment
racks in the living room, with more than a dozen suits, scores of shirts,
leather jackets . . . enough shoes to last a lifetime . . . flown over from New
York. . . . Sunglasses had been arranged in three rows on a high table. . . .
There were about ten pairs in each row; each pair in its original case, with
the top flipped up.”
The elevation of Puff Daddy to celebrity status illustrates a phenomenon
that will be of interest to future social historians seeking to understand the
sources and manifestations of American cultural decline in the late twentieth
and early twenty-first centuries. It may be argued that the rise and veneration
of celebrities has been a characteristic expression of this decline. Almost half
a century ago, Daniel Boorstin, the social historian, wrote:

Our age has produced a new kind of eminence. . . . This new kind of eminence
is “celebrity.”. . . He has been fabricated . . . to satisfy our exaggerated expecta-
tions of human greatness. He is morally neutral. . . . The hero was distinguished
by his achievement; the celebrity by his image or trademark. The hero created
himself; the celebrity is created by the media. . . .
The celebrity is always a contemporary. The hero is made by folklore, sacred
texts and history books but the celebrity is the creature of gossip . . . of maga-
zines, newspapers and the ephemeral images of movie and television screen. . . .
Celebrities are differentiated mainly by trivia of personality. . . . Entertainers
are best qualified to become celebrities because they are skilled in the marginal
differentiation of their personalities. . . . Anyone can become a celebrity if only
he can get into the news and stay there.

As Boorstin suggests, several forces sustain the phenomenon. The exis-

tence of the mass media is a fundamental precondition since it creates, dis-
seminates, and dwells on the images of celebrities; it assures that the celebrity
will be known, however superficially, to millions of people. The celebrities
have been created by the media (and their own PR people) because there are
millions interested in such fantasy figures upon whom they can project tran-
sitory admiration and perhaps a spurious identification.
The second precondition for the phenomenon is a moral, cultural, and aes-
thetic relativism that allows and stimulates the admiration of people of no
genuine distinction—moral, artistic, or intellectual. Genuine heroes, people
of great accomplishments, are few and far between. If fame based on some
impressive accomplishment is in short supply, notoriety will do. Celebrities
are the readily available substitutes for true greatness. It is also quite likely
that the attacks on “elitism” nurture this relativism and the cult of mediocre
and amoral celebrities. Arguably the populist and egalitarian strains in Amer-
 Our Society and Its Celebrities 61

ican history provide further support and legitimation for the rise and prolifer-
ation of celebrities. Anybody can become a celebrity, no special qualifications
are required, only adequate publicity, a certain degree of egomania, and some
attention-getting trait or activity.
The celebrity phenomenon also feeds on the enlarged, democratic individ-
ualism of our times. A growing number of people feel that they are entitled to
fame, attention, wealth, power, and special treatment; countless people take
themselves far more seriously than is warranted. People wish and can actu-
ally become widely known for odd, dubious, or absurd reasons, including col-
orful criminal acts.
Figures of entertainment and fashion fill most of the celebrity ranks, in part
because they have at their disposal a well-lubricated publicity machine; their
fame and fortune is tied to the financial success of the enterprises associated
with the celebrities and sustained by popular culture. There is a financial in-
centive for creating celebrities: movies, TV programs, and popular music re-
volve around them; the advertising industry regularly avails itself of their ser-
vices and endorsements to sell a wide range of products. Most celebrities
come from the world of entertainment because the entertainment industries
occupy such a prominent place in American life.
As the New Yorker article makes clear, celebrities are handsomely rewarded
for the functions they perform. These rewards in turn reinforce their bloated
and unrealistic self-conceptions.
The New Yorker’s treatment of Puff Daddy is but one of countless exam-
ples of a totally uncritical and unreflective view of the phenomenon of
celebrity worship. Another telling indication of the trend has been the grad-
ual transformation of the New York Times Magazine from a serious publica-
tion focusing on major political and social events or problems into one that
devotes, more often than not, more than half of its space to profiling assorted
celebrities from the world of entertainment, sports, and fashion.
The celebrity worship and the moral-aesthetic-intellectual relativism it en-
shrines are symptoms of cultural decline and confusion—time will tell how
serious a decline. As the New Yorker article pointed out about other celebri-
ties, “Ralph Lauren and Martha Stewart are more than brands; they offer vi-
sions of the world.” Hopefully these visions will not become dominant.
 Chapter Six

Watching Celebrities

Time and again, reading travel magazines I come upon the promise that the
destination described will provide great opportunities for “celebrity watch-
ing.” Writers of these articles take it for granted that readers get excited by
the possibility of spotting celebrities.
In a recent issue of the New York Times Travel Section, readers were as-
sured that in St. Moritz (Switzerland) “despite the scent of exclusivity . . . you
are free to mingle” with celebrities such as “supermodels, business tycoons,
former heads of state . . . the rich, the very rich, the royals and those who want
to marry a royal.” A nightclub in the same location was described as a
“celebrity haunt” providing “your opportunity to rub shoulders” with these
important individuals. Another recent article in the Times entitled “Feeling at
Home Among the Elite” was intended to encourage ordinary readers that they
could fit into the rarified playground of Punta del Este, Uruguay, “despite its
jet set reputation.”
I would like to ask people who enjoy “celebrity watching” (or those who
write articles suggesting that they do) to explain why such ogling, mingling,
or rubbing shoulders is a source of pleasure and self-fulfillment? Should we
believe that people thrive on fantasized ersatz relationships by laying eyes on
celebrities?
It is possible that those who rejoice in “rubbing shoulders” harbor a hope
that sharing temporarily the same space as celebrities elevates their own so-
cial standing. As the New York Times article on St. Moritz put it, “You can at-
tend their events, eat in their restaurants, walk among them, wear their
clothes, sleep on the same luscious sheets.” So what?
Daniel Boorstin grasped the essentials of the celebrity cult half a century
ago: “Our age has produced a new kind of eminence. . . . He is the human

62
 Watching Celebrities 63

pseudo-event . . . a substitute for the hero who is the celebrity and whose main
characteristic is well-knownness. . . . Anyone can become a celebrity if only
he can get into the news and stay there. Figures from the world of entertain-
ment and sports [and fashion industry] are most apt to be well known. . . . The
hero was distinguished by his achievement; the celebrity by his image or
trademark.”
Many highly talented, knowledgeable, and creative people are not widely
known and are not celebrities. Great scientists are not celebrities. They don’t
provide entertainment, and their skills and accomplishments are hard to em-
ulate; nor are they uniformly good-looking. Looks are very important for be-
coming a celebrity; most of them are good-looking and cultivate some aspect
of physical appearance that can become a “trademark.” Vast amounts of pub-
licity, a degree of egomania, and some attention-getting trait or activity are
the prerequisites of becoming a celebrity. And of course we would not have
celebrities without the mass media of communications that disseminate their
images and activities.
The celebrity cult is a form of vicarious gratification, an attempt at iden-
tification with those who possess attributes missing from the lives of ordi-
nary human beings: fame, wealth, vast amounts of attention, and often adu-
lation as well. In a populist, anti-elitist, socially mobile society, a growing
number of individuals feel entitled to fame, fortune, attention, power, and
special treatment. They also believe that each individual has limitless poten-
tial and there are no exclusive, hard-to-enter elites of the gifted. Many un-
likely individuals ascend to celebrity status when they succeed in drawing
attention to themselves by some means, becoming widely known for odd,
dubious, or absurd reasons, including spectacular criminal acts. Kidnappers,
bank robbers, and murderers often demand the opportunity to make state-
ments on television or radio before they surrender. Like the rest of us, they
want to transcend anonymity.
Celebrity worship is a reflection of moral and aesthetic relativism and the
insecurity many feel about their social status in a highly competitive society.
The celebrity phenomenon reflects an American (or modern?) uncertainty as
to what kinds of accomplishments truly deserve respect or admiration.
Why is Paris Hilton a celebrity? She is rich, good-looking, a prominent so-
cialite, a playgirl, successful at getting publicity; one of her partners made
public a video of their sexual activities; notoriety enhances celebrity status.
Aside from their exciting and scandalous sex and social lives, the most
widely publicized thing about celebrities is their tastes and possessions.
Celebrities are also good for business and enthusiastically participate in lu-
crative advertising campaigns endorsing products and services. Becoming a
celebrity is an obvious avenue for personal enrichment: if you are famous
enough, sooner or later you will also become rich because fame sells.
64 Chapter Six

Less obvious among the preconditions of celebrity worship is the decline

of community and the rise of social isolation that leads to fantasies of having
something in common with or relating to the rich and famous. “Celebrity
watching” expresses and exemplifies “false consciousness”; it is an attempt
to find meaning and fulfillment in the life and the attributes of others far re-
moved from one’s own far more circumscribed circumstances.
 Chapter Seven

Michael Moore:
The New Political Celebrity

Michael Moore embodies the fusion of the realms of entertainment and so-
cial criticism, each enhanced by his celebrity status. Even among politically
active celebrity entertainers, Moore stands out by virtue of his determination
to influence domestic politics by tirelessly disseminating his messages
through movies, television, books, and personal appearances of every kind.
His popularity—both in the United States and abroad—exceeds that of all
other detractors of the United States (except Che Guevara and Osama bin
Laden, whose images also appear on T-shirts). It is difficult to think of any
other individual in this line of work whose message has reached comparable
numbers.
In 2004 at the Cannes Film Festival in France, his Fahrenheit 9/11 was
given the highest award and was “greeted with a 20-minute standing ova-
tion.”1 At home the same film “has broken the record of the highest grossing
documentary of all time. . . .”2 During the 2004 presidential campaign,
prominent Democratic politicians embraced Moore (literally and figura-
tively) hoping that this movie would help them to prevail in the elections.
Among the appeal of the film, as one reviewer put it, is that it “offers the
thrill of a coherent explanation of everything. . . .”3 His books were similarly
successful:

Stupid White Men (2001), a diatribe against rich people, white people, dumb
people, men . . . was on the Times best-seller list for forty-nine weeks and sold
more than four million copies worldwide. Dude. Where’s My Country (2003) . .
. a diatribe against rich people, white people and the Iraq war . . . started out at
No. l. His first book, Downsize This! was also a best-seller. . . . Everywhere
Moore went on a recent forty-eight city book tour through America and Europe,
thousands of people showed up to see him. . . .4

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66 Chapter Seven

In his capacity as both a producer and product of mass culture, Moore per-
sonifies the pervasive entertainment orientation of our society that requires
everything to be entertaining, from social criticism to the weather report,
from warnings about lung cancer to the teaching of mathematics (if any) in
the schools.
More unusual, given his animating hatred of American society, is Moore’s
working-class social background, albeit of a rather prosperous working class
without memories of deprivations conducive to lifelong bitterness. Even in
the notable absence of such memories, Moore has cultivated an intense moral
indignation and resentfulness on behalf of this working class, although it is
impossible to locate any objective factor, personal injury, or grievance that
would account for the embittered stance he has taken. By the time Moore had
come of age, autoworkers, such as his father, were virtually part of the mid-
dle class:

his father, as a member of the United Auto Workers, was entitled to free med-
ical care, free dental care and four weeks of paid vacation. If he needed legal
help the union provided a lawyer free. He had two cars and owned his house out-
right. He lived not in the city of Flint . . . but in Davison, a white middle class
community. . . . His family took nice vacations and sent his three children to col-
lege. . . . He worked the first shift, from six until two, then played golf. . . . He
retired with a full pension . . . at the age of fifty-three . . . and did volunteer work
at the church.5

This background notwithstanding (or because of it?) Moore assiduously

cultivated a working class identity (or at any rate appearance), generally dress-
ing down, wearing baseball caps, sporting a beer belly, and trying to talk like
the common man. In the film Roger and Me, he seemed to make a special
point of being disheveled and dressed down on the occasions of seeking to in-
terview Roger Smith, the CEO of General Motors.
It is not unlikely that Moore—by all accounts, including his own, a rebel-
lious youngster—found the middle-class trappings of his youth boring and ir-
ritating. This is all the more plausible since his adolescence and youth coin-
cided with the 1960s. In the fourth grade he started an underground school
paper.6 His parents sent him to a Catholic school and “after 8th grade he en-
rolled in a seminary: He admired the Berrigan brothers and thought the priest-
hood was the way to effect social change.” It is not clear what precisely led
to these ideas. After the tenth grade he returned to the secular world of the
public high school. Subsequently he attended the Flint campus of the Uni-
versity of Michigan for one year, then dropped out. Moore became a hippie
and produced a weekly radio show called “Radio Free Flint.” He was often
on the evening news “leading a rally or antinuclear protest or . . . criticizing
 Michael Moore: The New Political Celebrity 67

the police. He started a crisis center for teenagers . . . that somehow mutated
into a small alternative newspaper called Flint Voice.”7
In 1986 Moore left Flint for San Francisco to become editor of Mother
Jones, but within weeks he was fired. Staff members said that “he was im-
possible to work with.” Part of the problem was that “his employees expected
him to be the ideal boss—after all he was the defender of the little guy. . . .
But as the staff of Mother Jones discovered, Moore wasn’t the ideal boss. . . .
He disliked sharing credit with his writers. He would often come in late. . . . If
someone said something he didn’t like . . . he would simply not invite that
person to the next meeting, or the person would be fired. . . .”8 As is often the
case, the personal and the political did not converge.
Moore claimed that Mother Jones fired him because he opposed the publi-
cation of an article by Paul Berman that was critical of the Sandinistas
(Moore was not). He “accused Berman . . . of being a traitor to the left and
giving aid and comfort to Reagan.” After Mother Jones, he worked briefly for
Ralph Nader whom he had admired since high school.9
Moore visited Sandinista Nicaragua and also thought well of Castro’s
Cuba. In his “Letter of Apology to Elian Gonzales” (published on his web-
site) he deplored Gonzales’s “kidnapping” from a country providing “free
health care whenever you needed it [and] an excellent education, one of the
few countries that has 100% literacy and lower infant mortality than the
United States.” He suggested that Gonzales’s mother (who took him with her
to the United States), as most other Cubans, only left Cuba because “they
simply wanted to make more money.” Moore further suggested that Cuban
exiles in Miami interested in fighting for freedom should have stayed in Cuba
to fight rather than “turn tail and [run] to Miami. . . . These very ex-Cubans . . .
were afraid to stand and fight Castro. . . .”10 The last remark illustrates
Moore’s grasp of the realities of life in a totalitarian police state and the op-
portunities it allows its citizens to express their opposition.
Moore’s political views have much in common with Noam Chomsky’s—
including the visceral rejection of American society and the conviction that it
is (alongside much of the rest of the world) relentlessly manipulated by un-
scrupulous, greedy elites. The cardinal message of Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11
is identical with the verities of Chomsky: “America is not a democracy. . . .
[It is] an oligarchy in which the wealthy pull the strings behind a facade of
manufactured democratic consent.”11 Moore takes the notion of conspiracy
quite personally and employs security guards to protect him. He “seems to
feel . . . that people are out to get him and that there are few people he can
trust.”12
Like most skilled propagandists, Moore prefers selectivity and misrepresen-
tation to outright falsehood. As a critic wrote, “Moore as a rule only conveys
68 Chapter Seven

enough information to arouse suspicion, not nearly enough to make a case.”13

In Fahrenheit 9/11 there is no reference to “Islamic fundamentalism, . . . ob-
sessive anti-Americanism or suicide terrorists and the difficulty of guarding
against them. . . . There are apparently no justifiable fears, only hysterical
fears manipulated by the authorities, whose every act is purposive and con-
spiratorial.”14 What Moore chose to show in this movie about Sadam Hus-
sein’s Iraq is an example of heavy-handed selectivity in service of a transpar-
ent political agenda: “. . . a peaceable kingdom . . . children flying kites,
shoppers . . . smiling in the sunshine . . . the gentle rhythms of life undis-
turbed. . . .” That is, until the American bombardments and invasion.15
Moore also shares with Chomsky, and other similarly disposed social crit-
ics, the conviction that the American public has been brainwashed and suf-
fers from false consciousness, thanks to the manipulations of their amoral
rulers and the media they control: “we live in a system of enforced ignorance.
The way the media works, the way our education system works, it’s all about
keeping us stupid. . . .”16 He is apparently among the few who was able to re-
sist these manipulations. He regards these rulers as more dangerous than any
terrorists: “‘just because there are a few terrorists doesn’t mean that we are
in some exaggerated state of danger,’ he said, except that is from ‘our multi-
millionaire, corporate terrorists. . . .’”17
A vitriolic hatred of the rich suffuses Moore’s writings and movies, all the
more peculiar since he has become one of them. Evidently he senses no “cog-
nitive dissonance” between such hatred and the fact that—as he notes in pass-
ing—“I live on the island of Manhattan . . . that is luxury home and corporate
suite to America’s elite. Much of the suffering you experience as an Ameri-
can emanates from this piece of platinum real estate. . . . Those who run your
lives live in my neighborhood. I walk the streets with them each day.”18 Why
did he choose to share a neighborhood with such deplorable human beings in-
stead of living in some wholesome working-class district? He does not ex-
plain. Reportedly his apartment cost $1.9 million, many years ago. He also
owns a beachfront summer house in Michigan that cost $1.2 million. On the
college lecture circuit, his fees range from $10,000 to $30,000.19 Notwith-
standing such circumstances, his condemnation of the rich is relentless:

The rich and powerful make it their mission to destroy our air, poison our wa-
ter, rip us off. . . . I’ve decided that the only hope we have in this country to bring
aid to the sick . . . and a better life to those who suffer is to pray like crazy that
those in power are afflicted with the worst possible diseases, tragedies and cir-
cumstances in life. . . .
With that in mind I’ve written a prayer to speed the recovery of all those in
need by asking God to smite every political leader and corporate executive with
 Michael Moore: The New Political Celebrity 69

some form of deadly disease. . . . So I’ve written “A Prayer to Afflict the Com-
fortable with as Many Afflictions as Possible.”20

Whether or not Moore intended these lines to be humorous, they illuminate a

bottomless hatred the origins of which remain unclear.
In contrast to this hatred of the heartless rich, Moore overflows with love
for the poor, especially if black. Unlike most of the white working-class
people he claims to be a self-appointed spokesman of, Moore seems bur-
dened by a guilt complex about black Americans and displays great solici-
tousness toward them. He avers that “every mean word, every cruel act,
every bit of pain and suffering in my life has had a Caucasian face attached
to it.” Black crime is an invention of white racists and the media, he tells
his readers. He firmly believes (or so he says) that the white race is respon-
sible for “this planet [becoming] such a pitiful, scary place to inhabit,” af-
flicted with nuclear weapons, environmental degradation, slavery, the Holo-
caust, and unemployment, among other evils. To sum it up: “You name a
problem . . . or the abject misery visited upon millions and I’ll bet you . . .
I can put a white face on it.” This is Moore’s version of Susan Sontag’s fa-
mous proposition about the white race being the cancer of humanity. Moore
also insists that there has been no genuine improvement in the conditions of
the black population; racism has just become more subtle; the system re-
mains “rigged.” He proclaims that he will only hire blacks and advocates
intermarriage and the production of babies of such marriages21—advice he
himself did not follow.
Moore’s critiques of American society are comprehensive, extreme, un-
qualified, and apocalyptic; they incorporate every variety of denunciation. He
wholeheartedly subscribes to the view that the United States is the evil em-
pire having observed, in connection with the demise of the Soviet Union,
“one evil empire down, one to go.”22
It is hard to know how much exactly Moore believes of his own words, as
for example that “millions of Americans . . . are off-balance, unsure, upset,
unglued. The rest are in prison.”23 Or is it possible that this is the way he
feels? (off-balance, unsure, unglued). He also writes: “So I’m stuck with a car
that doesn’t run, in a country where nothing works, and it is every man,
woman and state-tested child for themselves. Survival of the richest—no
more lifeboats for you. . . .”24 Again, an unlikely characterization of his per-
sonal circumstances.
Moore is among the many critics of this society who reaped considerable
material rewards for their critical messages as well as personal popularity. He
is a perfect example of the compatibility of vocal alienation with great mate-
rial and popular success and celebrity status.
70 Chapter Seven

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I thank Mr. Alan Edelstein for his comments about this essay.

NOTES

1. Pascal Bruckner, “Tour de Farce,” New Republic, July 19, 2004, 19.
2. Jason Zengerle, “Crashing the Party,” New Republic, July 19, 2004, 110.
3. David Denby, “George and Me,” New Yorker, June 28, 2004, 110.
4. Larissa MacFarquhar, “The Populist,” New Yorker, February 16 and 23, 2004,
134.
5. MacFarquhar, “The Populist,” 137.
6. Stupid White Men—and Other Sorry Excuses for the State of the Nation (New
York: ReganBooks, 2001), 96.
7. MacFarquhar, “The Populist,” 135, 136.
8. MacFarquhar, “The Populist,” 140, 142, 143, 144.
9. MacFarquhar, “The Populist,” 141, 142.
10. See his website: michaelmoore.com/words/message/index.php7message
Date=2000-03-31.
11. Denby, “George and Me,” 110.
12. MacFarquhar, “The Populist,” 138.
13. Geoffrey O’Brien, “Is It All Just a Dream?” New York Review of Books, August
12, 2004, 17.
14. Denby, “George and Me,” 110.
15. Christopher Hitchens, Love, Poverty, and War: Journeys and Essays (New
York: Nation Books, 2004), 293.
16. Moore, Stupid White Men.
17. Quoted in O’Brien, “Is It All Just a Dream?” 19.
18. Moore, Stupid White Men, 51.
19. David T. Hardy and Jason Clarke, Michael Moore Is a Big Fat Stupid White
Man (New York: ReganBooks, 2004), 117–18.
20. Moore, Stupid White Men, 231–33
21. Moore, Stupid White Men, 57, 58, 62–63, 70, 72.
22. Playboy, July 1999, 155.
23. Moore, Stupid White Men, xviii.
24. Moore, Stupid White Men, xx.
 Chapter Eight

SUVs and Americans

“Common Ground on the Environment” (Daily Hampshire Gazette, January

9, 2003, written by an employee of a skiing company in Aspen, Colorado)
puts a highly unconvincing, Pollyannaish gloss on SUV use. Most implausi-
bly the article claims that people drive SUVs “because there are no compara-
bly priced options with better gas mileage that offer equivalent safety, conve-
nience, performance and comfort.” There are in fact many such options.
SUV safety is a myth except in collisions with smaller cars; SUV rollovers
have been notorious. As to performance, one may ask what “performance” is
required by most SUV drivers who rarely if ever leave a paved road, let alone
penetrate the roadless areas pictured in SUV commercials. And what is “con-
venient” about a car that barely fits into a regular parking space and has trou-
ble turning a tight corner? As to the comfort SUVs offer, most regular sedans
and family vans offer comparable comfort and space for luggage. The only
rational claim that can be made for SUVs is that people sit higher and see bet-
ter. But as competing SUV models get bigger, even that advantage dimin-
ishes. In any event, this small benefit is bought at a high price.
A major source of the popularity of SUVs is the (false) sense of security
owners seem to derive from being encased in these large and heavy vehicles
equipped with four-wheel drive (they rarely need or use). SUVs are supposed
to be “rugged” and are invariably portrayed in advertisements in remote, road-
less, scenic settings. The promise of security is thus linked with fantasies of
adventure that appeal to sedentary, urban, and suburban middle-class Ameri-
cans. A recent ad for the Mercedes SUV (published in the New Yorker) was
openly cynical about such appeals: “Autobahn [the German superhighway]
meets Audubon. . . . There is nothing like the great outdoors. Especially when
it is whipping past at 147 mph on the autobahn.” Even during the camping

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season you will see more SUVs at suburban malls than at remote camp-
grounds. One may doubt that “many of those who drive SUVs . . . see them-
selves as outdoor people.” But even if they do so, such pleasant fantasies
merely distract from the impact of their SUV on the outdoors.
Since these vehicles are not cheap to buy and run, being authentic gas guz-
zlers, and offer only marginal or questionable benefits, it is all the more puz-
zling why they are so popular. It is likely that the possession of these ungainly
vehicles is connected with a sense of power, self-assertion, and (sometimes)
aggression. As Keith Bradhser (who wrote a book on the subject) put it, SUVs
have been “designed to intimidate other motorists.” Tanklike, they can go
anywhere (not that people want them to) and in a collision they will crush
smaller vehicles. And they keep getting bigger. The civilian version of the
army vehicle, the Hummer is the latest status symbol among Hollywood
celebrities.
SUVs have become a prominent item of conspicuous consumption suggest-
ing excess and abundance—they have more power, weight, and space than
most people need. Such excess is the essence of display, like “McMansions”
with five bathrooms and immense unused spaces. In offering excessive
amounts of weight and space, SUVs also resemble limos, which are even more
impractical, more wasteful of space, and more obviously intended to “make a
statement” divorced from any discernible need other than showing off.
It is another possibility that the expansion of the size of vehicles represented
by SUVs is associated with the corresponding expansion of the size of Amer-
icans. SUVs are likely to have a special appeal to those who are overweight on
account of the comfort they promise. But for the most part people drive SUVs
because they have become (mistakenly) identified with safety, freedom, ad-
venture, self-sufficiency, and ruggedness and because they offer marginal ad-
vantages like sitting higher and more comfortably than in some regular cars.
But these preferences have costly unintended consequences: air pollution, con-
gestion, and aggravating the dependence on imported oil. The largely imagi-
nary benefits of these vehicles are greatly outweighed by their damage to the
environment and public health and the increased economic-political depen-
dence on oil-producing countries.
While it is always risky to pronounce on what people “truly need,” I be-
lieve that few people truly need SUVs since they do not live on dirt roads and
do not have to move around huge families. Life without SUVs should not be
a hardship or sacrifice for most people and is compatible with safety, comfort,
and performance.
 Chapter Nine

The Chronic Ailments of

Television News

A few years ago Jim Maceda, a reporter on NBC Evening News, informed view-
ers that based on interviews he had conducted on the streets of Baghdad he had
reached the conclusion that Saddam Hussein enjoyed broad and strong support
among the people of Iraq. Disturbed by the ignorance and journalistic irre-
sponsibility these comments reflected, I wrote a letter to the producer of NBC
Evening News asking “does Mr. Maceda truly believe that in an exceptionally
brutal police state such as present day Iraq any critic of the ruling dictator will
come forward and unburden himself or herself in public to an American TV re-
porter? Did he ever hear about the treatment of the critics of the system? . . .
How did he select his informants and who did the translations . . . ?” I received
no reply from NBC.
A recent article in the New Republic helps to explain the attitude of Maceda
and many of his fellow reporters in Iraq. Foreign journalists in Iraq are tightly
controlled by the government and its ubiquitous “minders” who accompany
them everywhere; if they displease the authorities they get kicked out or are
refused visas. As the New Republic article pointed out, “broadcasting his
[Hussein’s] propaganda is simply the only way they can continue to work in
Iraq. . . . The networks make these concessions because the alternative is no
access.”
We do not know what proportion of American reporters are aware that “like
their Sovietbloc predecessors, the Iraqis have become masters of the Orwellian
pantomime—the state-orchestrated anti-American rally, the state-led tours of
alleged chemical weapons sites that turn out to be baby milk factories . . .” and
other deceptions they are exposed to and expected to report. Whatever their
level of awareness of the latter, these reporters faithfully report what they are
allowed to see. An exception was the excellent Frontline/World program on

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74 Chapter Nine

public television entitled Truth and Lies in Baghdad. It was made by a

British reporter who was expelled well before his visa expired and who
probably does not expect to return soon, if ever, in view of his findings.
It is no mystery why the Iraqi government is intent on denying free access
to foreign reporters and why it manipulates and shapes what they report. The
mystery is why American news organizations and especially TV networks
“mindlessly recite Baghdad’s spin” and why they are convinced that under
these conditions having reporters in Iraq serves a useful purpose. A CNN ex-
ecutive (interviewed for the New Republic article) insists that these manipu-
lated reports are “newsworthy” and it is essential for CNN to be able to re-
port from Iraq; being there “is an end in itself,” the New Republic concluded.
But why this obsession with “being there” when it not only precludes the
gathering of reliable and informative news but actually assures the opposite:
the steady, abundant flow of misinformation, amounting to Iraqi government
propaganda?
An attempt to understand this peculiar policy leads to further reflections
about the chronic and broader flaws of television news. The striving for a spu-
rious authenticity is a major explanation, and one that is not limited to the
misleading reports from Iraq. It is this quest for “authenticity” that prompts
network executives and reporters to believe that “being on the spot” is in and
of itself valuable, that thrusting a microphone in the face of a docile and in-
timidated pedestrian in Baghdad is a notable accomplishment.
But the presumed benefits of “being on the spot” have become an obsolete
journalistic article of faith in our age of resourceful police states, mass ma-
nipulation, organized spontaneity, and model institutions created for propa-
ganda purposes and especially for the benefit of foreign visitors. In a book of
mine (Political Pilgrims) I referred to some of these efforts as the “techniques
of hospitality” authorities in communist systems devised for the explicit pur-
pose of deceiving visitors from abroad; these techniques have not been lim-
ited to communist states as the case of Iraq shows.
The pursuit of authenticity is not the only explanation of the problems here
discussed. There is also genuine ignorance on the part of many American
journalists about repressive political systems abroad—quite similar to past ig-
norance about communist states that led to purveying similarly misleading in-
formation about them. These journalists and their employers find it particu-
larly difficult to grasp that public opinion in repressive police states cannot be
easily, if at all, assessed, sampled, or measured, because in these societies
people wear a tightly fitting mask of conformity.
Asking people on the streets of Baghdad what they think of their govern-
ment or of the United States has certain parallels in domestic television news,
not that the Americans queried are intimidated and hence cannot respond
 The Chronic Ailments of Television News 75

truthfully. The similarity lies in the compulsion to solicit the views of ordi-
nary people more or less randomly selected, who have no particular expertise
or qualifications for offering enlightening comments on the subjects in ques-
tion, only semiarticulate gut reactions. In spite of this, no newscast passes
without reporters earnestly extracting some such snippet of banality from
these randomly picked “ordinary people,” usually on the street, in shopping
malls, or at other public places. Their opinions or reactions are compulsively
solicited about major events deemed newsworthy, whether it is war with Iraq,
the state of the economy, the price of drugs, airport check-ins, or disasters of
one kind or another. A handful of interviews, regardless of their minimal sub-
stance, are not meaningful samples of public opinion.
I suggest two explanations for this phenomenon. One is the motivation to pay
lip service to egalitarianism by conveying that the networks care for the opin-
ions of ordinary folks and not only the experts; we are to believe that it is en-
lightening and important to learn what these handful of anonymous, inter-
changeable “regular” people opine on various issues in the seconds allotted to
them. Such people must come from all walks of life—an approach also dear to
advertisers who like to illustrate the wonders of their products through “regu-
lar” but “diverse” people—bus drivers, nurses, farmers, old-age pensioners,
firefighters, and police officers, preferably of different skin color and ethnicity.
Inserting the snippets by ordinary people into a newscast serves a second
purpose: to avoid dreaded abstractions or more complicated ideas; presum-
ably it would tax the intelligence of the viewers to be informed, say, that a
certain percentage of old-age pensioners cannot afford to pay for their drugs
instead of showing an actual old-age pensioner who cannot afford them and
says so. Likewise information about the rising gasoline prices cannot be dis-
pensed without showing a human being pumping gas and muttering some-
thing about the changing prices.
Since the news has to be lively and, if possible, dramatic and entertaining,
whatever is abstract, dry, analytical, and lacking in entertainment value is
strenuously avoided. This, of course, is the obvious explanation of the fond-
ness for reporting violence and disasters of every kind, as well as tearful per-
sonal responses to loss and suffering. As of this writing, every network pro-
vided on several occasions an extended and identical coverage of an
earthquake in a small town in Italy, doubtless because the victims were chil-
dren. Here was a juicy disaster with a particularly sad toll. The Italians por-
trayed met (without intending) the network requirements for stereotypical
emotional display: they sobbed, gesticulated wildly, ran around; they were
authentically and spectacularly grief-stricken.
It should also be noted here that while photogenic catastrophes in different
parts of the world are given eager and detailed coverage, in the normal course
76 Chapter Nine

of events approximately 90 percent of the world remains shrouded in obscu-

rity and is never referred to. News coverage is trapped between a resolute
parochialism (the overwhelming majority of news being domestic) and the
pursuit of the odd, exotic, and disastrous elsewhere whenever it occurs. In or-
der to deflect critiques of dwelling on the morbid or pathological, the evening
news usually ends with an uplifting, feel-good, human-interest story, often
quite trivial.
Television news will only become informative and honest if and when its
makers decide that providing entertainment to maximize the audience is not
its first obligation, when criteria other than photogenic suffering or banal feel-
good snippets govern news selection, and when the producers of the news ac-
quire a better understanding of the world outside the United States, including
the kind of political repression that has no precedent and parallel in American
experience.
At the time when the United States is approaching the possibility of war
with Iraq, it is particularly important that the American public be well in-
formed. This includes information about the character of the prevailing Iraqi
political system, its exceptionally repressive nature, and its pathologically
brutal leader. The media does not have to “demonize” Saddam Hussein, since
the facts speak for themselves. Most Americans have no idea how he came to
power and how he stays in power. There are plenty of Iraqi exiles in the
United States who can provide chilling “human interest” stories about the
system that could be a revealing counterpoint to supervised, sham interviews
on the streets of Baghdad.
A thorough examination of political conditions in Iraq on television
could contribute to the kind of moral clarity that would help the public to
decide whether or not regime change in Iraq would or would not constitute
a “just war.”
 Chapter Ten

Stereotyping and the Decline

of Common Sense

According to a textbook in my possession entitled Modern Geography

(“simplified and adapted to the capacity of Youth”) published in 1830 in
Hartford, Connecticut, “The Afghans are a brave, fierce and warlike people
. . . distinguished for their hospitality. . . .” By contrast, “the French are po-
lite, gay, active and industrious and celebrated for their proficiency in the
arts and sciences.” In turn, “the Dutch are honest, patient and persevering
and remarkable for their industry, frugality and neatness,” whereas “the Ital-
ians are affable and polite and excel in music, painting and sculpture . . . they
are effeminate, superstitious, slavish and revengeful.” The Russians are
“hardy, vigorous and patient of labor but extremely rude, ignorant and bar-
barous.”
As these examples make clear, Americans in those days were not appre-
hensive about heavy-handed stereotyping. It was not considered impossible
or offensive to offer brief generalizations about attributes that groups or na-
tionalities had in common or were supposed to have in common. Deep in his
or her heart, even the most enlightened present-day reader may admit that
these characterizations were not wholly without foundation. It is almost as
clear today as it was in the early nineteenth century that the Dutch, in many
respects, are quite unlike the Afghans, and a comparison of the French and
Russians, or Swedes and Italians, would also yield some obvious and highly
patterned differences. Stereotyping fell into bad repute because of the hate-
filled racial-ethnic labeling that justified the mistreatment and persecution in
our times of groups including Jews, blacks, Native Americans, Armenians,
gypsies—you name it.
Group differences are not limited to those rooted in nationality: social class
and levels of education too are associated with identifiable group differences.

77
78 Chapter Ten

Truck drivers share traits found far less frequently among mathematicians and
stockbrokers; the latter in turn would be difficult to confuse with professional
musicians. I read once that there used to be a high concentration of individu-
als of Scandinavian origin among tugboat captains in New York harbor but
not of those with a Jewish background. Asian Americans excel in the sciences
and engineering, African Americans in sports—scandalous as it has become
to say so in public. Of course each and every one of these and other groups
shares a common humanity that is the point of departure for a wide range of
admissible differences, as multiculturalists proudly emphasize.
Are shared group attributes vicious, degrading stereotypes or common-
sense observations about certain traits, propensities, talents, or interests some
groups have in common for reasons both known and unknown? Stereotypes
are widely held generalizations about groups; some are accurate, some are
not; they often exaggerate certain attributes and ignore others. Such general-
izations do not mean that every individual in a particular group possesses the
widely perceived characteristics ascribed to the group but a greater probabil-
ity that he will have them. Such generalizations are basic to human cognition:
we tend to classify and group all kinds of phenomena—few things in this
world, animate or inanimate, are totally unique or singular.
None of this is a uniquely modern phenomenon: aversion toward the stranger,
the outsider, variously defined (and often associated with the negative stereo-
types) is as old as human beings living in groups. But only in the past few
decades has the practice become strongly condemned, indeed outlawed (for the
most part only in the West, one must hasten to add). Stereotyping in much of the
non-Western world remains a time-honored, taken-for-granted practice; the sug-
gestion that Indians and Pakistanis or the Chinese and Japanese, Chechens and
Russians or Arabs and Israelis are fundamentally alike would prompt incompre-
hension or a good laugh in those parts of the world.
At the same time it has been largely overlooked that a recently prominent
trend in American society—multiculturalism—thrives on stereotyping. It in-
sists that there are ineradicable differences among groups (or the sexes) that
are the sources of group identity and identity politics, of ethnic, feminist, or
gay pride. It is politically correct and praiseworthy to claim that certain
groups have unique needs and attributes (which, for example, educational in-
stitutions should respect and cater to) but totally inadmissible to suggest that
certain groups may also share, along with their particular religious-political
convictions, different propensities to commit violent acts of terrorism.
It is thus important to point out that the ban on stereotyping—central to po-
litical correctness—has been highly selective. White heterosexual males, cor-
porate executives, evangelical Christians, housewives not interested in femi-
nism, anti-abortionists, and others can be openly stereotyped in highly
 Stereotyping and the Decline of Common Sense 79

unfavorable ways. Racism, sexism, homophobia, elitism, and ethnocentrism

have been freely and sweepingly attributed to such groups. These too are
stereotypes, and especially venomous ones given the frequent claim that they
are inherent and ineradicable.
Profiling or racial profiling is a form of stereotyping that rests on the as-
sumption that members of some groups are more likely than others to com-
mit crimes or acts of political violence. Such profiling has become a particu-
larly pressing issue in the wake of 9/11 and the preventive measures it has
inspired. Is it fair or reasonable to pay more attention at airports and else-
where to people who belong to groups known to have a greater propensity,
statistically speaking, to commit acts of terrorism than others, that is, young
males of Arab or Middle Eastern background and often of darker complex-
ion? How many native-born American old-age pensioners, suburban mothers,
or members of symphony orchestras have been among the known suicide pi-
lots or bombers? Why pretend that old ladies in wheelchairs have the same
potential to blow up planes than physically fit, young males from Islamic
countries?
The current procedure at airports and elsewhere is based on the ludicrous
premise and pretense that the propensity and capability to carry out acts of
terrorism are randomly distributed in the American population, although
everybody knows that this is not the case. This is why we see women with ba-
bies frisked and octogenarians’ luggage carefully examined. Random
searches of this kind are a colossal waste of time and resources. They are nec-
essary only insofar as not everybody can be searched thoroughly, thus some
people have to be singled out. But the latter should not be a random proce-
dure. What we need are intelligent forms of profiling that take into account
the largest number of probable variables associated with acts of terrorism and
the beliefs underpinning them.
The precipitous decline of common sense in our times, associated with a
politically correct solicitousness toward some minorities, was also revealed in
the recent case of a Muslim woman in Florida who insisted on her right to
wear a veil (hijab) that covered her entire face except her eyes in the photo-
graph used in her driver’s license. Such a photo, needless to say, is completely
useless for the purpose it is supposed to serve, namely the visual identifica-
tion of the driver. Upon the request of the Florida Department of Motor Ve-
hicles to provide a photo showing her entire face, she and her lawyers argued
(as reported in the New York Times on June 27, 2002) that “her religious be-
liefs dictate that she not reveal her face to strangers or men outside her fam-
ily” and the demand that she submit an unveiled photo “is subjective, unrea-
sonable and violates her religious freedom as well as her right to privacy and
due process.” The demand that Muslim women be exempt from rules that ap-
80 Chapter Ten

ply to the rest of the population (such as being allowed not to have photos on
their drivers’ licenses and presumably in other documents that reveal their
faces) illuminates the sharp conflict between politically correct multicultural-
ism and public safety and the routine, rational procedures of life in a modern,
secular society. Presumably in an Islamic theocracy the problem would not
arise since women are not allowed to drive.
Acceding to the request of this woman and her lawyers would be an un-
ambiguous declaration of the supremacy of religious values over secular ones
that would legitimate the special treatment of certain groups at the expense of
public safety and equality before the law. Perhaps the time will come when
some other religious believers will demand that women be altogether de-
prived of a driver’s license, perceiving such privilege a violation of their re-
ligious beliefs. And of course many Islamic groups find other practices and
liberties prevailing in modern secular societies offensive, distasteful, and irk-
some and would gladly take legal or other action to get rid of them.
The Florida case makes clear that multiculturalism carried to its logical,
politically correct conclusion is incompatible with the existence of a modem
secular society in which the laws apply equally to everybody regardless of
their religious beliefs. By the same token the pretense that everybody who
gets on a plane or hangs around a nuclear power plant has an equal likelihood
of committing acts of terrorism is as absurd as to insist that no differences ex-
ist among human groups or that members of particular social, national, or eth-
nic groups have nothing in common. At the root of these beliefs we find the
type of multiculturalism that harbors relentless hostility toward American so-
ciety and Western values and extends sympathy to every group that questions
or rejects these values.
 Chapter Eleven

Tawana Brawley and the “Exotic

Dancer” at Duke

The recent case of the lacrosse players at Duke University accused of raping
a young black woman brings to mind the case of Tawana Brawley, the black
teenager who in 1988 made similar charges against a group of white men in
Wappinger Falls, New York.
In both cases, what turned out to be unfounded charges were widely given
credit and generated immense publicity; celebrities and politicians rallied to
the cause of the alleged victims, lengthy and costly legal investigations fol-
lowed, and at last it emerged that the accusations were groundless. In both in-
cidents, the charges were seized upon as self-evident, incontrovertible proof
of the incorrigible and ineradicable racism that continues to permeate and in-
fect every pore of American society.
On the Duke campus, the incident was seen, at least initially, as proof not
only of the ingrained racism of American society but of other evils as well,
such as sexism and “classism.” Rallies, demonstrations, protest marches, and
candlelight vigils were held and demands were made on the administration of
the university to combat racism with greater determination. “On a single day
in March 550 news outlets featured some version of the story.”1 The incident
was said to be a “wake-up call against sexual assault,” and “enraged students
raised questions about their safety on campus.”2 Members of the faculty were
in the forefront of those denouncing American society and its endemic
racism. Eighty-eight members of the faculty “issued a statement in April say-
ing ‘thank you’ to the protesters who had branded the players rapists.”3
Protestations of the presumed innocence of the accused were often brushed
aside; they were, after all, white, upper-middle-class males accused by a poor
black female. The black female in question worked for an escort service and
attended the lacrosse players’ social gathering as an “exotic dancer.” It is

81
82 Chapter Eleven

doubtful that similar attention would have been generated if the alleged rape
victim had been white since being black and female has, for some time, been
a quintessential defining attribute of authentic victimhood. The long and in-
disputable legacy of mistreatment and discrimination black people have suf-
fered helps to explain the continued, ready acceptance of claims of victim-
ization also enshrined in compensatory legislation, known as affirmative
action. White guilt has been an understandable, but increasingly questionable,
response to this historical record.
According to the president of Duke, “the lacrosse episode . . . put into high
relief deep structures of inequality in our society—inequalities of wealth,
privilege and opportunity . . . and the attitudes of superiority these inequali-
ties breed.” The vice provost said that “whatever we have been doing to ad-
dress these problems [race, class, sex, and privilege] has been insufficient and
needs to be redoubled and tripled.” A law professor who was also the chair of
the academic council asked, “Have we tolerated behavior that would cause
people to believe that they can treat other people without respect?”4 The
Raleigh News and Observer concluded that the situation “has exposed seri-
ous issues of race, gender, and class division.”5
An article in the New Yorker reported that

much of the bitterest vitriol came from members of the Duke faculty who were
willing to assume not only the players’ guilt but the university’s. At a session of
the Academic Council Brodhead, [the president] was roundly assailed for not
taking decisive action against the team and one professor . . . urged him to con-
fess publicly that Duke was a racist and misogynist institution. Houston Baker,
an English professor . . . asserted in a letter (he subsequently made public) to . . .
the Provost, that at Duke, white male athletes were “veritably given license to
rape, maraud, deploy hate speech” and excoriated the university for its com-
plicity in the “sexual assault, verbal racial violence and drunken white male
privilege loosed amongst us.”6

Duke faculty were not unanimous in harboring such sentiments. There were
some willing to remind the public of presumptions of innocence, and James
Coleman, in particular, another law professor, was highly critical of the han-
dling of the case by the district attorney who characterized the accused as “a
bunch of hooligans.”7
While the Duke case is not yet officially closed, the charges of rape have
been dropped (but not those of sexual assault and kidnapping). The accuser
has expressed a new uncertainty about the nature of the incident, and DNA
tests have indicated that the lacrosse players had no sexual contact (that could
be defined as rape) with the accuser but that she had such contact with others
prior to the time of the alleged rape.8
 Tawana Brawley and the “Exotic Dancer” at Duke 83

Unlike in the Tawana Brawley case, in North Carolina the district attorney
gave every indication of a politically motivated urge to indict the accused,
and he pursued his case with an ethically dubious zeal (which included with-
holding information from the defense and using questionable methods for
identifying the alleged wrongdoers). He was running in an election and ap-
peared to seize the opportunity to display his antiracist credentials for the
benefit of black and liberal voters. It worked, and he won reelection.
After several decades of compensatory legislation, widespread reverse dis-
crimination (known as “affirmative action”), and numerous indicators sug-
gesting that both official and unofficial racism have greatly diminished, dema-
gogues like Al Sharpton continue to make lifelong careers out of mining
white guilt, and this guilt shows little decline, as the Duke incident also sug-
gests. Why should this be the case?
It is reasonable to suspect that when the dust settles and it becomes widely
known and fully acknowledged that the accusations against the lacrosse play-
ers were questionable and probably altogether groundless, those who had
been convinced of the truthfulness of the charges will fall back on the rea-
soning that was offered by professor Stanley Diamond in 1988 in the after-
math of the Tawana Brawley incident: “The case cannot be measured by le-
gal canons, official justice or received morality. . . . The grand jury has
responded to the technical questions of the case, weighing the evidence but
necessarily blind to its deeper meanings. In cultural perspective, if not in fact,
it doesn’t matter whether the crime occurred or not. . . . What is most re-
markable about this faked crime is that traditional victims have re-created
themselves as victims in a dreadfully plausible situation.”9
This point of view is likely to originate in deep reservoirs of sympathy and
guilt for the past sufferings of the “traditional victims” that resist being
drained by the evidence of substantial social and cultural change. This resist-
ance may be linked to sentiments of enlightened moral superiority that man-
ifest themselves in the eager and profuse admissions of guilt. To feel guilty
for the sins of one’s ancestors (or fellow citizens) and to dwell on this guilt in
public is a lofty and attractive moral position not easily abandoned.
Many academic intellectuals’ senses of identity rest on the role of the virtu-
ous social critic, on “conspicuous compassion,” and the associated readiness
to renounce society for a variety of sins. But wallowing in guilt is not neces-
sarily the best guide to action, or policy, or even to self-esteem. Overwhelm-
ing feelings of guilt led to the policies of reverse discrimination and new in-
justices in a variety of competitive situations when a middle- or upper-class
black individual is given automatic preference over a similarly (or better)
qualified poor or lower-class white one on account of the color of his skin and
the sufferings of his ancestors.
84 Chapter Eleven

White guilt is complemented and validated by the self-appointed spokes-

men of the black population who thrive on and make abundant use of what
Shelby Steele called “the victim-focused identity.” The image of the innocent
victim fortifies, morally and psychologically, the righteous critic of society
broadcasting collective guilt—it provides a self-evident, unchallengeable
moral high ground. At the same time, considerable material and social status
benefits follow from the legally certified and institutionalized victim identity.
When white guilt converges with the attachment to the victim identity there
is an enlarged, reflexive receptivity to the claims of the likes of Tawana Braw-
ley and “the exotic dancer” at Duke University. It may be time for the emo-
tionally satisfying white guilt to give way to more careful considerations of
right and wrong that are not automatically determined by the skin color of ei-
ther the wrongdoer or his victim.10

NOTES

l. Duke Magazine, May/June 2006.

2. Duke Chronicle online, March 29, 2006.
3. “At Law,” Wall Street Journal, December 27, 2006.
4. Duke Magazine, May/June 2006.
5. Quoted in the New Yorker, September 4, 2006.
6. Peter S. Boyer, “Letter from Durham,” New Yorker, September 4, 2006.
7. Raleigh News Observer, March 29, 2006.
8. New York Times, December 23 and 24, 2006.
9. Stanley Diamond, “Reversing Brawley,” The Nation, October 31, 1988.
10. In the end the total groundlessness of the charges was fully and legally estab-
lished and the prosecutor, Michael Nifong, became the subject of investigation for
ethical misconduct. (See “Duke Prosecutor Throws out Case against Players,” New
York Times, April 12, 2007; see also “After Duke Prosecution Began to Collapse, De-
monizing Continued,” New York Times, April 15, 2007.)
 Chapter Twelve

An Islamic Requirement
on Campus

Requiring incoming freshmen at the University of North Carolina to read a

partial and incomplete interpretation of the Koran has been a triumph of po-
litical correctness and the double standards often associated with it. One may
ask, to begin with, if the goal is purely educational, as the university author-
ities claimed, why should such a requirement exclude other major world reli-
gions? Why not also require students to read something about Buddhism, Ju-
daism, and the major varieties of Christianity of which they are also ignorant?
Surely Catholics and Protestant know little of each others’ beliefs and reli-
gious teachings and many misconceptions of Judaism still flourish waiting to
be dispelled.
The educational authorities at Chapel Hill argue that there is at the present
time a particularly pressing need for a better understanding of Islam and dis-
pelling misconceptions about it. There would be little to object to if the pro-
gram at North Carolina represented a serious attempt to understand Islam
even to the exclusion of other religions. But the claim that this requirement
was introduced merely to foster a better understanding of Islam and Islamic
cultures is not credible. If that were the case, students would have been re-
quired to read not merely the early chapters of the Koran; they would also
have been assigned various interpretations of Islam, including critical ones,
and those that probe the affinities between the professed beliefs and behavior
of Islamic terrorists and aspects of the Koran that apparently lend themselves
to such uses.
Instead the university authorities intended to expose students to an uncriti-
cal, partial, and selective treatment of the Koran, one that bypasses the attempt
to understand the connection between Islamic beliefs and the savagery and fa-
naticism of terrorists who insistently proclaim being motivated by such values
and beliefs. There is every indication that the book the students were required
85
86 Chapter Twelve

to read avoids reference to the militant, intolerant, dogmatic, conflict-oriented,

and self-righteous aspects of Islamic beliefs that have an affinity with the
mindset, motivation, and behavior of Islamic terrorists.
If the academic authorities wished students “to understand a culture we
don’t know anything about”—as chancellor of North Carolina University
Moeser said in an interview reported in the New York Times (August 20,
2002)—students should have been given the opportunity to learn something
about the Sharia Laws too, which legitimate discrimination against women
and the most brutal ways of punishing criminals such as stoning, flogging,
amputation, and beheading for reasons American students would find barely
comprehensible let alone justified.
Will the newly assigned volume and the teachers discussing it explain (in
search of a better understanding of a different culture) why these exception-
ally gruesome forms of punishments persist only in Islamic cultures and
countries? Do such punishments represent a misinterpretation or misunder-
standing of Islamic values, and if so why have they persisted for centuries?
Evidently a discussion of these and other unsavory practices and attitudes are
not part of the educational efforts the University of North Carolina—perhaps
they are considered harmless items of “cultural diversity” students need not
be familiar with, let alone be judgmental of.
Even if it were true (which it is not) that there is nothing in the Koran and
Islamic religious teachings that could possibly justify, legitimate, motivate, or
inspire the actions of terrorists, it would still have to be asked why, and on
what grounds, do they claim the opposite? What makes it possible for the ter-
rorists to find legitimation and encouragement in these allegedly misunder-
stood religious beliefs? Even if the Koran does not outright advocate the in-
discriminate slaughter of civilian “infidels,” how is it possible that the
terrorists find in it legitimation for such actions? What aspect of these reli-
gious doctrines help terrorists to fantasize about Paradise awaiting them as a
reward for killing the infidel?
These are exactly the kinds of questions that have been raised in connec-
tion with the relationship between Marxist theory and the practices of com-
munist states and movements. People seeking to defend the purity and high
moral tone of Marxism insisted that there was nothing in it to justify or legit-
imate the murderous, repressive policies of communist systems, that theory
and practice were wholly unrelated. By contrast communist leaders con-
stantly invoked Marxist theory and ideals to justify their actions and claimed
to be deeply committed disciples of Marx and authoritative interpreters of his
thought. Nor was it difficult to find affinities, if not explicit connections, be-
tween Marxist ideas and the policies of communist states. What precisely was
 An Islamic Requirement on Campus 87

the nature of the connections, of the affinity? Why did these ideas lend them-
selves to misapplication or distortion, if indeed that what the case?
These are precisely the questions that should be raised regarding Islam and
the political violence many of its adherents practice with notable zest. But this
is not part of the educational program at the campuses of the University of
North Carolina; rather, it appears that an effort is underway to erase and di-
vert attention from the possible connections between Islamic beliefs and Is-
lamic political behavior, including terrorism.
Why this urgency to absolve Islam of any responsibility for what has been
done in its name? Why expose students to a book that will leave them with an
uncritical interpretation of Islam? Why the reluctance to embark on a serious
educational effort that would help students grasp the essentials of this religion
and culture and their impact on the political beliefs and behavior of those
molded by them?
The answer lies in the attributes of the politically correct mindset and the
adversary culture that continue to dominate our institutions of higher educa-
tion. The educators in charge of this program in North Carolina would prefer
their students to believe that the source of all current social, political, eco-
nomic, or spiritual problems and conflicts is located in the United States or
the Western world. Blaming Islam, or Islamic fanatics, for terrorism is inad-
missible and politically incorrect because it lets the United States off the
hook. If people in other countries hate the United States, there must be good
reasons for it. We must look for “root causes”—which always end up being
U.S. foreign policy and the nature of American society. We must always be
self-critical, never critical of others—that is, those outside the United States
or outside the Western world. We must not be judgmental of religious or other
beliefs—unless they happen to be American or Western.
The University of North Carolina seeks to encourage a positive, or at least
nonjudgmental, view of a religion that has numerous less than appealing fea-
tures and of those who believe in it. Political correctness and “multicultural-
ism” (which as a rule entails a reflexive aversion to all things Western) hold
the key to the determination at the University of North Carolina to impose a
selective and flawed understanding of Islam on its freshmen.
 Chapter Thirteen

Rehabilitating the Great Books:

Literature and Life

It is hardly a secret that what used to be considered the great works of Western
literature no longer inspire the kind of respect and admiration they once did.
We live at a time when artistic and literary merit has become relativized in
much of academic thinking and teaching—a relativization compatible with the
admiration of and demand for books endowed with certain putative political-
ideological virtues. Departments of English have increasingly been shifting
from teaching to advocacy and to courses more sociological than literary.
Many teachers in these departments apparently have lost interest in literature
and found other topics and source materials more congenial and useful to sup-
port their worldview and educational objectives. As Harold Bloom observed,
“students of literature have become amateur political scientists, uninformed
sociologists, incompetent anthropologists, mediocre philosophers and over-
determined cultural historians.”1
Many among those who are supposed to interpret and elucidate the
meaning of great literary works are at great pains to demonstrate that there
is little if any qualitative difference between them and the products of pop-
ular culture. Terry Eagelton, a prominent representative of such beliefs,
suggested that the teaching of literature be abandoned in favor of what he
called “discourse studies” allowing instructors “to teach Shakespeare, tel-
evision scripts, government memoranda, comic books, and advertising
copy in a single program. . . .”2 Such sentiments prompted Alvin Kernan to
observe that

few things are stranger than the violence and hatred with which the old litera-
ture was deconstructed by those who earn their living teaching and writing about
it. . . . The most popular subjects of criticism and undergraduate and graduate
courses are . . . those that demonstrate how meaningless, or . . . how wicked and

88
 Rehabilitating the Great Books: Literature and Life 89

anti-progressive, the old literature has been . . . how badly it has treated those
who are not white, how regularly it has voiced an aristocratic jackbooted ethos
or propagandized for a brutally materialistic capitalism.3

Another critic of these trends, John Ellis, wrote, “professors of literature

now argue against the Western tradition in thought and literature. They argue
. . . that such study can be positively harmful. High culture is full of perni-
cious ideas and influences—even Shakespeare’s plays reflect reactionary at-
titudes: jingoistic imperialism, racism, sexism, homophobia. . . . High culture
is part of the ruling elite’s apparatus for social control.”4
The demotion of classics also came to be justified by the dubious argument
that the important thing in higher education is not the teaching of any “great”
books but the teaching of critical thinking: “The truth is that a fluency with
the Great Books is no longer a prerequisite for professional or social success.
Critical thinking skills arguably are.”5 Regrettably, the educational philosophy
that led to the antagonism toward the “great books” is not exactly the hotbed
of critical thinking, inspired as it has been by the new orthodoxies subsumed
under the concept of political correctness.
The late twentieth century was a period when new theories of literature as-
sociated with “deconstructionism” and postmodernity proclaimed that liter-
ary works have no inherent meaning or message but are subject to the diverse,
changing, and arbitrary interpretations of the readers, their meaning deter-
mined by their sense of identity and group or individual interests—racial, eth-
nic, gender, or class.
In the same period, reading habits changed for the worse and students’ at-
tention spans shrank (probably because of habitual television watching from
an early age) to a degree that makes it difficult for them to read longer and
more demanding works. Academic interest in the humanities has generally
declined as reflected in enrollments, majors chosen, and course offerings.
These developments coincided with the removal of many classics from
courses of literature and their replacement by works written by contemporary
authors whose reputation was often decisively bolstered by being female or
belonging to a designated “minority.” The idea of “minority” itself has be-
come narrow and arbitrary, based largely on skin color. For political and ide-
ological reasons blacks, Hispanics (but not Cuban Americans), American In-
dians (or Native Americans), and women have become the officially
designated minorities in the United States during the last four decades of the
past century. Women, of course, are not a minority at all since they form over
half of the population; Asian Americans are usually excluded since their in-
clusion undermines the conventional wisdom of equating minority status with
underachievement and low social status. Jews have never been included, pre-
sumably for the same reason.
90 Chapter Thirteen

The recollections of a recent “literature major” illustrate current trends in

the teaching of literature. She was a beneficiary of “a rarified diet of semi-
otics and deconstruction . . . [and met her] degree requirements by taking
‘Feminist Literary Criticism’ and ‘Women and the Avant-Garde’ as well as
two courses devoted principally to film. . . .” She graduated “without having
read for credit ‘The Odyssey,’ ‘Paradise Lost,’ and a single play by Shake-
speare or a single novel by Jane Austen, George Eliot or Henry James.”6 She
was, moreover, serenely convinced—as were other supposed authorities on
the teaching of English quoted in the same article—that this state of affairs
did no harm to her education,
The policies leading to such changes in the curriculum were also described
as a form of a “cultural populism” representing “attempts of women, ethnic
and racial minorities to achieve cultural enfranchisement. . . .”7 Such “repre-
sentativeness” often came to outweigh aesthetic or intellectual criteria.
Harold Bloom wrote, “if you believe that all value ascribed to poems or plays
or novels and stories is only a mystification in the service of the ruling class,
then why should you read at all . . . ? The idea that you benefit the insulted
and injured by reading someone of their own origins rather than reading
Shakespeare is one of the oddest illusions ever promoted by or in our
schools.”8
All in all, the closing decades of the past century were not auspicious for
the teaching and appreciation of the more demanding works of fiction often
written by those labeled as “dead white males.” On the other hand, the new
policies and trends did go a long way to satisfy the prevailing notions of so-
cial justice and group representation.
This essay registers strong disagreement with the trends outlined above. It
should not be necessary to remind readers that many works of fiction, clas-
sics and others, provide intellectual and emotional nourishment greatly supe-
rior to the offerings of mass culture or to much of the currently embraced po-
litically correct readings. Good fiction (the “great books”) is a source of
guidance for confronting the profound and timeless problems of life that are
not dependent on particular social settings or historical conditions. Great
writers are unusually gifted human beings who, for reasons far from clear,
possess powers of insight, understanding, and expressive talent that distin-
guish them from most of their readers and critics. Mario Vargas Llosa be-
lieves that writers “plunge into the innermost universe of memory, nostalgia,
secret desires, intuition and instinct . . . that nourish the creative imagination,”
that they incorporate into their writing “the element that rushes out sponta-
neously from the most secret corner of one’s personality” and they dwell “on
the vertiginous complexity of human nature.” Poetic and somewhat vague as
these notions may be, they do suggest a special, indefinable talent that, for in-
 Rehabilitating the Great Books: Literature and Life 91

stance, enabled Shakespeare to “sketch . . . certain images in which men of

every era discover their own faces.”9
Audrey Borenstein designated the distinctive contribution of literature as
its capacity to help us to grasp how others experience life; paraphrasing Car-
los Fuentes, she suggests that “we are in need of many experiences and this
is what literature offers us.”10 Novels provide examples of how individuals
solve (or fail to solve) problems the readers also confront, or some more ex-
otic ones they do not, but wonder about them from a distance, as it were. Lit-
erary characters (like readers) grapple with matters such as love, death, suc-
cess and failure, control over one’s life, and personal aspirations and
expectations and their problematic fulfillment.
Harold Bloom advocates reading “not only because we cannot know
enough people but because friendship is so vulnerable, so likely to diminish,
to disappear . . . [because] we cannot know enough people, profoundly
enough . . . [because] we need to know ourselves better” as well as for what
he calls a “secular transcendence” he likens to “falling in love.”11 A Hungar-
ian writer recalled the views of an unusually articulate Soviet soldier upon
learning that he was a writer: “He thought for a moment and then said: ‘That’s
good [being a writer] because if you are one you can tell us what we really
are thinking.’ . . . The Russian soldier regarded ‘the literary trade’ tantamount
to having access to some general truths. . . . The writer [was seen] as a magi-
cian, whose powers originated in some distant realm. . . . The soldier expected
truth to be articulated by writers, above all.”12 Like the views of Vargas Llosa
quoted earlier this too had a mythical, mysterious element to it, crediting the
writer with great, unfathomable powers.
It is not easy to propose precise criteria as to what qualities must be pres-
ent in order to assign greatness to a work of literature. Even educated tastes
vary and cultural elites can be divided in their judgment as to what consti-
tutes a great work of art, literary and other. Sometimes the greatness of a
work of art is recognized at the time of its creation, sometimes well after the
passing of its creator. At the present time museums are increasingly filled
with objects artists and their patrons of earlier times would have contem-
plated with bewilderment and revulsion. The Guggenheim Museum in New
York in recent years featured an exhibit of motor bicycles and garments by
the fashion designer Versace. The new Tate Gallery in London in 2002 dis-
played “cans of excrement” produced by Piero Manzoni who said that “he
produced these artifacts with the express purpose of showing the gullibility
of art buyers. But the Tate defended its purchase . . . on the grounds that he
was an ‘incredibly important international artist’ and his cans were ‘a semi-
nal work.’” The recent Holocaust exhibition at the Jewish Museum in New
York featured “a trick photograph of a well-fed young man holding a Diet
92 Chapter Thirteen

Coke, surrounded by the emaciated Jews of Buchenwald . . . [as well as] a

work . . . portraying cans of Zyklon B gas stamped with Chanel and Hermes
labels.” One of the contributing “artists” said, “I am using the iconography
of the Holocaust to bring attention to fashion. . . . Fashion like fascism is
about a loss of identity.”13
According to one opinion, “A great writer is like a great scientist: through
his work something vital becomes known which wasn’t known before.” For
example, “it was Dostoevsky’s discovery . . . that the most destructive and
dangerous of all religions was the new-found faith in the power of reason, sci-
ence, industry, revolution and the perfectibility of man.”14 Harold Bloom sin-
gles out “strangeness, a mode of originality” as the major criterion of great-
ness and, more elusively, the writer’s capacity “to augment one’s growing
inner self,” or “to enlarge a solitary existence.”15 John Aldridge suggests that
“the novel will be most influential at those moments when it is able to explore
areas of experience that are not yet completely familiar to the reading public,
thus functioning in its classic role as literally a bringer of the news, a discov-
erer of what is indeed novel.” Novelists make a lasting impact when they “ex-
press for the first time hitherto unknown or unexplored modes of feeling.”16
John Updike observed that “fiction seeks to concoct imaginary lives more
clearly significant than our own. . . .”17
At a time when cultural relativism combines with political correctness, it is
especially difficult to reach agreement as to what constitutes great literature.
Much of what used to be regarded as such is often dismissed as irrelevant, ob-
solete, and hopelessly “Eurocentric,” that is, influenced by allegedly dated
European traditions and standards. The rise of the demand for “role models”
in fiction (as in popular culture) adds a new dimension to these difficulties.
When a novel is praised for providing role models (or dismissed for not pro-
viding them), we are certainly in the presence of sociological or political cri-
teria rather than aesthetic or intellectual. It is an approach reminiscent of the
socialist realist literature of the former Soviet Union and other communist
systems that too was supposed to provide politically appropriate role models
and for which doing so was the major criterion of literary merit.
There used to be a far greater consensus, at any rate, among academic spe-
cialists and the educated public as to what constitutes good literature or what
works may be considered classics. Certainly sheer survival and a truly multi-
cultural appeal are useful criteria. A work of fiction that is read and enjoyed
around the world, over long periods of time, even in countries and cultures
other than those of its origin, speaks to human needs and concerns that tran-
scend particular historical settings and periods. Once more Harold Bloom ob-
served “Shakespeare for hundreds of millions who are not white Europeans is
a signifier for their own pathos, their own sense of identity. . . . For them his
 Rehabilitating the Great Books: Literature and Life 93

universality is not historical but fundamental; he puts their lives upon his
stage. In his characters they behold and confront their own anguish and their
own fantasies. . . .”18 Italo Calvino defines the classic as “a book which with
each reading offers as much of a sense of discovery as the first reading . . .
which even when we read it first time gives the sense of rereading something
we have read before.”19 One may add, obvious as it may seem, that the clas-
sics are a bridge to the past. Of course, this assumes that knowing about the
past is important, an assumption not self-evident to present-day readers and
especially the younger generations. Recognizing the influence and signifi-
cance of the past is especially challenging for Americans inclined to believe
that everything can be changed, fixed, or reinvented, including their inner-
most selves.
Besides addressing the timeless concerns and dilemmas of human exis-
tence, novels are also enlightening (without in the least distracting from their
literary-artistic merit) about social arrangements and institutions and the
problematic relationship between personal autonomy and social pressures, or
individual and society. They show how the social realm influences, if not de-
termines, the personal one, how social or cultural norms regulate, or fail to
regulate, individual behavior and how our behavior and freedom of choice is
impinged upon and curtailed by social forces and institutions; they also show
the degree to which we are “products” of our class, society, and culture, and
the extent to which our behavior and social position can or cannot be ex-
plained satisfactorily by relying exclusively upon conscious motives and
goals pursued by the individual.
In turn the literature of a period and a society, its major topics, schools, and
styles, is influenced by the broader social setting. An all too obvious example
of the social-political determination of literary topics and styles can be found in
the era of socialist-realism in the former Soviet Union. Soviet writers were ex-
plicitly instructed by the cultural-ideological authorities as to the topics to ad-
dress, the spirit in which to approach them, and the types of characters they had
to create. These writers steered clear of matters sexual for reasons that were to
be found outside the literary realm, in the neo-Victorian official morality and its
institutional imposition by censorship and self-censorship, the rewards and
punishments meted out, and by the very doctrine of socialist realism. By the
same token the singular preoccupation of large numbers of American writers in
the second half of the twentieth century with matters sexual cannot be ex-
plained purely as a matter of personal taste (or lack of it) but it points to broader
social-cultural influences and preoccupations also attested to by the mass me-
dia, sex manuals, fashions, and other nonliterary phenomena.
Even when writers seek to remove their topic from the familiar reaches of
their society by fleeing into the past or future, or to settings unknown to their
94 Chapter Thirteen

readers, when they cater to the escapist impulse rather than to the disposition to
identify with the familiar—even under these circumstances they tend to anchor
their work in some experience familiar to them and their readers, or they project
into the future or past such experiences in a modified form. In Chateaubriand’s
Atala and Renee, the unfamiliar, exotic setting of late-eighteenth-century North
American wilderness (which the author visited in 1791) is populated by
characters who resemble more closely idle French aristocrats tormented by
“weltschmerz” (a malaise combining alienation, identity problems, and lack
of purpose) than its actual inhabitants preoccupied with survival in a harsh
physical environment and the necessities of life obtained by physical exer-
tion. Chateaubriand knew little about the character and way of life of Amer-
ican Indians but knew a lot about members of the French aristocracy (to
which he belonged), and he projected aspects of their character upon the In-
dians in conformity with the requirements of romantic storytelling and char-
acter portrayal.
Such escapist literature appeals to readers because it does not reflect reali-
ties and settings familiar to them but transports them into realms they can
only fantasize about and thereby offers vicarious gratifications. This applies
most obviously at the present time to best-selling novels including those redo-
lent with sex and violence, books which have in common a “primitivist revolt
against social controls, especially those on sexual and aggressive impulses. . . .
The success of this kind of fiction depends precisely on its not being a re-
flection of contemporary reality. . . . Such works must . . . be regarded as the
particular modern embodiments of the age-old and almost universal tendency
to enjoy imaginative gratifications of impulses which are largely denied in so-
cial life.”20
Whatever the needs they meet, wittingly or unwittingly, novels provide in-
formation about matters social or social historical in ways not available to the
social sciences. They may be the only source of information about the past,
incomplete and subjective as they might be. Thomas Mann’s Magic Mountain
offered “a loving vision of a reality now vanished, of a European high culture
now forever gone, the culture of Goethe and Freud.”21 Similar examples of
“realities now vanished” captured in novels can be readily multiplied.
Fiction offers a partially reliable mirror of matters social through the self-
conscious effort of writers who wish to describe and record particular soci-
eties, social settings, or institutions—self-appointed social historians of a pe-
riod. Several well-known nineteenth-century authors such as Balzac,
Dickens, Flaubert, Stendhal, Thackeray, and Tolstoy exemplify this ap-
proach—not that their work reduces to the social-historical description.
Balzac, in the spirit of a zoologist, “wanted to analyze the social species of
which French society consisted and to write a true history of morals which the
 Rehabilitating the Great Books: Literature and Life 95

historians . . . usually forgot to write.”22 More broadly speaking, “realists and

naturalists, such as Flaubert, Zola, Frank Norris and Theodore Dreiser saw
their fiction as objective reports on human behavior.”23 More recently Tom
Wolfe insisted that writers go “beyond the confines of their own personal ex-
perience to get novelistic material”—by which he meant that they should ob-
serve and describe the details of social and material existence including what
and how people consume, down to brand names of clothing and footwear—
an approach in which he himself excelled.24 Elsewhere he wrote, “the realis-
tic novel—[is] a form that wallows enthusiastically in the dirt of everyday life
and the dirty secrets of class envy. . . . A highly detailed realism [is] based on
reporting . . . that would portray the individual in intimate and inextricable re-
lation to the society around him . . . [including] . . . the demonstration of the
influence of society on even the most personal aspects of the life of the indi-
vidual. . . .”25
Unfortunately, as one of his critics pointed out, this is an approach that can
lead to “a portrayal of human beings entirely subsumed under their external
aspects, such as their favorite objects, clothing, physical appearance—beyond
that there is—nothing.”26
There is more profound and authentic sociological information to be found
in the unintended revelations of writers, in their reference to matters they take
for granted rather than self-consciously and purposefully address and elabo-
rate. As Ian Watt wrote, even “literature which makes no pretense whatever
at reflecting social reality always does so in some form. . . . Literature reflects
society, but it usually does so with various degrees of indirectness and selec-
tivity.”27 Novels are full of such unintended revelations about particular soci-
eties and the prevailing cultural assumptions in the settings the writer dealt
with. For instance, in most nineteenth-century novels servants and the sub-
servience of servants are taken for granted (as for instance in those of Edith
Wharton) while their feelings or personalities are infrequently, if ever,
probed. By contrast, in a late-twentieth-century novel such as Ishiguro’s The
Remains of the Day, it is the social role and function of the main character
and narrator, a head butler, that is a key ingredient of the narrative and of the
character of the protagonist. Being a faithful, unreflecting servant is far from
taken for granted here; it is the role and mindset of the servant that is at the
center of the narrative and its unresolved conflict. Taking servants for granted
is, of course, part of taking for granted spectacular social inequalities, as was
the case in nineteenth-century novels and life. In Robinson Crusoe, slave
trading is a commonplace commercial activity that does not inspire moral in-
dignation or reflection. In contemporary American fiction, it is geographic
and social mobility that is taken for granted as people move around matter-
of-factly and effortlessly for a wide range of motives.
96 Chapter Thirteen

Another equally obvious example of unintended literary reflections or rev-

elations of social realities is social role differentiation based on sex, more
specifically the social-occupational status of women in novels throughout
much of the entire existence of the genre (until the twentieth century). Few of
these writers wasted words, questions, or moral reflections on the condition
of women or commented on the fact that their vast majority had little formal
education and no work or power outside the home. On the other hand, and
somewhat startling for the present-day reader, eighteenth- and nineteenth-
century writers often portrayed men shedding copious tears (as for example
in Robinson Crusoe, Atala and Renee, and Werther), as if such behavior were
as natural and usual for men as for women. That this, too, was taken for
granted is all the more remarkable since in most other respects men and
women were portrayed as if they had fundamentally different natures (in-
cluding expressive behavior) and hence different social roles and places in the
division of labor. The profusion of tears in the eyes of both sexes may be ex-
plained by the romantic sensibility embraced by Chateaubriand and Goethe,
though not by Defoe.
Social-historical information can also be gleaned from the reception ac-
corded to books and the treatment of their authors. When a writer is taken to
court because his novel is alleged to harm the prevailing conceptions of
morality (as happened to Flaubert because of Madame Bovary), we learn a
great deal about cultural, moral, and political conditions in a given society.
When the ruler of a country reads the manuscripts of major novelists before
they can be published—as Stalin often did—much is revealed about the rela-
tionship between literature and society, or rather writers and rulers.
Censorship is, needless to say, the most telling indicator of the relationship
between the power-holders and writers (or artists) and the reigning concep-
tions of the relationship between literature and social behavior, between ideas
and reality—the most obvious reflection of the belief that ideas matter and
may strongly influence, and even corrupt, behavior. Conversely, social hon-
ors bestowed on writers—awards, prizes, official appointments—also tell us
about prevailing social values, tastes, and political-cultural currents.
Further light is shed on the relationship between fiction and reality when
people model their lives on fictional characters, when “they have made love,
committed crimes and suicide according to the book.”28 The minor epidemic
of suicide sparked by The Sorrows of Young Werther (who commits suicide at
the end of the story) is one such example. In more recent times it has been the
mass media, and television in particular, rather than books, that provides such
models and motivates some to imitate forms of behavior portrayed.
In seeking parallels between social existence and its literary reflections, it is
especially informative to observe how much personal autonomy literary char-
 Rehabilitating the Great Books: Literature and Life 97

acters possess, to what degree their personal decisions and wishes shape their
lives, or, to the contrary, what part is played by identifiable social-historical
forces, including the social norms and expectations prevailing in their times.
How important in the literary presentation of individual choice are class, age,
sex, race, ethnicity, or even physical attributes and appearance (the latter
rarely a matter of interest to sociologists)? The sociological approach here
outlined must be distinguished from a Marxist analysis that attributes every-
thing to class and class interest (or social position defined by class and mate-
rial interest). The novel, contrary to the belief of Marxist critics, does not re-
duce to “an epic of bourgeois life.” If the principal bourgeois values are
“acquisitiveness, belief in material progress, disciplined social behavior, so-
briety, dedication to family, patriotism and boosterism, one must conclude
that major figures in the canon of the 19th century novel—Stendhal, Flaubert,
Dostoyevsky, Melville, even Balzac—radically subvert these values or vehe-
mently spurn them in their fiction.”29 Marx’s belief (expressed most suc-
cinctly in The German Ideology) that the “ruling ideas” of a period (those of
its ruling class) dominate all cultural, intellectual, or artistic endeavors is em-
pirically incorrect, or at least vastly oversimplified, certainly as regards com-
plex, pluralistic, and modern societies. As Levin Schucking pointed out,
“there is no such thing as a spirit of the age; there are only . . . a series of Spir-
its of the Age.” He also noted that “in earlier times the sociological soil is
most plainly to see, the influence of people of social eminence is manifest,
and there are only a few obvious centers from which the sustenance of the arts
proceeds.”30 However in modern, pluralistic societies it has become increas-
ingly difficult to specify which “class” rules, and which ideas “dominate” and
whom they dominate. Even if the identity of such a ruling class can be spec-
ified, it is far from clear what its ideas are and impossible to prove that they
dominate society and culture. Works of literature, especially the great ones,
rarely express class or group “interest,” although they may reflect the influ-
ence of the social background and various affiliations of the author.
Although fiction enshrines the subjective and the unique, dealing as it does
with particular individuals, not with classes or categories of people, at its best
literature combines the uniquely personal with the universally human. It does
so by addressing all the key human concerns and preoccupations: conceptions
of good and evil, death and violence, love and hate, the great variety of hu-
man relationships, the cultural and individual definitions of and responses to
both success and failure, the varieties of social and personal conflict, the en-
tire range of human desires and aspirations, both attainable and unattainable.
Novels also address the major preoccupations of sociologists and other social
scientists: questions of social order and change, the relationship between in-
dividual and society, the impact of particular social institutions on personal
98 Chapter Thirteen

behavior, the many forms of inequality, the striving for status and power, so-
cial mobility, family life, the attributes of various social groups, and the norms
and values that govern most behavior, among others.
Literature is particularly informative in grasping and revealing details of
social existence that elude social scientific inquiry that is not equipped to pen-
etrate the sphere of private (but socially relevant) feelings, motives, and val-
ues. Novels are capable of depicting the quality of human interactions and re-
lationships and expectations governed by unwritten, informal norms,
conventions, or customs. Literary portrayals also help to unearth the social
determinants of personal problems and predicaments, the ways in which the
social impinges on the personal as well as the extent to which the patterns and
demands of social existence clash with the personal, the unique, the acciden-
tal, or idiosyncratic—a clash that makes the prediction of both individual and
group behavior such a difficult enterprise for social scientists.
There are some parallels between the literary and sociological endeavors.
Audrey Borenstein’s summation is that “social scientists and writers alike are
. . . engaged in an unending search for the reasons why people act and think
and feel as they do.”31 Morroe Berger observed that “the novel and social sci-
ence are two ways of commenting on human behavior and social institutions.
. . . Both sought to explain life on the basis of institutions created by men and
women rather than by appealing to immutable absolutes and divine pow-
ers.”32 Sociology itself “has oscillated between a scientific orientation which
has led it to ape the natural sciences and a hermeneutic attitude which has
shifted the discipline toward the realm of literature.” The same author also de-
scribed sociology “as a kind of third culture between the natural sciences on
the one hand and literature and the humanities on the other.”33 He further ar-
gues that “from the moment of its inception sociology became both a com-
petitor and a counterpart of literature”34—a somewhat questionable proposi-
tion in light of the actual practices of most sociologists. The latter, and
especially those of a scientific bent, unlike writers of fiction, have little inter-
est in the less predictable and more idiosyncratic aspects of human motiva-
tion and behavior. Instead they strive to capture and systematize (and quan-
tify) broad and observable patterns and regularities of human behavior and
interaction and their enduring, institutional results. This is not to deny that
there are some similarities between the realistic-literary impulse to gather de-
scriptive information about social settings and circumstances and the socio-
logical data-gathering impulse.
Many sociologists and writers also share a desire “to see through” social
arrangements, institutions, and practices, to demystify, unmask, unravel, or
expose. These writers and sociologists are animated by a keen, stimulating
awareness of the numerous recurring differences between appearance and re-
 Rehabilitating the Great Books: Literature and Life 99

ality. Hypocrisy, deception, and self-deception have been a favorite target of

writers—unintended consequences or latent functions of sociologists. The
impulse to probe beneath the surface often merges into full-blown social crit-
icism, on the part of both writers and sociologists. For example, “the more
one studies Flaubert, the clearer it becomes how much insight into the prob-
lematic nature and the hollowness of 19th century bourgeois culture is con-
tained in his realistic works. . . .”35
One may also entertain some reservations about the apparently taken-for-
granted benefits of “unmasking” or “demystifying”—literary or social scien-
tific. The mistrust, cynicism, or skepticism that underlies these frames of
mind can be carried too far, it can become all too standardized, stale, and re-
flexive. There is a danger that an overpowering awareness of the discrepan-
cies between ideal and actual, theory and practice, appearance and reality
might lead to a malignant obsession with concealment that cannot allow for
any degree of idealism or truth seeking. Eugene Goodheart asked, “Why as a
matter of principle, should we trust the hidden rather than the evident sense
of an intellectual or cultural product? Why couldn’t we apply the demystify-
ing procedure to the reductionist method and . . . expose the will to discover
the hidden truth as a mask for the will to power. The habit of ideological sus-
picion when it become systematic and totalizing tends to produce an insensi-
tivity to ‘higher’ values, an inclination to associate truth with a cynical view
of motive.”36
Dwelling on the similarities between literature and sociology should not be
overdone. Sociologists are not interested in what is unique but rather in what
certain groups of people have in common: the married or unmarried, educated
or uneducated, criminal or law-abiding, the rich, the poor, members of differ-
ent religions denominations, ethnic groups, generations. Even more impor-
tant, most sociologists professionally disbelieve in the ineffable uniqueness
of human beings; instead they see them as products of social circumstance,
displaying highly patterned behavior.
There are also profound methodological differences between literature and
sociology; writers rely on observation and intuition, sociologists (while not
rejecting them completely) prefer explicit hypotheses, rational measurement,
quantification, elaborate data-gathering techniques. In the nineteenth century
when the prestige and impact of the natural sciences were rapidly rising, it
was tempting for sociologists, and to a lesser degree for writers, to believe
that they too could attain a measure of scientific certainty in their respective
endeavors.
Even more important is the fact that writers rely on and prize imagination,
unlike sociologists except perhaps in their research design or development of
hypotheses. The latter seek to describe and understand a reality that is external
100 Chapter Thirteen

to them, for the most part, whereas writers wish to create a reality of their own
that blends in some fashion with objective, external reality. Writers also wish
to entertain, whereas few reputable sociologists or other social scientists have
such aspirations.
Novels—regardless of their reliability as witnesses to the facts of social life
and human behavior—appeal to our interests for a variety of reasons, not all
of them compatible. On the one hand readers rely on them in order “to be dif-
ferent, [and] to be elsewhere. . . .”37 On the other, they also wish to make con-
tact with what is reassuringly familiar and confirms their experience. We also
look for simple diversion, for entertainment, including the childlike pleasure
of following a story and finding out what happens to its characters. And if all
this can be combined with some moral insight or instruction, that too will be
acceptable, or welcome, as the case may be.

NOTES

1. Harold Bloom, The Western Canon (New York: Harcourt, Brace 1994), 521.
2. Quoted in Robert Alter, The Pleasures of Reading in an Ideological Age (New
York: Simon & Schuster, 1989), 13.
3. Alvin Kernan, The Death of Literature (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University
Press, 1990), 70.
4. John M. Ellis, Literature Lost: Social Agendas and the Corruption of the Hu-
manities (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1977), 5.
5. Emily Eakin, “More Ado (Yawn) about Great Books,” New York Times, Edu-
cation Life, April 8, 2001, 41.
6. Eakin, “More Ado,” 24.
7. Eugene Goodheart, The Reign of Ideology (New York: Columbia University
Press, 1997), 91.
8. Bloom, The Western Canon, 522.
9. Mario Vargas Llosa, “Literature and Freedom,” Chronicles, April 1992, 15, 16.
10. Audrey Borenstein, Redeeming Sin: Social Science and Literature (New York:
Columbia University Press, 1978), 68, 214, 179.
11. Harold Bloom, How to Read and Why (New York: Scribner, 2000), 29.
12 DraganVelkic, “A Lehetetlen Valosaga” [The reality of the impossible], Elet es
Irodalom, [Budapest], August 13, 1999.
13. Robert Conquest, The Dragons of Expectation (New York: Norton, 2005), 195;
Stefan Kanfer, “How to Trivialize the Holocaust,” City Journal, Spring 2002, 10.
14. Stephen Vizinczey, Truth and Lies in Literature (London: Hamish Hamilton,
1986), 227, 232.
15. Bloom, The Western Canon, 3, 30, 518.
16. John W. Alridge, The American Novel and the Way We Live Now (New York:
Oxford University Press, 1983), 3, 4.
 Rehabilitating the Great Books: Literature and Life 101

17. John Updike, “Medieval Superheroes,” New York Times Book Review, January
28, 2001, 27.
18. Bloom, The Western Canon, 38–39.
19. Italo Calvino, Why Read the Classics? (New York: Pantheon, 1999), 5.
20. Ian Watt, “Literature and Society,” in The Arts in Society, ed. Robert N. Wil-
son (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 1964), 310.
21. Bloom, How to Read and Why, 189.
22. Wolf Lepenies, Between Literature and Science: The Rise of Sociology (New
York: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 4.
23. Morroe Berger, Real and Imagined Worlds: The Novel and Social Science
(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1977), 5–6.
24. Tom Wolfe, Hooking Up (New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2000), 159, 161.
25. Tom Wolfe, “Stalking the Billion-Footed Beast: A Literary Manifesto for the
New Social Novel,” Harpers, November 1989, 47, 50, 51.
26. Jonathan Raban, For Love and Money (New York: Harper & Row, 1989), 150.
27. Watt, “Literature and Society,” 308.
28. Rene Wellek and Austin Warren, Theory of Literature (New York: Harcourt,
Brace & World, 1956), 102.
29. Alter, The Pleasures of Reading, 31.
30. Levin L. Schucking, The Sociology of Literary Taste (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1961), 8, 19.
31. Borenstein, Redeeming Sin, 148.
32. Berger, Real and Imagined Worlds, 215, 126.
33. Lepenies, Between Literature and Science, 1, 7.
34. Lepenies, Between Literature and Science, 12.
35. Erich Auerbach, Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature
(New York: Doubleday, 1957), 433.
36. Goodheart, The Reign of Ideology, 18.
37. Bloom, The Western Canon, 523.
 Chapter Fourteen

The Counterculture of the Heart

According to a New York Times report (Style Section, November 24, 2002)
“16.6 million people visited matchmaking Web sites in September alone—a
figure [that] has made Internet dating seem almost stigma free. . . .” Internet
dating is not the only unconventional approach to matchmaking: there are
also computer dating services and “personals” in printed publications offer-
ing new ways to initiate romantic and other relationships. It all adds up to a
massive social phenomenon, yet its meaning and ramifications remain largely
unexplored.
“Personals” (online or printed) are a new departure in the pursuit of seri-
ous and important relationships; their rise reflects doubt over the efficacy of
the conventional methods or inability to make use of them. The communi-
cation of intimate personal needs via terse advertisements may promise to be
a more rational and effective approach to mate-selection than those that used
to prevail in modern Western societies. The innovative “rationality” of the
personals lies in the notion that the specification of attributes and interests
possessed and looked for can be a shortcut to finding a compatible person. It
would make it possible to bypass the haphazard and often frustrating con-
tacts based on introductions or the advice of others or initiated on the basis
of superficial personal impressions, appearances, and chance. If you specify
what kind of a person you are and what kind of a person you are looking for,
make clear, for instance, that the centerpiece of your recreational interests
are Bach cantatas and vacations in Mediterranean fishing villages rather than
country music and bowling, there may be a better chance of meeting kindred
spirits.
As will be shown below, the content of these messages conflicts with the
presumed rationality of the method—the attempt to gratify intimate emotional

102
 The Counterculture of the Heart 103

needs on the basis of written specifications subverts the romantic impulse and
its veneration of unpredictability and spontaneity while the attempted rational
specification of personal needs is permeated by nonrational, romantic no-
tions.
The phenomenon being discussed suggests that in the second half of the
twentieth century conventional ways of meeting people for romantic purposes,
or other serious relationships, has been abandoned in the United States by large
numbers of people including many apparently successful, attractive, and well-
educated ones—if their self-assessments are to be believed. It is a development
that sheds further light on the characteristics and problems of modernity, in-
cluding the decline of community, the growth of social isolation (especially in
major urban settings), and the tension between the demands of professional
work and those of emotionally gratifying intimate personal relationships.
The conventional methods of matchmaking being abandoned include in-
troductions by friends or relatives (arranged marriages at this point in time
need not be included, although they may persist in some ethnic enclaves) and
meetings in school or college, at places of work, or in recreational or special
interest organizations. Less orthodox methods of our times are the “pickups”
of strangers in public places of entertainment (bars, nightclubs, etc.), muse-
ums, parks, and even the streets. In some subcultures, professional match-
makers may still be at work competing with dating services.
Dating services have in common with the printed personals that they too
rely on explicit specifications of what is being offered and what is sought af-
ter. But they also involve an impartial intermediary who makes some judg-
ments about the presumed compatibility of the interested parties based on the
information presented. In theory such services could be quite successful if
they could benefit from the insights psychological theories offer about the
sources of human compatibility (if such insights or theories were available).

THE EMOTIONAL ASPIRATIONS OF AN ELITE GROUP

To better understand the new phenomenon of organized matchmaking, I took

a closer look at one particular manifestation of it that has been in existence
for over three decades—the “personals” in the New York Review of Books (the
Review below). In these advertisements, anonymous individuals specify both
their own attractions and the attributes they look for in others. The relation-
ships sought range from marriage, unmarried long-term relationships, affairs,
and dating, to friendship and afternoon trysts.
To the best of my knowledge, except for the London Review, no other com-
parable highbrow publication (for example, the Atlantic, Commentary, Harpers,
104 Chapter Fourteen

Nation, National Review, New Republic, New York Times Book Review, Weekly
Standard, and so on) publishes such personals. Why and how these personals be-
came a regular feature of the Review I was unable to determine.
The Review has been a leading intellectual biweekly journal publishing
mostly long book reviews or review essays, political opinion pieces, and oc-
casional movie reviews. Contributors tend to be prominent academics, well-
known writers, and journalists, mostly American with a steady British contin-
gent. In its earlier incarnation the Review closely reflected the radical trends
and sentiments of the 1960s; over time this orientation has moderated. The
Review remains liberal or left-of-center but no longer shrill, and occasionally
it publishes articles critical of political correctness and radical left-wing views,
movements, or political systems.
The total circulation of the Review is close to 140,000; the average age of
its readers is 56; 73 percent are males and 27 percent are females. Ninety-
seven percent of Review readers are college graduates; 70 percent have grad-
uate degrees or have attended professional schools. Sixty-eight percent are
classified as professionals or are in managerial occupations. The median in-
come of readers is $71,000, the average is $123,000. (The preceding data and
others to follow were kindly provided by Raymond Shapiro, business man-
ager of the Review for several decades.) Clearly, this is a highly educated and
affluent group of Americans.
The personals published in the Review provide an abundance of informa-
tion for the sociologist or social historian interested in cultural values, sexual
morality, tastes, ego-ideals, aspirations, and widely shared perceptions of de-
sirable human qualities. These messages also illuminate the contemporary
difficulties in “mate selection”: resorting to such advertisements is an implicit
admission of the narrowness, or unsatisfactory character, of the social circles
one moves in; it may also be an indication of a busy professional life that per-
mits little socializing.
I chose the Review for several reasons. In the first place, it is an unusually
rich source, having published regularly the personals (tens of thousands)
since 1970. Second, these ads are highly specific and detailed as to the types
of individuals sought and in regard to the characteristics revealed of those en-
gaged in the search. Third, focusing on one publication reduces to man-
ageable proportions the amount of data to be examined. Moreover readers of
a particular publication are already preselected to some degree; by virtue of
being readers of the same publication they have in common tastes, interests,
outlook, and political preferences. Fourth, it is of further interest that the Re-
view is a highbrow publication, an elite journal read by well-educated people,
many of whom may be considered intellectuals, aspiring intellectuals, and
trendsetters; most of them are professionals of some kind and a large pro-
 The Counterculture of the Heart 105

portion are academics. An important question however remains unresolved:

we do not know what portion of the authors of the personals actually read the
Review, or how much of it. But even if they do not read it, they have an idea
of what kind of a publication it is and what type of reader it attracts.
Representativeness is not one of the reasons for choosing the Review. Its
readers’ tastes, cultural values, aspirations, ego ideals are likely to be different
from the great majority of Americans who do not read it. Readers of the Re-
view are also unrepresentative politically; most Americans, unlike readers of
the Review, are not left-of-center; there is no reason to doubt that most readers
of the Review share its liberal editorial worldview, as the personals also testify.
The authors of the personals in the Review are an atypical group for yet an-
other obvious reason: because they rely on these communications to satisfy
important personal-emotional needs. (To be sure, we cannot tell if this is the
only method they rely on.) The apparent geographical distribution of this
group is also atypical: the Review is published in New York City and most
readily available there; the personals too suggest that most readers live in the
New York metropolitan area, although many do not reveal their location. (I
was unable to find out the geographic distribution of subscribers or the pro-
portion of subscribers versus those buying it at newsstands.) Probably over
half of the readers of the Review live in the New York metropolitan area and
the rest in various other metropolitan/academic settings, mostly San Fran-
cisco, Los Angeles, Boston, and Chicago.
Finally, this is also an atypical group (as far as the whole population is con-
cerned) because it consists largely of the middle-aged, divorced, or wid-
owed—at any rate, that is the impression conveyed (not every writer reveals
his or her age or marital status, while others provide approximations like
“fortyish” or fiftyish” or “mature”). This age distribution is likely to account
for the infrequent reference to the love of children or interest in parenthood.
Some writers make clear that they are “unencumbered,” noting that their chil-
dren are grown up; others may have children in the custody of a former
spouse or are uninterested in having any, given their zest for living and for a
rather wide range of social, cultural, and recreational activities they engage in
or aspire to engage in. With very few exceptions, also missing are indications
of interest in pets or having any.
The Review as a whole reflects and caters to intellectual-cultural trends
popular among liberal academic intellectuals and those belonging to the edu-
cated middle classes influenced by them. In turn the preferences and ideals
revealed in the personals are trendy and partake of the Zeitgeist educated
groups are attuned to or seek to be in touch with. These ideals and attitudes
are for the most part derived from, or part of, the cultural legacy of the 1960s,
a tamer echo of the counterculture of that period.
106 Chapter Fourteen

It is not known and would be hard to find out how successful these com-
munications are: how many contacts they lead to, how many letters or phone
calls are exchanged before people actually meet, what proportion of commu-
nications lead to meetings and to lasting relationships. Even the most method-
ologically ambitious researcher would be hard put to learn about such mat-
ters. This is a great pity since such findings could provide information about,
among other things, the relationship between self-assessment (conveyed in
the ads) and subsequent assessment by others. Whatever the success rate,
people have been contributing to these personals for decades.
How “success” in such matters is to be defined or measured is another
thorny issue; presumably some durable relationship in which both partici-
pants claim satisfaction or fulfillment. How “durable” is to be defined invites
further discussion.

MAIN THEMES OF THE PERSONALS

I did not attempt a quantitative analysis of this data for several reasons. To be-
gin with, the advertisements are totally “open-ended,” that is to say uncon-
strained by any uniform, external criteria; people tell as much or as little
about themselves as they wish. All we know about the authors of the person-
als is what they choose reveal and that is largely limited to personal traits pos-
sessed and sought in others. The only other readily forthcoming information
is age and sex, essential for the purpose at hand. But age may be misrepre-
sented. Perhaps for that reason sometimes a photograph is requested but the
possibility cannot be excluded that the photos used are not current. (I received
some anecdotal evidence supporting this possibility from a handful of vet-
erans of “personals” and computer dating.)
It would have been possible to quantify the desirable human qualities/
attributes specified—both that the writers claim to possess and those they
seek in others. Of course there is no way of knowing how accurate the self-
characterizations are; it is quite likely that given the goal of maximizing the
favorable attention of strangers, positive attributes are overstated. As the New
York Times noted on November 24, 2002 (in the Internet context), “the op-
portunity for false (or at least massaged) self-advertisement is now nearly
without limit.” Indeed, as will be shown below, at times the self-presentations
verge on parody or fantasy. To be sure it is still interesting to learn what peo-
ple consider desirable or attractive human qualities—whether or not they ac-
tually possess them. The one aspect of the personals that invites no doubt is
the specification of attributes sought in others.
In light of these difficulties, I settled for an impressionistic, qualitative
analysis supplemented by a generous sampling of the actual advertisements,
 The Counterculture of the Heart 107

examples of which are reproduced below. I did however range over the Re-
view from its earliest days to the present, examining at least one issue for each
year. I read far more than one issue per year in recent years when I was a sub-
scriber. Altogether I probably read over a thousand personals that appeared
between 1970 and the end of 2002 (numbers of personals per issue ranged
from approximately ten to sixty or more).
Information about approximate age is the most readily forthcoming, as
most writers feel compelled to give some indication of it in order to attract
their suitable counterpart. It appears that more women than men advertise—
possibly two-thirds are women, one-third men—a small minority (perhaps 5
percent) of whom are homosexual and lesbian. These are mostly people look-
ing for new departures, a large portion divorced or widowed, but again infor-
mation of this type is not always provided. Evidently these age groups face
far greater difficulties in their search for new partners, which helps to explain
their reliance on the personals.
It is noteworthy that many of those using abbreviations such as DWF (di-
vorced white female) include the “W.” Even in this largely liberal group it
is taken for granted that specifying one’s race (whiteness) is an essential
piece of information that needs to be disclosed. We cannot be sure exactly
what is intended: does it mean that nonwhites are discouraged, or do those
specifying their own whiteness think that nonwhites too may apply but
should know the racial identity of the other party? To say the least, if race
was irrelevant and only the personal qualities and interests mattered, there
would be no Ws.
The vast majority are over forty (possibly over fifty), probably between
forty and sixty. The relatively advanced age of many writers is a likely source
of the recurring effort to project a countervailing youthful image associated
with being active, adventurous, intense, resourceful, enterprising, curious,
and spirited and having a wide range of interests. To wit:

Blonde, slender, tall, willowy DWF very attractive (a younger Faye Dunaway) with
graceful lightness of heart, refined intelligence, smiling eyes. Ph.D./academic. . . .
Optimistic, emphatic, elegant. Physically sensual, aesthetically attuned. Lovely
profile, long legs. Considered great package: head, heart, spirit. Puts people at ease.
Loves exploring restaurants, architecture, performing arts, hiking, yoga, Jacuzzis,
narrative history. Europe any time. Thailand some day. Seeks well-educated, at-
tractive, kind man 5'11" plus, engaged with the world, able to laugh occasionally at
himself. [9/26/2002]

Green-eyed blonde, toned, trim, and very pleasing to the eye. Adventurous, ap-
preciative, curious life-long learner with humor that reveals a dry, sarcastic side.
Progressive world view, passionate about social justice, stimulating conversation,
reading, psychology, diversity. Aesthetic and unpretentious DF, professional,
108 Chapter Fourteen

likes art/photography, film, travel, music, the outdoors. Favorite getaways:

lakes, beaches. Enjoys leisurely biking, walking, caring relationships, yoga,
Spanish. Seeking affectionate man 55–65 ready to share life. . . . [12/5/02]

Dark, beautiful DJF with a passion for music and film. Anthropology Ph.D., in-
ternational human rights experience combined with playful spirit, wry humor.
NYC resident. Warm spontaneous smile, physical grace, calm presence, trim
figure. Keenly intelligent yet gentle, quietly affectionate, unafraid to laugh. Also
enjoys a good Bourdeaux, canoeing, being near water, Marx brothers, playing
pool, making amazing lemon cake, blues, live jazz, gospel, world music. . . .
Seeks bright, thoughtful, secure, open man 49–65 with ability to laugh.
[11/7/2002]

Inviting smile, beautiful bone structure, very pretty, slim Ph.D. with a real spark
(not hiding behind academic mask). Radiant, sensual, authentic, very present,
poised. Studied dance (Graham). Active in public speaking, fundraising, the
arts, and lefty community work. Good networker, gentle risk-taker, accentuates
the positive. Loves making people laugh. Enjoys the Vineyard anytime, Mon-
teverdi-Mozart-Modern, blackjack, theatre, movies, champagne, just looking at
nature, learning something new. Seeks bright, active man 60s–70s caring about
the world, concerned about others. [12/5/02]

Objective characteristics—such as ethnicity (when indicated, mostly Jew-

ish), marital status, levels of education (when specified, usually Ph.D.), oc-
cupation and location—are only randomly and sporadically revealed. When
indicated, occupation is often academic. There are also therapists, people in
publishing, some physicians, some businessmen and -women. Hardly anyone
was, or admitted to being, a lawyer. No industrial workers, computer pro-
grammers, farmers, or military personnel could be found, but there were a
handful of prison inmates reaching out.
Most personals do not dwell on prosaic and factual matters such as occu-
pation or income—an interesting finding in itself. “Financially secure,” “sol-
vent,” “independent,” or “successful” are the concessions to such down-to-
earth matters, to socioeconomic status.
Being narrowly specialized in one’s work or interests is shunned by most.
Abhorrence of routines combines with an artsy-artistic inclination and a touch
of bohemian, sometimes whimsical nonconformity. Veritable renaissance
characters abound, men and women with an amazing cultural reach, original-
ity and breadth of aspiration—free spirits, with wide-ranging interests and ac-
complishments, possessed of a sparkling mind and impressive physique.
These personals led me to recall advertisements of similar purpose in
newspapers published in communist Hungary during the 1970s and 1980s.
They had a sober, material-existential focus and flavor. Little was said
 The Counterculture of the Heart 109

about personal attributes, favorite recreational activities and pastimes, mu-

sical tastes or artistic interests. Instead people provided factual information
to potential partners about their age, height, weight, occupation, educa-
tional qualifications, assets (apartment, car, phone), and the neighborhood
or town they lived in; they averred freedom from bad habits (mostly drink-
ing) and said next to nothing about their personalities, feelings, tastes, and
hobbies.
The messages here discussed are the exact opposite, reflecting the desires
and needs of people who can take for granted a high level of material secu-
rity and comfort (among the luxuries taken for granted is travel, including for-
eign travel to exotic and romantic locations). For these writers, the establish-
ment of an important relationship has little to do with financial security but
everything to do with the intangibles of supposedly unique personal needs,
characteristics, tastes, and entertainments.
Many of the authors of the personals seek to establish their culture-consumer
credentials by specifying highbrow tastes and interests often in combination
with a complementary predilection for more simple or popular entertainments
hinting at a refreshing earthiness. For example:

Are you the man I am looking for? Are you single, 57 plus, physically fit, se-
cure, enjoy Matisse as well as Woody Allen, only missing the companionship of
a warm, fun-loving, attractive, slender, blue-eyed blonde artist to share movies,
museums, theatre, ballet, travel, long walks, quiet dinners. [1/17/1991]

Lover of life and laughter interested in meeting a man who values communica-
tion, spontaneity and sharing. . . . This publishing professional’s interests range
from the elation of discovering a first edition of Gide to the exhilaration of white
water rafting. If you’re not afraid of romance, intimacy and full moon this car-
ing woman (40) may want to be by your side. [4/23/1993]

Playful spirit. Natural Beauty with great legs, warm intelligent dark eyes, long
hair. Stunning, well-educated, sophisticated, fit. Feminine, sensual, unpreten-
tious, successful DWF. Loves new adventures, interested in art, community,
more. Avid reader, great Italian cook, works out, adores laughter, jazz, Mozart,
Michelangelo, Italy, French/English countryside, raw beauty of the Maine coast
and occasional fine Bordeaux. Seeks accomplished, interesting man 45–64 with
compassion, humor. [11/20/2000]

Serene, sweet, sensitive, sexy, sophisticated, spirited, petite, very pretty DJF.
(Manhattan) professional (medical research) seriously seeking divorced or wid-
owed emotionally evolved, accomplished, financially secure, urbane, gentle
male 49–60. Sense of humor essential and a (partial) passion for Puccini, pasta,
Paris, Provence and balmy evening promenades. [4/6/1995]
110 Chapter Fourteen

Hardly ever is reference made to religious affiliation, belief, or preference,

but far more frequently to political sympathies or outlook. Sometimes politi-
cally correct attitudes are spelled out such as “liberated man,” “politically
concerned” (readers are expected to know that what the appropriate concerns
are), “environmentally conscious divorcee,” “socially concerned jogging
feminist,” and so on. Most writers can take for granted a measure of political
compatibility or affinity that need not be spelled out given the shared prefer-
ence for reading the Review.
In addition to a solid majority looking for long-term heterosexual relation-
ships and a much smaller group of homosexuals and lesbians looking for part-
ners, there is a third group of the already married (and apparently intending
to stay married) who wish to supplement an unsatisfactory (or satisfactory?)
marital relationship with an affair on the side. These requests invariably come
from men (unless I somehow missed the females). For example:

Handsome Chicago area married [my emphasis] exec, fine background, good
future, looks for down to earth engaging lady for discreet involvement finding
summer’s butterflies & winter dreams [6/11/1987]

Married, 33 year old photographer-artist, affectionate, considerate, sometimes

passionate, sincere, intelligent, well-educated, unsophisticated, athletic . . . seeks
compatible woman for enduring intimate relationship. [Shared] interests . . . in-
clude movies, drawing, sculpture, music, outdoors, politics, philosophy, psy-
chology and encounter groups, teaching children, walking, swimming and open
creative conversation. [1/25/1973]

Does Alfred Brendel, Yo-Yo Ma, Julliard Quartet, Oscar Peterson turn you on?
Successful, attractive married [my emphasis] professional mid-forties seeks a
fun-loving professional woman interested in theater, art, chamber music and
stimulating conversation. [1/21/1982]

Affectionate married man, 28, seeks slim, intelligent woman for mutual oral in-
timacies. [4/7/1975]

Married, foreign-born professor and man of letters—with passion for annual

pilgrimage to Caribbean—seeks woman (25–45) for discreet encounters. Spe-
cial bias for Oriental woman. Must love reggae. [6/25/1998]

At a time when in liberal, feminist, and politically correct circles “lookism”

is a bad word, a surprisingly large portion of the writers of these messages
(and mostly the women) emphasize or boast of their physique or figure, their
appealing physical characteristics (slender, slim, trim, fit, “great legs,” beau-
tiful eyes, hair, and so on). The acclaimed physical attributes almost invari-
 The Counterculture of the Heart 111

ably are listed in the very beginning of the ad and followed by the admirable
traits of character and intellect. For instance,

Grace Kelly good looks. Stunning blonde. Doctorate. Humanist-values. Slen-

der 5'7" DWF. Young looking 44. Strongly values integrity. . . . Adventurous,
dynamic, accessible. Loves NY, theatre, music (Chopin to Gladys Knight to
gospel), film, Egyptian art, impressionists, travel, Italian food. Plays piano,
sings (blues/popular). Seeks trim, accomplished, kind, non-smoking 5'10"
DWM 38–52, comfortable with self, ready for permanent relationship.
[4/23/1993]

A younger, dark-haired more radiant Jane Fonda. Thin, smart, stunning, 40-
something. Stands out in a crowd. Graceful, gracious, DJF. Long, beautiful,
wavy hair, sensual smile. Interesting and interested, quick study. Art consultant,
curator. Nature-lover but can do black tie at the drop of a hat. Interests: music,
philanthropy, contemporary art, wine, hiking, film. Pilates. Runs daily. Loves
laughter, surprise, giving small dinner parties. Open, unafraid, passionate cre-
ative. Seeks NS, very bright man, medium-large build. 40s–50s, passionate
about something in his life. [12/5/2002]

Head turning good looks evocative of Diana Rigg from THE AVENGERS. Styl-
ish with hint of glamour and whimsy. Fun, funny, insightful, Well educated, ar-
ticulate, engaging. Trim, active, divorced. Good at making ordinary tasks, gives
great parties. Considered “soulful hedonist.” Enduring Francophile, would live
in Europe again in a minute. Interested in architecture, hardware stores, seeing
how things are constructed. Adores Art Deco, Klimt, Frank Lloyd Wright, Latin
music, wine, country USA, watching baseball/tennis. Seeks educated, attractive
55–youthful 60s man-interest in foreign travel and aesthetic appreciation.
[9/26/2002]

Stunning, head-turning good looks with a touch of glamour and a sweet heart.
Passionate, sensual Sophia Loren-type, gorgeous dark hair, standout eyes, real
presence. Down-to-earth, published fiction writer. Colorful, curious, open, hon-
est. Known for wonderful contagious laugh and very nice figure. Sunny dispo-
sition, tamed wild streak. Favorite things: films, Yankees, football, opera, pop
culture, THE SOPRANOS, all jazz, folk art, Miro, bantering with friends.
Dreams of one day living in Sydney or New Zealand. Seeks goodhearted, street-
smart, financially secure, attractive man 45–60. [11/7/02]

Such a wondrously attractive woman. A cross between Sigourney Weaver and

JoBeth Williams: poised, sensual, warm-spirited with a shy grace that lights up
a room. Slim body, exquisite face, fun humor, no artificiality. Interested in peo-
ple and the world around. Easygoing good company, dazzling cook (makes di-
vine bouillabesse), something of an oenophile. Drawn to beauty in nature, art,
112 Chapter Fourteen

theatre, music. Delights in generating/exchanging ideas, playing piano, hiking,

travel to unexplored places. Seeks NS, vital, successful professional (49–64)
with warmth and sense of discovery. [11/7/02]

The most often recurring attributes allegedly possessed and sought may be
summarized (in alphabetical order) as follows: accomplished, adventurous,
affectionate, attractive, authentic, bright, creative, caring, curious, down-to-
earth, earthy, easy-going, fit, funny, fun-loving, gentle, honest, intelligent, ir-
reverent, lively, open, passionate, playful, responsive, self-aware, secure, sen-
sitive, sensual, serious, slender, slim, smart, sophisticated, spirited, stunning,
stylish, successful, tender, trim, vibrant, vital, warm, well-educated, and
witty. These attributes overlap with many traditional romantic virtues noted
below.
It is the powerful and pervasive cultural legacy of the 1960s that accounts
for these patterns. Authors of the personals appear to be the descendants or
veterans of the counterculture of earlier decades. In their communications
1960s values and attitudes combine with a taken-for-granted, old-style liter-
ary romanticism made more widespread (and cheapened) by mass culture but
a romantic individualism was also a part of the counterculture of the 1960s.
In this culture the ideal personality is one in touch with his or her feelings,
playful, expressive, adventurous, open, permeated by the love of nature and
all that is “natural”; this type of individual also harbors notions of a pro-
grammatic self-realization, believes in the uniqueness of his or her per-
sonality, and is self-consciously hedonistic (albeit in a more refined fashion).
The pursuit of pleasure and self-fulfillment is often tempered by social con-
sciousness.
It is central to the romantic sensibility to believe that there is somewhere
out in the world a person who will gratify one’s considerable emotional
needs, who will be uniquely compatible and make one’s life fulfilled and
meaningful. In the case in point, this elusive individual is pursued by the
somewhat unromantic device of the personal advertisement that is in conflict
with the spontaneity true romantics pursue and believe in. Still, the personals
are steeped in an age-old romanticism and nurtured by the cultural values of
the 1960s. They are also products of the high divorce rates of past decades
and the social isolation of modern, mobile urban life.
Most writers embrace and affirm the entire repertory of romantic values
and virtues: sensitivity, sensuality, creativity, caring, strong feelings, warmth,
vitality, exuberance, tenderness, openness, sincerity, vulnerability, honesty,
spontaneity, innocence, and arresting physical beauty.
Sense of humor is another frequently mentioned desirable trait, as are “fun”
and “fun loving,” being relaxed and easygoing. These more typical
contemporary American virtues may be associated with the entertainment ori-
 The Counterculture of the Heart 113

entation of our society and times. A substantial portion of the ads specify the
preferred recreational or leisure time activities of the writers. Many messages
hint at consumption patterns that conjure up images of advertisements in
classier publications such as The New Yorker or the New York Times Maga-
zine—more refined, stylish, spiritual, or artsy versions thereof. These mes-
sages often come complete with allusions to intimate dinner parties, luxuri-
ous hideaways, contemplative walks on the beach, pastoral retreats off the
beaten path, accommodations fit for connoisseurs of the good life. There are
frequent references to good wines and gourmet cooking that is good for the
body and the soul.
When aggregated, the attributes possessed and sought after yield an unex-
pected impression of uniformity, a standardization of cultural values, tastes,
and ego ideals. What is advertised as attractive and appealing and what is be-
ing sought in others turn out to be remarkably similar, as also reflected in the
samples provided above. It is not easy to be a unique individual in contem-
porary American society: what once were considered unusual, innovative, or
daring attributes of nonconformity or experimental lifestyles had become the
new conventions of “nonconformity” when transformed into a trend and
taken up by large numbers of people.

THE SUSPENSION OF DISBELIEF

It is hard to escape the suspicion that many ads greatly overstate the personal
qualities and attractions of the individuals advertising. Time and again it is
conveyed that these individuals are endowed with virtually every conceivable
trait highly valued in our times in our culture. They are good-natured, easy to
get along with, warm, playful, accomplished, physically attractive, highly ed-
ucated and of broad interests. The women in particular seek to convey that
their personality combines an appealing and authentic simplicity with great
sophistication. It appears that the inflated self-presentations are more com-
mon among women than men.
In an age and culture in which a degree of skepticism and refusal to take
anything at face value are deeply embedded and widespread, it is surprising
to come upon a phenomenon (such as the personals) that is predicated on the
truthfulness and honesty of personal communications. Ours is a culture in
which few things are taken for granted, in which a sharp awareness of the gulf
between appearance and reality is common, especially among people who
think of themselves as sophisticated. Under these circumstances the premise
of the personals is unusual: we are asked to believe without reservations what
people say about themselves when the purpose of these statements is to cre-
ate and maximize favorable impressions.
114 Chapter Fourteen

In effect the authors of the personals are trying to sell themselves under in-
tense competitive pressure; their self-assessments invite the kind of skepti-
cism any example of flamboyant salesmanship elicits. How many “stunning”
women such as the following could be awaiting eager partners?

Stunning academic DWF, 55, slender, dark hair and eye, seeks S/DWM 55–63
for LTR. Me: striking, charming, intellectual, witty, serious, sophisticated, self-
aware, open, cultivated. You: humane, good-looking, honest, well-educated, ur-
bane, interested in art, classical music, films, candid conversations, travel.
[9/26/02]

Exuberant, warm, witty, most attractive, intelligent, cultured, elegant woman,

40s, seeks open, sensitive, literate, affectionate, successful, urbane, unattached
male counterpart 45–55. Prefer tallish, music-loving, non-smoking, “for what-
ever pleasures may result.” [6/25/1981]

Former aristocrat-Beautiful, accomplished Manhattan woman professional. 53,

beach, tennis, skiing, reading, movie, theater and travel enthusiast seeks inde-
pendent, affectionate, confident, funny, irreverent, healthy, enlightened,
adventurous, self-supporting man 40–55 capable of long-term partnership.
[2/20/1997]

Men too are capable of a similarly sanguine view of themselves:

Responsive, gentle, reflective, genuine, bright, stable, flexible, attractive, slim,

5'6" nonsmoking professional SWM seeks serious, intimate, potentially lasting
relationship with slender SWF of similar qualities. I enjoy movies, theater, dogs,
humor, verbal and non-verbal communications. [4/28/1983]

Joys to be shared, sights to be explored and adventures others can only dream
about. You: attractive with inner beauty, responsive, considerate, affectionate, un-
derstanding, companionable, with substance, style, multiple interests and integrity,
SWR n/s over 5'4" and irresistibly lovable. Me: SWM, n/s, tall, successful, no
dependents, attractive, generous, intelligent, responsive, idealistic, principled,
considerate, with a passion for adventure, nature, travel. . . . [5/14/1998]

World-class professor, divorcé, elegant, attractive, vivacious, earthy, caring

Manhattan resident. Seeks accomplished, well-educated, dynamic man 45–55 to
share life’s pleasures, travel warmth and love. [4/13/1989]

Secure, confident, generous, lively DWM 47 ready for a permanent commit-

ment to a mature woman. If you are also a non-smoker, forties, enjoy jazz and
classical music, swimming, walking in the country, candlelight romance, winter
vacations in Europe, we are ready for love and laughter together. [1/21/1988]
 The Counterculture of the Heart 115

We do not know how readers of these ads deal with the problem of over-
selling; they may automatically reject the outlandish claims (the hype) in toto,
or may discount some of the extraordinary assertions; they could give the ben-
efit of doubt even to the most implausibly alluring self-presentations or reserve
judgment until further communications or personal encounter. Nor do we know
how the authors reconcile their idealized self-presentation with the more realis-
tic impressions and assessments a personal encounter is likely to create. For that
matter it also remains unknown to what extent these flattering self-conceptions
are sincerely held, internalized, or consciously burnished and misrepresented.
The messages cited earlier are certainly not atypical, and there is a conti-
nuity of both style and substance over time. Moreover the shorter messages
are similar to the longer, more elaborate ones as shown below:

Striking Southern California woman, strawberry blonde and newly single,

thrives on imaginative sex, animated conversation, controversial politics,
Brahms quartets and the Moody Blues. Invites uninvolved intelligent male
40–60 similarly nourished to mutual feast. [4/14/1977]

Socially concerned, jogging feminist, rural background values depth, health,

arts, people work. Loves galleries, plays, outdoors, Bach, Mozart. Desires pro-
self, 50 plus male for growth, friendship, play. [6/28/1984]

Woman of intellect and sex appeal, literate, sophisticated, thoughtful, helpful, gen-
tle, vulnerable very attractive 49 of European extraction. Seeks strong-minded, re-
fined, reasonably handsome man capable of sustained friendship. [1/17/1985]

Boston SWF artist/therapist 48, attractive, passionate lover of life and nature,
vegetarian seeker of wisdom, Himalaya trekker seeks authentic, spiritually
aware, self-actualizing man 40⫹, accomplished in his field, open to new expe-
riences, willing to explore and enjoy life’s many wonders. [7/19/1990]

Winsome, creative widow 60 is witty, loving, great cook, brainy and a slender
good looker seeks vibrant, adventurous widower to create a lasting love affair.
[8/8/1996]

DWF Young 60s, independent, 5'7" blonde, involved in the arts, loves to travel,
full of wonder of life, in search of a quality man with more questions than an-
swers. [6/25/1998]

Hopelessly intellectual Berkshire farm-dweller, 5'6" brunette, 66. Passionate

about the word written and spoken. . . . Serendipitous discovery is my principal
joy on the page, in travel, in people. . . . I am interested in . . . someone who is
unattached and liberal who is fifty plus, well read . . . and considers himself
funny, healthy and happy. . . . [7/12/1999]
116 Chapter Fourteen

Two hours from Grand Central lives a Berkshire beauty with a great sense of hu-
mor, loves theatre, nature, adventure. If you are smart, secure, romantic mensch
old enough to remember WWII and still strong enough to paddle a canoe, write
please. [11/24/1999]

Adventurous, lovely, connected, fit, funny and smart Jewish woman (academic
52 NYC) seeking male counterpart to share loving and joyful aspirations.
Searching for a man with good mind, deep heart, full laugh and a social con-
science. [4/26/2001]

Man 40s characterized by an encounter group as creative, complex, caring, au-

thentic, intuitive, intense, impatient, durable, wise, searching, tentative, distin-
guished, not paranoid, not pretentious, not cynical, in transition, sharing, open,
politically concerned, effective. Would like to meet woman with some of the fol-
lowing: stylish, slender, elegant, sensate, spontaneous, spirited. [1/25/1979]

Los Angeles male, academic physical scientist 40 . . . youthful and very good
looking, sensitive, uninhibited, with broad education and interest in the arts, pol-
itics, sociology, psychology, literature, mountaineering, tennis, is going through
divorce (no children) . . . seeks an attractive, educated and intelligent woman—
preferably with her own career—who is emotionally stable, at peace with her-
self. . . . [2/19/1976]

Intense but optimistic man, 44, 5'10", trim, attractive, clean-cut, cerebral, saga-
cious, lethal wit, passions for political ideas and classical music, seeks spirited,
stable woman. . . . [4/6/1995]

Gentle, witty world traveler DWM, Ph.D. interested in literature, law, medicine,
music, museums, nature, science. Seeks S/DWF (40–60) deep, warm, respon-
sive. [n.d.]

Nagging questions remain, in particular, why such fine human beings must
invest so much time and energy in the search for suitable partners. Are these
self-presentations largely wishful fantasies, or exaggerations of traits pos-
sessed?
Presumably the implausible self-presentations are attention-getting efforts,
overselling oneself is a response to keen competition for partners not easy to
locate; they reflect the pressures of a competitive culture and a competitive
marketplace of personal relationships, especially among older age groups and
especially older women, who are even more often without partners (as statis-
tics too indicate).
Some broader conclusions may be drawn. One is that being alone in mid-
dle age is a difficult experience that sometimes stimulates problematic and
 The Counterculture of the Heart 117

cumbersome efforts to remedy the condition. The messages examined also

suggest that middle or approaching old age are to be escaped at all costs—one
must try to stay “young at heart” until the bitter end. Thirdly, in an age when
“diversity” is extolled, the repetitive specifications of ego-ideals and ideal
partners expose the narrow and stereotyped nature of our dreams and ideals.
At last there is the problem of heightened expectations central to secular
modernity. They are produced by a way of life that provides an abundance of
“options” and is free of pressing material concerns but is weighted down by
the imbalance between material needs easily gratified and emotional ones
largely unmet. Doubtless these aspects of modernity intensify expectations
and the quest for intimate relationships which, it is hoped, would compensate
for the loss of community, a stable worldview, and social isolation.
 Chapter Fifteen

Old and Busier Than Ever

Whenever I talk to retired friends or acquaintances they invariably tell me

that they are “busier than ever.” They have taken up learning (or relearning)
to play musical instruments, participate in creative writing workshops, take
courses in adult education programs, they jog, kayak, bird-watch, take edify-
ing trips to ancient monuments or impoverished third-world countries. They
cannot sit still. Former president Carter won’t stop writing books, shaking
hands of strangers on the street, traveling ceaselessly in pursuit of good
causes. Advertisements for retirement communities promise a mind-boggling
array of recreational, cultural, and social activities. It may indeed be true that
the retired are busier than ever.
If so, the question arises why so many prosperous Americans past the
prime of life and regular employment are so intent on squeezing so many ac-
tivities into their lives. Does the absence of routinized commitments and ob-
ligations create a threatening void that must be filled in haste to avert the on-
set of a profound unease? Does the lack of “busyness” drain life of purpose
and meaning? Are we so programmed that our nature abhors the vacuum in
our schedules?
There is, of course, nothing wrong with attempting to become a renais-
sance man or woman at an advanced age, or trying to keep fit physically and
mentally, to do things one had less or no opportunity to do at an earlier age.
But there is an urgency and compulsiveness that color these endeavors, a ver-
itable horror of idleness, of being left with time for reflection that might lead
to the contemplation of approaching death. The frantic activism of the old and
aging suggests that we are ill equipped, in this most religious of all modern
societies, to face death.

118
 Old and Busier Than Ever 119

A better understanding of these attitudes has to take into account the deeply
entrenched, long-standing veneration of being busy in American culture that
allows the benefits of busyness to go unspecified; what matters is being oc-
cupied, not what we are occupied with (an attitude somewhat similar to that
of endorsing “change,” no matter what kind). American optimism, youth cult,
and the belief that there is a solution for every problem also play a part; at an
advanced age these attitudes and beliefs seem to reappear with a new urgency
and intensity.
In traditional societies, the old used to be considered repositories of wis-
dom and had a high social standing. Even in contemporary Europe the old
have more social and familial functions and bonds and therefore fewer rea-
sons to feel superfluous and isolated; these functions and ties make life
more meaningful, and there is less pressure to find meaning in being busy.
In American society the old have become more marginal, and that, too,
contributes to this compulsive, meaning-seeking activism. In all probabil-
ity the United States leads the world in the proportion of the old who do
not live with their children and grandchildren, and often not even any-
where near them. The proportion, as well as absolute numbers, of healthy
retired people is also likely to be greater here than in most other modern
societies.
At the same time, American society is replete with unconvincing compen-
satory efforts intended to glorify old age not on account of the accumulated
wisdom or important social functions but largely on account of the leisure that
accrues to it. But an abundance of leisure uninformed by a philosophy of life,
substantial intellectual resources, or religious belief of some kind may give
rise to escapism, meaningless routines, to rushing around. It seems that hu-
man beings are not programmed to enjoy unlimited amounts of leisure with-
out unease and difficulty.
The problem is not helped by the growing reluctance or inability of Amer-
ican religious institutions to dwell on the subject of death. While the various
denominations have developed a commendable interest in improving life here
and now, in advocating social justice or environmental awareness, and in
combating various social problems, they have become reticent about advising
us about the ways of ending life and confronting its irrevocable end. Death
remains, by and large, a taboo topic. There is plenty of it in mass culture and
popular entertainments, but its treatment is unrealistic: either violent or sen-
timental.
These observations are not an endorsement of idle vegetation in old (or any
other) age. I am not suggesting that being inactive or less active is preferable to
being active, or even hyperactive. The latter may help, temporarily, to distract
120 Chapter Fifteen

from the realization that living longer does not solve the problem of death or its
approach; that old age, while more prolonged, remains debilitating, mentally as
well as physically, and that infirmity cannot be averted indefinitely, notwith-
standing the wonders of medical science. It is understandable that as we live
longer we seek to avoid confronting the end in more ingenious and imaginative
ways.
 III

FOREIGN MATTERS
 Chapter Sixteen

American Travelers to
the Soviet Union

The data for this study (comprising several hundred completed question-
naires) were collected in 1966 and reposed in cardboard boxes for exactly
forty years. In 2006 I rediscovered them, so to speak, and came to the con-
clusion that despite their antique quality they merited tabulation and analysis.
There seemed to be a wealth of information in the answers to close to one
hundred questions that the two sets of questionnaires contained. This was an
attempt to learn about American attitudes toward the Soviet system and of
characteristics of Soviet society as seen by the same Americans. As it turned
out, there was more information in the data about Americans and their polit-
ical and social attitudes than about Soviet society and people.
Readers may wish to learn why there was such an uncommon gap between
data collection and analysis. It was in part a matter of forgetting—out of
sight, out of mind; the boxes were languishing in a corner of my office while
I was occupied with other, seemingly more pressing, projects. There was
probably also a Freudian aspect of this forgetfulness: completing the study
required the use of methodology—quantitative analysis—that was not my
forte. I preferred the kind of research and writing that did not require “num-
ber crunching.”
In the 1960s when I undertook this project, the Cold War and its possible
culmination in nuclear war were major concerns in the United States. One
group of particularly alarmed Americans founded or joined an organization
called Citizens Exchange Corps (CEC) committed to improving the relation-
ship between the United States and the Soviet Union by establishing and cul-
tivating grassroots contacts between their citizens. A quintessentially Ameri-
can organization, CEC advocated face-to-face contacts and informal,

123
124 Chapter Sixteen

interpersonal communications to bring about such improvements and help to

avert the threat of nuclear war.
It was the major premise of this organization—derived both from long-
standing American cultural beliefs and the spirit of the 1960s and its thera-
peutic orientation—that in their essential attributes all human beings are alike
no matter under what kind of political systems they live. Unfettered, informal
communications between them will make them aware of these shared attrib-
utes. Given a chance to experience these basic similarities, intergroup suspi-
cions will evaporate and friction between different countries would corre-
spondingly vanish. The complementary assumption was that mutual
understanding between ordinary citizens would translate into high-level pol-
icy. CEC members who visited the Soviet Union were the prime subject of
this research project.
The second group that was sent questionnaires consisted of American math-
ematicians who attended the World Congress of Mathematics in Moscow in the
same year (1966). I included them as a control group of sorts, individuals who
had no ostensible reason to be especially interested in Soviet society or Soviet
policies, to have strong feelings about Soviet-American relations, or to harbor
apprehensions about nuclear war. I also expected them to be more apolitical and
less informed about the Soviet Union than the CEC group. As it turned out, the
major differences between these groups were demographic and educational
rather than attitudinal. The mathematicians were older (no teenagers among
them, while 8 percent in the CEC group were teenagers); 69 percent of the
mathematicians were between 39 and 49, while only 24 percent of the CEC
members were in that age group; 44 percent of the CEC group was under 40.
For this reason a high proportion of the mathematicians were married—83 per-
cent as against 55 percent of CEC members. Another major difference was that,
for obvious reasons, 67 percent of the mathematicians had Ph.D.s (against only
8 percent of the CEC group).
The differences in the levels of information, opinion, and attitude between
the two groups were less substantial than expected. It is possible that the
mathematicians who chose to attend the Moscow congress and chose to re-
spond to the questionnaire were a subgroup distinguished by a greater inter-
est in Soviet society and international relations. Twelve of them (out of a to-
tal of eighty-two) were capable of conversing in Russian, and twenty-three
reported being invited to the homes of Soviet people. A much smaller pro-
portion of CEC participants—10 out of 230—reported being capable of con-
versing in Russian.
The two groups had in common—besides being educated, middle-class
Americans—the more or less simultaneous experience of visiting the Soviet
Union in the year of 1966. The CEC members went in order to further the
 American Travelers to the Soviet Union 125

goals of their organization: to meet and better understand ordinary Soviet cit-
izens in pursuit of improving relations between the two countries; the mathe-
maticians went mainly to attend the world congress.
Although deeply influenced by the characteristics and concerns of the pe-
riod, the relevance of this study is not limited to the 1960s; this was also a
more general inquiry into political attitude formation, persistence, and change.
The information collected had the potential to shed light on these questions:

1. What kind of people (sociologically speaking) were particularly con-

cerned in the 1960s with Soviet-American relations and the danger of nu-
clear war between these countries? (This question applies mainly to the
CEC contingent.)
2. How much and what kind of information these well-educated, middle-
class Americans had about the Soviet Union in the 1960s.
3. What kinds of attitudes these two groups harbored toward the Soviet Union.
4. How their views of their own society influenced the respondents’ percep-
tions and judgments of the Soviet Union.
5. What, if any impact, the trip had on their attitudes toward the Soviet Union
and American society. What proportions of the visitors returned with
largely positive or largely negative impressions.
6. What the specifics of the travel experience were. (What did the visitors ac-
tually do and see? Whom did they meet?) Were they aware of the political
controls over their experiences, of what I called (in another study, entitled
Political Pilgrims) “the techniques of hospitality”?

It was not possible to provide answers to all these questions, given the lim-
itations of space and the abundance of information to be tabulated or cross-
tabulated.

CEC AND THE COLD WAR

The background of the founders, trustees, and advisors of the CEC suggests,
for the most part, that knowledge or expertise about international relations
and the Soviet Union was not an important requirement for holding such po-
sitions and hardly a defining characteristic of this organization. The president
and executive director was “an advertising writer” (see Francis Sugrue,
“Peace Ideas—Soviet Jobs for Americans,” Herald Tribune, November 28,
1965); others listed on CEC stationery were mostly businessmen, members of
the clergy, and college administrators. Eugene Burdick, coauthor of The Ugly
American (a spirited critique of U.S. foreign policies) was one of the trustees.
126 Chapter Sixteen

Anatol Rapoport, an academic specialist of conflict resolution, was also on

the advisory board. Overall there was a notable absence on these boards of
specialists on Soviet history, politics, or society.
Thus, it seems appropriate to characterize the CEC, its founders, and offi-
cers as liberal, idealistic, and somewhat naive. It is likely that these organiz-
ers and founders were animated to some degree by the notion of moral equiv-
alence between the two systems, especially in regard to responsibility for the
Cold War. CEC pamphlets produced in the early 1960s described it as

a nonprofit, tax-exempt organization chartered in 1962 to engage in people-to-

people contact for easing international tensions. Our goal is to raise the level of
contact between East and West before it is too late to reduce the danger of nu-
clear war through mutual understanding. . . . CEC believes that there must be a
meaningful build-up in mutual understanding to produce a suitable climate for
nuclear disarmament before a holocaust by accident or attack. . . . Unlike other
exchange programs which are limited to members of specific professions . . .
CEC exchanges include individuals of all ages and from every occupation—a
true cross section of U.S. and Communist societies.

The cultural-philosophical assumptions underlying the mission of the

CEC were deeply American. Central to them was the taken-for-granted con-
viction that ordinary citizens exert substantial influence on their government
because the government is representative and responsive to their wishes and
concerns, and the latter shape government policies, including foreign poli-
cies. If so, the peaceful, peace-loving attitudes of both ordinary American
and Soviet citizens—if effectively communicated to their respective govern-
ments—would result in more peaceful policies and reduce or eliminate the
threat of nuclear war.
A second major premise of the CEC was that since ordinary people every-
where are similar to one another in certain crucial respects, groups of differ-
ent national or ethnic backgrounds could readily and rapidly develop mutual
understanding and appreciation given the opportunity to meet and exchange
ideas. It was a basically apolitical and optimistic conception of human nature
averred, for example, by Edison Plunkett of Elmira, New York (former pres-
ident of Elmira Foods), a participant in the CEC exchange:

The Soviet people seemed as friendly, peace-loving and ambitious for their coun-
try’s improvement as do people here in the United States . . . the goals and aspira-
tions of the Russians . . . were similar to those of their American counterparts. . . .
To see people going about their business . . . one can see their enthusiastic atti-
tude toward their work, their industriousness—a puritanical ethic similar to that
in our American heritage. . . . (Jack Freed, “Elmiran Visits Russians, Finds Them
Like Americans,” Star-Gazette [Elmira, New York], October 5, 1966.)
 American Travelers to the Soviet Union 127

The associated or implied view of conflict between nation states was cor-
respondingly optimistic: such conflicts resulted from misunderstanding, mis-
perception, and miscommunication or insufficient communication. These be-
liefs, needless to say, did not take sufficient account of the profound
differences between American and Soviet society, their respective histories
and divergent political systems, and least of all, the huge difference between
the degree to which citizens, or public opinion, influenced the policymakers
and leaders of these two political systems.
There was a further, corresponding failure to fully grasp the important
structural differences between these two societies. In the United States it was
possible for ordinary citizens to create and sustain spontaneously, without
government approval, permission, or assistance, a wide variety of social, cul-
tural, political, or economic organizations (including CEC), but no such op-
portunities existed in the former Soviet Union in the 1960s. Hence, the Soviet
“counterparts” of the Americans belonging to the CEC were hardly counter-
parts; they could become involved in these exchanges only with official ap-
proval. In all probability, the Soviet citizens participating in these exchanges
were carefully selected by the political authorities to represent and articulate
the officially approved points of views. They were not, and could not be, “or-
dinary” Soviet citizens, spontaneously taking certain positions or joining a
social organization or movement; they could not be genuine “counterparts” of
the American participants.
The Soviet official purpose in these exchanges was illustrated by a recol-
lection of one of the American participants who noted that in the organized
seminars and discussion groups the focus of Soviet interest was on “why
America is making war on Vietnam and what can be done to stop the Ameri-
can government from its genocidal policies.” Also characteristic of these ex-
changes was the observation of Professor Samuel Hendel (chairman at the
time of the Russian area program at City College, New York, and member of
the advisory board of the CEC Field Institute). While “he felt the exchange
experiment was ‘breaking new ground’. . . he added, ‘I would be happier,
frankly, if there were more opportunities for the Americans to present their
side’” (quoted in Raymond H. Anderson, “Lost Soviet Visas Delay 2 U.S.
Women in Moscow,” New York Times, July 14, 1966). These asymmetries
were also reflected in the striking quantitative difference between the num-
bers of tourists (of all kinds) of each country visiting the other. For example,
in 1969, a total of 20,000 Americans visited the Soviet Union and 165 Soviet
“tourists” visited the United States. In 1982 it was 50,000 Americans against
a few hundred Soviet visitors (Yale Richmond, Soviet-American Cultural Ex-
changes: Ripoff or Payoff? Washington, D.C., 1984, 60).
None of this is intended to suggest that these exchanges were doomed to
total futility; something useful could still be accomplished even if officially
128 Chapter Sixteen

selected Soviet citizens representing their government’s positions met Amer-

icans who had no similar identification with their government and its policies.
Allen Kassof, for many years the head of IREX (International Research and
Exchanges Board), the American organization that arranged scholarly ex-
changes with the Soviet Union, took an even more charitable view of the
kinds of exchanges CEC sought to foster. In an April 2006 letter to me he
wrote: “I knew the organizers of many of the ‘amateur’ exchanges . . . and it
would be wrong to think that they were naive. If anyone began with the illu-
sion that the contacts were a direct path to understanding and peace (and few
did), they were quickly disabused by having to deal with Soviet bureaucracy.
. . . It was a rare American who returned dewy-eyed from a sojourn in the
USSR (on the contrary they were often appalled by what they saw). . . .”
While it remains difficult to establish what proportions of Americans were
naive or realistic about these (nonscholarly) exchanges, there was a further,
important asymmetry between participants of the exchanges the CEC fos-
tered. Not only were the Americans free to join CEC without governmental
authorization but many of them were critical of their own government and its
foreign policies as well as their society and freely expressed such sentiments.
(When asked “what were the major criticisms Soviet people made of Ameri-
can society,” one CEC respondent wrote “the same ones I make.”)

FACTS AND FINDINGS

Two hundred thirty pretravel questionnaires were returned by the CEC

group but only eighty-three posttravel; eighty-two pretravel by the mathe-
maticians and sixty-four post. Forty years after the questionnaires were
sent out, it was impossible to establish the total number sent and how many
in each group embarked on these trips. Reportedly, in 1965, 140 took the
same CEC trip (M. S. Handler, “140 Fly to Soviet to Start Citizen Ex-
change,” New York Times, August 28, 1965). Respondents in my survey
sometimes made references to 160 people in their group, but there was also
reference to a total number of 500 such visitors in the same year. There had
to be more than 160 such travelers since I received 230 responses. Most
likely, three such groups of 160 took the trip in 1966 and all of them were
sent questionnaires.
It is more difficult to guess how many mathematicians from the United
States attended the International Congress; eighty-two seems like a reason-
able figure but it is possible that twice as many, or even more, attended.
Approximately a third of the CEC visitors completed the second question-
naire (as opposed to 80 percent of the mathematicians). I can only speculate
 American Travelers to the Soviet Union 129

about the sources of this discrepancy. It is possible that in the aftermath of the
trip there was a diminished enthusiasm about and interest in the whole un-
dertaking. There might also have been a measure of disappointment, which
some of the respondents did not wish to confront or articulate, as the second
questionnaire might have prompted them to do.
In any event, the first set of questionnaires provides abundant information
about the sociological and attitudinal attributes of the CEC members sur-
veyed. Unless otherwise indicated, all figures to follow refer to the CEC
group: 48 percent were male, 50 percent female (of the mathematicians, 73
percent were male and only 25 percent female); 55 percent were married, 41
percent single, and only 2 percent divorced.
As regards the occupational background, teachers/academics were the
largest group, 29 percent; followed by businessmen and managerial, 19 per-
cent; students, 19 percent; housewives, 9 percent; social workers, 5 percent;
lawyers and doctors, 3 percent each; and clergy, 2 percent. Eighteen percent
were high school graduates; 31 percent were college graduates with first de-
grees; 23 percent had master’s degrees, and 8 percent had Ph.D.s.
The great majority (67 percent) was from the Northeast (26 percent from
New York City and 17 percent from other parts of New York state); 17 percent
from the Midwest, only 5 percent from the West and 2 percent from the South.
This lopsided distribution may reflect the influence of the location of CEC (in
New York City) as well as the concentration of people in the greater New York
City area interested in foreign affairs and especially Soviet-American relations.
The area concentration and the interest expressed in Soviet anti-Semitism also
suggest the likelihood that a high proportion of the respondents were Jewish.
More evenly distributed, 40 percent of the mathematicians were from the
Northeast, 22 percent from the Midwest, 13 percent from the West, 5 percent
from the South, and 3 percent from Canada.
There were several questions about the sources of information that these
respondents had about the Soviet Union or Russia. These questions do not im-
ply a belief that information necessarily determines attitudes or beliefs. Peo-
ple use information selectively and tend to favor whatever supports their pre-
disposition or preferences. Often identical bits of information are subject to
different interpretation.
Unexpectedly high proportions indicated familiarity with Russian fiction
(56 percent) and Soviet fiction (33 percent). Over 60 percent read some of the
works of Marx and Engels; 34 percent those of Lenin, 23 percent those of
Stalin. The mathematicians’ familiarity with these sources was also substan-
tial: 43 percent read some Russian fiction, 36 percent Soviet fiction, and 42
percent some Marx, again highly atypical figures even for well-read academ-
ics, especially outside the humanities.
130 Chapter Sixteen

Soviet sources of information were not widely consulted, with 96 percent

never or rarely having listened to Radio Moscow, which regularly broadcast
in English. As to American sources of information about the USSR, over half
relied on television, about one-third on radio, 85 percent on newspapers, and
76 percent on magazines—the latter figures probably a reflection of the
greater importance of printed sources forty years ago than would be the case
today.
I was also interested in the factual knowledge of these travelers in such
matters as the land area of the USSR compared with that of the United States,
the size of the Soviet population, estimates of Communist Party membership,
and the percentage of votes the party received in the national elections under
Stalin (over 90 percent) and after Stalin (74 percent) The latter estimate was
wrong. The votes were in the ninetieth percentile even after the death of Stalin.
The other estimates were largely correct.
The population in rural areas (as percentage of the total) was widely over-
estimated: 69 percent of the respondents put it between 51 percent and 75 per-
cent; 16 percent estimated it between 26 and 50 percent (it was in fact around
20 percent). The preponderant overestimation of the rural population suggests
an image of the Soviet Union as largely rural.
I also asked what the “Committee on State Security” (KGB) was (again
providing options for the answer). Forty-two percent correctly chose “major
coercive organ of the Soviet state” and 34 percent chose “an arm of the Se-
cret Police.” More humorously, 5 percent chose “government controlled in-
surance institute,” 4 percent “loans and savings organization,” and 1 percent
“an organization concerned with the prevention of accidents.”
As to the standard of living, 72 percent correctly believed that it was “much
lower than in the United States;” and 26 percent that it was “somewhat lower.
. . .” Very few chose “about the same. . . .” Regarding income differentials,
76 percent rightly thought that they were “considerable,” 15 percent that they
were “very high,” and only 6 percent that they were “nonexistent” or “very
small.” Responses to these factual questions suggest that this was, for the
most part, a fairly well-informed group.

ATTITUDES AND OPINIONS

I was also interested in the attitudes toward the exchanges CEC championed.
Forty-four percent chose the statement that most accurately captures the CEC
philosophy, namely that “basically people are alike all over the world; by
meeting them informally we can eliminate tension and misunderstanding be-
tween countries which is always a product of ignorance and lack of commu-
 American Travelers to the Soviet Union 131

nications.” Twenty-five percent averred that “meeting people of other coun-

tries helps to destroy national stereotypes . . .”; 19 percent agreed that such
meetings were not sufficient by themselves to improve international relations;
and only 11 percent supported the proposition that “it matters little how the
average citizens of different countries feel about each other . . . because hos-
tility between countries is produced by clashing ideologies, or economic and
political interests.”
To sum up, two-thirds adhered to what may be seen as the more naive, per-
sonalized view of international relations and one-third supported the more re-
alistic one.
The mathematicians’ attitudes were more realistic; only 24 percent agreed
with the statement that the informal get-togethers eliminate misunderstanding
and tension, as opposed to the 44 percent of the CEC members. Twenty-seven
percent of the mathematicians (versus 19 percent CEC) thought that such
meetings were unlikely to improve international relations.
Respondents were also asked what specific reasons prompted them to take
the trip and were given sixteen options and asked to mark five. The most
widely given reasons were:

• 74 percent: to better understand the average Soviet citizen;

• 57 percent: to become better acquainted with Russian culture;
• 54 percent: to be an ambassador of friendship;
• 47 percent: to obtain factual information about aspects of Soviet society;
• 40 percent: to equip myself with firsthand information to disprove false-
hoods current in the United States about the Soviet Union [only 10 percent
of the mathematicians chose this option]
• 39 percent: to acquire firsthand information I can disseminate among
friends;
• 35 percent: to enrich my personality by visiting a new country;
• 27 percent: to confirm my belief that Soviet and especially Russian people
are good, no matter what kind of government they have;
• 27 percent: to counteract misinformation Soviet citizens have about the
United States, and explain the truth about the United States;
• 21 percent: to put factual foundation under the ideas I already have about
the Soviet Union;
• 13 percent: to see the country my ancestors came from;
• 12 percent: to improve knowledge of Russian language [23 percent of the
mathematicians chose this].

Most of these responses were congruent with the declared mission of the
CEC.
132 Chapter Sixteen

Among the mathematicians the most popular choice (49 percent) was “to
enrich my personality, etc.” and the second most popular (45 percent) “To be-
come acquainted with Russian culture.” These were clearly more apolitical
reasons.
Given my interest in the relationship between attitudes toward American
society and the views of the Soviet Union, the respondents were also asked to
choose among different characterizations of both American and Soviet soci-
ety. The most popular option (74 percent) concerning the United States (and
indicative of a social-critical disposition) was that it was “a pluralistic society
with high standards of living but with many serious unresolved social prob-
lems and defects.” Far below was the number of those, 14 percent, who be-
lieved that it was “democratic and pluralistic striving to extend social justice.”
The unqualified positive assessment—“a land of freedom and unlimited op-
portunity”—was held by only 6 percent. Likewise, the most unqualified con-
demnation—“an irresponsible and wasteful society, obsessed by consumption
and controlled by a power elite”—was also chosen by only 5 percent.
The mathematicians were somewhat less critical of American society, as
shown in their response to the statement that emphasized the “serious and un-
resolved social problems and defects” of the United States: 67 percent chose
it versus 74 percent of the CEC respondents.
In evaluating the seemingly judicious view (the first option, cited above)
held by almost three-quarters of the respondents of American society, we do
not know which part of the statement carried more emotional weight: the ac-
knowledgment of positive aspects (pluralistic, high standards of living) or the
negative (serious social problems and defects).
Another question sought to gauge the views about convergence between
American and Soviet society (widely held at the time) offering these alterna-
tives:

• 44 percent (as against 26 percent of the mathematicians): “the United States

and the USSR are becoming similar in their use of technology and growing
bureaucratization”;
• 33 percent: “becoming similar insofar as the values and aspirations of their
average citizens are concerned”;
• 9 percent: “becoming more alike with regard to the standard of living”;
• 6 percent: “becoming similar in most areas of life.”

Here again, almost three-quarters subscribed to what is essentially a belief in

convergence, and the mathematicians’ responses were largely similar.
Another group of questions probed the conceptions of the Soviet Union: 44
percent chose “a society that modernized itself at great cost and at the ex-
 American Travelers to the Soviet Union 133

pense of personal and political freedom” (versus 51 percent of the mathe-

maticians);

• 30 percent: “made great progress in modernizing itself under very difficult

conditions”;
• 18 percent: “a totalitarian society that remains in many ways underdevel-
oped and intolerant of . . . dissent and diversity”;
• 7 percent: “a peace-loving country . . . which created a truly popular sys-
tem of government.”

Again it may be asked which component of the most popular answer carried
more weight: the accomplishments of modernization or its costs.
It was my assumption that those who held the most negative conceptions
of American society would be more susceptible to more favorable percep-
tions of the Soviet Union. This assumption was not completely supported by
the responses. The most negative view of American society held by the small
number (5 percent) of respondents (i.e., “an irresponsible and wasteful soci-
ety, obsessed with consumption and controlled by a power elite”) proved
compatible with assessments of the Soviet Union: ranging from the most fa-
vorable (“a peace loving country which made more social and economic
progress in a short time than any other country and which created a truly
popular government”) held by the smallest number to “a society that made
great progress in modernizing itself under very difficult conditions.” A hand-
ful ascribed to the more critical view: “a society that modernized itself at
great human cost and at the expense of personal and political freedoms.”
Only the most unambiguously critical assessment “a totalitarian society . . .
etc.” was shunned.
The most widely held view of American society that incorporated both pos-
itive and negative aspects (“pluralistic, high standards of living” and “serious
and unresolved social problems and defects”) was compatible with the entire
available range of assessment of the Soviet Union, including the most unfa-
vorable.
The most unambiguously favorable views of America (“a land of freedom
and unlimited opportunity”) did not invariably coincide with the most nega-
tive view of the Soviet Union, but sometimes allowed for the less judgmen-
tal and most widely chosen one, that is, “a society that modernized itself at
great human cost, etc.” Still, more typically the highly favorable views of
America went along with the more critical views of the Soviet Union.
While most of these perceptions of the two societies were not starry-eyed
or unrealistic, the options offered in the questionnaire might have restricted
the expression of the most strongly felt or salient attitudes. There was also a
134 Chapter Sixteen

list of various features of Soviet society, positive and negative (“assets or

weaknesses”), of which I solicited approval or disapproval. For the most part,
the responses were predictable and unremarkable. For instance: 87 percent
approved or strongly approved of free medical services and similar percent-
ages of universal literacy. As to “political participation of the broad masses”
(which, of course, did not exist), 55 percent had no comment, probably be-
cause they were bewildered by the suggestion that it existed or were not sure
how to respond given a measure of favorable disposition; on the other hand,
39 percent approved, which meant that they mistakenly believed that it ex-
isted. Eighty-five percent disapproved of “the persistence of anti-Semitism”;
93 percent supported the raising of the standard of living; 77 percent disap-
proved of the one-party system; 57 percent of the privileges of the party-elite,
although 25 percent professed to be “indifferent,” and 12 percent had no opin-
ion. Both of the latter responses suggest that the issue was not salient or well
known.
There were some interesting divisions of opinion about the state of control
over the means of production: 42 percent did not favor it as against 33 per-
cent who did; 19 percent professed to be indifferent. But almost two-thirds
disapproved of “the absence of private enterprise” (that is a condition identi-
cal to “state control over the means of production”); only 15 percent ap-
proved; a quarter were indifferent or offered no opinion. There were no note-
worthy differences in the responses of the two groups to this group of
questions.
Since the majority of the CEC respondents failed to return the second ques-
tionnaire it was not possible to make meaningful comparisons between atti-
tudes before and after the trip. Still, there were self-assessments about the im-
pact of the trip on various opinions, and beliefs. I asked, “in which of the
following areas did the trip change your feelings, opinion or attitude?” Eleven
such areas were listed, including Soviet living standards, domestic and for-
eign policy, Soviet social problems, people’s attitudes toward the govern-
ment, and others. Respondents could choose between “great, considerable,
some or none” as to the degree of change in their attitudes. There was an
open-ended follow-up question asking to explain “what the change consisted
of” to shed some light on the quality of the change. A far greater portion of
the CEC people reported “great change” in regard to some attitude than did
the mathematicians. For example, while 18 percent of the CEC respondents
reported “great change” regarding their views about Soviet people, only 2
percent of the mathematicians did so; likewise 12 percent versus 2 percent re-
garding Soviet domestic policies; 21 percent versus 6 percent regarding liv-
ing standards; 21 percent versus 8 percent regarding physical aspects of So-
viet cities, and so forth. Overall the responses in the “great change” column
 American Travelers to the Soviet Union 135

totaled 122 points for the CEC members as against 45 points for the mathe-
maticians.
All reports of changing attitudes would have been more meaningful and in-
formative if we had known exactly what they had replaced or modified. Thus,
for example, only 22 percent of the CEC people registered “great” or “con-
siderable” change in their view of Soviet social problems; the rest (78 per-
cent) presumably learned little or nothing, or nothing new. This could also
mean that their previous views (whatever they were) had been confirmed dur-
ing the visit. Presumably the subjects least affected by the visit were those
about which they could learn the least (e.g., social problems) or the country-
side (they did not see) or anti-Semitism.

EXPECTATIONS AND EXPERIENCES

A close reading of the post-visit responses, and especially those to the open-
ended questions, makes clear that despite the Soviet goal of controlling the
exchanges, many Americans found opportunities for informal contacts and
conversations with Soviet citizens, usually on the street and in other public
places. The mathematicians, too, reported many informal and apparently can-
did exchanges of opinion and information with the natives.
Clearly, many Soviet citizens in major urban areas (as well as in resorts
such as Sochi on the Black Sea) were not deterred from seeking unauthorized
contact with Americans. But there were exceptions. A mathematician re-
ported, “I met several Russians who had relatives in the U.S.A. but they were
afraid to communicate (by mail) with them.” In seeming contradiction to this
observation, the same respondent found “Soviet citizens critical of their gov-
ernment.”
The responses do not make clear what proportion of the encounters and
conversations reported by the CEC contingent occurred with the preselected
“ordinary” Soviet citizens as distinct from those outside this category. Like-
wise, we have no way of knowing how many of the thirty-four invitations to
the homes of Soviet citizens reported by the CEC participants were officially
planned or authorized and how many were not.
Responses to the open-ended questions reveal a great variety of attitudes
and experiences, positive as well as negative, conditioned in a large measure
by the expectations of the travelers as they themselves made clear. It is im-
possible to quantify what portion of the experiences were generally positive
or negative; most were mixed.
These responses also remind one of the inherent difficulty of bridging the
gap between the multiplicity and uniqueness of personal experiences conveyed
136 Chapter Sixteen

in a multitude of ways and words and the social scientific endeavor that seeks
to fit such responses into neat, compressed, and clear-cut categories. The
most widely reported experience of both groups of visitors was that the So-
viet people they met were friendly, warm, helpful, outgoing, and avidly in-
terested in American ways of life and especially the standards of living and
were impressed by the freedom to travel.
The other most widely shared and deplored experience was that of bureau-
cratic inefficiency shaping the practical arrangements for the trip (CEC) as
well as the life of the natives observed; as one visitor noted, the Soviet peo-
ple spend much of their life “waiting in line for everything.”
It was another widespread perception of the visitors that Soviet people were
healthy and beneficiaries of a superior health care system provided by their
government. These observations were made in the same period when statistics
began to show the decline in public health that continued unabated through the
remaining decades of the Soviet Union (and into the postcommunist era as
well). It is doubtful that more than a handful (if any) visitors had reason to visit
Soviet hospitals or were provided with truthful statistics of public health.
The wide range of expectations and the “revelations” resulting from test-
ing them against experience are reflected in the comments that follow. A stu-
dent CEC participant wrote: “I expected Soviets to have a downtrodden,
brow-beaten attitude . . . [but] They are extremely proud. . . . One of the [So-
viet] students said, ‘So what if we don’t have color TV and washing ma-
chines—we will be on the moon first, without them.’” A theater agent was
“disappointed in the performing arts—expected a high degree of excellence.
Found . . . inferior and backward acting technique.” She also found the “So-
viet character less vivacious, less demonstrative than expected. . . . Though
people were warm and friendly . . . [they] rarely laughed . . . or showed un-
inhibited emotion.” By contrast, other visitors commented on the expressive,
emotional nature of the people they met.
A mathematician from Chicago “found the cities much better than ex-
pected and the countryside somewhat worse. . . . The Russians were much
more openly critical of bureaucrats, past mistakes, civil liberties restric-
tions, etc. than I expected.” The part played by expectations and their meet-
ing realities is further shown in the comments of a chemist from Princeton,
New Jersey, who found “the people warm and eager to be friendly though
tempered by fear . . . living standards much lower than expected . . . anti-
Semitism intense and terrible . . . Soviet cities backward . . . [and] class dis-
tinctions” noticeable. Class distinctions were also observed by a mathe-
matician from Philadelphia who was “shocked by the meanness of a Soviet
mathematician toward the serving waitress. Such attitude is unthinkable ei-
ther in Paris or the USA.”
 American Travelers to the Soviet Union 137

There were considerable differences of opinion among those who found

cities poorly planned and buildings neglected and those who found the (same)
cities clean and well planned. A librarian from Detroit wrote: “Soviet living
standards are much more behind the U.S. than I thought. . . . [but] The phys-
ical aspects of Soviet cities were better than I expected . . . cleaner than the
major U.S. cities. . . .”
There were also those who found the country “incredibly more poverty
stricken than I had thought . . .” whereas others found the improvements in
the living standards impressive, especially compared to prerevolutionary
conditions, although they were not in a position to ascertain what the lat-
ter were like. A “homemaker” from Grand Rapids, Michigan, thought that
Soviet “life is even more Spartan than I had imagined; although they claim
anti-Semitism doesn’t exist . . . it does; likewise with class distinction; I
did not realize that drinking was such a problem, especially with young
people.”
Expectations also played a crucial part in assessing the overall impact of
the trip, as in the response to the question seeking explanations for any atti-
tude change that might have occurred: “Soviet life seems to be freer than I
had imagined [a self-employed sales representative from Great Neck, New
York, wrote]. . . . People were even warmer and friendlier than I had thought
they would be. . . . [They] looked neat, well groomed and nicely dressed. . . .”
On the other hand, he confessed to greatly underestimating “the extent of
anti-Semitism. . . .”
Several of the CEC participants were aware of the restraints on these ex-
changes. A high school teacher wrote, “Visitors to the USSR are bound by In-
tourist [the official tourist agency] regulations over every aspect of the tourist’s
necessities—accommodations, food, etc. Visitors are also circumscribed . . . to
travel outside of designated areas. . . . Everything is controlled by the govern-
ment.” Another high school teacher wrote, “These contacts [at organized events
such as seminars, lectures] were much less fruitful for they were ‘planned’ and
were more formal and official, less frank and less an exchange of ideas.” On the
other hand, he found (on other occasions) Soviet people’s attitude toward their
government “much more critical than expected,” whereas the physical aspects
of Soviet cities were “less drab than expected.” A retired businessman from
Elmira, New York, thought that “personal contact with Russians at organized
events was very limited and non-productive.” Even in private, informal talks
“discussions were limited by language barriers, in most cases, and therefore
confined to generalities and expressions of friendship. . . .” Notwithstanding
these difficulties, his “impressions represented a change for the better, largely
because our press and official propaganda apparently deliberately misrepre-
sents almost all aspects of Soviet life.”
138 Chapter Sixteen

Yet another high school teacher observed, “The [Soviet] people at the lec-
tures were up on the platform handing out the official line. . . . No one was al-
lowed to express a difference of opinion in public.” A college senior wrote of
those met at the organized events, “Very well indoctrinated by the Party—
always evaded questions, said what they were expected to say. . . .” In more
spontaneous encounters, another respondent wrote: “immediate agreement
was found” that “Stalin and Khrushchev were bad” as was the suppression of
the Hungarian Revolution of 1956 while “the Beatles were good.” A professor
of mathematics “was surprised at the political apathy and/or essential agree-
ment with the government.” He was also “surprised to find petty dishonesty
when cab drivers and chauffeurs . . . asked for . . . payment in dollars. . . .”
A “planning analyst” from Washington, D.C., found that a meeting of
minds [with Soviet people] was only achieved on matters such as “peace and
friendship and [other] bland generalities.” He was also among those who
found far more anti-Semitism and deeper class and status cleavages than ex-
pected. His concluding comment was that the trip was an “interesting, fasci-
nating experience but [the Soviet Union] a strikingly depressing place to live
for a person interested in ideas or politics.”
Positive impressions dominated the observations of a research chemist
from Los Angeles: “People are happy. They have more money and a higher
standard of living than I had been led to believe. They . . . seem in complete
accord with the government . . . its program and policies.” He also found them
“very relaxed. . . . [They] laughed and enjoyed themselves easier than Amer-
icans. . . . Everything seemed very clean and neat in the cities. . . .” A secre-
tary from Nebraska came to the conclusion “that a system which has managed
to provide freedom from want and from fear of illness may actually provide
[create?] a different kind of people . . . who have the capacity to make a bet-
ter world.” These feelings were not shared by a mathematics professor from
Cleveland, Ohio, who during his visit “had the persistent feeling that anything
could go irreparably wrong anytime . . . and [that] people seem[ed] poorer
than in Mexico . . . counting the value of freedom and the value of time (wait-
ing time).” His “single most memorable experience” was the refusal to be
served in a restaurant that was not full because “I was a foreigner.” A “mer-
chant” from Detroit listed his most memorable experience as the witnessing
of “two policemen beating up a teenager because he was singing at the rail-
road station.” Other memorable experiences reported included “being pho-
tographed by the secret police” and getting things stolen from the dormitory
and hotel rooms where visitors stayed.
Not all mathematicians were better informed or more sober in their judg-
ments and conclusions. One (who did not disclose either his residence or place
of birth) believed that Soviet standards of living were “about the same as the
 American Travelers to the Soviet Union 139

American.” Of the Soviet people, he wrote, “They are rugged, healthy, pio-
neering, outgoing and friendly, talented, generous and proud. I consider them
very much like us.” He also believed that they were healthier than the French
(“but otherwise very European”) and more “independent than in Mexico.” An-
other mathematician offered this interpretation of the attitude and behavior of
Soviet people: “A patient people—willing to live under decreased freedom of
movement and low [living] standard so future generations can benefit.”
A professor of mathematics from Cincinnati, Ohio, also had offered a san-
guine assessment of Soviet people and society: “They are happy, confident
and proud and with good reason. Public transportation is excellent, goods are
adequate and plentiful, and housing, though cramped, is cheap. . . . This is ob-
viously a country on the move.”
A mathematician from Ossining, New York, wrote: “people I met seem
very honest and forthright similar to what you might expect from a Midwest-
ern rural community.” A mathematician from Rhode Island took an upbeat,
yet curiously mixed position summing up his impressions: “Beautiful coun-
try, extremely nice, polite and friendly people, their attitude seems relaxed;
class structure is not apparent. . . . Their morals seem to be very strict. The
standard of living . . . is much lower than I would expect. The inefficiency of
the bureaucratic system is amazing.”
Sometimes the open-ended responses comments contradicted the others.
Thus, the same mathematician who chose the most negative characterization
of the Soviet Union (i.e., “a totalitarian society that remains in many ways un-
derdeveloped and intolerant of any political, philosophical or intellectual dis-
sent and diversity”) also wrote that “the people surprised me; I often thought
if I didn’t know where I was I would never have guessed that I was in Rus-
sia. The people seemed happy and enjoying life. . . . There didn’t seem to be
any people following or watching others—I guess I expected to be in some
sort of police state.”
Among the notable misperceptions of American society on the part of So-
viet citizens reported by the visitors was disbelief that blacks could own cars
and that most Americans own private automobiles. Many also reported pro-
found and genuine incomprehension of a pluralistic, open society where the
government did not control everything and having a passport was a com-
monplace experience.

TAKEN-FOR-GRANTED DURABILITY

None of these visitors had the slightest idea, premonition, or experience

leading them to question the durability of the Soviet system and the Soviet
140 Chapter Sixteen

empire (not that the experts on such matters did so at that time). Whether they
perceived the Soviet system as repressive or progressive, its people impover-
ished or well provided for, none could foresee that a quarter-century later the
system would unravel and abruptly collapse. No conversations or experiences
were reported that called into question or cast the slightest doubt on the over-
all stability and persistence of the Soviet system.
More surprisingly, no reference was made by the visitors to any discussion
they might have had with Soviet people about the 1956 revelations of
Khrushchev; likewise little was said about the Soviet dissidents of the period,
Solzhenitsyn included. None of the visitors was in a position to detect the pro-
found alienation of a critical mass of Soviet citizens that, in conjunction with
the eroding political will and self-confidence of the rulers, would bring down
the system in the early 1990s.
In the final analysis, American attitudes—popular or official—played little
part in the changes percolating within Soviet society during the 1960s, 1970s,
and 1980s. The exposure of Soviet citizens to American visitors, however
limited in scope, might have made a small contribution to altering warped and
stifled views of the world outside the Soviet Union, and especially of its al-
leged arch-enemy, the United States; these encounters helped to make a small
number of Soviet citizens more aware of options and possibilities, fraying the
mental-ideological straitjacket the regime imposed on its people.
 Chapter Seventeen

Alexander Yakovlev

Alexander Yakovlev’s name is largely unknown to the American public, al-

though he was a major political figure during perestroika, a key advisor to
Gorbachev, and a high-ranking official in the Soviet political hierarchy for
most of his adult life.
Born in 1923, Yakovlev came from a poor peasant family; his father had
four years of education and was the first chairman of the local collective farm.
His mother was an illiterate, “downtrodden peasant woman and a religious
believer to the end of her days.” Yakovlev became a Party member in 1943.
He worked in the Central Committee of the Party between 1953 and 1973 in
positions connected with ideology and propaganda and became head of the
Party’s propaganda department in 1969. He was ambassador to Canada from
1973 to 1983; in 1983 he was appointed director of the Institute of Interna-
tional Economy and Relations. Under Gorbachev he was restored in 1985 to
his position as head of the Party’s propaganda department, and in 1986 he be-
came secretary of the Central Committee in charge of ideological matters. In
1987 he was appointed to the Politburo.
Prior to A Century of Violence in Russia (2002), Yakovlev had published
another important book in English, The Fate of Marxism in Russia (1993), a
pathbreaking study that examines the link between Marxism and the political
practices and institutions of the Soviet Union and other “actually existing”
communist systems.
A Century of Violence in Soviet Russia provides a remarkable range and
amount of information despite its compactness, enumerating and illuminating
the major phases, trends, and events associated with the repressive policies of
the Soviet system. Like the earlier, more theoretical work, it amounts to an
exploration and summation of what went wrong with what used to be called,

141
142 Chapter Seventeen

charitably, “the Soviet experiment.” But unlike the other volume, A Century
of Violence focuses on specific institutional and moral failures and the human
costs the system exacted; it identifies the groups and strata of the population
that suffered most. As such, it may be compared to The Black Book of Com-
munism,1 which attempted to document and examine the crimes not only of
the Soviet Union but of all other existing or extinct communist states. There
are, however, important differences. None of the contributors to The Black
Book were ever communist officials, let alone high-ranking ones, and, due to
its scope, The Black Book could not be as detailed and thorough as the work
here introduced.
Readers accustomed to dispassionate, scholarly analyses of political phe-
nomena and traumatic historical events should be warned: this is not a de-
tached, bland discussion wrapped in neutral social scientific terminology—it
is an emotionally charged expression of deeply felt pain and moral indigna-
tion that accumulated during a lifetime of witnessing the suffering, misery,
and mendaciousness inflicted by the Soviet system. Doubtless Yakovlev’s
personal pain was intensified, even in retrospect, by the fact that he himself
devoted much of his life to that system.
There are many critiques of communist systems by authors of different
backgrounds and nationalities; what makes this volume unusual is the biog-
raphy and stature of its author. It is hard to think of any other communist of-
ficial of comparable rank and distinction who so explicitly, sweepingly, and
powerfully repudiated the system he was a part of, who was as much an in-
sider and a product of the system as Alexander Yakovlev. Only Milovan Dji-
las occupies a comparable position: he was similarly highly placed (in the
Yugoslav communist ruling elite) and his indictment of Soviet-style commu-
nism is notable for its depth and scope.2 Trotsky, too, renounced the Soviet
regime in its Stalinist incarnation, but he remained a Marxist and even a
Leninist, and his critiques of the Soviet system are less far-reaching than
Yakovlev’s. Unlike other insider critics of communist systems, Yakovlev did
not defect, nor was he exiled. He still lives in Russia, devoting much of his
life since the collapse of the Soviet system to the fate of its victims in his ca-
pacity as head of the Commission on the Rehabilitation of Victims of Polit-
ical Repression.
While for most readers Yakovlev’s insider position and perspective will
immeasurably add to the authenticity of this book, there may be some for
whom the intensity of his disillusionment and moral passion may cast doubt
on the credibility of his message. They are likely to be the same people for
whom the demise of the Soviet Union has had the unhappy result of render-
ing the United States the only superpower. They are even more likely to be
 Alexander Yakovlev 143

disturbed by Yakovlev’s unqualified rejection of Marxism and not just the So-
viet system. In their eyes it is a grave transgression to link Marxist theory to
the policies and practices of a communist system such as the Soviet Union
used to be. Yakovlev has no doubt of such a linkage, as he also made clear in
his earlier book.
Yakovlev’s critiques of the Soviet system will not be easy to discredit. He
is neither a pampered Western intellectual in search of a cause nor a defector
who can be accused of having been bought off by Western lucre. It will be in-
teresting to see the response of those who find it hard to stomach his convic-
tion that Marxism, too, bears significant responsibility for the human toll ex-
acted by communist systems.
Yakovlev ranks as a major historical figure on several grounds. In the first
place, he made crucial contributions to the political changes associated with
Gorbachev, to the liberalization of the Soviet system that hastened its end. He
was also a key contributor to the intellectual and spiritual ferment that led to
perestroika and glasnost, promoting the quiet and gradual evolution that pre-
ceded Gorbachev’s reforms and providing their intellectual foundations.
Known as “the father of glasnost,” he belonged to the small group of Party
intellectuals who (as another close associate of Gorbachev, Anatoly Cher-
nyaev, puts it) “were in many ways the ambassadors to Gorbachev of a larger
liberal intelligentsia, one whose humanist, ‘Westernizing’ philosophical and
practical orientation had been developing for over two decades. . . . [They
were] collectively described as ‘Children of the 20th Congress,’ reformist
thinkers who kept alive the unfulfilled hopes of Khrushchev’s ‘thaw’ for
broader liberalization of Soviet society and integration with the international
community.”3 Yakovlev was also among those who tried to keep Gorbachev
on a steady course of reform and to bolster his liberal-democratic policies
against the resistance of the nomenklatura and his own fluctuating political
impulses.
Yakovlev has been unique among former Soviet officials and ideologues in
confronting the relationship between Marxism and the debilitating flaws of
the Soviet system. The Fate of Marxism in Russia is the major expression of
that effort in English, but the reader will find references to the same theme in
this volume.
Among his other contributions, Yakovlev has devoted a great deal of his
time since the early 1990s to documenting and rehabilitating the victims of
Soviet communism and has remained a voice of critical conscience in the
postcommunist period. In the course of these activities he has acquired
many detractors at both ends of the political spectrum. In recent years he has
been among the most outspoken critics of the many serious deformations of
144 Chapter Seventeen

Russian public life and politics associated with old-style communism, right-
wing nationalism, and anti-Semitism. He understands keenly the deep roots
of the historical pathologies that the Soviet system represented and that made
the transition to a political democracy and civil society difficult:

The land of Rus accepted Christianity from Constantinople in A.D. 988. Char-
acteristics of Byzantine rule of that era—baseness, cowardliness, venality,
treachery, overcentralization, apotheosis of the ruler’s personality—dominate in
Russia’s social and political life to this day. In the twelfth century the various
fragmented Russian principalities . . . were conquered by the Mongols. Asian
traditions and customs, with their disregard for the individual and for human
rights and their cult of might, violence, despotic power, and lawlessness became
part of the Russian people’s way of life.
The tragedy of Russia lay first and foremost in this: that for a thousand years
it was ruled by men and not by laws. . . . They ruled ineptly, bloodily. The peo-
ple existed for the government, not the government for the people. Russia
avoided classical slavery. But it has not yet emerged from feudalism; it is still
enslaved by an official imperial ideology, the essence of which is that the state
is everything and the individual nothing.

These circumstances presumably also help account for what Yakovlev does
not hesitate to call the “slave psychology” of the Russian people, which re-
mains a major obstacle to the genuine liberalization of the society and its eco-
nomic reconstruction. Thus Yakovlev connects both the pre-Soviet and Soviet
past and the postcommunist present, and his reflections on recent develop-
ments are pessimistic.
A Century of Violence is an impassioned, bitter, and emotional indictment
of the Soviet system from its earliest days and a methodical and detailed in-
ventory of its misdeeds. Yakovlev has no illusions about the “purity” of the
early Soviet goals and policies allegedly promoted by Lenin or, for that mat-
ter, about the personality of Lenin, whom he regards as having been as evil
and unscrupulous as Stalin. (“Stalin did not think up anything that was not
there under Lenin: executions, hostage taking, concentration camps, and all
the rest.”) This is a major departure from the conventional wisdom that has
long prevailed among Western academic specialists, who detect significant
discontinuities between the policies and personalities of these two figures.
A survey, in effect, of the worst repressions of Soviet history from Lenin to
perestroika, A Century of Violence contains a wealth of information, includ-
ing case histories of victimization, based on both Yakovlev’s personal expe-
rience and his privileged access to archival sources. Yakovlev systematically
probes the policies and individuals behind these repressions, whose victims
included children and adolescents, Mensheviks, Social Revolutionaries, An-
 Alexander Yakovlev 145

archists, and other socialists (early allies of the Bolsheviks), the peasants, the
intelligentsia, the clergy, the nationalities and Jews, former prisoners of war
(in World War II), and civilians taken to Germany as forced laborers.
Yakovlev holds the Soviet system responsible for the deaths of at least sixty
million Soviet citizens. He is particularly strong in his coverage of the re-
pression of the intelligentsia, touching on many famous groups and individu-
als, including those silenced, exiled, or imprisoned in the 1920s; the “Trot-
skyist terrorist” writers in Leningrad in 1937; Pasternak, Daniel, Sinyavsky,
Brodsky, and, later, Solzhenitsyn.
Another strength of the volume is its treatment of the ethnic-national poli-
cies and repressions directed at the Ukrainians, Volga Germans, Kalmyks,
Crimean Tatars, Ingush, and others and its detailed discussion—particularly
relevant today—of the mistreatment of the Chechens.
While many of the major events and policies discussed in this volume are
known, at least in their general outlines, many others are likely to be unfa-
miliar, even to specialists. As early as 1918, for instance, there was labor un-
rest in Motovilikha, a village in Perm province, where “the workers de-
manded a stop to special food privileges for Soviet government and Party
workers, an end to summary executions, guarantees of freedom of speech
and assembly.” Yakovlev also brings to light Lenin’s predilection for hostage
taking as a means of consolidating the system; the mistreatment of close to
half a million Soviet prisoners of war returned after the Soviet-Finnish war;
the communications between Romain Rolland (the pro-Soviet French writer)
and Stalin about the punishment of children and adolescents; Meyerhold’s
complaint to Molotov about his treatment in prison; the numerous intrigues
and denunciations among various writers and artists; the persecution of the-
ater companies and moviemakers in the 1930s; the fate of the Korean mi-
nority; the huge number of Soviet workers severely punished simply for be-
ing late for work; the alleged organizations of Jewish bourgeois nationalists
in the Stalin Works in Moscow and at the Kuznetsk metallurgical complex;
the preparations to deport Jews at the time of the “doctors’ plot” before
Stalin’s death; and the suppression of the 1962 food riots in Novocherkassk.
Yakovlev also demolishes the myth, widespread in the West, of Yuri An-
dropov’s liberal credentials. It may also surprise some readers that Yakovlev
regards the early twentieth century as the brightest, most promising era of
Russian history.
Yakovlev’s revelations and graphic descriptions of the many misdeeds of
the system are only one noteworthy aspect of this book. Another is what we
learn about the transformation of his own beliefs and attitudes, how and why
he became profoundly critical of the system he helped legitimize and keep in
power for decades.
146 Chapter Seventeen

The case of Yakovlev illuminates the process of political disillusionment in

our times. It raises the intriguing question of what it takes to reject a political
system and its legitimizing ideas for a man raised in, fully committed to, and
well rewarded by it, a high-ranking member of the political elite who spent
much of his life in the rarefied heights of the nomenklatura. Even more sig-
nificant and unusual is that this sweeping, unconditional rejection of the sys-
tem comes from a man with a long and deep involvement with official doc-
trine, with ideology, and with the task of convincing the population of the
virtues and legitimacy of the system. In an interview in 1994 he linked his dis-
affection precisely to his involvement with ideology: “The main thing that
changed my worldview was the fact that my ideology was my business. . . . I
took the work seriously. And gradually, step by step, more and more often, it
nauseated me. Then I went back again to the primary sources. . . . When you
get older faith alone is not enough, you want to look more deeply. And as
soon as you begin to analyze what you believe it begins to crack.”4
Three sets of experiences played a major role in the undermining of
Yakovlev’s beliefs and commitment to the system. The first was acquired dur-
ing World War II, in which he served and sustained serious injuries, the sec-
ond was Khrushchev’s historic revelations during the Twentieth Party Con-
gress in 1956, and the third was his demotion in 1972 as the result of an
article he wrote criticizing Russian nationalism and anti-Semitism.
His doubts and disillusionment during World War II were stimulated by
the inhumane treatment of former Soviet POWs: “A serviceman taken pris-
oner was regarded as having committed a premeditated crime. . . . Soldiers
and commanding officers who had broken out of encirclement were treated
as potential traitors and spies. . . . When, at the beginning of 1942, a group
of us young officers arrived at the Volkhov front . . . we saw this practice
take place under frontline conditions.” Soviet soldiers were supposed to
fight to the death regardless of the circumstances. There was also apprehen-
sion on the part of the authorities that exposure to life outside the Soviet
Union, even for prisoners of war or slave laborers, might have implanted at-
titudes that would erode unquestioning loyalty to the system. Sometimes for-
mer Red Army officers who had been liberated from prison camps or had
broken out of encirclement were assigned to “assault battalions,” which
“were employed in situations where it was almost impossible to stay alive.”
It is hardly surprising that such experiences gradually undermined
Yakovlev’s political faith; what is more surprising is that they did not have
a similar impact on many others and did not impair their capacity to work.
for the regime.
Another particularly disturbing experience was Yakovlev’s witnessing the
return of Soviet POWs from Germany:
 Alexander Yakovlev 147

I remember the Vspolye train station in Yaroslavl a year after the war, the rumor
that a train would be passing through with some of our soldiers . . . from Ger-
man prisoner of war camps. I was still on crutches, but I went with the others . . .
to watch. Railway cars, small windows with iron bars; thin, pale, bewildered
faces at the windows. And on the platform, women weeping and wailing . . . run-
ning back and forth between the cars looking for their husbands, brothers,
sweethearts. . . .
The people on the platform . . . couldn’t understand why these boys from the
Nazi camps were being transported like criminals to the Urals and Siberia. I re-
member the tortured faces, the total incomprehension, theirs and mine.

The second major blow to Yakovlev’s loyalties and beliefs (as to those of
many others of his generation) was Khrushchev’s famous speech at the Twen-
tieth Party Congress in February 1956. Yakovlev was present and what he
heard, he says, “plunged me into the deepest dejection, if not despair. Every-
thing seemed unreal, even that I was sitting there in the Kremlin hearing
words that were destroying everything I had lived by, shattering the past,
rending the soul. Everything crumbled, never to be made whole again.” Nev-
ertheless, Yakovlev remained a highly placed functionary for decades to
come, leading what must have been a difficult inner life:

I had been honest in my previous faith, and I was equally honest in rejecting it. I
came to detest Stalin, . . . who had deceived me so cruelly and trampled on my ro-
mantic dreams. From then on I devoted myself to searching out a way to put an
end to this inhuman system. . . . All this took the form of hope, not action. . . .
I lived a double life of agonizing dissimulation. I conformed, I pretended, trying
all the while not to lose my bearings and disgrace myself. No longer interested in
working for the Central Committee, I looked for an out and found one. . . . I sensed
a need to reeducate myself, to reread everything I’d read before, go back to origi-
nal sources—Marx, Engels, Lenin, the German philosophers, the French socialists,
the British economists, all the fountainheads of my outlook on the world.

Even before the Twentieth Congress, Khrushchev made public statements

disclosing the rampant mismanagement of the economy; these Yakovlev “jot-
ted down” and found distressing. To wit:

We’ve been squandering the accumulated capital of the people’s trust in the
Party. We can’t go on endlessly exploiting the people’s trust. . . .
We’ve become like priests and preachers: we promise a kingdom in heaven,
but in the here and now there are no potatoes. Only our long suffering Russian
people would put up with something like that. . . . We are not priests, we are
Communists, and we must give them this happiness here on earth.
When I was a worker, there was no socialism, but there were potatoes, and
now we have built socialism and there are no potatoes.
148 Chapter Seventeen

The third set of experiences that helped change his worldview was set in
motion in 1968 in Prague, where he was sent to oversee Soviet journalists
covering the Soviet invasion. At the time he was deputy head of the propa-
ganda department of the CPSU Central Committee, and this was a vital as-
signment. Officially the dispatch of troops was described as friendly assis-
tance, but Yakovlev was shocked by what he found. “I saw gallows with
effigies of Soviet soldiers hanging there. . . . People were shouting ‘Fascists,
Fascists.’” Yakovlev has summed up the experience as “an important school
for me. . . . It had a great sobering effect.”5
As to the article that led to his demotion as head of the Party’s propaganda de-
partment (and to his exile to Canada as ambassador), he recalls, “No sooner had
I written an article in 1972 on the dangers of chauvinism, nationalism, and anti-
Semitism in the USSR—hung out the dirty laundry, as it were—than I was re-
moved from all Party work. Moreover, I remain labeled to this day as a ‘Russo-
phobe’ and a leader of ‘kike-masons’ and supplied with . . . different surnames
Epshtein, Yankelevich, Yakobson.” In other words, Yakovlev continues to pay a
price for defying both the elements in the old Soviet hierarchy and the anti-
Semitic groups and attitudes that have resurfaced over the past decade.
In Yakovlev’s summation, the most serious damage (and the hardest to re-
pair) has been to what Trotsky called the “human raw material.” Political re-
form, institutional change, free elections, and new laws are welcome and es-
sential, but they will not create a stable, democratic, and decent society unless
the basic attitudes and values of the people change, or those of a critical num-
ber of people change. Yakovlev writes, “The Bolshevik regime is guilty not
only of the deaths of millions of people and the tragic consequences for their
families, not only of creating an atmosphere of total fear and lies, but of a
crime against conscience, of producing its notorious ‘new historic community
of people’ distorted by malice, doublethink, suspiciousness, and pretense.
Lenin and Stalin and their henchmen . . . destroyed the nation’s gene pool . . .
undermining the potential for the flowering of science and culture.”
This is indispensable reading for anybody who wants to grasp the nature of
the Soviet system, the full range of its crimes against its people, the sources
of its collapse, and the grave problems it left behind.

NOTES

1. Stephane Courtois et al., The Black Book of Communism: Crimes, Terror, Re-
pression (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1999).
2. Most notable are Djilas’s The New Class (New York: Praeger, 1957) and his
Conversations with Stalin (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1962).
 Alexander Yakovlev 149

3. Anatoly S. Chernyaev, My Six Years with Gorbachev (University Park: Penn-

sylvania State University Press, 2000), xvii, xv–xvi.
4. Quoted in Robert V. Daniels, “Overthrowing Utopianism” [review of
Yakovlev’s The Fate of Marxism in Russia], New Leader, 14–18 February 1994, 17.
5. Jonathan Steele, Eternal Russia: Yeltsin, Gorbachev and the Mirage of Democ-
racy (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1994), 175. In a conversation I
had with Yakovlev in 1998 in Washington, D.C., he confirmed that his visit to Prague
had made “a terrible impression” on him; he asked Soviet tank drivers why they were
there, and they had no idea.
 Chapter Eighteen

Violence of Higher Purpose

Communist systems existed in areas of diverse historical and cultural tradi-

tions inhabited by different ethnic groups. As time went by, these systems be-
came more differentiated in their policies, including the degree of repression
they engaged in. These systems ranged in size and population from Albania
to China, in longevity from the Soviet Union (seventy-four years) to Sandin-
ista Nicaragua (ten years), in economic development and level of urbaniza-
tion from Czechoslovakia and East Germany to Ethiopia and Angola. Many
of these systems could also be described—at least in their origins—as “revo-
lutionary.”1 Forrest Colburn wrote:

What is strikingly similar about the twenty-two cases of contemporary revolu-

tions . . . is not their structural origins, but the common values and shared be-
havior of their leaders. . . . [S]uccessful revolutionaries, once in control . . .
proved to have had remarkably similar ideas about how to remake their societ-
ies. . . . The shared intellectual culture of contemporary revolutions centered on
a commitment to “socialism.”2

Communist political violence ebbed and flowed, surged and diminished

over time. There are identifiable high points (as, for example, the 1930s in the
Soviet Union and the 1960s in China) and long periods of routine, less life-
threatening policies of repression. But the common ideological foundations
of communist systems shaped their policies of repression, which centered on
the crucial—theoretical as well as practical—distinction between supporters
and opponents. Igal Halfin noted, “Far from dispensing with the division of
human souls into good and evil, Communism endowed this tradition with the
status of a thoroughly scientific observation. The Communist conceptual ar-

150
 Violence of Higher Purpose 151

chitectonics was full of black-and-white oppositions: proletariat versus bour-

geoisie, revolution versus counterrevolution, progress versus reaction. . . .”3
Another widely shared philosophical premise was that “the leaders of the
Communist Party, unfettered by a ‘bourgeois’ legal code or a capricious judi-
cial system, were fully entitled to punish enemies of the state. They were em-
powered to do so because of their privileged relationship to historical laws.”4
The common heritage of the Marxist-Leninist worldview also enabled the
rulers and planners of repression to think in abstract, impersonal categories
and overlook the specific, empirical consequences of their policies for
particular groups and individuals. Simon Leys observed (in the Chinese con-
text): “[T]he Communists always believed that mankind mattered more than
man. In the eyes of the party leaders individual lives were merely a raw ma-
terial in abundant supply—cheap, disposable and easily replaceable. There-
fore . . . they came to consider that the exercise of terror was synonymous
with the exercise of power. . . .”5
The political police forces (or “state security” organs) communist states de-
veloped to perform these tasks were larger, more powerful, and more highly
differentiated than regular police forces charged with ordinary crime control
and prevention. They had similar organizational structures because the first
communist state, the Soviet Union, was the model for such forces and pro-
vided assistance in establishing them. Police and military officers from vari-
ous communist states attended Soviet training schools; Soviet advisors as-
sisted their East European counterparts in the preparation of the post–World
War II show trials. The East German state security arm (the Stasi) came to
play a prominent role in third-world communist systems. As a former high-
ranking Vietnamese communist functionary wrote, “the state of our security
forces owes a lot to the East German Stasi and the Soviet KGB. These two
organizations trained our cadres in various specialized subjects and ex-
changed experience about methods of detection and investigation. . . . [T]he
Cong [the Vietnamese political police] became just as overmanned as the
armed forces.”6
All communist penal systems made a sharp distinction between political
and nonpolitical crimes and criminals. In every one of them the latter were
treated better and were often given, informally, power over the political pris-
oners. The authorities considered political criminals a much greater threat
than ordinary criminals, who were not accused of calling into question the
system or of trying to undermine it. Sometimes those classified as political
criminals were also accused of common, nonpolitical crimes, including, in
the Soviet case, “hooliganism.” The purpose of such accusations was either
to obscure the political origins of the persecution of particular individuals
152 Chapter Eighteen

(especially if they were known in the West) or to complete their moral dis-
creditation.
In at least four communist states—the Soviet Union, Cuba, China, and Ro-
mania—those accused of political crimes were sometimes simultaneously
classified as suffering from some type of mental illness and were detained in
special psychiatric institutions. The most widely practiced and best known
was the Soviet detention of outspoken dissidents in psychiatric hospitals,7 but
in China, too, according to recent reports, there is “a secretive system of psy-
chiatric hospitals around the country that are affiliated with local public se-
curity bureaus [the Chinese political police]. . . .” In one instance, a Chinese
dissident was held for seven years in such a hospital for unfurling a protest
banner in Tiananmen Square in 1992.8 These spurious attributions of mental
illness were probably made for two reasons. One was to make the system ap-
pear more humane and less punitive; the other, more sinister and totalitarian
in its implications, was the belief that questioning and criticizing the system
itself amounted to a kind of mental disease.
It is among the remarkable paradoxes of history that communist systems
claimed the lives of vast numbers of their citizens in spite of the ideologically
derived expectation that they would be far less repressive than both their his-
torical predecessors and other contemporary noncommunist societies. This
expectation rested on the belief that communist governments would enjoy
unparalleled popular support and legitimacy, that they would be veritable em-
bodiments of consensus and harmony and therefore would have little need to
resort to force in dealing with their citizens. As Engels wrote (and as Lenin
quoted approvingly):

Society, thus far based upon class antagonism, had need of the state . . . for the
purpose of forcibly keeping the exploited classes in the condition of oppression.
. . . [But] when at last it [the state] becomes the real representative of the whole
of society, it renders itself unnecessary. As soon as there is no longer any social
class to be held in subjection . . . nothing more remains to be repressed, and a
special force, the state is no longer necessary. The first act by virtue of which
the state really constitutes itself the representative of the whole of society—the
taking possession of the means of production in the name of society this is at the
same time, its last independent act as a state. State interference in social rela-
tions becomes, in one domain after another, superfluous and then withers away
of itself. . . .9

This presumption of unfolding social harmony was at the heart of the

optimistic assessments of the future of the state as an agency of coercion;
the same presumption also served as the theoretical basis for establishing
a one-party system that would be adequate to represent all interests in a so-
 Violence of Higher Purpose 153

ciety that had banished major divisions and conflicts. In more recent times,
even in communist Ethiopia, which rapidly embraced overt terror, “the
Revolution began with a famous slogan and song: Without blood, without
blood. . . .”10
Admittedly, the use of force was not expected to disappear at once but
gradually—hence the expression, “the withering away of the state.” This an-
ticipation was predicated on the elimination of social contradictions, “antago-
nisms” associated with the conflict-ridden, exploitative class societies of the
past; in the new socialist system there was going to be little conflict requiring
massive state regulation and little discontent to be repressed (and this applied
not only to political conflicts but also to antisocial or criminal behavior,
which was expected to disappear since its root causes, exploitation and in-
equality, were to be eliminated).
The remaining opponents of the new society were expected to be a mere
handful—a notion rooted in Marx’s mistaken idea that a fundamental polar-
ization of capitalist societies was destined to take place, leading to a huge in-
crease in the size of the exploited masses and a decline in the number of the
exploiters. After the revolution the few former exploiters that remained were
to be annihilated as a class (though in practice, many of them were annihi-
lated as individuals as well) and deprived of the means to cause trouble for
the new government. In other words, the new system was supposed to rest on
such overwhelming popular support that it would require little coercion to
maintain itself. Lenin wrote:

What class must the proletariat suppress? Naturally only [!] the exploiting class,
i.e., the bourgeoisie. The toilers need a state only to suppress the resistance of
the exploiters. . . . [Whereas] the exploiting classes need political rule in order
to maintain exploitation . . . [t]he exploited classes need political rule in order
completely to abolish all exploitation, i.e., in the interests of the vast majority of
the people, and against the insignificant minority consisting of the modern
slaveowners—the landlords and capitalists.

Lenin (before the October Revolution) was also exceedingly and unrealis-
tically optimistic about the prospects for the elimination of bureaucracy (the
mainstay of coercion and organized political violence in this century): “since
the majority of the people itself suppresses its oppressors a ‘special force’ for
suppression is no longer necessary.” He also wrote that the

suppression of the minority of exploiters by the majority of wage slaves of yes-

terday is comparatively so easy, simple and natural a task that it will entail far
less bloodshed than the suppression of the risings of slaves, serfs or wage
slaves and it will cost mankind far less. . . . The exploiters are naturally unable
154 Chapter Eighteen

to suppress the people without a highly complex machine for performing this
task: but the people can suppress the exploiters even with a very simple “ma-
chine,” almost without a machine, without a special apparatus. . . .11

These were extraordinarily groundless beliefs and anticipations, and Lenin

himself rapidly abandoned them after his seizure of power. Thus, for exam-
ple, in 1922 he demanded the arrest and execution of a “very large number”
of residents of the small town of Shuya because they had opposed the
confiscation of consecrated articles from local churches. Lenin wrote, “Now
it is the time to teach these people such a lesson that for decades to come they
will not dare to even think of such opposition.”12
Indeed, it quickly became apparent that none of the predictions cited above
were correct: conditions in the Soviet Union (and in the other communist
states to emerge later) were far from conducive to the shrinking of bureau-
cracy and the restrained use of coercion by the party-state. On the contrary,
communist states created coercive agencies of unprecedented size and com-
plexity, agencies that came to be charged not merely with tracking down and
punishing those suspected of political unreliability (manifest, potential, or
imaginary), but also with overseeing vast construction projects utilizing the
labor of those arrested.
The major reason for these developments was that the popular support that
had been anticipated quickly evaporated—or, arguably, never existed; the
programs and policies of the Soviet Communist Party (and those of most
other communist states) did not elicit the wholehearted support of the major-
ity. In fact, these policies—for example the collectivization of agriculture—
stimulated the growth of opposition. At every step of the way people had to
be pushed, prodded, and coerced along the path of rapid, state-controlled
industrialization and political regimentation.
Secondly, communist governments placed a high premium on total con-
formity, which could not be achieved by persuasion but only by intimidation.
The political culture of the party was permeated by intolerance and dogma-
tism; means were unflinchingly subordinated to ends that could not be ques-
tioned.
By the early 1930s the resistance to collectivization and the purges (in the
USSR) called for a new justification of intensified repression already institu-
tionalized, on a smaller scale, under Lenin. The new theory of political con-
flict promulgated by Stalin claimed that it was the very successes of social-
ism that called forth the vicious resistance of the enemy (sometimes called the
cornered enemy). This resistance called for stern measures, even if it was only
the resistance of a determined and vicious minority. Stalin said:
 Violence of Higher Purpose 155

We must smash and throw out the rotten theory that with each forward move-
ment we make, the class struggle will die down more and more, that in propor-
tion to our successes the class enemy will become more and more domesticated.
This is not only a rotten theory but a dangerous theory, for it lulls our people
to sleep, leads them into a trap and makes it possible for the class enemy to rally
for the struggle against Soviet power.
On the contrary, the more we move forward, the more success we have, then
the more wrathful become the remnants of the beaten exploiter classes. . . . [T]he
more mischief they do the Soviet state, the more they grasp the most desperate
means of struggle as the last resort of the doomed.13

This became the official justification of the waves of terror unleashed during
the 1930s.
The isolation of the Soviet Union contributed to its besieged mentality: it
was plausible to claim, as Soviet leaders repeatedly did, that internal enemies
were conspiring with those abroad. Alleged conspiracies were integral parts
of the widely publicized show trials and essential for justifying the mass ter-
ror. Conspiracy themes were also incorporated into routine accusations
against the anonymous victims of the terror. “Who recruited you?” was a
standard question in countless interrogations. The “organs of the state secu-
rity” (Cheka, NKVD, GPU, MVD, KGB, etc.) were in effect counterconspir-
acies seeking to uncover and smash those of the enemy. In all this, there was
an element of psychological projection: “totalitarian regimes see other
regimes [and one may add, groups and individuals as well] as being as ruth-
less, duplicitous as themselves, and they act accordingly. . . .”14
It is important to note that although the repression inflicted by communist
states had not been anticipated in their theoretical blueprints, these policies
nonetheless had deep and arguably idealistic roots: they were by-products of
the urgent desire to reshape societies (and human beings) and to remove all
obstacles from, and opposition to, this endeavor. As Solzhenitsyn wrote:

To do evil a human being must first of all believe that what he is doing is good.
. . . The imagination and the spiritual strength of Shakespeare’s evildoers
stopped short at a dozen corpses. Because they had no ideology.
Ideology—that is what gives evildoing its long-sought justification and gives
the evildoer the necessary steadfastness and determination. That is the social
theory which helps to make his acts seem good instead of bad in his own and
other’s eyes. . . .
That is how the agents of the Inquisition fortified their wills: by invoking Chris-
tianity; the conquerors of foreign lands by extolling the grandeur of their Mother-
land; the colonizers by civilization, the Nazis, by race; and the Jacobins (early and
late) by equality, brotherhood and the happiness of future generations.15
156 Chapter Eighteen

More recently, Alexander Yakovlev, former member of the highest Soviet

political elite (in charge of ideology and propaganda under Gorbachev), came
to the conclusion that the roots of Soviet political violence could be discerned
in the Marxist-Leninist ideological legacy and inspiration: “Fundamentally,
the responsibility for the genocide . . . that took place in Russia and the entire
Soviet Union rests on the ideology of Bolshevism.”16 He did not believe that
the mass killings could be ascribed to a siege mentality, the backwardness of
Russia, or Stalin’s personality. He wrote:

[B]elief in the inevitability of the coming Communist world served to justify the
numerous and senseless victims of the class struggle. . . .
The idea that one should not fear creating victims in the course of serving the
cause of progress, that the revolutionary spirit of the proletarian masses must be
preserved at any cost is very characteristic of Marx. . . .
Moral criteria are simply not appropriate under the conditions of a revolu-
tionary coup d’etat; they are “revoked” by the brutality and directness of class
warfare. . . . This special “class” morality . . . leads to indulgence of any actions.
. . . Its justification comes from the special vision of the historical path of de-
velopment, its final goals for the full renaissance of humanity.

He repeatedly stressed the idealistic underpinnings of communist political vi-

olence:

Dostoevsky’s Grand Inquisitor speaks of love for humanity. But complete con-
tempt for an actual individual flows from this love. . . .
. . . [A]ll of this was committed under the guise of concern about humankind,
but with complete disregard for the specific individual. Terror is the way of re-
making human material in the name of the future. . . .
Marx finally shed the discussion about humanity and love. . . . He no longer
spoke of moral justice. . . . All this grew into the conviction that everything that
corresponded to the interests of the revolution and communism was moral. That
is the morality with which hostages were executed . . . concentration camps were
built, and entire peoples forcibly relocated. . . .
Can everything be justified in the name of progress? And is it really progress?
What gives one group of people the right to sentence to death civil society, or
popular custom centuries in the making?17

Yakovlev’s reflections reaffirm the distinctive feature of communist politi-

cal violence: its initial idealistic origin and intent—that is to say, it was vio-
lence with a higher purpose. By contrast, much historic violence, including
recent outbreaks of ethnic hostility, have little or no idealistic justification.
The Nazis, the Turks, the Hutus, the Serbs, and others (engaged respectively
in slaughtering Jews, Armenians, Tutsis, and Albanians) had no interest in
 Violence of Higher Purpose 157

“remaking human material in the name of the future”; they just wished to get
rid of those belonging to groups considered different, threatening, competing,
or inferior, although sometimes even these types of violence were colored by
the conviction that a better world would be created after the inferior or poi-
sonous group was removed. Most intergroup (ethnic) violence is based on a
visceral, taken-for-granted group hostility aggravated by competition for im-
portant and scarce resources, usually land. In Rwanda, Bosnia, Kosovo, the
Sudan, Cyprus, Sri Lanka, and Israel (and Palestine), groups have sought
greater control over their lives while other groups have sought to prevent
them from achieving this goal. Schemes for improving human nature, or a de-
sire for major social transformation and utopian social arrangements, had
played a negligible part in these conflicts and massacres.
Communist political violence flowed from a utopian vision of the future,
from the great goals pursued, and from the intolerance the service of these
ideals inspired, as well as from an intense attachment to power. The means
had to be subordinated to historically unparalleled ends that required
extraordinary measures. In a nutshell, this is the part played by ideology or
belief in the repression communist states introduced.
The future orientation of the revolutionaries and their successors helped to
resolve or reduce the tension between ends and means: the Bolsheviks did not
“consider the chance of attaining certain goals to be lessened by the . . . pro-
tracted and large-scale use of means which [were] . . . at extreme variance to
them. . . .”18 The accomplishments unfolding in the future were going to out-
weigh and cleanse the questionable means employed in their pursuit—this
was the unshakeable conviction of generations of communist leaders and
revolutionaries in the Soviet Union and other communist states. The commit-
ted revolutionary steeled himself in the face of the pain and suffering his poli-
cies caused. Lenin said that “there are no . . . serious battles without field hos-
pitals near the battlefields. It is altogether unforgivable to permit oneself to be
frightened or unnerved by field hospital scenes. If you are afraid of the
wolves, don’t go into the forest.”19 This was an attitude Edward Ochab, a Pol-
ish functionary, shared: “I became . . . a professional revolutionary. I read
Lenin’s What Is To Be Done . . . where Lenin maintains that the socialist
revolution needs ‘professional revolutionary’ cadres . . . who would be pre-
pared to spend months crawling along sewers and would be in charge . . . of
organizing the masses. That was when I said to myself that’s me.”20
Self-discipline, mastery of personal feelings, and commitment to the cause
made it possible to transcend reservations or revulsion about the means used.
Again, as Leites put it, “The Bolshevik must eschew free-floating empathy. . . .
Bolshevism shares the feeling expressed by a character in Dostoevsky’s A
Raw Youth: ‘It doesn’t matter if one has to pass through filth to get there as
158 Chapter Eighteen

long as the goal is magnificent. It will all be washed off, it will all be
smoothed away afterward.’”21
Leites also wrote that “Bolshevik doctrine rejects the virtue of empathy
with and pity for all human beings. . . . The awareness of distress of others
would reduce one’s capacity to perform those acts which would ultimately
abolish it.”22 This might be called the surgeon’s view of pain; he must remain
indifferent to the bodily sensations of the patient in order to heal him. Thus,
in the political struggle, “instead of feeling guilty about the sufferings which
one imposes on others . . . one attempts to feel self-righteous about directly
and actively imposing suffering on others—for the sake of the future aboli-
tion of suffering.”23
Hence the political violence of communist systems was instrumental rather
than expressive or passionate, not the kind that would satisfy some personal
instinct or impulse, although occasionally and illicitly it might have done
so.24
The use of violent means was also made easier by perceiving them as both
defensive and revolutionary. Trotsky wrote, “The man who repudiates terror-
ism in principle—i.e., repudiates measures of suppression and intimidation
toward determined and armed counter-revolution, must reject all idea of po-
litical supremacy of the working class and its revolutionary dictatorship. The
man who repudiates the dictatorship of the proletariat repudiates the Social-
ist revolution. . . .”
Earlier, Trotsky pointed out that the dictatorship of the proletariat is a
necessity because no agreement is possible with the bourgeoisie: “only force
can be the deciding factor.”25
Leites grasped with great clarity the mentality required by impersonal, de-
liberate, ideologically motivated mass murder, the willingness to “dirty one’s
hands.” Still, there remained, in all probability, a lingering awareness of the
dissonance between ends and means.26 This awareness helps to explain the
secretiveness surrounding much of the political violence in most communist
systems, and probably the Nazi secretiveness as well.
The uninhibited use of political violence and coercion also followed from
the paternalism of professional revolutionaries (subsequently transformed
into functionaries) who believed that they were acting on behalf of, and in the
interest of, the masses, while in fact they were sharply separated from them.
The deep class cleavages in Russia (and in other similarly or even more back-
ward communist countries) bolstered this elitism.
Even Stalin’s extraordinary power-hunger and vindictiveness toward his
real or imagined enemies is in part explained by his conviction that he was a
chosen instrument of history, the executor of great and lofty goals bequeathed
by both Marxist-Leninist theory and Russian history. Similar beliefs doubt-
 Violence of Higher Purpose 159

less also motivated Mao, Castro, Kim Il Sung, Ho Chi Minh, and other com-
munist leaders. Such convictions did not inspire restraint or attention to proper
procedure.
Despite the controversies that have surrounded it since the late 1960s, it is
the theory of totalitarianism that best explains the principal characteristics of
communist political violence and coercion. The latter were inseparable from
the unconstrained exercise of power, from the urge to dissolve distinctions be-
tween the public and private realms (by completely subordinating the latter to
the former), and from the attempted politicization of every aspect of life. Be-
cause political meaning was attached to virtually everything the citizens did,
political crime and deviance became defined very broadly, leading to the mis-
treatment of vast numbers of people, most of whom had not the slightest in-
terest in politics and were not inclined to question let alone endanger the
power of the party-state.
Communist leaders were (at least in the beginning) inspired by ideas
promising secular redemption; they possessed enormous concentrated power
unchecked by any institutional arrangement, countervailing social force, or
tradition.27 At the same time, in all probability the personalities of the
supreme leaders also played a part in the forms political violence took.
Stalin, Mao,28 Castro, Mengistu (of Ethiopia),29 and Mathias Rakosi (of Hun-
gary) were exceptionally ruthless, deceitful, and vindictive individuals who
attached little value to individual human lives. They each had the proven ca-
pacity to turn on or betray their closest collaborators, friends (if any), or
comrades-in-arms if they were suspected of the slightest disagreement or di-
minished loyalty.
No communist system was free of repression, but the severity of repression
fluctuated over time (North Korea may be an exception, since its repressive
policies seem to have changed little over the years). The routine reliance on
political violence and coercion was at once a defining characteristic of com-
munist systems and a telling indicator of the failure of their policies and their
lack of (or limited) legitimacy. Communist systems’ habitual reliance on re-
pressive policies may also be seen as the institutionalization of their leaders’
intolerance.
The decline and fall of communist states coincided with declining repres-
sion, growing corruption, and the underlying weakening of the political will
of their ruling elites.30 Those still in power—in China, Cuba, North Korea,
and Vietnam—did not hesitate to use force to crush and stifle dissent or op-
position and have remained highly repressive. Nonrepressive, tolerant com-
munist systems “with a human face” have never came into existence. Hun-
gary in the late Kadar years did move in such a direction but it eventually fell
apart.
160 Chapter Eighteen

In the final analysis, the repressive character of communist states can be

explained by a combination of universal and historically specific factors. The
first includes the longstanding and entrenched human potential and disposi-
tion to dehumanize, demonize, and mistreat others (those defined as out-
siders, strangers, and enemies) without compunction and for a wide variety of
reasons; most commonly such hatreds and scapegoating are associated with
competition and conflict for scarce resources (not only material). Social, eth-
nic, and religious differences between groups further aggravate such disposi-
tions.
Preconditions for the type of massive violence and coercion must also in-
clude the availability of certain minimal technological and administrative
means for carrying out large-scale repression, lethal or nonlethal. Victims
must be transported (on trains, trucks, or boats) to particular locations (for in-
carceration or execution); firearms are required for the rapid and efficient
killing of large numbers (absent gas chambers); barbed wire is an essential in-
gredient for the creation of concentration camps and for rapidly confining
large numbers of people.
The second set of factors consists of more specific historical, and ideologi-
cal elements. Most communist states had no democratic, liberal, or individu-
alistic political culture or traditions; reflexive submission to authority was
more readily forthcoming in these societies. Most of these countries were also
economically underdeveloped, inegalitarian, and scarcity-ridden.
Arguably, ideology—that is to say, certain structured and militant beliefs—
was most important in channeling frustrations and resentments into politically
defined and legitimated violence and aggression and such beliefs also led to
the mistreatment of designated groups in the purported service of bringing
about a radical break with past deprivations and injustices—although these
beliefs were held only by small elite groups.
Communist systems were relentlessly ends-oriented. These ends provided
the assurance and legitimation needed to coerce, or outright eliminate, all
those who stood in the way of the great experiment in human liberation, the
creation of a better world. In each of these societies small but determined mi-
norities (mostly politicized intellectuals or quasi-intellectuals) found new
meaning in the attempt to radically transform societies and human beings;
politics became, at least initially, a quasireligious quest that stimulated ruth-
lessness and intolerance. As Hilton Kramer, among others, has pointed out:
“Socialism had indeed supplanted religion as the source of ‘political ideal-
ism,’ and from that fateful shift there have flowed many of the horrors of the
modern age.”31 This idealism or utopianism did not endure, but the practices
and institutions created in its pursuit remained in place decades after revolu-
 Violence of Higher Purpose 161

tionary fervor had gradually given way to the love of power and privilege
among the ruling elites.
The decline and fall of communist systems shows that the love of power
and privilege bereft of ideological and moral certainties is insufficient for
keeping such systems going, especially when they are also incapable of meet-
ing the less than utopian needs of their people. As Forrest Colburn has writ-
ten, “Politically intoxicated . . . revolutionaries have shoved their poor soci-
eties into an unsustainable recasting of state and economy that has left the
majority of people disoriented, politically cynical, and materially more im-
poverished. . . . The brutal confrontation of dreams with intractable political
and . . . economic realities . . . explains the dispiriting outcomes of contem-
porary revolutions.”32
In the final analysis the inhumanities here discussed were, for the most
part, unintended byproducts of the desire to radically and rapidly change the
human condition through the inherently limited and crude means at the dis-
posal of human beings.

NOTES

1. The nonrevolutionary communist regimes were those established in Bulgaria,

Czechoslovakia, East Germany, Hungary, Poland, and Romania as a result of the ar-
rival and prolonged stay of Soviet troops during and after World War II in these coun-
tries.
2. Forrest D. Colburn, The Vogue of Revolution in Poor Countries (Princeton, N.J.:
Princeton University Press, 1994), 13–14. Milovan Djilas also believed that in com-
munist states “everything, including the economy [was] subordinate to ideological
power” (see his Fall of the New Class: A History of Communism’s Self-Destruction
[New York: Knopf, 1998], 312).
3. Igal Halfin, Terror in My Soul: Communist Autobiographies on Trial (Cam-
bridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2003), 14.
4. David Chandler, Voices from S-21: Terror and History in Pol Pot’s Secret Prison
(Berkley, Calif.: 1999), 150.
5. Simon Leys, “After the Massacres,” New York Review of Books, October 12,
1989, 17.
6. Bui Tin, Following Ho Chi Minh (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1995),
115.
7. Peter Reddaway, Psychiatric Terror: How Soviet Psychiatry Is Used to Suppress
Dissent (New York: Basic Books, 1977); Petro G. Grigorienko was subjected to this
treatment as recalled in his Memoirs (New York, 1982); see also Alexander Yakovlev,
Century of Violence in Soviet Russia (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press,
2002), 147–48.
162 Chapter Eighteen

8. Erik Eckholm, “A China Dissident’s Ordeal: Back to the Mental Hospital,”

New York Times, November 30, 1999. The use of psychiatric wards in China for de-
taining political prisoners is also described by Liu Binyan in A Higher Kind of Loy-
alty (New York: Pantheon, 1990), 225–27. Concerning similar policies in Cuba, see
Charles J. Brown and Armando M. Lago, The Politics of Psychiatry in Revolutionary
Cuba (New Brunswick, N.J., 1991). In Romania dissidents were sent to psychiatric
institutions for periods ranging from a few months to several years. (See Dennis Dele-
tant, Ceausescu and the Securitate: Coercion and Dissent in Romania, 1965–1989
[New Armonk, N.Y.: M.E. Sharpe, 1995], 93–101.)
9. Quoted in Lenin, State and Revolution (Moscow: Foreign Languages Publish-
ing House, n.d.), 25–27.
10. Davit Wolde Giorgis, Red Tears (Trenton, N.J., 1989), 21.
11. Lenin, State and Revolution, 39, 68, 144–45.
12. Quoted in Mikhail Heller, Cogs in the Wheel: The Formation of Soviet Man
(New York: Knopf, 1988), 36. Lenin’s inclination to political violence is also docu-
mented in Richard Pipes, ed., The Unknown Lenin (New Haven, Conn.: Yale Univer-
sity Press, 1996).
13. Quoted in Robert V. Daniels, A Documentary History of Communism (New
York: Random House, 1960), 57. Stalin made the statement in 1937 in a speech to the
Central Committee of the Party.
14. Ted Galen Carpenter, “Democracy and War,” The Independent Review (Winter
1998): 436. Edward Shils also noted that “The phantasy of conspiracy requires the re-
ality of counterconspiracy so that in the end the world becomes an arena in which two
conspiracies operate, the wicked conspiracies of the enemies and the legitimate and
morally necessary conspiracy of Bolshevism” (The Torment of Secrecy [Carbondale:
Southern Illinois University Press, 1974], 30).
15. Alexander Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago, vol. 1 (New York: Harper &
Row, 1973), 173–74.
16. Yakovlev, Century of Violence, 15.
17. Alexander Yakovlev, The Fate of Marxism in Russia (New Haven, Conn.: Yale
University Press, 1993), 7, 11,17, 29, 38, 39, 56–57.
18. Nathan Leites, A Study of Bolshevism (Glencoe, Ill.: Free Press, 1953), 105.
19. Leites, A Study of Bolshevism, 105.
20. Quoted in Teresa Toranska, “Them”: Stalin’s Polish Puppets (New York:
Harper & Row, 1987), 88.
21. Quoted in Leites, A Study in Bolshevism, 208, 106.
22. Leites, A Study in Bolshevism, 348.
23. Leites, A Study in Bolshevism, 352.
24. Presumably such impulsive, sadistic enjoyment of violence motivated the
Japanese soldiers in Nanking as well as the participants in pogroms, lynchings, and in
other spontaneous outbursts of ethnic violence.
25. Leon Trotsky, Terrorism and Communism: A Reply to Karl Kautsky (Ann Ar-
bor: University of Michigan Press, 1960), 20, 23.
26. Heinrich Himmler, for one, quite candidly addressed the problem of ends and
means with respect to the final solution of “the Jewish question” in a speech to SS of-
 Violence of Higher Purpose 163

ficers in which he acknowledged that it was unpleasant to contemplate the mounds of

corpses and required strong character, as he saw it. See Joachim C. Fest, The Face of
the Third Reich (New York: Patheon, 1970).
27. Zbigniew Brzezinski, “Patterns of Autocracy,” in The Transformation of Rus-
sian Society, ed. Cyril Black (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1960).
28. On these aspects of Mao’s personality, see Li Zhisui, The Private Life of Chair-
man Mao (New York: Random House, 1994).
29. “Mengistu once confided to me that he enjoyed chairing meetings in this hall
. . . because he was able to sit right above the basement where all former aristocrats
whom he despised were imprisoned” (Giorgis, Red Tears, 126). This was by no means
the only reflection of Mengistu’s unappealing personality. For other examples of his
megalomania and ruthlessness see Giorgis, Red Tears, 18–21, 33–34, 332, 352.
30. This is the central argument of Paul Hollander, Political Will and Personal Be-
lief (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1999).
31. Quoted in Patrick A. Swan, ed., Alger Hiss, Whittaker Chambers and the
Schism in the American Soul (Wilmington, Del.: ISI Books, 2003), 314.
32. Colburn, The Vogue of Revolution, 77.
 Chapter Nineteen

The North Korean Gulag

North Korea is the only surviving communist regime that has managed to
preserve intact the worst, most oppressive characteristics of such systems.
These include isolation, a grotesque personality cult of the leaders (father
and now son), breathtaking mendaciousness, an exceptional degree of mil-
itarization, and the catastrophic economic policies that have led to famine
and the death of an estimated 2 million people. It has also kept the Gulag
system going.
The Aquariums of Pyongyang: Ten Years in a North Korean Gulag by Kang
Chol-hwan and Pierre Rigoulot is, to the best of my knowledge, the first and
only account in English by a survivor of the North Korean Gulag and by ex-
tension the North Korean police state. The author was forced into a camp with
his family in 1977, at age nine, and was released ten years later. (He escaped
from the country through China in 1992.) This is an extraordinarily informa-
tive, indeed revelatory, volume; it is also well written and moving.
It is especially interesting to learn something about this country from one
of its natives at a time when the United States is trying to sort out its rela-
tionship with North Korea and searching for a way to deprive it of nuclear
weapons. Yet, as far as I can tell, this first-rate book has not been reviewed in
any major publication.
Thus our ignorance of North Korea persists. Occasional high-level delega-
tions visit the country, but they are carefully prevented from learning any-
thing other than what the officials wish them to learn. The book makes it clear
that North Koreans are intimidated to a degree that most Americans cannot
conceive of. It also helped me to understand—though not entirely—how
President Carter came to the conclusion in 1994 that the North Korean peo-
ple “revered” their leader—then Kim Il Sung—and that Pyongyang was “full

164
 The North Korean Gulag 165

of pep” with shops reminding him of Wal-Mart! While Western admirers of

North Korea are not as numerous as those of Stalin’s Russia or Mao’s China
used to be, there are a handful, such as Bruce Cumings, a professor at the Uni-
versity of Chicago, who has for some time taken it upon himself to be an
apologist of this murderous regime.
The author of this book was born in North Korea to a prosperous, pro-
communist North Korean family that had lived in Japan until the division of
the North and South. They made the unfortunate decision to return to partic-
ipate in the socialist transformation. (Many such families, wooed by the
regime, returned from Japan and were initially well-treated and provided with
privileged living conditions.) The author’s grandfather handed over his “im-
mense fortune” to the authorities, but eventually got in trouble with the
regime and disappeared in 1977—he simply did not come home one day.
They learned later that he was “picked up work and taken away to a hard-
labor camp without even the chance to pack a bag.”
A few weeks later the rest of the family was taken from their comfortable
apartment in Pyongyang to Yodok, one of the many camps in the remote ar-
eas of the country. The camp was divided into “villages,” each for a “specific
category of detainees”—Mr. Kang’s family was interned in the village for
those repatriated from Japan—who were forbidden any contact with prison-
ers from other villages.
The detainees “had missing teeth, their hair was caked . . . and overgrown,
and they were filthy . . . more striking than their physical appearance was the
aura of weakness that oozed from their every pore . . . and a pervasive sense
of desperation.” During the orientation session, the new arrivals were told by
an official that “you people don’t deserve to live, but the Party and our Great
Leader have given you a chance to redeem yourself. . . . We will discuss all
this further at our next meeting for criticism and self-criticism.”
In the camp hunger was endemic, working conditions harsh, and “during
our years of detention, rags were often the only clothing we had. . . . After a
few months . . . the appearance of our rags bothered us no more. . . . The only
thing that mattered was keeping warm.” Special punishments were meted out,
including the “sweatbox” for offenses such as “stealing three ears of corn, re-
sponding to a guard’s command with insufficient zeal, missing a role call.”
Prisoners could be put in it for weeks or months, and most of them did not
survive.
In the sweatbox, a prisoner is forced to crouch on his knees in “a kind of
shack . . . devoid of any openings . . . shrouded in total darkness . . . given so
little to eat that he will devour anything that comes within arms’ reach . . .
most often a wayward cockroach or centipede. . . . The secret of survival was
to eat every insect. . . . Hardly anyone exited the sweatbox on his own two
166 Chapter Nineteen

feet. If the prisoner had to relieve himself he raised his left hand; if he was
sick . . . his right. No other gestures were allowed.”
The author’s work assignments included burials, which conferred two ad-
vantages: a little extra food and, more importantly, access to the clothing of
the dead. Malnutrition was such that rats were regularly eaten: “If I were to
improve my nutritional intake and realize my dream of becoming the family’s
provider of meat, the better option was rat [compared to the risk of stealing
rabbits]. One of my coworkers—a camp veteran—was the first to introduce
me to the dish. . . . Despite my revulsion, I could not resist . . . because the
rat was truly delicious. Though the rodents were everywhere, trapping them
was difficult.” After figuring out how to reuse the traps he increased his catch
and was able “to supplement the family’s small food ration.”
Public executions were another regular feature of camp life. Attendance
was obligatory. While executions were usually by firing squad, on one occa-
sion, two members of an elite military unit were hung for trying to escape
from the country. “Once both men were finally dead, the two or three thou-
sand prisoners in attendance were instructed to pick up a stone and hurl it at
the corpses while yelling: ‘Down with the traitors of the people!’”
After his release, Mr. Kang saw that life as a “free” citizen of North Korea
was appalling. Corruption was widespread, a direct response to the endemic
scarcities and deprivations. His escape from the country was a long and com-
plicated undertaking. China initially impressed him as a wonderfully free and
prosperous country, given his experiences in North Korea—though getting
from China to South Korea was almost as difficult as escaping from the
North.
This book, like all others that deal with similar experiences in comparable
settings, compelled me to ponder how such monstrous systems come about
and persist and what precisely motivates the human beings in control of them
at the highest level. Theories of totalitarianism help to answer these ques-
tions—but far from completely. Regrettably, the general conclusion is that ex-
ceptionally repressive political systems have a unique capacity to unlock and
put to their use the worst aspects of human nature.
North Korea remains the classic embodiment of totalitarianism, perhaps
the only one left in the world today. It has withstood isolation, famine, the
collapse of Soviet communism, and liberalization in the rest of the commu-
nist world. It would be a monumental mistake if Western concessions born
out of fear of its nuclear weapons were to prolong the existence of this re-
pugnant and inhumane regime.
 Chapter Twenty

Admiring North Korea

Anyone who knows the history of the colossal and surrealistic misperceptions
of communist regimes on the part of many Western intellectuals will find this
volume [Bruce Cumings’s North Korea: Another Country] at once familiar
and distinctive. It is appearing against the background of the reasonable ex-
pectation that something might have been learned from the long history of
such misperceptions and their resourceful encouragement by the officials of
such regimes. Most of these states no longer exist, and from their ashes
emerged further evidence confirming their mendacity and disproving the
propaganda they steadfastly disseminated for both domestic and foreign con-
sumption.
Bruce Cumings, a professor at the University of Chicago, strangely enough,
has chosen North Korea—the only surviving communist state to preserve in-
tact the worst, most oppressive characteristics of such systems—as the recipi-
ent of his affections and the object of his efforts at political rehabilitation.
These sentiments are inspired in part by his respect for the Korean people, cul-
ture, and tradition and by his failure to distinguish sufficiently such traditions
from the realities of the murderous regime in the North. Evidently, Cumings
belongs to the long line of Western academic intellectuals who are fully per-
suaded that the United States bears responsibility for much that is wrong with
the world, including the existence of political systems and movements that are
its most dedicated adversaries. Not only does he believe that the United States
is largely responsible for the (in his opinion, defensive) brutality and pugnac-
ity of North Korea, he is equally eager to acquaint the reader with the alleged
achievements of this regime. These include “compassionate child care” and
superior health and education benefits (the kind all communist regimes rou-
tinely have claimed among their accomplishments). He approvingly quotes a

167
168 Chapter Twenty

writer who averred that prior to the recent economic disasters, typical North
Koreans lived “an incredibly simple and hardworking life but also [had] a se-
cure and happy existence, and the comradeship between these highly collec-
tivized people [was] moving to behold.”
The author is eager to dispel any impression of North Korean aggression
against the South (which culminated in its 1950 invasion); he even uses the
disingenuous argument that the conflict was a civil war and that the 38th par-
allel is “not an international boundary.” He dwells on the sufferings the
United States inflicted during that war, and thus creates a framework for his
apologetic reinterpretation of the paranoid garrison state North Korea has be-
come. His emphasis on the inhumanities of U.S. air warfare is reminiscent of
the argument that the U.S. bombing of Cambodia somehow prompted the
massacres of Pol Pot. Thus a very familiar theme pervades the narrative: “Be-
leaguered” North Korea (like other communist systems, whose conduct was
not entirely praiseworthy) did some bad things, but it was due to feeling and
being threatened and victimized by the United States.
In a disclaimer early on, we are assured that the author has no sympathy for
the North; there are indeed critical statements scattered throughout the book,
including the admission that the regime does not promote human freedom
(but this admission is hastily qualified with “not from any liberal’s stand-
point”). Cumings has no love for the grotesque personality cult of the lead-
ers, but he cannot resist remarking about “U.S. support for dictators who
make Kim Jong Il look enlightened”; nor does he endorse the garrison state
(he notes that conscripts have to serve ten years). But he laments the bad press
North Korea gets. He has little doubt that the misconceptions about this much
maligned political system are rooted in the ignorance of Americans (blended
with racism) and nurtured by the sensationalistic mass media and unscrupu-
lous politicians.
The reader’s doubts about the depth and genuineness of Cumings’s criti-
cisms of the regime are further stimulated by the fact that he was considered
sympathetic or dependable enough by the North Korean authorities to be al-
lowed (or invited?) to make a television documentary. Such doubts deepen
when one reads his many contemptuous references to the defectors from the
North and their “tales” (which reminded me of Noam Chomsky’s dismissive
references to the “tales” of Cambodian refugees about the atrocities they wit-
nessed).
In a triumph of selective perception, he manages to interpret the most
damning indictment of the North Korean Gulag available—The Aquariums of
Pyongyang, by Kang Chol-Hwan and Pierre Rigoulot—as providing support
for his views of the system. As he sees it, the book is “interesting and believ-
able” because it is not the “ghastly tale of totalitarian repression that its orig-
 Admiring North Korea 169

inal publishers . . . meant it to be.” But it is precisely and resoundingly just

that, as any reader without a soft spot for North Korean tyranny would read-
ily discover. Cumings writes that “conditions were primitive and beatings
were frequent [in the camp described in that book] but the inmates also were
able to improvise much of their upkeep on their own . . . small animals could
surreptitiously be caught and cooked.” He delicately refrains from mention-
ing that these small animals were mostly rats, and a regular part of the narra-
tor’s diet. That book makes abundantly clear that hunger and malnutrition
were endemic; inmates stealing food or trying to escape were executed. Cum-
ings also fails to mention these public executions the inmates were obliged to
attend, stressing instead that families were commendably kept together and
that “death from starvation was rare.” In any event, reaching for moral equiv-
alence, he suggests that these deprivations ought to be put in proper perspec-
tive by our “longstanding, never-ending gulag full of black men in our pris-
ons”—which should disqualify us from “pointing a finger.”
As one reads on, it becomes an increasingly compelling question how it is
possible for a professor of history at a great institution of learning—the Uni-
versity of Chicago—to have any sympathy for such a regime. One explana-
tion may be that, like other similarly disposed visitors to communist coun-
tries, Cumings was favorably impressed by the remnants of a traditional
social order reflected in the conduct and interaction of ordinary people, their
respectful manner, and sense of community. On his conducted tours he re-
joiced in the prevailing orderliness and cleanliness—the little old ladies
sweeping the streets (presumably without any official encouragement!)—and
contrasted these appealing conditions with their absence in South Korea and
other noncommunist third-world countries. Among the revealing and novel
information he provides is that “every citizen who travels, checks into a ho-
tel, or dines at a public restaurant is required to carry a sanitation pass, ver-
ifying that he or she has been to a public bathhouse within the past week.”
Cumings is aware of the flaws of North Korea, but they have no percepti-
ble emotional impact on him. He generally withholds moral judgment, owing
to his zeal to rehabilitate the regime and to his reflexive indulgence in moral
equivalence (the United States and South Korea are no better).
Sections of the book offer some useful information about the cultural-
historical background and recent economic difficulties of North Korea and
about the personal lives and character of its two leaders (dead and living). It
is, however, of far greater interest as a document illustrating the stunning per-
sistence of the political attitudes of academic intellectuals durably estranged
from their own society and predisposed to find virtue in others opposed to it,
and in the surviving idealized social arrangements of the past.
 Chapter Twenty-one

The Fiftieth Anniversary of the

Hungarian Revolution

My recollections of the Hungarian Revolution of 1956 and the subsequent il-

licit nocturnal border crossing into Austria provide indelible illustrations of
the connections between the personal and the political. While the immediate
consequences of the Revolution were, for the most part, tragic, I was among
its beneficiaries. Fifty years later I remain convinced that leaving Hungary
was a wise decision and one that, at one stroke, quite dramatically changed
my life. Rarely does a walk of a few hours in the countryside have such far-
reaching consequences. It was a gamble, as I could have been arrested before
reaching the border or at the border. Life in the West, in unfamiliar surround-
ings without family and friends, could have turned out to be grim. I left with
nothing but the clothes on my back, including a crumbling, American-made
leather jacket I have preserved to this day. The jacket hangs in a closet and I
wear it on November 19 to impress my friends who will join me in a small
celebration of my border-crossing anniversary.
Leaving Hungary did not assure unalloyed contentment and the elimination
of all problems of life. But by doing so the political realm ceased to dominate
and deform the personal one. I gained access to higher education, a profes-
sional life, and a modicum of intellectual creativity. More important—and
perhaps the hardest to convey to those who had no opportunity to make such
comparisons—I exchanged life in a repressed and regimented society for one
in a free world, which I do not put into quotation marks.
The border crossing was the culmination of longings that I used to believe
would never be consummated. Conditions for getting out were not auspicious
between 1948, when the communist regime was established, and 1956. The
Iron Curtain (of which the Berlin Wall was the best-known and most con-
spicuous part) was not a figure of speech.

170
 The Fiftieth Anniversary of the Hungarian Revolution 171

Political and personal elements were intertwined in my motivation to leave

Hungary. There was, to begin with, a growing distaste for the intrusive and
mendacious political system that even a high school student was bound to ex-
perience firsthand (for instance, we were required in school to sign petitions
demanding the strictest punishment for the defendants in the Hungarian Purge
Trials). There was no way to ignore or avoid the singularly repetitive, numb-
ing, and self-righteous political propaganda that engulfed all of us, in and out-
side school.
I also recall, among the reasons for my questioning the system, the specta-
cle of party functionaries and government officials riding around in large,
luxurious, chauffeur-driven American (!) cars while most people suffered a
wide range of shortages and the official propaganda claimed that an egalitar-
ian society was being built. Even in my mid-teens I could discern the yawn-
ing gulf between official pronouncements and practices, proclaimed ideals
and social realities. That is to say, I rejected the regime in the first place be-
cause of its addiction to fraudulent propaganda.
I also believe that the vast majority of Hungarians (and people in other
communist countries) came to reject the system above all because of their ex-
perience of the insistent, routine misrepresentations of reality they could
check against their daily experiences. To be sure, objective realities—the de-
clining standard of living, the loss of free expression, the abuses of power, re-
strictions of religious practices, and so on—also mattered a great deal. But
these grievances were more strongly felt since the authorities endlessly
claimed that we lived in growing harmony and abundance in the most en-
lightened and just social system and under the benevolent guidance of wise
and beloved leaders.
The second set of experiences relevant to my departure were more per-
sonal. One night in June 1951 a police truck arrived at the apartment building
where we lived to collect our family, which had officially been classified as
“politically unreliable” or “class enemies.” We were taken under police guard
to a freight train terminal where similarly designated people were assembled
for shipment to villages in Eastern Hungary defined as “forced dwelling
places” that we were not permitted to leave. Upon arrival at the railway sta-
tion of the designated village, we were met by a small crowd assembled by
the local party organizers who shouted denunciations at the newly arrived en-
emies of the socialist state.
Our political classification resulted from my maternal grandfather’s prewar
social status: he used to be a well-to-do, self-made businessman. His proper-
ties had been confiscated by the communist authorities years before the exile.
He lived with my parents and myself, hence we were considered one family,
all members of which were hopelessly contaminated by his capitalist past.
172 Chapter Twenty-one

About 50,000 people similarly classified were exiled from Budapest in

1951 and dumped into villages to live under crowded and primitive conditions.
This measure was officially explained as a stage in the class struggle and one
that also alleviated the housing shortage in the capital.
The exile closely followed my matriculation from high school and it meant
that I could not attend university, to which I had been admitted. After two
years in the village I was conscripted into the army, but having been a politi-
cally unreliable element, I was placed into a so-called construction battalion.
Instead of getting military training, we performed manual labor at various
construction sites. I worked at the construction of military barracks, the Hun-
garian Nuclear Research Institute, and a state farm. Following discharge from
the military I sought employment as a laborer in construction, since such a job
entitled one to temporary permission to live in Budapest.
Between October 23, 1956, and the massive Soviet offensive that began on
November 4, I gave little thought to getting out of the country. I was on the
streets most of the time, observing events and participating in demonstrations,
distracted from plotting my escape. A chance meeting with a truck driver in
mid-November led to my joining a group of strangers driven by another
driver to a small town by the Austrian border. There were about fifteen of us,
including children and a baby. At night the truck deposited us near the border
and we were shown by the locals the way to Austria. We began our walk
through the open fields. After about an hour we saw in the moonlight two fig-
ures standing by a ditch who turned out to be Hungarian border guards. We
approached. Silence ensued. At last one of the guards remarked, “Why are
you going in such a big group?” This sounded like a friendly question and
was followed by the guards pointing us in the right direction.
After arriving in Vienna, I was among three hundred Hungarian students
the British universities undertook to help to continue or commence their stud-
ies. I arrived in England on November 30, and in January began my studies
at the London School of Economics. (I knew some English and quickly
picked up more.)
I chose to study sociology because it seemed interesting. I had never
heard of such a field before. After graduating in the summer of 1959, I came
to America for graduate studies that led to a Ph.D. from Princeton in 1963.
A nontenured teaching job at Harvard and more than three decades at the
University of Massachusetts at Amherst followed. In 2000 I retired from
teaching, but not from writing. I have produced twelve books over the
years. My personal life in America had little to do with matters political.
But the past found expression in my books, many of which, in one way or
another, have some connection with the experience of having lived in a
communist society.
 The Fiftieth Anniversary of the Hungarian Revolution 173

I spent the first twenty-four years of my life in Hungary, close to three in

England, and forty-seven years in the United States. I remain fluent in Hun-
garian and pass for one when I visit, which I do every year since the collapse
of the communist system. I still have relatives and friends in Hungary, and I
like Hungarian food. I don’t have a love-hate relationship with Hungary or
Hungarians. I used to think of myself as a so-called rootless cosmopolitan—
a term of disapproval Andrei Zhdanov, the Soviet cultural commissar under
Stalin, coined. This is no longer quite true. With the passage of time, I sank
roots in western Massachusetts. I have found New England very much to my
liking, being an outdoorsman and nature lover. I don’t even mind the occa-
sional bears visiting our backyard. After the excitements of growing up in
Hungary, surviving both Nazism and communism, and witnessing the Revo-
lution, I appreciate a settled and secure academic life. I have an American
wife, a daughter, a stepdaughter, a dog and a cat, and two kayaks. I have pub-
lished books critical of anti-Americanism, but that does not mean that I am
uncritical of everything in this society, far from it.
I learned that political conditions inevitably, and often painfully, shape per-
sonal lives. In the course of my reluctant participation in the building of Soviet-
style socialism in Hungary, I met many peasants and workers, supposed ben-
eficiaries of the system, who were its most embittered victims and adversaries.
It became clear to me that repressive political systems, even if they proclaim
impressive idealistic aspirations, will cease to be idealized (as they often are
from a distance) once the human costs of their practices are experienced or
understood. Warren Beatty would not have directed Reds if he had known
how far apart the ideals and realities of Soviet communism were from one an-
other. Nor would he have produced the movie if he had known real people
who had lived under such a system, or if he had given thought to the question
of why the ideals he admired lent themselves so readily to distortion and mis-
application.
My life in the West deepened the conviction that personal freedom has a re-
ality and meaning that can be truly appreciated only by those who have lived
under circumstances defined by its absence.
 Chapter Twenty-two

Crossing the Moral Threshold:

The Rejection of Communist
Systems in Eastern Europe

There is no shortage of explanations—political, economic, or cultural—of

why communist systems were unpopular in Eastern Europe and why upris-
ings erupted as they had in 1953 (East Germany), 1956 (Hungary and
Poland), and 1968 (Czechoslovakia). Of these uprisings, the Hungarian was
the most significant, its demands the most far-reaching, its popular support
the most widespread, and its human toll the greatest.
There were numerous well-founded grievances against communist regimes
in Eastern Europe: the standard of living declined due to rapid, forced indus-
trialization, the collectivization of agriculture, mismanagement, and decline of
work ethic; nationalistic sentiments were deeply offended by the slavish imi-
tation of everything Soviet; the populations were terrorized by the political po-
lice modeled on the KGB; grotesque, compulsory cults of Stalin and his local
emissaries flourished; cultural life was homogenized and politicized; political
indoctrination became part of formal education and daily life; religious insti-
tutions were crushed and religious practices discouraged; meaningless but
time-consuming political participation was demanded and extracted from the
population, such as voting in one-party elections and attending demonstrations
and endless meetings; the freedom of movement was severely curtailed (the
Iron Curtain was not a figure of speech); last, but not least, political propa-
ganda was as ubiquitous, pervasive, and irksome as commercial advertising in
capitalist countries (but far more monolithic), and unlike advertising its propo-
sitions and commands could not be questioned or ridiculed.
Not all these grievances were equally strongly felt at different points in
time and in the different countries of Eastern Europe, but there was a conti-
nuity and convergence among them that led to the uprisings noted above and
the final extinction of communist rule in Eastern Europe at the end of the

174
 Crossing the Moral Threshold 175

1980s. Needless to say, the latter could not have been accomplished without
unmistakable indications that the Soviet Union was no longer prepared to im-
pose its will and control over this area and shore up the local governments by
military force.
There is an important component of the discontent all these developments
and policies generated that did not receive adequate attention, namely, their
subjective perception and evaluation by ordinary people and the moral indig-
nation and outrage they created. This essay seeks to better understand these
more subjective undercurrents of the widespread political disaffection that
pervaded these countries and especially the part played by what I will call the
moral threshold of their citizens. Much of the discontent, I suggest, had more to
do with matters subjective and social-psychological than with objective social-
political conditions and deprivations. This is not to diminish the importance
of the objective conditions that too were plentiful and consequential.
People can tolerate a wide range of deprivations if they are legitimated or
justified in some fashion, or made meaningful. This can be accomplished by
custom, communal solidarity, religious belief, law, or charismatic leaders. In
traditional societies most people were impoverished but widespread poverty
was considered normal and hence not conducive to much, if any, indignation;
likewise, time-honored social inequalities were readily accepted as in-
escapable and justifiable. This was in part the case because alternative social
arrangements were unknown and unthinkable, and in part because the depri-
vations of life here and now were widely believed to be temporary, to be al-
leviated in some kind of otherworldly existence—in short, because people
were sustained by supernatural religious beliefs that helped to diminish the
importance of the material (and other) difficulties of life here and now.
The restrictive, repressive aspects of traditional societies were likewise
readily accepted because they were longstanding and part of deeply rooted
and often religiously sanctioned social arrangements. Traditional societies
were successful (up to a point) in controlling and stabilizing personal expec-
tations; stable expectations in turn stabilized social and political institutions
and practices.
By contrast, communist systems, (indeed all revolutionary societies) rap-
idly and abruptly raised a wide range of expectations. As Raymond Aron
wrote half a century ago, “A revolution seems capable of changing every-
thing. . . . [It] provides a welcome break with the everyday course of events
and encourages the belief that all things are possible.”1
In addition to these elusive promises and expectations, communist systems
were quite specific in their (unfulfilled) promises. They included vast mate-
rial improvements, freedom from various social restraints (such as traditional
societies maintained), a sense of personal liberation that was to be combined
176 Chapter Twenty-two

with new, sustaining communal ties (a new, improved, and enlightened sense of
community), rational, scientific ways of organizing and perfecting society, am-
ple opportunity for participation in public life and political decision-making,
the eventual attainment of social equality (to be preceded by modest, tempo-
rary inequalities based on indisputable merit), and, most crucially (and im-
plausibly), the elimination of the conflict between personal and public inter-
est, or between the individual and society. Last but not least, these systems
also promised to create a new, greatly improved human being, “the new so-
cialist man”—a secular version of the saintly heroes and protagonists of or-
ganized religion. The attributes of this new socialist man were most readily
and meticulously revealed and elaborated in the figure of the so-called posi-
tive hero—an integral part of the socialist-realist literature produced in these
countries. Vasily Grossman, the Soviet writer, observed,

Writers dreamed up out of whole cloth people and their feelings and thoughts. . . .
The literature which called itself “realistic” was just as formalized and imagi-
nary as the bucolic romances of the 18th century. The collective farmers, work-
ers and rural women of Soviet literature seemed . . . to be close kin to those
beautifully built villages and those curly headed shepherdesses who played on
pipes and danced in the meadows among pure-white lambs. . . .
In novels and poems . . . Soviet people were being depicted like people in me-
dieval art, who had represented the Church’s ideal, the idea of divinity. . . .

Socialist-realist literature was another ambitious attempt to obliterate the

dividing line between actual, perceptible realities and the way things were
supposed to be according to the official, ideological blueprints and desires.
Arguably it was the most far-reaching, grotesque, and elaborate denial of the
realities inhabitants of these communist states were exposed to.
The promises made by these systems were not limited to their early, ideal-
istic, revolutionary stages; they persisted well after the revolutionary objec-
tives were abandoned. The propagandists and ideologues insisted that these
promises were fulfilled, that a historically unprecedented, just, and gratifying
social system was being built. These claims were put forward and repeated by
the enormous, comprehensive agit-prop apparatus that encompassed the mass
media, door-to-door verbal “agitation,” and the entire system of education. At
places of work, special seminars were organized with compulsory attendance
requirements that would elaborate and regurgitate the same messages. Slo-
gans were particularly offensive in their brazen defiance of reality. For ex-
ample, in Hungary the slogan “Tied a gyar, magadnak dolgozol!” that is, “the
plant is yours, you are working for yourself!” was plastered all over factory
buildings. These were the same places of work where at the end of the shift
workers were searched as they exited (to make sure they did not steal), where
 Crossing the Moral Threshold 177

their earnings were determined by distant authorities, where they had no say
in their working conditions and no autonomous unions to represent and pro-
tect their interests.2 To be confronted day after day with such reality-defying
slogans in every walk of life was a slap in the face, a daily humiliation. Un-
derstating the case, one of the fighters in the 1956 Revolution wrote, “the
workers did not feel that they owned the factory, the land, the fruits of their
labor.”3
Given the comprehensiveness and relentlessness of the propaganda cam-
paigns, the public in communist states was well acquainted with both the of-
ficial claims of rectitude and accomplishment and their lack of fulfillment
(through daily personal experience). This led to the sentiments and attitudes
here discussed.
A specific kind of outrage was generated by the routine misrepresentations
of reality that culminated in the crossing of the moral threshold. The latter
refers to internalized moral norms and sensibilities that define in a compelling
way what kinds of behavior, policies, or events are morally acceptable or un-
acceptable, what can or cannot be tolerated. Communist systems created a
specific and intense moral outrage by institutionalizing and perpetuating
these discrepancies between theory and practice, ideal and actual, promises
and the realities they created. This became their particular weakness, at any
rate in the long run. Gyorgy Litvan, a Hungarian historian (former supporter,
later opponent of the system) wrote, “it was the moral cynicism, or moraliz-
ing cynicism, that became the Achilles-heel of Stalinism. The latter was only
effective as long as the edifice of faith was intact, but its nakedness was re-
vealed as soon as the edifice began to shake and fall apart. It was obligatory
to moralize because of the redemptive claims but it was precisely the moral-
izing that made the system vulnerable.”4
The mendaciousness of the rulers was widely recognized; people came to re-
sent being lied to and compelled to lie in turn, pressured as they were to partic-
ipate in hollow displays of loyalty to the system they despised. During their to-
talitarian phases, these systems were not content with passive acceptance on the
part of the population; they were determined to squeeze out displays of ap-
proval, a semblance of supporting, enthusiastic participation in the political-
public life the authorities created and permitted. Such compulsory participation
took several forms: on the official holidays (and some other special political oc-
casions), virtually the entire working population had to take part in huge mass
rallies; people were routinely obligated to vote in elections which provided no
choice, only the opportunity to endorse the official candidates; workers had to
attend at their place of work the political seminars; students at every level in the
system of education had to imbibe the official messages in the framework of
courses in humanities and social sciences as well as in newly created courses
178 Chapter Twenty-two

on Marxism-Leninism. Special boarding party schools were also created for

those already in elite positions and others groomed for such positions.5
While no political system lives up completely to its own ideals or idealized
self-conception, communist systems excelled in creating an unprecedented
gulf between their policies, promises, and claims, on the one hand, and their
performance, on the other. The ceaseless exposure to reality-defying propa-
ganda stimulated a reflexive comparison of the daily reality experienced by
the citizens with its official representation and misrepresentation. The politi-
cal jokes of the period remain a highly informative repository of the popular
awareness and responses to these manifold discrepancies and misrepresenta-
tions.
Alexander Wat, the Polish author, memorably summed up this phenome-
non: “The loss of freedom, tyranny, abuse, hunger would all have been easier
to bear if not for the compulsion to call them freedom, justice and the good
of the people.”6 Two Hungarian writers, Tamas Aczel and Tibor Meray, made
the same point: “most intolerable was the simulation of virtue, the endless
proclamation of good intentions: everything was taking place on behalf of
‘the people,’ in the name of the workers’ power. . . .”7
It should be noted here that for the deeply committed, idealistic sup-
porters of the system (including those belonging to the political elite), the
journey to disillusionment, to the crossing of the moral threshold, was
much more prolonged, painful, and halting than for ordinary people. This
was a result of their longstanding commitment to the system and the tech-
niques they developed to avert or delay a drastic moral awakening. It was
possible to avoid or postpone the crossing of the moral threshold (or face
up to the abyss between theory and practice) by refusing to generalize from
particular experiences as long as the internalized beliefs of a distinctly re-
ligious character were in place. This mindset is revealed by incantations
such as those of George Lukacs, who averred that “the worst socialism is
better than the best capitalism.” His former disciple, Agnes Heller, an early
supporter of the regime (later émigré) observed that Lukacs was led to
communism by “a search for redemption. He wished to be the new St. Au-
gustine of a universalistic movement such as Christianity used to be. The
communist St. Augustine. He longed for a movement that would transform
the world. . . . If there was anything he took from his Jewish background
it was messianism.”8
For these believers, the experience of the specific flaws and shortcomings
of the system could be neutralized by their faith and commitment and by the
attendant capacity to defer to the future the benefits the system was going to
deliver; in the absence of such faith, personal experience was devastating.
The most widely used technique or defense mechanism was what Arthur
 Crossing the Moral Threshold 179

Koestler called “the doctrine of unshaken foundations,” 9 the conviction that,

notwithstanding apparent problems and deficiencies, the system was headed
in the right direction, its positive aspects outweighed the questionable ones—
or, more simply, that the ends justified the means. A Hungarian writer, Istvan
Eorsi, who moved from sincere devotion to equally sincere opposition to the
regime, also used this defense mechanism and a similar terminology: “On the
rare occasion when we were stung by the pricks of doubt, we instantly applied
the balm of magic incantations to the wound. They included ‘essentially’ and
‘in the final analysis.’ Certain aspects of the confession of the ‘traitors’ [in the
show trials] perhaps were not entirely true, but in its ‘essentials’ and ‘in the
final analysis’ the charges were well founded.”10
Likewise, Agnes Heller clung to the sentiment that under difficult condi-
tions “the essentials are OK.”11
Another defense mechanism was described by Miklos Gimes, a dedicated
Hungarian communist functionary who became a revolutionary in 1956 and
paid with his life for his changed convictions:

Gradually we came to believe . . . that there are two kinds of truth, that the truth
of the Party . . . could possibly be different and more important than objective,
factual truth, that truth and momentary political expediency are identical. . . . If
there is a truth higher than factual truth . . . then lies can be “true” since lies can
be useful in the short run; a fabricated political trial can also be “true” since it
may yield political benefits. Suddenly we are transported to the outlook which
infected not only those who devised the show trials . . . which poisoned our pub-
lic life . . . paralyzed our critical thinking and finally prevented us from per-
ceiving basic facts of life.12

Wolfgang Leonhard, a communist functionary in East Germany after

World War II, had a traumatic and tangible encounter with the abyss between
theory and practice when he found out that there was a hierarchy of food ser-
vices at the party headquarters entailing several classes of meals for different
groups of staff members depending on their position.13 Andras Hegedus, for-
mer prime minister of Hungary, also recalls the special, high-quality meals he
was served in his office; he was uneasy about them but allowed himself to be
persuaded (at the time) that they were justifiable given his devotion and the
value of his services to the party.
As an adolescent supporter of the communist regime in Hungary (around
the same time Leonhard met his moral threshold, after World War II), I made
my own troubling discoveries of what struck me as a serious conflict be-
tween theory and practice. These doubts arose from my daily contemplation
of the luxurious American automobiles members of the nomenklatura used.
On my way to school every day, I walked by a streamlined Hudson parked
180 Chapter Twenty-two

by the sidewalk with the chauffeur waiting for his passenger (a minister) and
I wondered why a much smaller Skoda, VW, or Opel would not be suffi-
cient? What did it mean that under conditions of scarcity when private auto-
mobiles were mostly unheard of, these functionaries were provided with
large, luxurious vehicles? I was well aware of the egalitarian rhetoric and
proclaimed policies of the regime and under the impression they were being
implemented. I also believed that discrepancies between luxury and depri-
vation (as exemplified by the different modes of transportation for high-
ranking officials and the “masses”) were only prevalent in capitalist systems.
The bad impression created by these luxury vehicles was deepened by the
curtains on the windows hiding the faces of the occupants in the back, sym-
bolizing their inaccessibility, or perhaps an embarrassed preference for
anonymity.
This kind of moral revulsion was an unintended consequence of the ex-
traordinary claims of the official propaganda (and its distant connections
with the utopian aspects of the official ideology) designed to make these sys-
tems not merely acceptable but convince the citizen of their unprecedented
comparative-historical superiority.
It may be asked, how do we know that there was a popular awareness of
these manifold moral transgressions, and how was it manifested? Which
forms of the discrepancy between theory and practice were the most unac-
ceptable or outright intolerable?
The most obvious evidence of these perceptions and feelings comes from
the rapid unraveling, indeed collapse, of these systems at the end of the 1980s
and early 1990s. Once it became clear (under Gorbachev) that Soviet troops
would no longer guarantee the survival of the governments in Eastern Europe,
these systems rapidly fell apart with surprisingly little effort on the part of the
rulers to hang on to power, as if they themselves realized their own unpopu-
larity and illegitimacy. Inside the Soviet Union the long-simmering crisis of
legitimacy (that began with Khrushchev’s 1956 speech at the Twentieth Party
Congress) intensified during the years of glasnost (which brought to surface
much of what had been hidden), culminating in a corresponding loss of po-
litical will to cling to power on the part of the Soviet ruling elites.14
While it is difficult in retrospect to assess or classify different moral thresh-
olds in various groups or strata of the population, it is possible to speculate
about some of its determinants. It is likely that those who held strongly inter-
nalized traditional and especially religious values, as well as those who be-
lieved in some kind of secular, humanistic values were more deeply offended
than others. Not surprisingly, those who suffered at the hands of these regimes
also looked for and easily found larger moral causes for their own rejection
of these systems.
 Crossing the Moral Threshold 181

At last an effort should be made to comprehend the likely motives and men-
tality of those who devised the counterproductive propaganda campaigns that
directly contributed to the discreditation and moral rejection of these systems.
The propaganda directed at the populations in communist systems was remark-
ably heavy-handed, humorless, self-righteous, and repetitive. Little effort was
made at anything resembling a more sophisticated effort at persuasion; the pop-
ulation was inundated with unqualified assertions and claims reflecting a totally
polarized and oversimplified view of the world and human beings.
Whether or not or to what degree the power-holders themselves believed
the propaganda they disseminated or presided over is debatable. They cer-
tainly believed in its overall necessity, as something that made a contribution
to the survival of the system and to keeping their power. Many citizens of the
communist states were convinced that their rulers themselves did not believe
their own propaganda, that it was all put forward and disseminated in a totally
cynical fashion. If so, this provided further reasons for rejecting the system.
As the literary incarnation of a Czech political refugee put it, “what is so de-
bilitating, so spiritually debilitating, is that no one believes in the Party line,
least of all those who are charged with enforcing it. At least in the past, at the
time of the Inquisition . . . or in the early days of the Russian Revolution,
those who imposed an ideology believed in it, but in Czechoslovakia, since
1968, no one believes in Marxism or Leninism, and so what they impose
upon us is what they themselves know to be a lie.15
The key to understanding the nature of communist propaganda that was
used in communist systems (as distinct from the propaganda of the commu-
nist parties in the West or communist state propaganda directed at the West,
or other parts of the world) is that it was inspired by a totalitarian mentality
and was integrated with the possession of power. Just as the attitude to power
was uncompromising, so was the attitude toward the battle of ideas. No quar-
ter was given and no concessions were made in presenting the case for the of-
ficial worldview and policies. As Gyorgy Litvan put it, those in power feared
that “if only one brick is pulled out, the whole edifice would collapse.”16 This
also applied to propaganda.
The qualities of the propaganda were further determined by the monopoly
on power of those dispensing it. The communist systems kept up the propa-
ganda barrage in the manner here described since their power rested far more
decisively on coercion and intimidation than on persuasion. The possession
of power obviously reduces the need for propaganda; the survival of these
regimes did not depend on persuading their citizens about the righteousness
of their objectives and policies; obedience was exacted by coercive measures,
or their threat. Nonetheless, it is likely that the rulers would have preferred to
govern on the basis of a genuine popular acceptance of their policies.
182 Chapter Twenty-two

Another major stimulant of communist propaganda was the mirage of the

new socialist or communist man these systems sought to create. Appropriate
models of behavior had to be created, promoted, and disseminated in various
ways and settings and this too became a task of propaganda.
Finally, it is also likely that another major source of communist propaganda
(as a compensatory device) was the unacknowledged awareness of the lead-
ers of their own questionable legitimacy and lack of genuine or wide popular
support.
Communist systems in Eastern Europe, and Hungary in particular, lost
their legitimacy not merely because they created repressive police states
which imposed a wide range of material, social, and cultural deprivations on
their people but also because they violated, basic, elementary moral precepts
that had been internalized by the populations of these countries. They created
intense moral revulsion because the people rightly felt that these systems en-
gaged in prolonged and determined attempts to drastically redefine their per-
sonal experiences of the new social environment—that is to say, to deceive
them without the least hesitation. If so, one of the many lessons of the an-
niversary we are here remembering and honoring may well be that ordinary
human beings are capable of moral judgment and these judgments can have
profound political and historical consequences.

NOTES

1. Raymond Aron, The Opium of Intellectuals (London: Secker and Warburg,

1957), 42–43.
2. Miklos Haraszti, Worker in a Workers’ State (New York: Universe Books, 1978)
is a revealing study of how industrial workers experienced and responded to these re-
alities.
3. Angyal Istan Sajatkezu Vallomasa [The Firsthand Confession of Istvan Antal]
(Budapest, n.d.), 37. The author was executed for his participation in the armed strug-
gle during the 1956 Revolution. (I translated this and all subsequent quotes from Hun-
garian sources.)
4. Gyorgy Litvan, Oktoberek Uzenete: Valogatott torteneti irasok [The Message of
Octobers: Selected Historical Writings] (Budapest, 1996), 335.
5. An illuminating discussion of these schools and their program of indoctrination
can be found in Andras Hegedus, A Tortenelem es Hatalom Igezeteben [In the Thrall
of History and Power] (Budapest, 1988).
6. Aleksander Wat, My Century (Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press,
1990), 173.
7. Thomas Aczel and Tibor Meray, Tisztito Vihar [Cleansing Storm] (Munich,
1978), 276. Published in English under the title The Revolt of the Mind.
 Crossing the Moral Threshold 183

8. Agnes Heller, Biciklizo Majom [Monkey on the Bicycle] (Budapest, 1999),

136, 87.
9. Arthur Koestler, “Soviet Myth and Reality,” in The Yogi and the Commissar
(New York: MacMillan, 1961), 123.
10. Istan Eorsi, Versdokumentumok, Magyarazatokkal, 1949–1956 [Poetic Docu-
ments with Commentary] (Budapest, 2001), 8.
11. Heller, Biciklizo Majom, 81.
12. Sandor Revesz, Egyetlen Elet: Gimes Miklos Tortenete [A Single Life: The
Story of Miklos Gimes] (Budapest, 1999), 291.
13. He described this in his Child of the Revolution (Chicago: 1958).
14. See Paul Hollander, Political Will and Personal Belief: The Decline and Fall of
Soviet Communism (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1999).
15. Piers Paul Read, A Season in the West (New York, 1988), 27.
16. Litvan, Oktoberek Uzenete, 336.
 Chapter Twenty-three

Ambivalent in Amsterdam

There have been three major ideological-political movements in the twentieth

and early twenty-first centuries that most explicitly and purposefully ex-
ploited and harnessed the capacity for hatred to the pursuit of political objec-
tives: communism, Nazism, and now radical Islam.
Supporters and leaders of all three movements believed that they could cre-
ate blissful social systems if only they could eradicate the groups and indi-
viduals malevolently obstructing the accomplishment of the great goals. The
thirst for destroying these enemies was dependably fueled by a consuming
hatred. All three were arrayed against the West, that is to say, against secular,
liberal, democratic, and pluralistic societies.
But Nazism and communism were largely secular, or secular-religious—
their adherents did not seek fulfillment and glory in the combination of self-
destruction with the destruction of their enemies in the expectation of gener-
ous otherworldly rewards. These three belief systems also differed in the
degree of irrationality their leaders and supporters displayed, reflecting the
varying degrees of religious, or quasi-religious, fervor motivating them. “Irra-
tionality” here (as in general) refers to implausible, empirically unfounded
beliefs and expectations—for example, those of the suicide bombers who are
convinced that their murderous deeds will secure them admission to paradise.
Islamic radicals are also distinguished from Nazis and communists by the
prominence and intensity of their hatred, freely and joyously expressed, and
the ready embrace of self-destruction rooted in the beliefs in otherworldly re-
wards. A major question of the present-day political agenda of the whole
world, and especially Western nations, is how serious a threat such fanaticism
represents and how to cope with it.

184
 Ambivalent in Amsterdam 185

In light of these questions and concerns, Ian Buruma’s new book is of

great interest. Buruma had earlier addressed (with Avishai Margalit) in Oc-
cidentalism (2004) the more elusive sources of the current Islamic hatred of
the West and the rejection of Western values and institutions. In this volume
the point of departure is the 2004 murder of Theo van Gogh, an outspoken
Dutch critic of Islamic beliefs and attitudes. Why did a young man, who
was neither poor nor oppressed, who had received a decent education, who
had never had trouble making friends, who enjoyed smoking dope and
drinking beer—why would such a man turn into a holy warrior whose only
wish was to kill and, perhaps more mysteriously, to die? There is no clear
answer forthcoming, but there are numerous plausible, if somewhat contra-
dictory, suggestions offered.
Murder in Amsterdam is the product of a journalistic fact-finding visit
consisting of sketches of the major protagonists in the recent violent dramas
and interviews with people expressing very different points of views about
these events and their background. The chapters are somewhat disjointed,
as if hastily put together—albeit by a very knowledgeable native of Holland
who had access to the major players and had given much thought to these
matters.
Buruma is judicious and discerning, but his efforts to avoid simplification
often interfere with determining what his own views are. Sometimes it takes
an effort to establish whether or not the views described are his or those of his
interlocutors. And when presenting the latter, it is often unclear whether he
agrees or disagrees with them. He writes about Ayaan Hirsi Ali, the famous
female critic of Islam of Somali origin and former member of the Dutch Par-
liament, who was forced to live underground because of death threats and
who is currently in exile in the United States: “To some she is a heroine,
standing up against the forces of darkness, battling for free speech and en-
lightened values. . . . Others . . . loathe her.” Does the “some” include or ex-
clude the writer? Does he question that she stood up against the forces of
darkness defending free speech at great risk to her life? Is she mistaken in her
belief that many problems “that plague the Islamic world . . . can be explained
at least in part . . . [by] . . . a warped view of sexuality,” that is to say, the at-
titude toward women? Is she overly zealous “in her battle for secularism” as
he suggests? And is not such zealousness commendable when it combines, as
it did, with great courage and integrity? Is she wrong suggesting that the lib-
eration of Muslims in the West “is sabotaged by the Western cultural relativ-
ists . . . who say, ‘It’s part of their culture, so you mustn’t take it away. . . .’”
Here Buruma gently guides the reader to the conclusion that these are unwise
positions. He also writes that she “was no Voltaire. For Voltaire had flung his
insults at the Catholic Church, one of the two most powerful institutions of
186 Chapter Twenty-three

eighteenth-century France, while Ayaan risked offending only a minority that

was already feeling vulnerable in the heart of Europe.” A peculiar judgment,
since Voltaire was hardly in imminent danger of assassination and forced to
live in hiding, whereas she was hounded by an exceptionally brutal, violent,
and hate-filled “minority”—as if that minority status minimized or trivialized
the risks she had taken or neutralized the deadly fanaticism of her enemies. In
the postscript, Buruma shows more sympathy, apparently more on account of
the tragic circumstances of her life than her beliefs. His “country seems
smaller without her,” he concludes.
Another example of authorial ambivalence is the discussion of the views of
Afshin Ellian, a scholar born in Tehran who writes newspaper columns in
Holland “harshly critical of political Islam.” Ellian believes, in Buruma’s
telling,

that citizenship of a democratic society means living by the laws of the coun-
try. A liberal democracy cannot survive when part of the population believes
that divine laws trump those made by man. The fruits of European Enlighten-
ment must be defended. . . . European intellectuals, in their self-hating nihilism
and utopian anti-Americanism, have lost the stomach to fight for Enlighten-
ment values. . . . No religion or minority should be immune to censure or
ridicule.

Buruma does not say what he thinks about these sensible and defensible
propositions but observes later that “the tone of his [Ellian’s] columns is
sometimes strident, even shrill.” He also appears to distance himself from the
opinion of former leftist Paul Scheffer, who thinks that “allowing large com-
munities of alienated Muslims to grow in our midst was a recipe for social
and political disaster.”
At one point Buruma argues that democracy would only be threatened “if
all true Muslims were political revolutionaries.” It is hard to see why a
smaller, determined group of violent revolutionaries (who enjoy the passive
support of more substantial, if undetermined, portions of their community)
should be dismissed as nonthreatening.
It is a telling illustration of the attitudes found in the Islamic communities
in Holland that van Gogh’s killer and his friends demanded that they be pro-
vided with apartments by the municipal authorities built in such a way that
the “women should be able to go in and out of the kitchen unseen.” Buruma
quotes an old woman in a declining working-class neighborhood, one of the
few Dutch people who chose to stay: “The trouble really began when masses
of Moroccan and Turkish families were dumped in our neighborhood. They
had no idea how to behave in our society. Garbage bags would be tossed into
 Ambivalent in Amsterdam 187

the street from the second floor. Goats would be slaughtered on the balcony.
The worst . . . [is] that we don’t speak the same language. You know, when
your ceiling leaks and you can’t tell the neighbors upstairs to turn off their
tap.” Again, it’s not clear if Buruma thinks these are vicious ethnocentric
stereotypes or reasonable enough complaints.
This is not to say that the author never makes his views clear. Toward the
end of the book he demolishes a conventional wisdom, writing, “It is unlikely
. . . that those who want God’s kingdom on earth are going to be satisfied with
a better deal for the Palestinians or a U.S. withdrawal from Iraq.” Thus on the
one hand he recognizes that “violence in the name of faith” is hard to tame or
eradicate, but on the other he seems to blame Dutch society for the alienation
of the Islamic community, sometimes the Western world as a whole: “Perhaps
Western civilization, with the Amsterdam red-light district as its fetid symbol,
does have something to answer for.”
As to the responsibility of Dutch society, it is not clear if it is the “smug-
ness” and racism that are blamed, or their opposite: the politically correct ea-
gerness to cater to the immigrants’ customs and sense of identity and the at-
tendant abandonment of any serious attempt to integrate them.
Thus Buruma oscillates between explaining the instances of violence (and
the attitudes giving rise to them) by the character of Dutch society, Islamic be-
liefs, and broader historical trends and phenomena. He writes (discussing the
mindset of van Gogh’s killer) that “the death wish in the name of a high cause,
a god, or a great leader is something that has appealed to confused and resent-
ful young men through the ages and is certainly not unique to Islam.” But the
current confluence of violence against the “infidels” with self-destruction has
few equals outside the ranks of those imbued with Islamic beliefs. Neither
Nazism nor Marxism generated suicidal violence; likewise, the radical leftist
terrorist groups in the 1960s and 1970s in the United States and Europe dis-
played no suicidal impulses, presumably because they had no religiously in-
spired conviction that a blissful afterlife awaits them as a reward for their
murderous good works.
Overlooking these and other differences also contributes to questionable par-
allels between a traditional Dutch-Protestant self-righteousness and the Islamic
variety: “Mohammed [the killer of van Gogh], in a very Dutch delusion of
grandeur, expanded his youthful enthusiasm for neighborhood politics to en-
compass the fate of mankind.” Buruma also writes, “In the muddled mind of
Mohammed Bouyeri . . . ran a deep current of European anti-liberalism com-
bined with self-righteous moralism and Islamist revolutionary fervor.” The at-
tribution of European antiliberalism in this instance is gratuitous and redundant;
Bouyeri’s behavior was amply accounted for by the other attributes noted.
188 Chapter Twenty-three

There is also an implausible and strained attribution of resemblance be-

tween costumed Dutch soccer fans celebrating a soccer game and supposedly
corresponding attitudes of Muslims: “It [the celebration] was a return to an
invented country, no more real than a modern Dutch Muslim’s fantasy of the
pure world of the Prophet.”
Far more persuasive is the parallel between the part played by ideas in the
major campaigns of political violence in recent history: “Revolutionary Islam
is linked to the Koran . . . just as Stalinism and Maoism were linked to Das
Kapital, but to explain the horrors of China’s man-made famines or the So-
viet gulag solely by invoking the writings of Karl Marx would be to miss the
main point. Messianic violence can attach itself to any creed.” True enough,
but once the notion of “messianic” is introduced we have a circularity in the
argument, since “messianic” is a key component of the “creeds” in question.
It would be safer to say that violent impulses attach themselves to, and find
legitimation in, messianic creeds that legitimate the former, and this applies
to both Marxism and Islam.
This informative volume would have been more enlightening if its author
could have settled in his own mind the respective contributions Dutch society
and Islamic beliefs have made to the violence he sought to understand.
 Chapter Twenty-four

Travel in the Peloponnesos

Even at a time when it is the conventional wisdom that the world is getting
smaller, that modernity crushes cultural diversity and globalization over-
whelms local distinctions, travel can still provide some welcome refutation
of such claims. Surely, airports all over the world are virtually identical in
design and ambience, as are superhighways, parking garages, hydroelectric
dams, telephones, TV sets, microwave ovens, and many other products of
modern technology. Although we depend on these devices, few of us un-
derstand how they work, what laws of physics they obey, and the scientific
discoveries they embody. Perhaps here lies one source of aversion to
modernity: it makes us humiliatingly dependent on machines and instru-
ments that we cannot comprehend; it also makes us further dependent on
the specialized few who can make them work or fix them when they fail to
do so.
This, however, is not the whole story. Technology does not completely
erase traditional ways of life even when widely relied upon, and it is not
equally widely relied upon everywhere notwithstanding its availability and
affordability. Even thoroughly modernized Western Europe abounds in spots
and corners pleasantly different from North America (and other parts of Eu-
rope) to gladden the heart of the traveler looking for remnants of the past and
settings different from those he is familiar with. To be sure pristine, techno-
logically untouched areas are impossible to find in Europe—but, in any event,
one would not want to spend one’s holiday in such places given the physical
discomforts. There are limits to the pursuit of authenticity and heartwarming
traditional ways of life, even for the romantic critics of modernity. On the
other hand, there is an appealing element of adventure and modest risk asso-
ciated with travel in the less-modernized parts of the world.

189
190 Chapter Twenty-four

It is an endlessly interesting question why so many among the educated

and affluent (not that the two invariably go together) are so taken with the
past and its physical remnants; why the nostalgia for the imaginary (or real?)
times bygone? Interest in the old is not merely a response to the burdens and
stresses of modernity, of living in crowded, polluted technological civiliza-
tion. Already in the middle of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries,
European writers, artists, and aristocrats traveled to places (foremost among
them Italy and Greece) where they sought to discover and rediscover lost
virtues, pleasures, and sensibilities. Both the Enlightenment intellectuals and
the Romantics somewhat later avidly pursued the past, the remains of tradi-
tional societies where they sought instruction and relief from the difficulties
of their own as yet barely modern world. James Boswell, Chateaubriand, By-
ron, Flaubert, Goethe, Heine, Shelley, and Wordsworth were among such
travelers.
Werther, an outstanding literary personification of this sensibility, and
doubtless reflecting the feelings of his creator Goethe, mused in a small Ger-
man village of his times: “Nothing can fill me with such true, serene emotion
as any features of ancient, primitive life like this. . . . How thankful I am that
my heart can feel the simple, harmless joys of the man who brings to the table
a head of cabbage he has grown himself. . . .”1 Romantic nature worship
sometimes merged with religious sentiments; Thomas Gray, the poet, was
prompted by the Swiss Alps to observe (in 1739): “Not a precipice, not a tor-
rent, not a cliff but is pregnant with religion and poetry. There are certain
scenes that would awe an atheist into belief, without the help of other argu-
ment.”2
These writers and artists, small in number, were the vanguard of a move-
ment, pioneers of what was to come in our times: the popular “journeys of
self-discovery” undertaken by large numbers of prosperous, educated, middle-
and upper-class people (North American, European, Japanese), especially the
young among them. These journeys have in part been prompted by the belief
that a certain amount of travel is an obligatory part of one’s education. In
more recent times the “junior year abroad” programs of many American col-
leges institutionalized this belief. There are, however, other broader and
murkier motives blending with the more straightforward and rational pursuit
of some knowledge of the world and the cultures of different societies that
travel may yield.
Travel unconnected to utilitarian pursuits (business, colonial exploration,
conquest) can be linked to the rise and spread of individualism, to taking one-
self seriously, and to the belief in one’s uniqueness, or in the imperative to
discover it. As Paul Fussell put it, travel is also an “escape . . . from the trav-
 Travel in the Peloponnesos 191

eler’s domestic identity.”3 The desire for such escape is related to the rejec-
tion of a conception of one’s identity predominantly rooted in one’s social
roles; such a conception came to be seen as far too narrow and confining and
failing to do justice to the richness, complexity, and uniqueness of one’s in-
dividuality. Individualism is a by-product of modernity, or incipient moder-
nity, of a heightened intolerance of conditions felt to be constricting, sup-
pressing the wondrous complexity and hidden potentials of the self.
The urge to discover one’s “true self” by means of travel is based on the
idea that new surroundings would allow, or compel, one to see things differ-
ently, to take a new look at oneself, and stimulate the discovery of new as-
pects of one’s personality, leading to, what in these days is called “personal
growth.” In the new, unfamiliar settings, fewer things would be taken for
granted, one’s eyes would open to new realities, possibilities, and insights; the
traveler would benefit from exposure to the different customs and ways of life
and types of people, from the novel and hopefully transforming experiences;
no longer will he be captive to stale, ingrained habits and tastes—hence the
notion that travel broadens.
A major attraction of travel has been its association with novelty and
change, with the suspension of routines and the promise of coming upon new,
more fulfilling ways of life. But there is a paradox here, since the traditional
societies most of the travelers here discussed seek are, or appear to be, stable
and unchanging, which is precisely one of their appeals. How can these two
desires, for novelty and tradition, be reconciled? They can insofar as various
features of traditional society are the novelty, a welcome departure from the
turmoil, busyness, and restlessness of the Western societies most of these
travelers come from.
The principal, if not often clearly articulated, appeal of traditional societies
lies in the moral and existential certainties they offer; people who belong to
them have no great trouble deciding what to do with their lives and do not
find it difficult to make moral choices and judgments; nor do they have iden-
tity problems—they know all too well who they are, what their limitations
are, and they do not entertain grandiose fantasies and desires about reinvent-
ing themselves. Of course, by the same token those living in these traditional
societies also have fewer choices in matters of importance, but this may be
overlooked by those who in our times feel overwhelmed by an excess of
choice, or options.
There may be another, more prosaic, explanation. In the past, as in recent
times, many journeys were undertaken in part to escape the harsh northern
climate: to the Mediterranean, the Caribbean—wherever a milder climate
could be found. Certainly the reverse has never been the case: southerners
192 Chapter Twenty-four

have not been flocking to northern destinations. Of course it has not been only
a matter of different climates but also different incomes: populations in the
less than balmy climates of northern Europe and North America have enjoyed
higher living standards and could more readily afford to travel than those in
southern Europe let alone in much of the rest of the world.
The travelers here alluded to tend to assume that many countries other than
their own are more exotic, colorful, vibrant, and stimulating. The main char-
acter of a romantic novel (and a stand-in for its author, the early nineteenth-
century French writer and traveler Francois-Rene de Chateaubriand) thus
rhapsodized, “Ancient and lovely Italy offered me its innumerable master-
works. With what reverent and poetic awe I wandered among those vast edi-
fices consecrated to religion by the arts! . . . What a succession of arches and
vaults! How beautiful the strains of music heard around the domes, like the
rolling of the ocean waves, like the murmuring winds of the forests, or like
the voice of God in His temple!”
The character in Chateaubriand’s novel also put his finger on another mo-
tive for travel, even more pertinent in our times than it was two centuries ago
when it was written: “Europeans constantly in turmoil are forced to build
their own solitudes. The more tumultuous and noisy our heart, the more calm
and silence attracts us.”4 This is exactly what we expect and hope to find in
places “off the beaten path,” less touched or untouched by material progress.
In these fulfilling destinations these travelers hope to come upon the descen-
dants, if not the actual incarnations, of the noble savage and what is left of un-
spoiled nature. For Americans and urbanized Europeans, even present-day
farmers, peasants, or fishermen will qualify as noble savages. A recent visitor
to Greece typified these sensibilities as he wistfully recalled, “We stopped for
an early breakfast at the Krifos Kipos taverna in the tiny fishing village Agios
Nikolaos and watched the caiques come in, hung with kerosene lanterns and
laden with the morning’s catch of fish.” Unhappily, he was also compelled to
note that the serenity was punctured by the cries of traveling salesmen adver-
tising their wares with loudspeakers mounted on their trucks.5
A sense of security is also associated with traditional societies. In none of
the small towns where I stayed on recent trip to Greece (Tolo, Githeo, Kar-
damili, Methoni on the coast; Stremitsa and Dimistsana in the mountains) did
we see any policemen. There was, coincidentally or not, a sense of security
and tranquility. Realistically or not, we felt safe.
All this leads to the question of what exactly it takes to pronounce a village
or small town “unspoiled.” The major requirements certainly include small
size, lack of crowds, minimal presence of modern technology, and reminders
of the past, mostly in the form of old buildings. No village or town will qual-
ify as “unspoiled” if it is full of cars and tour buses or if it boasts huge park-
 Travel in the Peloponnesos 193

ing spaces. TV antennas, too, encroach on the idea of the unspoiled even
when sprouting from old houses. Small size does not automatically protect
from crowds. This was clearly the case in Rocamadour, France, which I vis-
ited a few years ago—a splendid, small medieval town in a rocky hillside full
of great Gothic churches and chapels but also one inundated with crowds of
tourists filling its small streets, lined with gift shops and restaurants. My wife
and I were part of these crowds and therein lies the paradox and insoluble
problem of pursuing “unspoiled” places. Given the large number of travelers
intent on discovering and visiting them, they cannot remain unspoiled. The
same applies to the beauties of nature trampled underfoot by the all of us na-
ture lovers. It is somewhat easier to ration access to the beauties of nature (as
the U.S. National Park Service has done in recent years) than to inhabited vil-
lages and towns. Cars can be excluded as they are from many small towns in
Europe, but that is not the whole solution. Masses of pedestrians feasting on
junk food disgorged on the edge of these towns by enormous tour buses or
emerging from their own cars encroach on our expectations just as much as
traffic jams on the old town square or main street. Rural areas and small
towns can also be spoilt, indeed ruined, not just by mass tourism but by in-
dustry and commerce. On our recent trip to Greece we were shocked to dis-
cover a huge thermal power plant belching fumes in the center of the Pelo-
ponnesos in the midst of an otherwise attractive mountainous landscape and
not far from the well-preserved remnants of the Byzantine city of Mystra. I
do not know when it was built and if there were alternatives to such an obvi-
ously polluting plant in that location. There is, though, little doubt that area
residents who thereby got their electricity would not willingly unplug their
televisions or refrigerators in order to enjoy unpolluted air and unspoiled
scenery.
My interest in visiting the Peloponnesos, while not explicitly influenced by
the impulses and attitudes sketched above, was certainly colored by them. I
have always been interested in remote, scenic, mountainous areas surrounded
by or incorporating bodies of water. A large part of the attractions of the Pelo-
ponnesos was the scenery: dramatic mountains and gorges, a deeply indented
coast, and low population density. Almost the entire southern, eastern, and
western coast is dotted with small coastal towns and harbors, complete with
Venetian forts. From guidebooks I learned about the old monasteries tucked
into a deep gorge, irresistible even for those possessed of a secular mentality.
I was also drawn to the Peloponnesos because of the Mani Peninsula in the
south, famous for its desolate landscape, abandoned fortress villages, and
fierce early residents—“a proud and courageous people,” according to the
Michelin Guide, supposedly descended from the Spartans, “exclusive and
bellicose” and filled with “a spirit of adventure.” Those few remaining “still
194 Chapter Twenty-four

live in their steep villages dotted with olive trees on the mountain slopes pre-
serving the cult of honor and hospitality,” the guide further assured us. In the
old days their lives revolved around bloody family feuds and successful at-
tempts to repel invaders from other parts of Greece or from abroad, including
the Turks. They were supposedly feared by other Greeks. Most of these orig-
inal residents have vanished over time.
The Peloponnesos also abounds in famous ruins (such as Epidaurus, Myce-
nae, and Olympia), which I find of lesser interest since in many instances
there is more left to the imagination than to the eye on these sites, at least for
those of us archeologically challenged.
My first stop (reached by a two and a half hour drive from Athens’s airport)
was the small coastal resort town of Tolo. It is near the much better known
and more picturesque town of Naflion, which used to be the first capital of in-
dependent Greece after the Turkish occupiers were defeated in 1822. (Athens
became the capital in 1834.) I am among those who did not realize (or forgot)
that Greece has only been an independent nation-state since the early nine-
teenth century, following the long and unwelcome presence of the Turks; that
is to say, it was part of the Ottoman Empire. Other powers, such as Venice,
controlled areas on the coast, as did the French in conjunction with the Cru-
saders; Britain possessed some islands in the Ionian Sea. I suspect that most
people also fail to realize how small the population of Greece is (ten million),
considering its historical and cultural importance. Of course Greece also pro-
duced emigrants ranging in the millions over time.
The only ruins I visited (on the way to the Mani peninsula), and very im-
pressive ones at that, was Mystra (or Mistras), a former Byzantine city
founded in the thirteenth century in the foothills of the Taygetos mountains,
“occupying an exceptional site,” as the Green Guide puts it. It is in the area
where Sparta used to be (and there is now a modern city of that name). Mys-
tra is a widely dispersed collection of partially ruined and restored palaces,
monasteries, and fortresses at various elevations surrounded by tall, pictur-
esque cypresses and connected by a network of trails and roads. It too was
occupied by the Turks, and the churches were converted into mosques.
There are excellent views of the Taygetos mountains and the surrounding
countryside.
The next major stop was Kardamili, a small coastal town on the Messen-
ian Gulf (“simple holiday resort and fishing village,” according to the Green
Guide) north of the Mani peninsula and flanked by the Taygetos mountains
on the east and north of the Mani Peninsula. We chose it because it abuts the
Viros Gorge and numerous hiking trails.
Further coastal explorations followed as we drove north on the pleasant
highway circling the Messenian Gulf, stopping briefly in Koroni, a very at-
 Travel in the Peloponnesos 195

tractive small port with citadel built by Venetians and Turks, and stopping for
a few days in Methoni, further west. Here the major attraction was the huge
Venetian fort and nearby Pylos (yet another attractive and lively coastal town)
and its nature reserve. In Methoni we were the only guests in a pleasant ho-
tel. From Methoni we took two day trips to Pylos and the nearby nature re-
serve, where we climbed a modest mountain topped by a partially ruined but
still impressive fort overlooking the sea and the large horseshoe-shaped bay,
part of the nature reserve. Subsequently we drove north along the shore until
turning east and into the mountains to stay in the small towns of Stremitsa and
Dimitsana, both located at elevations over 3,000 feet.
Aside from our interest in the monasteries, we went to the area because
of the Lousios Gorge, which promised good hiking and in which the monas-
teries were located. The first and most spectacular monastery we visited
(Moni Agios Prodromu) was partly accessible by car. After descending on
a switchback road into the gorge, we continued on foot. Less than one
hour’s walk took us to the monastery located under an overhang of the cliff,
part of it built into the mountain. Nearby was a small garden, a spring and
some outbuildings. We were the only visitors. We had a glimpse of the liv-
ing quarters of the monks (a handful only, it seemed), the ossuary where the
skulls of earlier residents of the monastery reposed on shelves (hundreds of
them), and a small room (quite dark) that had spectacular wall paintings.
The wall painting of what appeared to be a saint was in excellent condition,
with vivid colors.
It is not easy to put into words what made the visit to this monastery so
memorable. For one thing it was something rather unusual; people living in
North America or Western Europe rarely have the chance to come upon an-
cient monasteries hidden in a deep gorge. At the bottom of the gorge was a
sizeable and clean stream, much of it white water. The monastery was sur-
rounded by lush vegetation and smaller streams. All was quiet. The few
monks went about their business, whatever it was. They were quite friendly,
offering water and olives (candy in another monastery). They had electricity
and could reach civilization easily if they wanted to. We have no idea how of-
ten they would and for what purpose. What did they do with themselves?
How much of their time was spent with prayer and other devotions or with
cultivating their gardens? How strong is their belief in eternity? These are
matters we were in no position to learn about. These monks certainly made a
choice by removing themselves from where most people live and from human
company (other than fellow monks) and from women, except for visiting
tourists or pilgrims. I am sure that in Greece, as in much of Europe and North
America, the number of such people is dwindling. Still, there were young
men among the monks in this and the other two monasteries I saw.
196 Chapter Twenty-four

The serenity, seclusion, and the blending of the site with the natural beauty
of the site were among the identifiable reasons for being impressed. Regard-
less of one’s religious beliefs (or, in this case their absence), the monastic life
and its reclusiveness hinted at an engagement with the spiritual realm, at a
sustained determination to grapple with the pursuit of meaning in life (and
death). This idea may, of course, be romantic projection; monks may become
monks for all sorts of reasons that do not necessarily include great religious
fervor, spirituality, or the desire to do good works. It is also quite possible that
the daily, rigidly regulated and routinized rituals of devotion could divert at-
tention from reflection and from deeper, less-structured spiritual quests. Nor
did I have proof that these monks engaged in any charitable, humane, or help-
ing activity. And yet they inspired respect and exuded more than a whiff of
authenticity.
It must be readily acknowledged that one learns little of importance about
people with whom one does not share a common language and way of life,
which is usually the case when we travel. In Greece many of the natives
spoke some English, but our exchanges were largely brief, functional trans-
actions. Even so, some impressions emerge and linger, superficial as they
were by necessity. Driving habits, for example, give some clues to the na-
tional character, or aspects thereof, as they vary in a patterned way from
country to country. Greece is clearly among the countries—along with France
Italy, Spain, and others in Europe—where people drive aggressively, and dan-
gerously, and in obvious disregard of posted speed limits; they also readily
honk at other drivers to express displeasure. On the other hand, they are sur-
prisingly tolerant when confronted with double or otherwise illegally parked
drivers blocking their way in the narrow streets of small towns and villages,
when traffic is at a standstill for one reason or another.
Greek drivers think nothing of passing, or trying to pass, on curvy two-lane
mountain roads that carry a fair amount of traffic. Why are these people
(mostly men) so impatient, aggressive, and competitive in these situations?
One explanation may be that unlike in the United States and parts of Western
Europe, the widespread use of cars in Greece is more recent and one may sur-
mise that owning a car is more a matter of pride and self-assertion. But there
is also a certain general impatience and less self-discipline more readily
found in all Mediterranean countries. In Britain, Holland, Scandinavia, and,
above all, in the United States and Canada, people drive in more disciplined,
less assertive ways. Greek, French, and Italian driving habits are comparable
to those of many American male teenagers. Self-assertion is certainly part of
the explanation. The many small shrines on roadsides erected in memory of
the victims of such driving habits testify to their consequences.
 Travel in the Peloponnesos 197

The other explanation of Greek driving habits, like those of the Italians, is
that they don’t care much about rules. I recall that on another trip, flying from
Athens to an island, some passengers, apparently friends of the pilot, walked
casually in and out of the cockpit and quite a few smoked unselfconsciously
in nonsmoking areas without earning a reprimand from the flight attendants.
On the recent trip I also read in the Greek English-language newspaper about
chronic squatting on public lands including nature reserves, about which the
government has done little. Nor are environmental regulations enforced, evi-
dently. The paper wrote (in an editorial), “In recent decades, Greece has ex-
perienced an environmental disaster at all levels. The postwar model of de-
velopment led to repeated abuse of the environment. The most fundamental
principles regarding the protection of natural resources were violated. . . . All
these years strict laws were not able to prevent the destructive activities of or-
ganized interests, mainly due to widespread corruption and lack of proper
monitoring mechanisms” (Kathimerini, September 24, 2003, 2).
On the other hand, the indifference toward the environment does not seem
to extend to the toleration of billboards along the highways, except in the
vicinity of Athens. The impressive nature reserve north of the coastal town of
Pylos (mentioned earlier) also seemed well protected and clean; it included
large lagoons, bird sanctuaries, and the spectacular bay with emerald water.
The apparent cleanliness of the sea was another delightful and unexpected
finding, and not only in this sanctuary. The fish population sampled while
snorkeling was modest both in size and variety compared to the Caribbean,
but these waters were by no means a saline desert.
There is a paradoxical relationship between tradition, modernity, and con-
cern with the natural environment. Modernity as manifested in population
growth and pressure, in urbanization and industrialization, is clearly bad for
the environment. On the other hand, only prolonged modernity creates the
kind of mentality that is self-consciously protective of the environment. Only
educated, urban people generations removed from rural roots or origins re-
vere nature and the environment. The romanticization of nature in Europe co-
incided with accelerating industrialization and urbanization. The more tradi-
tional a society, the less widespread the self-conscious admiration of nature
and the less concern with the environment, partly because people depend very
directly on the physical environment for their livelihood—from agriculture,
animal husbandry, and forestry to hunting and fishing. Being traditional also
means an unquestioning acceptance of these time-honored activities required
by survival; nature is taken for granted and exploited without a second
thought. But such exploitation remains circumscribed and moderated by
primitive technology and lower population densities.
198 Chapter Twenty-four

A degree of friendliness toward strangers is also characteristic of more tra-

ditional societies found in parts of Greece. I often found people going out of
their way to be friendly and helpful, and not because we rented their rooms
or ate in their restaurants. This was the case in particular when we needed in-
formation or directions in small towns; on such and other occasions people
tried to round up a proficient English speaker if their own English was lim-
ited or nonexistent. Off the major highways we did not encounter aggres-
siveness, impatience, and unfriendliness, nor any hostility on account of be-
ing American, even though one reads and hears much about Greek anti-
Americanism. Such good-natured behavior might have been due to various
circumstances. We were tourists in small towns at the end of the tourist sea-
son, and people who make their living from tourists are not noted for their
hostility or surliness toward them, although there are exceptions: in parts of
the Caribbean and in any country where nationalistic pride is wounded by no-
tions of servicing well-heeled strangers. A few years ago some Hungarian in-
tellectuals complained that Hungary was becoming “a nation of waiters.”
This never seems to have occurred to the Swiss, who have been capable of
combining high levels of collective self-esteem with a flourishing tourist in-
dustry for well over a century.
It is a test of the satisfactions a particular journey yields whether or not one
would consider returning to the places visited. But this rarely happens. The
accessible world abounds in attractive and interesting places. An American
traveler can go to Britain, France, Italy, Spain, or Switzerland (among others)
every year for decades without exhausting points of interest, natural or man-
made. As we seek out new places with similar appeals, we are also motivated
by a domesticated exploratory impulse. This impulse is not fully rational and
by no means universal. Enormous numbers of people are perfectly content not
to travel at all, or go to the same places year after year, confining their travel
to a particular resort or a second home. The exploratory impulse of the kind
here noted rests on a pure if vague curiosity, some kind of unarticulated hope
and expectation as to what may be accomplished by visiting different parts of
the world.
In the end one must recognize that travel—like so many other human ac-
tivities—often reflects contradictory desires and beliefs. We want both nov-
elty and a change of pace, but we also wish to immerse ourselves in the sta-
ble, time-honored ways of life assumed to persist in some corners of the
world; we look for relaxation, for new comforts and luxuries, more interest-
ing food and drinks, but travel, even the most modern and convenient, is al-
most inescapably tiring and disruptive; we are interested in invigorating new
human contacts, but short trips circumscribed by language barriers cannot
yield them; we long for the simplicity that eludes us at home, yet we also
 Travel in the Peloponnesos 199

know that we are hopelessly dependent on the conveniences of modern tech-

nology. On our journeys of “self-discovery” we are not likely to discover
much about ourselves we do not already know. None of this is to suggest we
should give up traveling or that it is not a learning experience. However, one
of the things we learn is that no magic breakthrough in personal liberation,
enrichment, or self-discovery is accomplished by restlessly moving around,
and that the pursuit of authenticity and meaningful life is no less elusive in
the new as in the familiar settings.

NOTES

1. Johann Wolfgang Goethe, The Sorrows of Young Werther (New York, 1962), 43.
(First published in 1774.)
2. Paul Fussel, ed., The Norton Book of Travel (New York, 1987), 275.
3. Fussel, Norton Book of Travel, 13.
4. Francois-Rene de Chateaubriand, Atala and Rene (New York, 1961), 11, 98. (First
published 1800.)
5. Nicolas Krauss, “Where the Gods Are Neighbors,” New York Times Travel Sec-
tion, June 18, 2000, 9.
 IV

THE SURVIVAL AND

REPLENISHMENT OF
THE ADVERSARY CULTURE
 Chapter Twenty-five

The Resilience of the

Adversary Culture

The terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, provide a new vantage point for
examining the evolution and current condition of the American adversary cul-
ture. This term, coined by Lionel Trilling in his 1965 book Beyond Culture,
refers to a discernible and durable reservoir of discontent, a disposition of
those Americans who habitually find the United States—or at least its gov-
ernment—at fault in virtually every conflict in which it is engaged and its so-
cial institutions irredeemably corrupt. It is a culture whose boundaries, both
demographic and intellectual, defy precise definition; nonetheless, the con-
cept has been indispensable for identifying a chronic domestic estrangement
and the specific beliefs associated with it.
As to the social-demographic boundaries, most of those within the adver-
sary culture may loosely be described as intellectuals, or quasi-intellectuals,
and their followers; they are found in the greatest concentrations on major
college campuses and in the surrounding communities. Living near a campus
generally inclines one to overestimate the adversary culture’s importance and
influence, whereas distance from such a setting tempts one to write it off as
inconsequential. A visit to a campus by someone not inured to its atmosphere
illustrates the psychic distance between the two. About five years ago, New
York Times columnist Maureen Dowd asked former President George H. W.
Bush what he had learned at a Hofstra University conference about his pres-
idency; Bush answered: “I learned that there are some real wacko professors
scattered out around the country.”1
As to the political-intellectual boundaries of this culture, it is left of center;
its animating views are unswervingly anticapitalist, Marxist, quasi-Marxist;
feminists, radical environmentalists, anarchists, and pacifists also qualify. With
the collapse of Soviet communism, the composition and major preoccupations

203
204 Chapter Twenty-five

of this culture have somewhat changed. Radical environmentalism; antiglob-

alization and multiculturalism have come into the forefront. Environmental-
ism fits the adversary culture because of its antimodernist bias. Antiglobal-
ization combines environmentalism and anticapitalism on a global scale to
replace what used to be anticapitalism on national scales.
The adversary culture has also adopted postmodernism and deconstruc-
tionism. These relativistic positions and postures have been combined, curi-
ously enough, with hearty, unqualified denunciations of American society and
Western culture. As in the past, these condemnations rest on nonrelativistic
assumptions, on absolute standards used for judging and condemning Amer-
ican society and culture.
Adherents of the adversary culture can be found in numerous settings, or-
ganizations, and interest groups. They include postmodernist academics, rad-
ical feminists, Afrocentrist blacks, radical environmentalists, animal rights
activists, Maoists, Trotskyites, critical legal theorists, militant homosexuals,
and lesbians. These groups often have different political agendas but share
core convictions and key assumptions: all are reflexively and intensely hos-
tile critics of the United States or American society and, increasingly, of all
Western cultural traditions and values as well. It is their core belief that Amer-
ican society is uniquely repellent—unjust, corrupt, destructive, soulless, in-
humane, inauthentic, and incapable of satisfying basic, self-evident human
needs. The American social system has failed to live up to its original histor-
ical promise and, they insist, is inherently and ineradicably sexist, racist, and
imperialist.
The adversary culture, by and large, took little notice of the collapse of So-
viet communism, the end of the Cold War, and the retreat of state-socialist sys-
tems around the world. Its increasing preoccupation with matters domestic re-
flects the dearth of foreign alternatives to the alleged evils of American
society and capitalism. Nevertheless, the supporters of the adversary culture
still tend to sympathize with virtually every political entity that opposes the
United States. These include the former Soviet Union, China under Mao, Cas-
tro’s Cuba, Sandinista Nicaragua, supporters of the uprising in Chiapas, Yu-
goslavia under Milosevic, and the PLO and other anti-Israeli Arab groups and
movements. There have been occasional disagreements among these critics
regarding U.S. policy toward particular adversaries: a few of them supported
the 1991 Gulf War and more of them the intervention in Kosovo. Some rec-
ognized that the Taliban’s hatred of the United States and all it stands for does
not necessarily make it an admirable ally or friend. Barbara Ehrenreich, for
example, was disheartened that authentic enemies of the United States abroad
were less than enlightened as regards the rights of women: “What is so heart-
 The Resilience of the Adversary Culture 205

breaking to me as a feminist is that the strongest response to corporate glob-

alization and U.S. military domination is based on such a violent and misog-
ynist ideology.”2
In the wake of September 11, some observers somewhat prematurely
thought that the adversary culture has undergone substantial change. Hendrik
Hertzberg found that only “traditional pacifists . . . and a tiny handful of re-
flexive Rip Van Winkles” object “to the aims and methods of the antiterror-
ism campaign. . . . Conservative commentators have had a frustrating time of
it rounding up the usual blame-America-first suspects, because so few of
those suspects are out there blaming America first.”3 Michael Kelly pro-
claimed “the renaissance of liberalism” and the marginalization of left-liberal
politics in the same period.4 Even more pointedly, George Packer argued in
the New York Times Magazine, “September 11 made it safe for liberals to be
patriots. Among the things destroyed with the twin towers was the notion held
by certain Americans, ever since Vietnam, that to be stirred by national iden-
tity, carry a flag and feel grateful toward someone in uniform ought to be a
source of embarrassment.”5
But the adversary culture did not disappear, and its familiar attitudes
reemerged. This has been most apparent on the campuses, where anti-U.S.
sentiments and attitudes have been conventional wisdom since the later
1960s. Moreover, aspects of the worldview of this culture have been ab-
sorbed over time into the mainstream of public opinion through the media
and educational institutions.6 While the adversary culture still overlaps with
the Left, a purely political definition does not do it justice. Rather, the atti-
tudes and beliefs in question involve matters not considered central to poli-
tics at earlier times: sense of identity, cultural norms, matters of taste. Rus-
sell Jacoby’s comment about alienation captures what is distinctive about the
adversarial disposition: “Alienation once referred to social relations and la-
bor, signifying an objective condition. Later it turned into an irritation or an-
noyance. ‘I am alienated’ someone will announce, meaning, ‘I am unhappy
or uncomfortable.’”7
A heightened receptivity to the real or perceived injustices of American so-
ciety has a long tradition; high expectations and the value placed on noncon-
formity have deep roots in American social and cultural history. Strong be-
liefs in the perfectibility of human beings and institutions have for centuries
been an essential attribute of the American view of the world, as has an inde-
fatigable optimism regarding the solubility of all social, political, and personal
problems. The social critical temper of the adversary culture has always fed
on the high expectations that American society has generated and nurtured
from its earliest days.
206 Chapter Twenty-five

The current adversary culture descends from the 1960s, the last high wa-
termark of social discontent. But while the most obvious and powerful causes
were the Vietnam War, civil rights, and women’s liberation, the adversary cul-
ture may also be seen as a response to the cumulative impact of modernity.
Preeminent among the corrosive effects of modernity are the decline of the
sense of purpose and community, the weakening of social solidarity and the
problems of identity.
The stalwarts of the adversary culture—the likes of Noam Chomsky, Gore
Vidal, Susan Sontag, and others—basically blamed the United States for the
attack, invoking the “root causes,” that is to say, American policies and atti-
tudes. But there were also new dissenters from the conventional adversarial
wisdom, such as Christopher Hitchens and Paul Berman.8 Dissidents on the
moderate left included Michael Walzer, who emphatically rejected the oft-
repeated proposition that poverty and inequality explain terrorism. He sug-
gested instead a “cultural-religious-political explanation” that emphasized the
obsession with an Enemy embraced by people who are “ideologically or the-
ologically degraded.”9 Christopher Hitchens criticized those on the left who
were reluctant to acknowledge that “the bombers of Manhattan represent fas-
cism with an Islamic face.” He reminded fellow leftists that what Islamic mil-
itants “abominate about ‘the West’ is not what Western liberals don’t like.”10
Ellen Willis, a columnist for the Village Voice and a journalism professor at
NYU, argued that “the lessons of Vietnam” do not apply to Afghanistan and
favored committing ground troops in the war.11 Richard Falk argued that a U.S.
military response to 9/11 could be justified and sought to provide a legal-moral
framework for “a just response”—although he did feel compelled to observe
that “a frenzy in the aftermath of the attacks [is] giving us reason to fear the
response almost as much as the initial, traumatizing provocation.”12
It is hard to know what proportion of those on the left experienced a con-
flict between newfound patriotic impulses and the adversarial outlook in the
aftermath of the September 11 attacks. Most public responses to September
11 from the adversarial left suggest the persistence of sentiments and attitudes
traceable to the late 1960s.

THEY HATE US FOR GOOD REASONS

Two major, closely linked arguments have been pursued among those on the
adversarial left that converge in assigning ultimate responsibility to the
United States for the attacks. The first is that if Arab terrorists harbored pro-
found hatred for this country, this hatred had to be well founded; in other
words, the United States must be hateful if it is hated. This proposition has
 The Resilience of the Adversary Culture 207

provided a welcome opportunity to enumerate America’s historic misdeeds,

which supposedly justify such hatreds. The second proposition focuses on the
alleged “root causes” of this hatred. The root causes of terrorism and the ha-
tred of the United States (which shade into one another)—members of the ad-
versary culture believe—should be understood rather than condemned. Em-
phasis on root causes leads to a deterministic, therapeutic view of the
terrorists who are seen as “spawned” by compelling social-political and eco-
nomic conditions beyond their control or full comprehension. They and their
beliefs are held to be products of authentic grievances: poverty, inequality,
backwardness, and social injustice. Of course this does not explain the moti-
vation of Osama bin Laden, his associates, and the well-educated middle
class suicide pilots.13
The “root cause” approach also proposes that hostility toward the United
States is inspired by American support for corrupt and repressive political
systems such as those in Pakistan, Egypt, and Saudi Arabia—as if the Islamic
terrorists opposed to these governments were anxious to replace them with
political democracies.
The responses of well-known figures of the adversary culture to September
11 illuminate the persistence of their convictions. Their moral indignation and
anger focused almost entirely on the actions and policies of the United States
and was largely devoid of corresponding sentiments regarding its avowed and
murderous enemies. Gore Vidal thus observed that “the USA is the most cor-
rupt political system on earth” and bin Laden was merely “responding to U.S.
foreign policy.”14 A particularly curious form of this argument was put forward
by a speaker at a Green Party conference: “The World Trade Center Disaster is
a globalized version of the Columbine High School Disaster. When you bully
people long enough they are going to strike back.”15 According to Professor
Thomas Laqueur of Berkeley, California, “on the scale of evil the New York
bombings are sadly not so extraordinary and our government has been responsi-
ble for many that are probably worse.” Frederic Jameson argued that “the Amer-
icans created bin Laden. . . . This is therefore a textbook example of dialectical
reversal.”16 Susan Sontag was far more enraged by the White House, our “ro-
botic President” and public figures who stood united behind him, than she was
by the terrorists: “this was not a ‘cowardly’ attack on ‘civilization’ or ‘liberty’ or
‘humanity’ or ‘the free world’ but an attack on the world’s self-proclaimed su-
perpower, undertaken as a consequence of specific American alliances and ac-
tions. . . . The unanimity of the sanctimonious, reality-concealing rhetoric
spouted by American officials and media commentators in recent days seems
. . . unworthy of a mature democracy.”17
Norman Mailer told a Dutch audience, “The WTC was not just an archi-
tectural monstrosity but also dreadful for people who didn’t work there, for it
208 Chapter Twenty-five

said to all those people: ‘If you can’t work up here, boy, you’re out of it. . . .’
Everything wrong with America led to the point where the country built that
tower of Babel, which consequently had to be destroyed.”18
There was an unmistakable discrepancy between the volume of compas-
sion extended to the wholly unintended civilian victims of U.S. air strikes
against the Taliban and the expressions of compassion for the wholly intended
victims of the suicide pilots. As on so many similar occasions, moral equiva-
lence was invoked. Noam Chomsky, perhaps the most durable and represen-
tative figure of the adversary culture, proposed that the attacks of September
11 were eclipsed by the American bombing of the pharmaceutical factory in
the Sudan and numerous other American atrocities.19 He asserted that “the
United States had killed thousands of innocent civilians in Somalia, Sudan
and Nicaragua—actions far more ‘devastating’ than the September 11 at-
tacks—and was now trying to ‘destroy the hunger-stricken country’ of
Afghanistan.”20 Edward Said, similarly prominent, made clear (in the Egypt-
ian daily Al-Ahram) that he sees the United States as a genocidal power with
a “history of reducing whole peoples, countries and even continents to ruin
by nothing short of holocaust.”21 Michael Mandel, a law professor in Toronto,
made no bones about his belief that, “The bombing of Afghanistan is the le-
gal and moral equivalent of what was done to the Americans on September
11.”22 Eric Foner of Columbia University could not decide “which is more
frightening: the horror that engulfed New York City or the apocalyptic rheto-
ric emanating daily from the White House.”23 Michael Klare, a professor of
“peace studies and world security studies” at Hampshire College (Amherst,
Massachusetts), became “despondent” because “the United States was ratch-
eting up a strong military response to September 11.” He professed to be con-
sumed by fear “that U.S. military reprisals would set off a renewed cycle of
terrorist attacks and violence.”24 The General Secretary of the American
Friends Service Committee said, “[O]ur history teaches us that bloodshed
leads only to more bloodshed. . . .We call upon our president and Congress to
stop the bombing. . . . Our grief is not a cry for retaliation. Terrorism must be
stopped at its root cause.”25 Vivian Gornick (author of The Romance of Amer-
ican Communism) agreed: “Force will get us nowhere. It is reparations that
are owing, not retribution.”26 Alice Walker “firmly believe[d] that the only
punishment that works is love.”27 Richard Gere, the actor, similarly advised,
“If you can see the terrorists as a relative who’s dangerously sick . . . the med-
icine is love and compassion.”28 Oliver Stone called the September 11 attacks
“a revolt” and equated the Palestinians dancing in the streets at the news of
the attacks with those who publicly rejoiced at the news of the French and
Russian Revolutions.29
 The Resilience of the Adversary Culture 209

Another oft-repeated theme of the adversary culture also reappeared: that

America violates its own best values. Thus Russell Means, the American In-
dian activist who led the 1973 uprising at Wounded Knee, said, “It’s what I
used to see when I was behind the so-called Iron Curtain touring Eastern Eu-
rope. It’s what I used to see in Nicaragua and Colombia . . . [namely] the on-
going deprivation of individual liberties and violations of the U.S. Constitu-
tion by the Federal Government. . . . The government lost all constitutional
responsibility and has become an outlaw.”30
Terry Eagleton was equally convinced that “They [the Bush administra-
tion] will use the crisis as an excuse to trample on our civil liberties,”31 while
the cover of Gore Vidal’s new book, The End of Liberty: Toward a New To-
talitarianism, showed the Statue of Liberty gagged with a U.S. flag. Alexan-
der Cockburn averred that the war in Afghanistan was “about the defense of
the American Empire.”32 Two feminists found no difference (moral equiva-
lence again) between the practices of a religious police state and the influence
of fashions in American society: “Taliban rule has dictated that women be
fully covered whenever they enter the public realm. . . . During the 20th cen-
tury, American culture has dictated [sic] a nearly complete uncovering of the
female form. . . . The war on terrorism has certainly raised our awareness of
the ways in which women’s bodies are controlled by a repressive regime in a
far away land, but what about the constraints on women’s bodies here at
home. . . ? The burka and the bikini represent opposite ends of the political
spectrum.”33 Ralph Nader, meanwhile, was led to conclude that “there is an
escalation of the corporate takeover of the United States. The ground and soil
are ripe for a revolt by the American people.”34
A fine example of a visceral response to the American flag and what it
stands for came from Katha Pollit of The Nation, who revealed that “my
daughter who goes to Stuyvesant High School only blocks from the World
Trade Center, thinks we should fly an American flag out our window. Defi-
nitely not, I say: The flag stands for jingoism and vengeance and war.”35 A
physics professor at the University of Massachusetts (Amherst) shared these
sentiments: “To many ordinary people . . . around the globe the U.S. has done
terrible things. . . . If I think about the flag, I have to think about it from the
point of view of those people.”36 At Amherst College, war protesters (al-
legedly students from nearby Hampshire College) burned the flag while
chanting “this flag doesn’t represent me.”37
It was not only the celebrities of the adversary culture who found the
events of September 11 an appropriate occasion for reaffirming their animos-
ity toward American society. There were demonstrations on nearly 200 cam-
puses and in several major cities as a “nationwide network of more than 150
210 Chapter Twenty-five

student antiwar groups . . . [emerged] holding campus vigils, protests, and

teach-ins.”38 The correspondence columns of local newspapers in and around
college campuses were flooded with letters expressing sentiments similar to
those of the better known critics of the United States quoted above.
A professor of journalism at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, re-
garded the attacks as the “predictable result of American policies . . . [that]
ignored the suffering of Palestinians. . . . How can we fail to see that our pol-
icy has created zealots and suicide bombers” [my emphasis].39 He, too, was
convinced that the adversaries of the United States are helpless pawns of so-
cial and historical forces, whereas the United States and its amoral leaders al-
ways have alternatives to choose from and can therefore be held morally cul-
pable.40 A professor in the sociology department at the same university
proposed that we must “find a way to reduce those alienating actions whereby
we create our own enemies.”41 At a Haverford College meeting on Septem-
ber 14, an emeritus professor suggested that “the United States was the most
violent nation on earth and ended by saying, ‘We are complicit.’” At a teach-
in at the University of North Carolina, “one lecturer told the students that if
he were President he would first apologize to the widows and orphans, the
tortured and impoverished and all the other millions of other victims of Amer-
ican imperialism.” University of Texas Professor Robert Jensen told his stu-
dents and peers that the attack “was no more despicable than the massive acts
of terrorism . . . that the U.S. government had committed during my life-
time.”42 Barbara Foley, professor of English at Rutgers University, warned
her students, “Be aware that whatever its proximate cause, the ultimate cause
[of the attacks] is the fascism of u.s. [sic] foreign policy over the past many
decades.”43
Members of the Middle East Studies Association, a professional academic
group, also reached the conclusion that the United States bore primary re-
sponsibility for the terrorist attacks (which, by the way, they refuse to desig-
nate as such).44 At the 2001 annual meeting of the association, one panelist
said, “We have not shown that our actions differentiate us from those who at-
tacked us.” An elderly professor in the audience declared, “We ought to be re-
minded of our responsibility for Hiroshima and Nagasaki and understand that
we are not so good,” receiving a round of applause. The moderator fully en-
dorsed his view.45

STYLE AND SUBSTANCE

Many academic members of the adversary culture also have in common an ir-
resistible attraction to obscure theorizing and arcane jargon, preferring eso-
 The Resilience of the Adversary Culture 211

teric turns of phrase and opaque abstractions to concreteness and specificity.

One explanation may be the parochial elitism of numerous academic intel-
lectuals who write mainly for one another and whose inaccessible language
and terminology “signifies” their vanguard status. The second explanation
may be the more important, however. The discontent that animates many crit-
ics of American (and Western) society and has become a major source of their
sense of identity and self-esteem is murky and shapeless. Its origins may not
be clear even to those consumed by it; diffuse and contradictory grievances,
impulses, unfathomable sentiments, and personal resentments are inherently
difficult to express in precise and accessible language. Form follows function:
lack of clarity in style reflects amorphous motives and beliefs; Russell Jacoby
calls them “postcoherent thinkers.”46 A statement of the “Transnational Fem-
inist Practices Against War” illustrates what he has in mind:

As feminist theorists of transnational and postmodern cultural formations . . . we

offer the following response to the events of September 11 and its aftermath:
First and foremost, we need to analyze the thoroughly gendered and racialized
effects of nationalism and to identify what kinds of inclusions and exclusions
are being enacted. . . . We see that instead of a necessary historical material and
geopolitical analysis of 9-11, the emerging nationalist discourses consist of
highly sentimentalized narratives that . . . re-inscribe compulsory heterosexual-
ity and the rigidly dichotomized gender roles. . . . A number of icons constitute
the ideal types in the drama of nationalist domesticity.47

It is among the attractions of obscurity that what people cannot fully com-
prehend is more difficult to criticize and refute. But it is also the case that
some people are impressed by what they cannot fully understand, what prom-
ises some great, lurking, not fully penetrable revelation. A paragraph from the
newly popular volume Empire, coauthored by an American literary scholar
and an imprisoned Italian terrorist, provides further illustration:

In the logic of colonialist representations, the construction of a separate colo-

nized other and the segregation of identity and alterity turns out paradoxically
to be at once absolute and extremely intimate. The process consists, in fact, of
the moments that are dialectically related. In the first moment difference has to
be pushed to the extreme. In the colonial imagination the colonized is not sim-
ply an other banished outside the realm of civilization; rather it is grasped or
produced as Other, as the absolute negation, as the most distant point on the
horizon.48

Doubtless there are connections and affinities between the attractions of

obscurity, profound political misjudgments, and commonsense-defying be-
liefs. As Orwell observed, only intellectuals are capable of believing certain
212 Chapter Twenty-five

kinds of nonsense. Could, for example, anybody without the benefits of

higher education and not living in an academic setting believe (with Michael
Hardt and Antonio Negri, the authors of Empire) that the 1992 Los Angeles
riots were “the most radical and powerful struggles of the final years of the
20th century”?49

THEN AND NOW

The adversarial generation of the 1960s holds on to a conception of America

that is both malignant and inauthentic, and to a sense of identity of the fear-
less fighter for truth and social justice. This is the generation that had the op-
portunity and pleasure to glorify its youth by linking it to the causes of the
1960s. Perhaps therein lies the key to its durability, and in the critical mass of
those who came of age together when a generic, youthful idealism converged
with the rise of idealistic social movements and causes of the time.
But age and mortality are taking their toll on the leading figures of the ad-
versary (and counterculture) rooted in the 1960s. Eqbal Ahmad, William
Sloan Coffin, David Dellinger, William Kunstler, Norman Mailer, Susan Son-
tag, I. F. Stone, and Edward Said passed away. Other influential representa-
tives of this culture are pushing their seventies or are older, including the
Berrigan brothers, Noam Chomsky, Ramsey Clark, Angela Davis, E. L. Doc-
torow, Barbara Ehrenreich, Richard Falk, Stanley Fish, Tom Hayden, Fred-
eric Jameson, Jonathan Kozol, Ralph Nader, Victor Navasky, Michael Par-
enti, Theodore Roszak, Paul Sweezy, and Howard Zinn. Even Bill Ayers, the
cheerfully unrepentant Weatherman-bomber, is in his mid-sixties. The beliefs
of this aging subculture, however, are being passed on to segments of the
younger generations. American society since the end of the Cold War has con-
tinued to produce high expectations (that cannot be met) and the correspon-
ding disappointments often turn into social criticism. Some young people are
consumed by the same blend of incoherent discontent and diffuse idealism
that characterized the protestors of the 1960s. They, too, seem to be in the grip
of the conviction that “something is terribly wrong” with this society—a con-
viction that precedes the identification of the specific wrongs. When subse-
quently identified, the specific flaws become proof of the prior, underlying
belief in pervasive corruption and thoroughgoing moral decay.
This smaller generation of “peace activists” today also resembles earlier
ones in that they appear to be not so much opposed to all wars but only those
waged by the United States (or Israel). Given their conviction that American
society is profoundly unjust, any war its government may wage is bound to
be judged immoral. However, should there appear on the horizon some new
 The Resilience of the Adversary Culture 213

“national liberation movement” or militant cause that uses a congenial and

idealistic rhetoric, the putative devotion to peace would vanish and be re-
placed by support for the new, liberating, and authentic revolutionary violence
(Chiapas? Shining Path? Maoists in Nepal?).
A recent sympathetic portrait of such young people in the New York Times
educational supplement demonstrates how present attitudes replicate those
prevalent in the 1960s. The “typical student activist” of our times portrayed
in the article is one of the leaders of “Students for Social Equality.” He “is fu-
eled by a nagging anger over the fact that there are haves and have-nots, op-
pressors and the oppressed.” (His father is a general contractor on Long Is-
land, and both parents are Republican.) His favorite words are “love,”
“unity,” “solidarity,” and “justice,” along with “beautiful”—as in “unity is
beautiful.” In his conversation with the reporter “he searches for the roots of
his unrest.” He and others like him (one of them radicalized by the writings
of Howard Zinn) radiate “an ardor not seen for several decades.” The main
character in the article was smitten by an antiglobalism demonstration: “It
was amazing how many people were out acting on their beliefs and coming
together. It was beautiful.” A protest at the military training center at Fort
Benning, too, “was a really beautiful protest, really spiritual.” Union Square
in New York City became a “magical place of unity” at an anti-Afghanistan
war demonstration. Among the activists, the reporter observes, “there is a lot
of raging against the machine.”50
Many readers, at least of a certain age, will recall that “raging against the
machine” was the main theme of Mario Savio’s fiery oration during the Free
Speech demonstrations at Berkeley in 1964. Then and now “the machine”
stood for impersonality, lack of community and feeling, “profits above peo-
ple,” and the fear of being crushed by forces over which one has no control.
Then, as now, for many of the alienated the personal realm and its concerns
ultimately dwarf and displace what is truly political. American society will
continue to generate a mixture of high expectations, unease, and discontent
that is its hallmark and that of modernity.

NOTES

1. Dowd, “Happy in Free Fall,” New York Times, May 7, 1997.

2. Ehrenreich, Village Voice, October 9, 2001, 54.
3. Hertzberg, New Yorker, November 5, 2001, 37.
4. Kelly, “A Renaissance of Liberalism,” Atlantic Monthly, January 2002, 19.
5. Packer, “Recapturing the Flag,” New York Times Magazine, September 30,
2001, 15.
214 Chapter Twenty-five

6. Roger Kimball has called this the “mainstreaming of radicalism.” See his The
Long March (San Francisco: Encounter Books, 2000), 26. See also Gertrude Him-
melfarb, One Nation, Two Cultures (New York: Knopf, 1999).
7. Jacoby, The End of Utopia (New York: Basic Books, 1999), 121.
8. Podhoretz, “Return of the ‘Jackal Bins,’” Commentary, April 2002, 29.
9. Walzer, “Five Questions About Terrorism,” Dissent (Winter 2002), 6.
10. Hitchens, “Against Rationalization,” Nation, October 8, 2001, 8. See also his
“Minority Report,” Nation, October 22, 2001.
11. Letter, New York Times, November 1, 2001.
12. Falk, “A Just Response,” Nation, October 8, 2001, 15.
13. Daniel Pipes refutes the argument that poverty causes terrorism in “God
and Mammon: Does Poverty Cause Militant Islam?” National Interest (Winter
2001/2002).
14. New Statesman (London), October 15, 2001, 18–19; see also “Author Vidal
Blames U.S. for Conflict,” Boston Globe, November 24, 2001.
15. Progressive Review, October 29, 2001.
16. Laqueur and Jameson quoted in Tony Judt, “America and the War,” New York
Review of Books, November 15, 2001, 4.
17. Susan Sontag, “The Talk of the Town,” New Yorker, September 24, 2001, 32.
18. Mailer quoted in New Republic, November 26, 2001, 8.
19. Quoted in David Horowitz, The Ayatollah of American Hate (Los Angeles:
Center for the Study of Popular Culture, 2001), 7.
20. Quoted in New Republic, December 10, 2001, 9.
21. Quoted in Weekly Standard, October 8, 2001, 35.
22. Globe and Mail (Toronto), October 9, 2001.
23. Foner in the London Review of Books, October 4, 2001.
24. Klare, Hampshire Life (Northampton, Mass.), September 28, 2001, 8, 10.
25. Letter, New York Times, October 9, 2001.
26. New Republic, October 15, 2001, 10.
27. Walker, Village Voice, October 9, 2001, 54.
28. Quoted in New Republic, October 29, 2001, 10.
29. “Voices of Reason? Not in Hollywood,” Boston Globe, October 23, 2001.
30. Associated Press Symposium, “How Have We Been Changed?” Daily Hamp-
shire Gazette (Northampton, Mass.), October 13–14, 2001.
31. Quoted in Judt, “America and the War,” 4.
32. “The Left and the Just War,” Nation, November 22, 2001, 10.
33. Joan Jacobs Brumberg and Jacquelyn Jackson in Boston Globe, November 23,
2001.
34. Quoted in The New Republic, November 19, 2001, 10.
35. Pollit, “Put Out No Flags,” Nation, October 8, 2001, 7.
36. Quoted in “How Words Spoken Sept. 10 Came Back to Haunt the Speaker,”
Wall Street Journal, October 10, 2001.
37. “Pro-America Rally Upset by Flag Burners,” Daily Hampshire Gazette, Octo-
ber 19, 2001.
 The Resilience of the Adversary Culture 215

38. Lisa Featherstone, “A Peaceful Justice?” Nation, October 22, 2001, 18.
39. Bill Israel, “A Policy of Neglect and Cowardice,” Mass. Daily Collegian
(Amherst, Mass.), September 12, 2001.
40. Such selective determinism has been with us for a long time. See Paul Hollan-
der, “Sociology, Selective Determinism and the Rise of Expectations,” American So-
ciologist (November 1973).
41. Jay Demerath, September 15, 2001, departmental e-mail, University of Mass-
achusetts, Amherst.
42. Each incident or statement quoted in “The Best and the Brightest,” Wall Street
Journal, October 2, 2001.
43. Foley, quoted in New Criterion, October 2001, 2.
44. The same is true of spokesmen for the major human rights organizations who
argue that “terrorism” lacks clear definition. See Commentary, January 2002, 28.
45. Quoted in New Republic, December 3, 2001, 15, 17.
46. Jacoby, The End of Utopia, 141. See also Jay Tolson, “Wittgenstein’s Curse,”
Wilson Quarterly (Fall 2001).
47. E-mail posted by Augustin Lao-Montes of the Department of Sociology at the
University of Massachusetts, Amherst, October 29, 2001.
48. Quoted in New Criterion, October 2001, 20.
49. Quoted in New Criterion, October 2001, 20.
50. Abby Ellin, “The Making of a Student Activist: How a Long Island Boy
Learned to Start Worrying and Hate the Bombs,” New York Times (Educational Sup-
plement), November 11, 2001, 26–28. See also Andrew Hsiao, “Make Noise Not War:
A Peace Movement Grows in New York and Beyond,” Village Voice, October 9, 2001.
 Chapter Twenty-six

The Chomsky Phenomenon

Discussing a volume devoted to critiques of Noam Chomsky’s (or anyone

else’s) ideas should entail a balanced evaluation of the views in question. But
such an evaluation is difficult to accomplish when the individual in question
is possessed of an unwavering self-righteousness and when the views exam-
ined are so extreme, unbalanced, and immoderate that their quality could only
be overlooked by one of his most devoted disciples. Needless to say we are
not talking here about Chomsky the linguist (his original, if by now distant,
claim to fame) but about Chomsky the political commentator, world class so-
cial critic, relentless detractor of U.S. foreign policy, scourge of Israel, de-
fender of Holocaust deniers, and dedicated proponent of the belief that the
United States has been responsible for most evil in the world, and is ruled by
an elite that is the most corrupt, ruthless, and depraved ever known in history.
We are also talking about the man who has been propounding these views for
almost half a century with a singular zeal, implausible repetitiveness, and un-
flagging determination
Unknown even to critics of his political ideas who are ready to concede his
excellence in linguistics, Chomsky’s contributions to that field have also been
questionable and increasingly obsolete, two linguists in this volume argue. To
wit, “a remarkable feature of Chomsky’s linguistic writings is how few of
them (the percentage has shrunk to almost zero over time) are professionally
refereed works in linguistic journals” write Robert Levin and Paul Postal,
both professors of linguistics. Whatever the quality of his intellectual contri-
butions to political discourse or linguistics, his apparent impact and durable
popularity as well as the abundant laudatory literature about him already in
print justify a comprehensive critical examination of his ideas such as this
volume provides, the first of its kind.

216
 The Chomsky Phenomenon 217

Chomsky’s political beliefs and pronouncements deserve critical analysis

not because of their originality but because of the extraordinary certitude with
which they have been held, the unusual manner in which they have been ex-
pressed, and their popularity among educated publics. According to Larissa
McFarquhar’s portrait of him in The New Yorker (March 31, 2003), he was
“preoccupied with politics even as a child and his views have not changed
significantly since he was ten.” He has also been alleged to be one of the ten
most often cited authors of all times and his recent pamphlet 9-11 was trans-
lated into twenty-three languages and published in twenty-six countries.
There have been many critiques of Chomsky but until the appearance of
this volume they have been scattered, inaccessible and unsystematic. The vol-
ume here reviewed does remedy this state of affairs up to a point. Part I, en-
titled “Chomsky, The World and the Word,” contains two essays on his views
on foreign affairs (on Southeast Asia and the Cold War) and one on his cri-
tiques of the American mass media, a somewhat dubious grouping. In part II,
“Chomsky and the Jews,” we learn about his animus toward Israel and of his
support of the Holocaust deniers. Part III is entitled “Chomsky and the War
on Terror” and its two essays respectively address his attitude toward 9/11
and his anti-Americanism. (Since anti-Americanism informs and permeates
all his nonlinguistic utterances, this chapter could have been put anywhere.)
The remaining two essays in part IV reassess his contribution to linguistics.
The contributing authors (in addition to the editors who wrote the introduc-
tion as well as two substantive chapters) are Paul Bogdanor, Werner Cohn, Eli
Lehrer, Robert Levine, Stephen Morris, Thomas Nichols, Paul Postal, Ronald
Radosh, and John Williamson.
While the volume does address Chomsky’s major preoccupations—U.S.
foreign policy and its supposed subordination to economic interests (capital-
ism), the misdeeds of Israel, the corruptions of the American media, as well
as his work in linguistics—gaps remain. For instance, a concluding, overview
chapter would have been useful to tie together the individual chapters, and the
organization of the volume could have been more coherent. A chapter on his
inimitable polemical style and its possible connection to his ideas about lan-
guage would have been interesting. Also missing is a chapter that could have
tried to explain the origins of his beliefs and attitudes, something biographi-
cal or psycho-historical, as distinct from, and in addition to, expounding and
dissecting them. While he is by no means the only Jewish detractor of Israel,
his hostility is so intense and extreme that some specific explanation is called
for, especially when it is combined with his defense of the Holocaust deniers.
The editors note briefly that “His animus toward Israel is so great . . . that it
seems to call for a psychological explanation, especially given the fact that
his father . . . was a Hebrew teacher; his mother wrote children’s stories about
218 Chapter Twenty-six

the heroism of Jews trying to form a new country in the face of Arab hatred;
and Chomsky himself was once a member of a pro-Israel youth group.” Un-
fortunately these matters are not followed up or amplified perhaps because
the editors considered it inappropriate to try to connect the personal and the
political.
To say the least, Chomsky has been a controversial and polarizing figure
ever since he exchanged the role of acclaimed linguist for relentless social
critic during the Vietnam War. While he has a huge and devoted following
abroad as well as in the United States, he has also been widely criticized for
his intemperate and extreme pronouncements even by those on the left who
share many of his beliefs. In particular, his respectability suffered damage due
to his downplaying of the Cambodian massacres under Pol Pot, confidently
and scornfully dismissing the refugee accounts of their magnitude in his 1977
Nation article and his book, After the Cataclysm, published in 1979. His in-
explicable support for the French Holocaust denier Robert Faurisson and his
followers gave pause to many. He has also shown an episodic enthusiasm for
discredited third-world dictatorships that apparently impressed him with their
revolutionary-socialist credentials and rhetoric, such as Vietnam, Cambodia,
Mao’s China, Cuba, Grenada, and Sandinista Nicaragua. He has argued tire-
lessly that the United States was determined to destroy or contain such coun-
tries because they offered inspiring alternatives, irresistible examples of so-
cial change and reform that could have spread all over the world, and even to
the United States.
Since 9/11 new waves of global (and domestic) anti-Americanism lifted
him once more to greater prominence as he resumed the role of giving ex-
pression to the feelings of all those unyieldingly hostile to the United States
at home and abroad. In particular, he advanced with great relish and confi-
dence the view that the United States deserved the acts of terror (9/11) given
its own, far greater acts of evil over time as the foremost terrorist entity in the
world.
Having been the prototypical public intellectual, endlessly disseminating
his ideas in books, articles, interviews, public appearances, and the mass me-
dia, and one whose sense of identity appears to be have been rooted in re-
lentless, moralizing social-political criticism, Chomsky should be of great in-
terest to the sociologist of knowledge as well as to students of political
morality and political psychology. Even among the many committed critics of
American society and U.S. foreign policy he stands out by virtue of the
uncommonly extreme and strident character of his indictment. Widespread
receptivity to his views in the most varied geographic and cultural settings
stimulate further scrutiny of the Chomsky phenomenon, although it appears
 The Chomsky Phenomenon 219

that his most devoted followers in this country are concentrated among the
aging former activists of the 1960s, as well as among groups of college stu-
dents both at home and abroad. He stimulates further curiosity (of a more psy-
chological nature) on account of displaying an exceptional self-assurance that
permeates all of his utterances; he rarely fails to suggest, matter-of-factly and
casually, that only the most morally depraved or intellectually stunted would
disagree with his views.
It is characteristic of Chomsky’s style that the most outlandish propositions
are delivered as self-evident; they are matters of course, taken for granted ver-
ities embedded in a quasi-rationalistic style. He routinely lubricates and lards
his arguments with expressions such as: “it is surely not in doubt that”; “as-
suming that facts matter”; “nobody with even a shred of honesty would dis-
agree”; “if we are not moral hypocrites we would agree that”; “it is an obvi-
ous truism that”; “the available facts lead to one clear conclusion”; “observers
of evident bias and low credibility” (those with whom he disagrees) while
others supporting his beliefs are “widely respected” with “excellent creden-
tials.” “Evidence from sources that seem to deserve hearing” invariably sup-
port his contentions, while authors he dismisses “might have troubled to in-
quire into the source of [their] allegations.” Views he rejects are never
“subject to possible verification” or possess “a shred of credibility.” There are
also endless references and appeals to the “serious reader,” “serious observer,”
or “serious analyst” who would unfailingly endorse his views as would those
of “minimal intelligence” or honesty.
Chomsky’s statements, beliefs, and public postures confirm (if more con-
firmation is needed) that received notions of the nature of intellectuals need
substantial revision. As readers of Society know, it used to be widely as-
sumed that the key, defining characteristic of intellectuals is a generally
(rather than selectively) critical, questioning, and skeptical mindset that is
not confined to the critiques of particular, predetermined trends, policies, in-
stitutions, or social-political phenomena. Nor is such an attitude compatible
with the trusting acceptance of assertions emanating from political entities fa-
vored, let alone with support for political systems that institutionalize the
suppression of free expression. The “true intellectual” is also supposed to es-
chew rhetorical excess and should be capable of making well-grounded,
sober distinctions between different social-political phenomena and different
kinds of human folly and misconduct.
The proverbial critical intellectual is expected to protest and expose social in-
justice, political repression, and fraudulent political rhetoric wherever encoun-
tered; his interest in appearance and reality, theory, and practice is not sup-
posed to be confined to any particular social setting or political entity.
220 Chapter Twenty-six

Needless to say the true intellectual is also anxious to discover facts and
information relevant to his argument and truth-seeking and not only those
which support and confirm his existing beliefs and preferences. He or she
should be capable of making a determined attempt to approach the social-
political world with an open mind, instead of a doctrinaire, predictable, and
predetermined set of ideas that leads to selective perception and misrepre-
sentation.
If indeed the attributes noted above define the “true intellectual,” then
Chomsky falls short; it would be more reasonable to classify him as a certain
kind of “true believer” whose beliefs are, however, largely negative. Chom-
sky endlessly exposes evil (as he sees it) and seethes with moral indignation
but is surprisingly reticent to offer alternative ideas about desirable social-
political arrangements except for his occasional endorsements of some third-
world dictatorships that earned his sympathy because of their socialist rheto-
ric and hatred of the United States. He offers next to nothing approximating
a transformative social-political blueprint or vision, nothing specific as to
what social-political arrangements should replace the endemic corruption and
evil dominating American life and institutions as he sees them. In all these re-
spects there is a strong resemblance between Chomsky and Michael Moore,
except that Moore does not claim to be an intellectual or an impartial,
supremely rational observer of the social-political world.
What then are the major critical findings of the various authors in this vol-
ume? The most serious is that Chomsky’s political assertions are riddled with
misrepresentation, and the evidence for his assertions is questionable. This is
not merely a matter of exaggeration and distortion, which too abound in his
statements. Two linguists, Paul Postal and Robert Levine, who have known
and worked for him, observed that “the two strands of Chomsky’s work [the
political and the linguistic] manifest exactly the same key properties: a deep
disregard and contempt for truth, a monumental disdain for standards of in-
quiry . . . and a penchant for verbally abusing those who disagree with him.”
He makes claims and assertions that can be disproved without much dif-
ficulty, including his frequent insistence that he did not make the often-
embarrassing statements in question. A striking case in point was an article in
the New Yorker (cited above) in which he was quoted as saying in class (at
MIT) that the United States in World War II supported anti-Soviet military
units under Nazi control which slowed down the liberation of Nazi death
camps by the Soviet forces, resulting in increased number of inmates killed
in these camps; hence, the United States contributed to the Nazi killing of in-
nocents. The author of the chapter (John Williamson), having read these state-
ments, asked Chomsky (by e-mail) for some evidence and elaboration of the
allegation. Chomsky responded (by e-mail) “first by saying that MacFarquhar
 The Chomsky Phenomenon 221

[the author of the article] had manufactured all the statements attributed to
him on the subject; and then by referring me to an obscure source that he said
would support the claim which he said he hadn’t made.” John Williamson
also asked the reporter if indeed Chomsky had made the statement, which she
confirmed and also made available videotape of Chomsky’s statement un-
ambiguously vindicating her. The source Chomsky referred to as supporting
his allegation (he denied making) “proved no such thing” as many quotes
from it (cited in the Williamson essay) make clear. Williamson reached the
conclusion (after a prolonged e-mail exchange with Chomsky) that “no fact
outweighed his opinion; no historical resource, no matter how impeccable,
could shake his idée fixe.”
More generally, several contributors to the volume note Chomsky’s ques-
tionable use of sources or references which often have no relevance to his as-
sertions: “His admirers often cite the huge number of footnotes . . . as proof
of his impeccable scholarship. But the copious references are there to create
a kind of pseudo-academic smog: many of them . . . are so vague as to be use-
less. Quite often his citations . . . only lead the reader back self-referentially
to another of Chomsky’s own works in which he makes the same unsupported
assertion. . . .” He is also criticized for “mutilating quotations that his readers
are unable to verify” and for “a strategy for creating a Potemkin village of in-
tellectual authenticity.”
Chomsky’s support of leftist, third-world dictatorships is another source of
criticism. On his guided tour of North Vietnam in 1970 he discerned “a high
degree of democratic participation at the village and regional level” that he
was in no position to perceive relying as he did on his guides to interpret North
Vietnamese political realities. Even worse was his attempt to justify Viet-
cong terror: “Don’t accept the view that we can just condemn the [National
Liberation Front] terror, period, because it was so horrible. I think we really
have to ask questions of comparative costs . . . if we are going to take a moral
position on this—and I think we should—we have to ask both what are the
consequences of using and not using terror. If it were true that the conse-
quences of not using terror would be that the peasantry in Vietnam would
continue to live in the state of the peasantry of the Philippines, then I think
the use of terror would be justified.” This was a classical ends-justify-the-
means reasoning further undermined by Chomsky’s obvious inability to know
how the peasants in Vietnam lived under the communist regime and how that
compared with peasant life in the Philippines—of which, in all probability, he
knew even less.
As quoted in the May 2002 New Criterion (by Keith Windschuttle), he
once called China under Mao “an important example of a new society in
which very interesting and positive things happened . . . in which a good deal
222 Chapter Twenty-six

of collectivization and communization was really based on mass participation

and took place after a level of understanding has been reached in the peas-
antry. . . .” Again it would be interesting to know what enabled him to reach
these conclusions other than the predisposition to sympathize with a puta-
tively socialist system.
While less favorably inclined toward the Soviet Union than the third-world
regimes noted above, he bitterly denounced Vaclav Havel for comparing the
United States favorably to the former Soviet Union. He wrote: “It is also
unnecessary to point out to the half a dozen or so sane people who remain [!]
that in comparison to the conditions imposed by US tyranny and violence,
East Europe under Russian rule was practically a paradise. . . .” In 1966 he
wrote in the Harvard Educational Review that not only did the United States
support and encourage terror in other countries but “[American] schools are
the first training ground for troops that will enforce the muted, unending ter-
ror of the status quo in the coming years of a projected American century; for
the technicians who will be developing the means for the extension of Ameri-
can power; for the intellectuals who can be counted on . . . to provide the ide-
ological justification for this . . . barbarism. . . .”
He compared Israeli conduct in Lebanon with the massacres of Pol Pot he
had earlier tried to minimize. Even more grotesquely he saw moral equiva-
lence between Israel’s rescue of its hijacked hostages from Entebbe, Uganda,
in 1976 and the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, writing that the Israeli ac-
tion should be compared to “other military exploits, no less dramatic, that did
not arouse such awed admiration in the American press,” notably the Japa-
nese attack on Pearl Harbor.
Chomsky’s political judgment and discernment is further reflected in his
recent claims that the American bombardment of the chemical factory in Su-
dan (which was carried out at night to minimize casualties) was more vicious
than the attacks of 9/11: “The terrorist attacks were major atrocities. In scale
they may not reach the level of many others, for example, Clinton’s bombing
of the Sudan . . . destroying half its pharmaceutical supplies and killing un-
known numbers of people. . . .”
Then there is his claim of “the silent genocide” the United States was
preparing to commit against the people of Afghanistan by preventing food
supplies to reach them (“we are in the midst of apparently trying to murder 3
or 4 million people, not Taliban, of course, their victims”—a claim totally
groundless notwithstanding his insistence that it was supported by “grim
warnings from virtually every knowledgeable source.”
The problem with such and other similar assertions is not merely that they
are untrue and therefore unethical. Just as insidious is his contribution to the
steady corruption of the capacity for moral discernment and judgment by res-
 The Chomsky Phenomenon 223

olutely lumping together phenomena that are in fact morally and factually
quite dissimilar. Chomsky has been the most ardent and determined practi-
tioner of the groundless attribution of moral equivalence to different political
entities and actors, which, on closer inspection reveals that behind the appar-
ent equivalence looms the unsurpassable evil, represented by the United
States and Israel. Not only did he routinely equate the United States with the
U.S.S.R. (always making clear that he found the former far more dangerous
and immoral than the latter), he also routinely compared the United States
(and Israel) to Nazi Germany—a practice that continues.
Chomsky has always dismissed opposition to communist systems and
movements as a smokescreen for nefarious American policies and objectives.
He wrote that “The ideology of anti-communism has served as a highly ef-
fective technique of popular mobilization in support of American policies of
intervention and subversion in the postwar period.” In other words, it was an
opiate of the people rather than a set of ideas justifiably critical of such sys-
tems.
There is finally Chomsky’s puzzling defense of Faurisson and his fellow
Holocaust revisionists/deniers. After all, one can be a determined, no-holds-
barred critic of the United States, capitalism, globalism, Israel, or the whole
Western world (as many have been) without supporting individuals and
groups whose fantastic beliefs are embedded in and conditioned by anti-
Semitism. Chomsky has always claimed that he supports Faurisson merely as
a gesture in defense of free expression, or intellectual freedom. But even if
this were true, he has been exercising his libertarian impulses quite selectively:
the world is full of groups and individuals expressing foolish, grotesque, or
hate-filled beliefs; yet, Chomsky did not rush to their defense unless he could
implicate the United States or Israel (or their allies) in the infringements of
free expression. Genuine civil libertarians “while they will give legal aid to
Nazis . . . will not associate with Nazis, collaborate with Nazis politically,
publish their book with Nazi publishers, or allow their articles to be printed
in Nazi journals. On these counts alone, Chomsky is not civil libertarian,” as
Werner Cohn argues in this volume. Nor would civil libertarians defend Fau-
risson (as Chomsky had) “as an ‘apolitical liberal’ whose work was based on
‘extensive historical research’” and dispute his anti-Semitism. Chomsky fur-
ther argued, in defense of Faurisson, that “everyone should have the right of
free speech, including fascists and anti-Semites, but that Faurisson was nei-
ther of these.” It should also be noted that while Chomsky repeatedly asserted
that he did not share Faurisson’s views, he never actually criticized him.
It is hardly surprising that Chomsky’s selective concern with the right to
free speech does not include those who criticize him or whose views he finds
distasteful. Even in the classroom he cannot tolerate disagreement and was
224 Chapter Twenty-six

observed “to berate for a long time” a student who disagreed with him and ig-
nored his attempts to speak. “People cried out ‘Let him talk!’ but to no avail.
Another student stood up . . . but Chomsky ignored him. People made loud,
disgruntled noises in protest of his treatment but Chomsky ignored those
too.”
While we do not know what motivates Chomsky, it is possible to offer
some suggestions to account for his influence and popularity. Clearly, he ap-
peals to all those who, for whatever reason share his beliefs and especially his
emotions but are incapable, or less capable, of articulating them with the
same skill and conviction. In all probability the most important appeal of his
messages is their pungent, resounding simplicity served up, as it were, with
trimmings of intellectual sophistication. As other ideologues, secular or reli-
gious, he offers a monochromatic, conspiratorial worldview in which evil is
unambiguously identified and denounced, over and over again, an activity
that satisfies a deep-seated scapegoating impulse in his audiences shared in
some measure by all human beings.
It should not be too difficult for social historians to explain why, at this
point in time, it is the United States (and Israel) that have become the most
inviting targets of these sentiments for groups dissatisfied with their lives and
the world around them and consumed by a variety of grievances which com-
bine the personal and the political.
 Chapter Twenty-seven

The Banality of Evil and the

Political Culture of Hatred

There was a time when the most stunning and premeditated forms of politi-
cal violence, exemplified by the Holocaust, were associated with the “banal-
ity of evil”—a concept introduced by Hannah Arendt. She popularized the
idea that the Holocaust was a form of bureaucratized mass murder carried out
by “desk murderers” who had no strong feelings about it, perfectly ordinary
human beings, such as Eichmann and his associates, impersonal and inter-
changeable “cogs” in the gigantic killing machine. Anybody could have per-
formed the task, no political passion or ideological conviction was involved
or required. It was implied that this type of violence was emblematic of
modernity and mass society, as were their key characteristics: anonymity, stan-
dardization, homogenization, impersonality, as well as increasing specializa-
tion and reliance on technology. Stanley Milgram’s experiments concerned
with obedience to authority further bolstered the notion that people are able
and willing to inflict pain and suffering on total strangers for no reason other
than their willingness to obey authority, as the Nazi executioners did.
In the wake of these theories it has become widely accepted—with a curi-
ous mixture of horror and relish—and especially among intellectuals, that all
of us are potentially amoral, robotic monsters, but monsters without convic-
tions, distinction, or originality. There was something morbidly fascinating
about the contrast between extraordinary moral outrages (such as the Nazis
perpetrated) and the pedestrian, mundane character of the perpetrators. The
popularity of these ideas was nurtured by the questioning of modernity that
brought us technology, mass production, efficiency, bureaucracy, impersonal-
ity, and the decline of community. These ideas were especially congenial with
the protest movements of the 1960s whose stock in trade were impassioned
critiques of impersonality, dehumanization, and faceless bureaucracies.

225
226 Chapter Twenty-seven

The “banality of evil” approach also lent itself to a generous extension of

the idea of “complicity” and the rejection of American (or any other Western)
society. If anybody could readily become a mass murderer, or assist in mass
murder, and if beliefs and motivation are largely irrelevant to behavior, then
no society is immune to genocidal temptations. Moreover the allegedly ho-
mogenized mass societies nurturing modern technology (such as the United
States) might have a special affinity with devising new, efficient forms of
mass murder, even genocide. Not by accident did “genocide” and “genocidal”
become favorite epithets of the social critics and political activists of the
1960s (rarely directed at truly genocidal political systems).
It may also be recalled here that the 1960s generation of radicals took great
pleasure in comparing the United States to Nazi Germany (they spelled
America with a “k”) and whenever possible threw at it terms like “fascist,”
“nazi” and “genocidal”; they also liked to compare American institutions to
the gestapo, storm troopers, or Auschwitz.
The Vietnam War further stimulated the inclination to associate mass mur-
der with technology and view the United States as a genocidal state intent on
killing simple peasants impersonally with sophisticated technology, prefer-
ably from high altitudes rather than in manly, authentic, face-to-face combat.
American soldiers in this perspective were “professional killers” and implic-
itly, their lack of passion was also held against them by many anti-war ac-
tivists. Repeatedly, critics of the United States contrasted favorably the sup-
posedly poorly armed, deeply committed, simple guerillas, operating in small
groups with the mechanized might of the U.S. forces for whom fighting was
a “job” to be performed impersonally and efficiently.
The recent waves of political violence committed by Islamic groups and in-
dividuals dealt a heavy blow to the theories and ideas Arendt popularized. A
greatly neglected factor of political conflict and violence suddenly and dramat-
ically reemerged, namely fanatical hatred and religious-political convictions le-
gitimating the ruthless violence such hatred inspired. Rarely in history has the
relationship between belief and behavior been so clear as in the actions of the
Islamic suicide pilots and bombers fortified and reassured by conceptions and
personifications of evil defined with great clarity and held unhesitatingly. There
was nothing banal, impersonal, dispassionate, or detached about their beliefs
and behavior. A pure, fierce hatred of evil motivated them as well as deeply felt
beliefs in otherwordly rewards. (More down-to-earth motives also played a part
as families received substantial material compensation for their “martyred”
sons or daughters in addition to a marked improvement of their social standing
in the community that applauded suicide bombings.)
In numerous Arab countries and communities a political culture evolved
that joyously enshrined hate and violence as a sacred mission directed at the
 The Banality of Evil and the Political Culture of Hatred 227

designated objects of hate. In these settings virulent hatred is inculcated from

an early age; it is disseminated by the mass media, in schools and places of
worship, sanctioned by both religious and political authorities.
It is one thing to kill or harm one’s enemies in a matter-of-fact and defen-
sive manner and something quite different to publicly rejoice in and glorify
such killings. It is the hallmark of a political culture drenched in self-righteous
hate that it encourages individuals to display joyously their bloody hands on
television after they committed murder, as was the case last year when two Is-
raeli soldiers were lynched on the West Bank. This political culture also helps
to account for the behavior of people who dance in the streets when hearing
about the indiscriminate mass murder of their supposed enemies, as was the
case in numerous Arab cities after September 11. One can also associate the
same political culture with the attitude of parents who express great happiness
upon hearing of the “martyrdom” their children incurred in the course of
blowing to bits innocent civilians.
Whatever the ingredients or sources of such hatred—material deprivation,
lack of education, frustration, resentment, sense of inferiority, the scapegoat-
ing impulse—it has become the dominant force fueling political conflict and
violence in many parts of the world. The “root causes” are not poverty but rel-
ative deprivation or frustrated expectations and the overpowering but com-
forting belief that others are responsible for one’s misfortune. It is also highly
relevant here that (as reported in a recent New York Times op-ed piece) opin-
ion polls in the West Bank and Gaza found “that better educated Palestinians
were more likely than others to approve of violence.”
There is certainly nothing banal or inauthentic about the violence of the
suicide bombers enthusiastically killing themselves in the pursuit of their
ideals. Religious beliefs and a climate of public opinion legitimate and nur-
ture such hatreds, which in other cultures most people would find embarrass-
ing to display in public, let alone act on them.
It is perhaps the authenticity of such violence and the belief that its perpe-
trators are among the virtuous victims of the West (mainly of the United
States and Israel) that impels the hardcore supporters of the adversary culture
to take a more charitable view of it and its perpetrators. Even if these warriors
have not attracted as much open sympathy as the Vietcong used to, they ben-
efit from the identity of their enemies in the eyes of the radical-left behold-
ers. The latter cannot help being drawn to virtually any group or individual
passionately opposed to and willing to take militant action against the United
States and Israel since they regard the United States “the great Satan” and the
source of all evil and injustice in this world and Israel its ally and lackey.
In the wake of 9/11 these attitudes have taken several forms. One was the
search for “root causes,” which invariably led to the conclusion that the
228 Chapter Twenty-seven

United States and Israel are in the final analysis responsible for the violence
directed against them. Another expression of the same attitude was the solic-
itousness shown toward those accused of or suspected of the terrorist violence
against the United States and Israel. A great surge of concern about their civil
and human rights and welfare swept through left-liberal circles, which would
be praiseworthy had such concern been shown also for the corresponding
rights and welfare of the victims of the various anti-Western, anti-American,
and anti-Israeli terrorists.
At numerous universities administrators have been anxious to protect the
sensitivity of Arab students and adherents of Islamic beliefs deeming offen-
sive any expression of American patriotism including the display of the
American flag. Campus critics of the U.S. war on terrorism in Afghanistan
and elsewhere were assured a far more supportive environment than those
supporting it. Symbolic gestures of support and solidarity were also extended
by Western “peace activists” who rushed to Arafat’s headquarters in Ramal-
lah and to the besieged terrorists in the Church of Nativity in Bethlehem and
sometimes interposed themselves between Israeli bulldozers and their targets
in the occupied territories. There have also been many attempts to deny that
Islamic religious beliefs could have inspired, influenced, or legitimated the
murderous political impulses and behavior of the suicide bombers and other
terrorists. These attempts are reminiscent of past disputes about the relation-
ship between Marxism and the practices of communist states. The repressive
nature of these states could not be directly blamed on Marx and his theories
but nonetheless there was a connection, at the very least in the sense of enti-
tlement to ruthlessness on behalf of great ideals to be realized. The paradise
awaiting the suicide bomber is a religious notion not invented by the individ-
uals in question who act on this idea. None of the other violent enemies of
Western societies in recent times (the Weathermen, the Red Brigade in Italy,
the Baader-Meinhof gang in Germany, the IRA in Ireland, the Basque terror-
ists, etc.) were suicidal. They did not have the kind of religious assurance and
encouragement their Islamic counterparts possess at the present time.
The evil of Nazism was not banal, nor is the evil of the suicide bombers.
Whatever the social and political circumstances which contribute to their ac-
tions, they do not provide moral license or mitigation for their behavior; these
are individuals who, according to all indications, choose their actions freely,
with utmost deliberation, and under no compulsion other than the prodding of
their beliefs and the enthusiastic support of their community.
 Chapter Twenty-eight

The Left and the Palestinians

Support for the Palestinian cause—that is to say, Palestinian statehood and the
right of return of Palestinians to Israel—has become a major item on the po-
litical agenda of the left in Western countries.
In demonstrations against globalism or the war in Iraq, there are pro-
Palestinian contingents; on American college campuses pro-Palestinian or-
ganizations (often allied with Islamic ones) thrive. Western “solidarity
groups” visit the West Bank and Gaza and often interpose themselves be-
tween rioting or demonstrating Palestinians and Israeli troops. Sometimes
they join the demonstrators. They were also deployed around the headquar-
ters of Yasir Arafat to protect him, while their representatives visited and
hugged him. At any given time, hundreds of Western sympathizers are in the
Palestinian areas to lend whatever aid and comfort they can. Boycotts and
embargos against Israel are proposed and organized; academic intellectuals
advocate excluding Israelis from academic organizations and institutions. The
International Solidarity Movement (solidarity with the Palestinians) supports
the Palestinians’ “legitimate armed struggle.” Tom Paulin, the well-known
English poet and teacher at Oxford University, writes about “the Zionist SS”
and reveals that he never believed in Israel’s right to exist. He also encour-
ages the shooting of Jewish settlers in occupied territories.
While these groups are in a state of intense moral indignation about Israeli
atrocities, their condemnation of Arab-Islamic acts of terror is either nonex-
istent or muted and perfunctory. Acts of terror against Israeli civilians (what
Martin Peretz called “the utter routinization of the savage killing of inno-
cents”) attract little moral attention or energy; they are reflexively attributed
to the misbehavior of Israel (or the United States) or to the famous root causes
which amount to Israeli (or American) culpability.

229
230 Chapter Twenty-eight

The key to these skewed perceptions and uneven moral judgments is to be

found in a deeply internalized victim-victimizer scenario. Ever since its vic-
tory in 1967 in the Six-Day War, Israel and its Jewish population ceased be-
ing seen as victims (or potential victims) by many liberal Western intellectu-
als—and no further events would dislodge this perception. There is a certain
parallel here with the comparative perceptions of the United States and the
Soviet Union during the Cold War, when the latter retained an underdog sta-
tus in the eyes of many Western beholders despite its enormous military
power and conquests and gradually became the moral equivalent of the
United States.
A similar moral equivalence is widespread today in comparisons of unre-
strained Palestinian violence against Israel and the often harsh Israeli coun-
termeasures seeking to deflect it. It is overlooked that Israel kills civilians in-
advertently in the pursuit of terrorists, while the terrorists deliberately target
civilians in ways to maximize Israeli casualties and openly rejoice when these
goals are accomplished.
The support for the Palestinians cannot be understood in isolation from
grasping why Israel is detested, just as past (or persisting) sympathy for com-
munist systems could only be understood when seen as an integral part and
product of the profound hostility to Western, capitalist democracies.
In all probability, the current denigration of Israel is part of a similar, broad
rejection of all things Western. Israel in the eyes of radical leftists (and ar-
guably even in those of less than radical leftists) is identified with everything
they abhor in the West: capitalism, consumerism, individualism, scientific ra-
tionality, and other Western intellectual and philosophical traditions. Espe-
cially delegitimating Israel is its close political-military relationship to the
United States.
By the same token, idealization of the Palestinians may well be a substitute
for the kinds of projections and longings, which in the past found their target
in communist systems, movements, and guerillas. With the collapse (or trans-
formation) of most communist systems, there are no admirable alternatives
left to the perceived evils and corruption of the West with the problematic ex-
ception of Cuba. Hence the new and admittedly smaller generation of politi-
cal pilgrims goes to Palestine.
Palestinians are embraced not merely because they are adversaries and ap-
parent victims of Israel; they also came to personify and revitalize idealized
conceptions of the third world and its inhabitants which flourished in the
1960s and 1970s. They are the new noble savages leading virtuously simple
and deprived lives (the latter can in part be ascribed to Israeli policies). The
young men and children throwing stones at Israeli tanks have become sym-
 The Left and the Palestinians 231

bols of what is seen as the heroic struggle of powerless, authentic, non-

technological fighters against the powerful, technologically advanced, imper-
sonal monster encased in tanks and armored personnel carriers—images sim-
ilar to those of the lean, small Vietcong fighters battling manfully with
minimal equipment the impersonal might of the United States. In both cases
there was more involved than sympathy for the underdog: the struggle also
symbolized a confrontation between the virtues of a preindustrial social order
and its authentic actors, and the vices of the dehumanized military-industrial-
scientific complex embodied in the United States. As Susan Sontag observed
at the time, there was no “existential agony” or alienation among the North
Vietnamese.
There is another possible explanation for the increased appeal of the Pales-
tinian cause during the last few years while the intifada and suicide bombings
unfolded. It may well be that Palestinian violence is not merely accepted as a
justifiable response to Israeli policies, but is actually applauded. Once more
there are probable parallels with the appeal of communist movements and in-
surgencies of the past and their righteous violence. Many Western intellectu-
als had a longstanding and barely (if at all) suppressed admiration for what
they saw as the morally superior, passionate, invigorating, authentic use of vi-
olence in a wholesome, liberating cause. Sartre, Franz Fanon, Carlos Fuentes,
Regis Debray, C. Wright Mills, Norman Mailer (and many less illustrious fig-
ures)—all these sedentary and verbose intellectuals believed in the redeem-
ing uses of authentic violence in overcoming unadventurous ways of life,
trapped and paralyzed as they felt between theory and practice and in their
comfortable middle-class lifestyle. Political (and sometimes nonpolitical) vi-
olence came to be seen as the magic device with which to bridge the gap be-
tween theory and practice, rumination and action, good intentions and gen-
uine commitment.
Palestinian guerrillas and especially the fearless suicide bombers embody
such authenticity and unwavering commitment. They do put their lives on the
line and joyously, serenely destroy themselves (and many more others) for the
good of the cause. They symbolize a profusion of self-transcendence unpar-
alleled in recent times. Professor Gayatri Spivak of Columbia University ex-
plained (or tried to) why this was the case:

Suicide bombing—and the planes of 9/11 were living bombs—is a purposive

self-annihilation, a confrontation between oneself and oneself, the extreme end
of autoeroticism . . . the destruction of others is indistinguishable from the de-
struction of the self. . . . Suicidal resistance is a message inscribed in the body
when no other means will get through. It is both execution and mourning, for
232 Chapter Twenty-eight

both self and other. For you die with me for the same cause, no matter which
side are you on. Because no matter who you are, there are no designated killees
[sic] in suicide bombing. . . . There is no dishonor in such shared and innocent
death. (Quoted in The New Republic, July 29, 2002, 9.)

While left-liberal intellectuals in the West have serious reservations about

religious fanaticism (especially when associated with Judeo-Christian beliefs
and practices), Islamic religious fanaticism gets the benefit of doubt since it
is a product of the third world and the cultural diversity it represents and as
such cannot be rejected out of hand. Even when such religious fanaticism and
the violence it inspires is hard to take, it is always possible to fall back on the
root causes: the suicide bombers are poor, oppressed, and weak; they are des-
perately trying to call attention to their condition. Little is said about the hefty
awards given to their families or about the fact that many of the violent ac-
tivists and their organizers are neither poor nor uneducated.
The Palestinians, real and imaginary, are neither the first nor the last rep-
resentatives of righteous rage against the evils alienated Westerners feel sur-
rounded by in their own societies.
 Chapter Twenty-nine

The Personal and the Political

in Lessing’s Fiction

The Sweetest Dream continues Lessing’s long-standing preoccupation with

the intimate connection, most insistently proclaimed in our times by radical
feminists, between the personal and the political. The book may also be seen
as a further and most explicit stage in Lessing’s journey of distancing herself
from her old leftist convictions and from all radical-utopian beliefs. What she
seeks to convey here has certainly been proposed before, by philosophers, po-
litical scientists, and clear-headed intellectuals: that there is no political or so-
cial solution for personal problems, especially for the most difficult and inti-
mate ones. Likewise, sweeping schemes of social engineering founder on
their own unintended consequences and the imponderables of human nature.
The determined, self-conscious mixing of the personal and the political, more
often than not, yields unpleasant results.
This is a novel mainly focused on England during the 1960s, but it spans
half a century from World War II until the late 1990s. In a short preface, Less-
ing expresses the hope that she “managed to recapture the spirit of the Six-
ties” (she does, most successfully) and conveys justifiable irritation with the
(British) Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (“there has never been a more
hysterical, noisy and irrational campaign”), which embodied many of the
questionable beliefs and attitudes of the period.
Unlike most books focusing on the 1960s and written on either side of the
Atlantic, and especially on ours, The Sweetest Dream is not infused with
nostalgia for that supposedly golden era of youthful idealism and personal
liberation. Quite to the contrary, Lessing embarks on a highly critical, al-
though not totally unsympathetic, examination of the period and the types
of people who seemed to set and embody its tone most characteristically. I
can only think of Saul Bellow (and especially his Mr. Sammler’s Planet) as

233
234 Chapter Twenty-nine

offering a comparably profound critical reflection of that era’s problematic as-

pirations and the human beings emblematic of them, who firmly believed that
all good things are compatible, including no-holds-barred “self-realization,”
warm communal relationships, and the revolutionary transformation of all so-
cial institutions and practices. This was “the sweetest dream.”
It was a period when large numbers of people were seized by the convic-
tion that what mattered most were good and pure intentions, which by them-
selves vindicated the actions they inspired. Even more remarkably, these peo-
ple believed that human love, kindness, and a sense of solidarity could be
extended and expanded effortlessly and without discrimination.
In this book these impulses find expression, among other things, in the
commendable but somewhat muddled generosity of the major character,
Frances (a “neurotic nurturer” as “the kids” see her); she takes into her spa-
cious home various “strays” who belong to “a tribe of youngsters ‘disturbed’
for one reason or another,” confusedly rebellious middle-class youth (includ-
ing the offspring of her former spouse). These idealistic young people habit-
ually refer to their parents as “shits.” Frances the nurturer is a kind and largely
apolitical woman who nonetheless absorbed many of the beliefs and impulses
prevalent in the subcultures of the 1960s. She is a victim both of these beliefs
and of her own decency.
It is her former husband, “comrade Johnny,” who is the prime exhibit of
the foolishness, irresponsibility, and hypocrisy of which a thoroughly politi-
cized human being is capable. The son of wealthy parents, he was educated
at Eton, but as a young man became involved with the British Communist
party; he remains through much of his life a full-time functionary. Staunchly
pro-Soviet until almost the very end of “the Soviet experiment”, later in life
Johnny switches to a more broadly based leftist “third-worldism,” admiring
Castro and assorted African dictators. What does not change is his unwaver-
ing alienation from his own country and his contempt of capitalism—if in-
deed it is capitalism that is the deepest animating impulse behind Johnny’s re-
lentless hostility toward his own society and the nonsocialist Western world.
Johnny exemplifies what happens when the political realm invades and ab-
sorbs the personal: the withering of the personal. He is never at a loss to spout
soothing (or rousing) agit-prop rhetoric, but is singularly “challenged” in the
department of ordinary human concerns and feelings. He is serenely uncon-
cerned with the welfare of his children from his failed marriages; he supports
them neither financially nor emotionally. He is a windbag and inveterate free-
loader, a parasite with a clear conscience getting free meals from his first
wife, whom he despises on account of her low level of political con-
sciousness. (“My wife . . . does not understand that the Struggle must come
before family obligations.”) Why worry about such mundane matters when
you are dedicating your life to the liberation of the masses and the future of
 The Personal and the Political in Lessing’s Fiction 235

humanity? Life holds no mysteries for him, and he has a ready answer and the
remedy for every question and problem. In this, he reminds me of Homais,
the pharmacist in Madame Bovary, another irresponsible, cheerfully imper-
sonal windbag, beholden to soothing platitudes extracted from the vulgarized
beliefs of the French Enlightenment.
American readers may be surprised by the many similarities between the
ethos and representatives of the 1960s in England and in this country. For ex-
ample, in the English private school described, “pupils came and went, with
little regard for time-tables or exams. When teachers suggested a more disci-
plined approach, they might be reminded of the principles that had established
the school, self-development being the main one.” Similarly familiar is the
physical appearance of the people populating these pages who wear the “cur-
rent uniforms of non-conformity” and wish to be seen as “Che Guevara
clones.” In England too, in these circles, the epithet “fascism” was thrown
around with abandon: “they all used the word fascist as easily as they said
fuck, or shit, not necessarily meaning much more than this was somebody they
disapproved of.” The mentally ill, these English youngsters believed, “are just
like us.” The tribal massacres in Africa were dismissed as products of a “dif-
ferent culture,” another expression of cultural diversity that should not prompt
“judgmental” attitudes. A group of true believers (in the novel) could listen to
the revelations of a former inmate of the Gulag “as if the tale did not concern
them.” They are people (like the American believers in the innocence of the
Rosenbergs) “who cannot change once their minds are made up.”
These similarities are all the more surprising since the two countries and so-
cieties are in fact very different; Britain was neither involved in the Vietnam
war, nor did she have to face the historic burden of slavery—two factors fre-
quently invoked to explain the social-political movements of the 1960s in the
United States and the alienation their participants displayed. What the alienated
had in common in both societies—as this novel suggests—was a combination
of privileged background, a sense of political and economic security and of en-
titlement (compatible with all sorts of neurotic needs and symptoms), and a pro-
found belief that the prevailing social-political institutions and arrangements
were self-evidently and utterly rotten and worthless. This complex of attitudes
helps to explain, why, for example, most of the privileged youngsters in the
book consider shoplifting both an entertaining and a lucrative hobby and a form
of political protest against “the system,” against capitalism. (“When he [one of
the characters] arrived at the LSE [part of the University of London] he was de-
lighted that to steal clothes, books, anything one fancied, as a means of under-
mining the capitalist system was taken for granted. To actually pay for some-
thing, well, how politically naive can one get?”)
Lessing does not have a clear answer as to the root of this malaise, of “this
rage . . . too deep in some part of the collective unconscious to reason with.”
236 Chapter Twenty-nine

The closest she comes to pointing to a source is the British version of the gen-
erational conflict and incomplete or malfunctioning families. There are nu-
merous glimpses of parental self-centeredness and irresponsibility, often as-
sociated with the period’s grand notions of self-realization. Such parental
neglect helps to explain the mentality and rootlessness of this small sample of
the English “youth culture.”
It is not hard to understand how children who grow up without a father or
with two indifferent, uninvolved parents become susceptible to a deep sense
of grievance, which may or may not take a political form, depending on the
prevailing social conditions. The sons of Johnny and Frances are obvious ex-
amples, although, given their grotesquely irresponsible and largely absent fa-
ther, they become scornful of his politics. Arguably, they belong to the off-
spring of “a generation of Believers, now discredited, [who] had given birth
to children who disowned their parents’ beliefs, but admired their dedication.
. . . What faith! What passion! What idealism!” Here again is a close parallel
with the so-called red diaper babies in this country, who became prominent
1960s radicals and subsequently politically correct academics, some of them
writing reverent studies of the American communist movement without fully
identifying with its failed policies.
A virtually separate part of the novel takes place in an African country
named Zimlia, which closely resembles present-day Zimbabwe and is seen
through the eyes of one of the novel’s characters, a young, idealistic doctor
who takes a job there to help the poor. Her experiences of the pervasive cor-
ruption, brutality, and economic stagnation—rarely encountered in Western
works of fiction (or nonfiction) about Africa—is further illustration of the
colossal and disheartening gap separating theory from practice, good inten-
tions from good results, and of a spectacular failure of decolonialization. The
new, indigenous elites are greedy, cynical, and ruthless, and no more con-
cerned with the welfare of the masses than their predecessors were. Another
sweet dream shattered.
The greatest strength of this novel is its compelling focus on the timeless
tension between idealistic social-political aspiration and the dark sides of hu-
man nature. Fallible and flawed human beings, torn between conflicting val-
ues and desires, are bound to fail to create a social order in which there is no
chasm between the personal and the political, good intentions and good re-
sults. As Lessing shows, “the sweetest dream” of such harmony and ful-
fillment will likely continue to haunt and elude us.
 Chapter Thirty

Haven in Cuba

William Lee Brent was a Black Panther activist in the San Francisco Bay area
in the 1960s with a substantial criminal record and many years spent in jail
before joining the Panthers. A New York Times reporter wrote “By his own ad-
mission Mr. Brent squandered the first half of his life on petty crime, which
rewarded him with nothing more than an intimate knowledge of the Ameri-
can prison system and a bitterness that corroded his soul” (Larry Rohter: “25
Years an Exile: An Old Black Panther Sums Up,” New York Times, April 9,
1996). In 1969 following his arrest in a shootout with the police (which left
two policemen seriously injured) while out on bail, he came to the conclusion
that escaping to Cuba was the best available option and could only be ac-
complished by hijacking a plane. He succeeded and has lived in Cuba ever
since, remaining a fugitive from American justice. He said of the hijacking:
“I was at war . . . with an enemy which was the United States Government
and the skyjacking was a continuation of that struggle” (Rohter, “25 Years
Exile”).
On his arrival in Cuba, he was treated with considerable suspicion and kept
in jail for almost two years. He contrasted American jails favorably with their
Cuban counterparts. Following his release he was given the privileges for-
eigners of similar political disposition enjoyed: free housing, full board, med-
ical care and a small stipend. After a stint of sugarcane cutting and a laboring
job in a factory he rather disliked, he succeeded in gaining admission to the
University of Havana where he studied Spanish and other subjects in the hu-
manities for four years; he graduated in 1981 with a B.A. in Hispanic lan-
guages. Earlier he met and moved in with (and later married) an American
woman, a long-time supporter of Castro’s Cuba and various radical-left
causes in the United States; she worked for the Cuban government helping to
promote tourism.
237
238 Chapter Thirty

After graduation Brent was given a job teaching English in school and
after 1986 he found employment at Radio Havana as announcer and disk
jockey. In the late 1980s or early 1990s (not quite clear from his memoirs
when) he left his job at the radio in part to avoid “stressful situations”
which led to high blood pressure as did his daily consumption of “more
than a quart of rum,” as revealed in his memoirs (Long Time Gone [New
York, 1996], 270, 268). He was also unhappy with the new policy of get-
ting paid in pesos instead of dollars although he still enjoyed a good living
standard as a privileged “foreign technician” as he was classified. After his
retirement, given his modest pension (he did not work for the twenty-five
years required for retirement with full benefits), he started to do freelance
translations and give private English lessons and wrote his memoirs for an
American publisher.
The memoirs make clear that Brent was well aware of and dismayed by
the many flaws of Cuban socialism but given his situation, was resigned to
them. There were the widespread scarcities and rationing: “Cuban pesos
were plentiful because everyone worked and there was nothing to buy. This
led to black marketing” (Long Time Gone, 204). Later on he had access to
the special shops serving the “foreign technicians” and the Cuban political
elite. He recalled the working conditions in the soap factory where he used
to work as poor and unsafe. Moreover, “everyone worked overtime but was
paid only eight hours. . . . The union never disagreed with the labor condi-
tions set forth by the state and union members never disagreed with their
leadership” (Long Time Gone, 207, 210–11). He learned that “once you got
involved in a permanent work situation here . . . it took an act of Congress
to get you out of it. You couldn’t quit jobs on your own. Everything had to
be approved, and if the authorities said no, you couldn’t do a damned thing
about it. There was no input from the bottom. . . . Everything came from
the top down. The government told you what to do and you did or else”
(209). The Committee for the Defense of the Revolution included
“overzealous busybodies who thought their revolutionary duty was to in-
form on everyone they knew or came in contact with” (215). Even the for-
eigners who came to Cuba for political reasons were under “incredibly bu-
reaucratic control” (228). When Brezhnev visited Cuba they all were
rounded up and detained for the duration of his visit although assured that
this was no reflection on their political reliability. He felt “hurt and disil-
lusioned” (237–38). There was “complete dependence on the Soviet
Union” for economic development (233). While teaching in school, he
found out that students had to be retained and promoted regardless of their
performance; he was rebuked for grading too hard (245). He was not happy
 Haven in Cuba 239

with the compulsory farm work for both students and teachers and he “re-
sented the fact that it was mandatory for teachers as well” (246).
On an assignment as a reporter for Radio Havana Cuba he was sent to a
model prison where he “neither saw nor heard anything that made me think
that these prisoners would be any better off when they were released than they
had been when they came here” (263). His own years in prison led him to be-
lieve that prisons “are terrible places no matter where they are. They are vivid
proof that a society cannot live up to the hopes and dreams of its people. . . .
My program on RHC about the prison, however, did not reflect my true feel-
ings because I knew my bosses would have me rewrite any negative refer-
ences and they would put me on their unreliable list. I reported only the pos-
itive aspects . . .” (265). Even the vaunted health care left something to be
desired: “to get a bed in a hospital, except in a life-threatening situation, you
have to have a letter from your work center or the organization sponsoring
you” (268).
After 1989 “profound economic and social changes were about to take
place that would . . . shake our political convictions to their foundations . . .
after three decades of promises that everything was going to be all right, the
economy was falling apart . . .” (271, 273).
Even before the economic crisis his adaptation to life in Cuba was not al-
together smooth or complete. As he explained to Huey Newton, his old boss
and comrade-in-arms, with whom he had a reunion in Cuba: “I respect the
Cubans . . . and I’m grateful they decided to give me asylum. The system is
different, but I’m learning to concentrate on all the good things . . .” (233).
The memoir ends on a somewhat conflicted note inspired by the aftermath
of the collapse of the Soviet Bloc and the ensuing economic hardships result-
ing from the end of the massive subsidies it used to provide. On the one hand,
Brent admits:

I felt confused and frustrated. I had believed in the revolution and considered
myself part of it. The system was working fairly well when I first arrived: the
basic necessities were provided. Now there didn’t seem to be any guarantees at
all. My faith was badly shaken. My friends felt the same way. Many of them—
black and white—were turning to the ancient African religion Santeria. . . . In
my need for something to help me come to grips with the new reality of my sur-
roundings, restore my declining political convictions. . . . I began to acquaint
myself with Santeria. (274)

On the other hand, he writes (on the next page), “In spite of the great disap-
pointment at the course the Cuban revolution had taken over the many years
I have lived on the island, I have not lost my resolve or my dedication to the
240 Chapter Thirty

struggle of my people and the cause of justice and equality for all. . . . My po-
sition is the same today as it was from the moment I joined the Black Panther
Party . . .” (275).
In the following he writes about his continued loyalty to “the cause of
black liberation” and the circumstances which led him “to challenge the sys-
tem” (in the United States) rather than about his commitment to building of
socialism in Cuba: “my methods were uneducated, lacking in social and po-
litical knowledge and based on intuitive resentment of unjust and abusive au-
thority. . . . Through the ‘clutch of circumstance’ I found myself in Cuba. I
have been away from my people for a quarter century. Much has changed.
The flight I commandeered all those years ago is still not over” (275–76). On
this ambiguous note does the book end.
Following the publication of the book, he told the New York Times corre-
spondent that “his own faith that socialism is the best path for humanity re-
mains unshaken. . . . So is his conviction that he must never abandon the
struggle against ‘the system.’ I have been on a flight from depression, op-
pression, racism, injustice, inhumanity, cruelty. That flight is not over” (New
York Times). These are the same sentiments expressed at the end of his book.
They reflect a generalized left-liberal idealism not peculiar either to the Black
Panthers or the Cuban Revolution. These sentiments have been carefully pre-
served and are the apparent cornerstones of his sense of identity constructed
over the years.
An understanding of his political attitudes requires a consideration of prac-
tical alternatives. Brent could not return to the United States without facing
criminal prosecution and even if he cut a deal he would have had to confront
a new set of difficulties readjusting to American life and making a living at
an advanced age. We don’t know what his wife, apparently a more deeply
committed and ideological leftist, would have thought of such a move; it is
unlikely that she would have favored it.
Moreover, as reported in 1996 his life in Cuba was quite agreeable: “Mr.
Brent now lives with his wife, a fellow American radical, who first visited
Cuba in the 1960s, in a comfortable apartment with a view of the Almendares
river and a tree-studded park.” He has a pair of longhaired dachshunds, his
wife “had become interested in the movement to establish pure dog breeds in
Cuba . . . [and] joined the dachshund club in Havana . . .” (265), a large col-
lection of jazz and blues records, and a computer he uses to keep in touch
with American political developments. A poster prominently displayed in his
apartment calls “for the freedom of Mumia Abu-Jamal,” convicted of killing
a policeman in 1981.
Brent was neither uncritical of the Black Panthers (especially since they
expelled him after the shootout) nor of conditions in Cuba but despite nu-
 Haven in Cuba 241

merous disillusioning experiences he persevered in his beliefs, that is to say,

“his own faith that socialism is the best path for humanity is unshaken,” he
said. So is his conviction that he must never abandon his struggle against ‘the
system’ he still believes forced him here, even if it means that he never sets
foot in the United States again” (New York Times). He has obviously mellowed
and may be musing deep in his heart about an American road to socialism and
social justice that would be less arduous than the Cuban.
 Chapter Thirty-one

Demystifying Marxism

Leszek Kolakowski is one of the great thinkers of our time, author of numer-
ous books on philosophy and religion, recipient of many honors and awards.
He left his native Poland in 1968, after being dismissed from his teaching po-
sition at Warsaw University and expelled from the communist party for his
unorthodox views. He went on to a distinguished academic career in the
West—teaching at McGill University in Montreal, the University of Califor-
nia, Berkeley, and Yale—more recently dividing his time between All Souls
College, Oxford, and the University of Chicago.
The publication of the new, one-volume edition of his monumental study,
Main Currents of Marxism (W. W. Norton, 1,283 pages), is a welcome occa-
sion for some reflections on his achievement, as well as the part played by
Marxism in twentieth-century intellectual history. Not only is Main Currents
the definitive history of Marxism, it is its definitive critique and demystifica-
tion. This huge study examines every aspect of this revolutionary political
philosophy: its origins, interpreters, the schools of Marxism in both the nine-
teenth and twentieth centuries and the disputes among them. Mr. Kolakowski
conceived of the study as “an attempt to analyze the strange fate of an idea
which began in Promethean humanism and culminated in the monstrous
tyranny of Stalin.”
It is impossible to summarize a huge work such as Main Currents in a brief
review but some of its major propositions can be noted. The most important
and instructive is that Marxism is essentially a secular religion, a product of
utopian impulses influenced by nineteenth-century romantic longings and
faith in the limitless perfectibility of human nature and social institutions.
Living in communist Poland doubtless helped Mr. Kolakowski to recognize
the unwelcome results of the attempted realization of these theories. He

242
 Demystifying Marxism 243

wrote, “The influence achieved, far from being the result or proof of its sci-
entific character, is almost entirely due to its prophetic, fantastic and irrational
elements. Marxism is a doctrine of blind confidence that a paradise of uni-
versal satisfaction is awaiting us . . . it is a certainty not based on any empir-
ical premises . . . but simply on the psychological need for certainty. . . .
Marxism performs the function of a religion and its efficacy is of a religious
character.”
At the present time, few political systems continue to claim that they are
faithfully applying Marxist theory to their political and economic practice or
are even inspired by its ideas. The exceptions are North Korea and Cuba.
(China and Vietnam pay some lip service to the Marxist heritage while rap-
idly privatizing their economies.) In Western capitalist countries Marxism
survives as an academic pursuit of intellectuals estranged from their societies.
The moralistic rejection of capitalism remains the major strength and appeal
of Marxism and is revitalized by the hostility to globalization.
Main Currents was written between 1968 and 1976, well before the col-
lapse of Soviet communism, a political system that legitimated itself by
Marxism and claimed to be splendidly guided by it. Mr. Kolakowski had
experienced in Poland how little help Marxism offered in the creation of a
more humane, rational, and just society, let alone a freer one.
Western Marxists vehemently argue that the disaster of Soviet communism
has no relevance whatsoever to the great truths and insights Marx and his fol-
lowers dispensed. They dispute just what kind of a contribution Marxist ideas
made to the socialist states that arose and expired in Eastern Europe—what
was the true relationship between theory and practice? They argue that the
Eastern European communist states collapsed because of the discrepancy be-
tween Marxist theory and Soviet practice. In reality, these states failed—
among other things—because they did rely on Marxist ideas in the building
of a new social system.
It is possible to resolve the dispute about the effect or influence of Marx-
ism on the policies and institutions of the various “actually existing” com-
munist states by separating policies and the practices that diverged from the
theory from those that were congruent with it. The most glaring discrepancy
between theory and practice (or the theory and the anticipated results of its
implementation) emerged in the economy: The nationalization of the means
of production created neither a more productive nor a more efficient or hu-
mane society. As Mr. Kolakowski wrote, “Marx seems to have imagined that
once capitalists were done away with, the whole world would become a kind
of Athenian agora: one had only to forbid private ownership of machines or
land and, as if by magic, human beings would cease to be selfish and their in-
terests would coincide in perfect harmony.”
244 Chapter Thirty-one

It did not happen; instead these systems developed chronic shortages, a

diminished work ethic, and a deeply alienated work force. The one-party
dictatorship provided fewer avenues for political participation than the
parliamentary system in pluralistic societies. The rise of supremely power-
ful dictators surrounded by compulsory cults flew in the face of the Marx-
ist belief in the unimportance of the individual in the historical process.
The proletariat did not become the ruling class, and the workers were not
persuaded that they were the masters of their own fate or owners of means
of production. Neither religion nor crime had withered away, notwith-
standing the Marxist belief that the first was an opiate of the masses (pro-
duced by the hopelessness of life in a capitalist class society) and the sec-
ond a direct response to the poverty, exploitation, and inequality such
societies perpetuated.
Nonetheless there was no divergence between theory and practice as far as
abolishing the private ownership of the means of production was concerned.
It was embraced and zealously implemented in all communist states from Al-
bania to Vietnam—despite the obvious economic price it exacted—especially
in agriculture and the production of consumer goods. These may have been
unintended consequences, but they originated in Marxist beliefs and presup-
positions.
There was further congruence between theory and practice as regards the
doctrine of class struggle. It was also embraced in all communist systems and
provided historical and theoretical legitimacy for great surges of political vi-
olence and coercion. It directly led to punishing people not for what they did
but for what they were—their opinions and beliefs inferred from their affili-
ations or social origins.
The belief in the omnipresence and inexorability of class struggle desensi-
tized its practitioners to the results of their policies; it also succeeded in per-
suading them (with the help of Marx’s fantasies about the ultimate withering
away of the state) that the generous use of repression would pave the way to-
ward a social system where none would be needed. Theory also became real-
ized in the attempted coercive elimination of religious beliefs and practices—
a policy adopted thanks to Marx’s great contempt for organized religion.
Insofar as there was a discrepancy between theory and practice, it did not
mean that no effort was made to implement Marxist ideas, but that the at-
tempted implementation failed to yield the anticipated results; there was a
yawning gulf between the promises, ideals, and expectations the theory fos-
tered and the results of their attempted realization—but not between the the-
ory and the policies and institutions which were devised to implement them.
Mr. Kolakowski rightly emphasized that “no political or religious move-
ment is a perfect expression of that movement’s ‘essence’ as laid down in its
 Demystifying Marxism 245

sacred writings; on the other hand these writings are not merely passive but
exercise an influence of their own on the course of the movement.” He has
given us great help to understand what it was in these ideas that lent itself to
misuse or distortion, to the institutionalization of a politicized ruthlessness
dedicated to receding ends.
It is safe to say that Leszek Kolakowski’s work will remain important and
appreciated as long as ideas and their unanticipated consequences have an im-
pact on history and human behavior.
 Chapter Thirty-two

Public Intellectuals and

the God That Failed

The collapse of communist states in Eastern Europe in 1989 and of the Soviet
Union itself in 1991 was widely assumed to mark the end of the historical ca-
reer of communist systems and movements; it was also expected to discredit
durably the ideas that animated them. The remaining incarnations of “scien-
tific socialism”—notably the grotesque North Korean dictatorship and the
bankrupt patrimony of Fidel Castro—were hardly inspiring models of a “so-
cialism with a human face.”
The fall of communist states has been followed by a growing amnesia
about the human toll exacted by their attempts to implement socialist ideals
in the not-so-distant past, and coupled with a revival of anti-capitalist senti-
ments generated by the problematic results of globalization. No similar at-
tempts were made at earlier times to downplay or reinterpret nonjudgmentally
other major historical atrocities, including, in more recent times, the mass
murders carried out by Nazi Germany. Academics did not parse the populist
elements of Nazism in order to separate them from the genocidal practices in
the way ideologues cull communism’s egalitarian message from its gruesome
applications.
In present-day Russia an abiding veneration of that great guardian of order
and stability, Stalin, is coupled with ambivalence about the Soviet past and a
yearning for the security and superpower status it provided. Maoist guerillas
have become powerful in Nepal in recent years and remain entrenched in
parts of India. Market economies failed to solve all social and economic prob-
lems in the countries where they were introduced; as a result, democratically
elected leftist governments came into power in Venezuela and Bolivia, likely
to be followed, according to some experts, by others of their kind in the re-
gion.

246
 Public Intellectuals and the God That Failed 247

In the West no such trends can be discerned at the present time, but the re-
jection of capitalism and bourgeois cultural values remains entrenched among
many intellectuals and in academic subcultures. Although specific communist
states, extinct or surviving, are no longer widely admired by Western intel-
lectuals, their anti-capitalist and egalitarian rhetoric remains attractive and
many on the left steadfastly deny that Marxism was implicated in the moral
and political-economic failures of the now defunct communist states. As Ken-
neth Minogue observed in 1990: “When regimes collapse . . . the principles
and ideals which animated them can be glimpsed creeping stealthily away
from the rubble, unscathed. Communism ‘never failed’—its exponents can be
heard muttering—it was ‘never tried.’” This is especially the case when, as
Enrique Krauze wrote in the New Republic a decade later, “celebrity utopians
need a new address for their fantasies” and no such address is available be-
cause no political systems or movements exist upon which wishful fantasies
can be readily projected. What remains are the good intentions and hopes that
have proved impossible to realize. This is why Cornel West could maintain
that “Marxist thought becomes even more relevant after the collapse of Com-
munism in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe than it was before.” A flick-
ering loyalty to the ideals that promised to transcend sordid socio-political in-
equities persists, as the hard-core loyalists refuse to accept that the human
condition cannot be radically altered and improved, and that the failed at-
tempts to do so required huge amounts of coercion and violence—as the his-
tory of communist states has shown. Leszek Kolakowski’s observation made
in 1978 (in his history of Marxism) about the influence of Marxism remains
largely valid: “Almost all the prophecies of Marx . . . have already proved
false, but this does not disturb the spiritual certainty of the faithful . . . for it
is a certainty not based on . . . ‘historical laws,’ but simply on the psycholog-
ical need for certainty. In this sense Marxism performs the function of reli-
gion. . . .”

THE OLD GUARD

Present-day radical leftists, anarchists, and supporters of the (leftover) coun-

terculture continue to draw inspiration from old-guard leftist thinkers (some
dead and others of an advanced age) disposed to minimize, deny, or explain
away a political system that resulted in the deaths of tens of millions. Long
before the fall of the Soviet Union, Western Marxists were compelled to find
ways to protect their beliefs from the assault of the realities of existing com-
munist states. The late historian and activist E. P. Thompson was one of them.
He was deeply attached to communist ideals, despite disillusioning events
(such as Khrushchev’s revelations in 1956 and Soviet repression in Eastern
248 Chapter Thirty-two

Europe in the same year). In a hundred-page “letter” to Kolakowski, Thomp-

son proclaimed that Marxism was not discredited by the depredations of Stal-
inism or flaws of existing socialist states; he held up the “utopian potentials”
of Marxism. He argued that “our solidarity was given not to communist states
in their existence but in their potential—not for what they were but for what
. . . they might become. . . .” He rebuked Kolakowski for linking “actually ex-
isting” Soviet-style systems with Marxism. Fifty years, he said, was “too
short a time in which to judge a new social system.” Thompson comes across
as the prototypical true believer who regarded capitalism as the unchanging
source of all evil and Marxism its diametrical opposite: the singular source of
all that is good and honorable, to be venerated regardless of its failed appli-
cations.
Gus Hall, the general secretary of the U.S. Communist Party for several
decades and a member since 1927, exemplifies unwavering commitment to
the Soviet Union and a disciplined capacity to overlook its considerable
blemishes. Following the fall of the Soviet communism he served all his life,
he told reporters, “The world should see what North Korea has done . . . it’s
a miracle. If you want to take a nice vacation, take it in North Korea.” He was
not joking. His unwavering loyalty was rewarded by a $40 million subsidy
between 1971 and 1990, provided by the Soviet authorities.
Herbert Aptheker, the Marxist historian, author of many books on black
history and member of the U.S. Communist Party between 1939 and 1991,
was of a similar generation. Although he broke with the party late in life, he
remained a true believer in Marxism and the ineradicable evils of capitalism
and American society. He believed, for instance, that higher education in the
United States was “class- and race-based” and tightly controlled by the ruling
classes. He succeeded in averting a major reassessment of his convictions be-
cause he managed to dissociate his pro-Soviet, communist beliefs from his
lifelong struggle against racial discrimination that, he felt, legitimated all po-
litical stands he took.
Among the living, Eric Hobsbawm continues to offer another, better
known example of the loyalties here discussed. Arguably, his fame and repu-
tation rest, in part, on personifying resistance to disillusionment in the face of
the vast accumulation of historical evidence calling into question old leftist
articles of faith. He has shown how one may admit the deep flaws of all com-
munist regimes that ever existed yet continue to regard the ideals inspiring
and admirable. As of 1994 he still averred that even if he had known in 1934
that “millions of people were dying in the Soviet experiment,” he would not
have renounced it because “the chance of a new world being born on great
suffering would still have been worth backing.” He wrote in his autobiogra-
 Public Intellectuals and the God That Failed 249

phy, “I belonged to the generation tied by an almost umbilical cord to hope of

the world revolution and its original hope, the October Revolution. . . .” He
saw himself as fighter for a better world trying to make sure that mankind
“will not live without the ideals of freedom and justice.”
The bedrock convictions of Noam Chomsky rest on different foundations: an
exceptionally fierce hatred of the United States, rather than durable admiration
of an alternative political system. Although not a professed Marxist, he detects
economic interests at the root of American depravities and attributes excep-
tional ruthlessness and cunning to American elites and policymakers. He seems
incapable of contemplating any moral outrage without comparing it to some al-
legedly greater, far more repellent atrocity committed by the United States. He
would equate 9/11 with the American bombing of the pharmaceutical factory in
Sudan. He has been tirelessly disseminating his major message that no moral
outrage could surpass those habitually committed by the United States (and its
quasi-Nazi puppet, Israel). His attraction to communist systems has been
episodic and based mainly on sympathy for the enemies of his archenemy. He
repeatedly questioned the magnitude of Pol Pot’s massacres in Cambodia and
scorned the testimony of refugees both in an article published in 1977 in the Na-
tion and a 1978 book. Chomsky also downplayed Eastern Europe’s communist
repression and said, “in comparison to conditions imposed by U.S. tyranny and
violence, East Europe under Russian rule was practically a paradise.” He con-
sidered Sandinista Nicaragua an inspiration for the downtrodden all over Latin
America and even for the poor in the United States. Chomsky’s quasi-celebrity
status helps to explain the persistence of his political beliefs, reinforced by the
favorable response of audiences who take pleasure in the combination of moral
certitude and fulminations.

THE YOUNGER GENERATION

Nine years after the Soviet empire imploded, radical leftists and anarchists
alike were thrilled by the publication of Empire (2001), written by Antonio
Negri and Michael Hardt. The jargon-ridden volume was not merely an ex-
ample of resistance to disillusionment, it was a major effort to revitalize rad-
ical leftist values and beliefs. As Alan Wolfe put it, “Empire is best under-
stood as an attempt, using Marxist jargon, to bring back to life . . . anarchism
and particularly the more destructive forms of anarchism. . . .” The major
theme animating the book is the impassioned reaffirmation and romanticiza-
tion of political violence, sanctified by the evil it was designed to combat. Ne-
gri and his supporters (and predecessors in the 1960s) argued that given the
250 Chapter Thirty-two

“essential” or “inherent” violence of capitalism, violent actions against it were

morally unproblematic. Negri, a leader of the Red Brigades—which in the
1970s committed numerous high-profile terrorist acts in Italy—was charged
with armed insurrection and given a prison sentence (which only required him
to spend nights in jail). In the 1970s he provided a remarkable example of false
consciousness, imagining himself as a member of the Italian proletariat: “I live
the life of the sniper, the deviant, and the worker who doesn’t show up at his
job. Every time I put on my ski mask, I feel the warmth of the proletarian
worker community around me. . . . Every action of destruction and sabotage
seems to me a manifestation of class solidarity. Nor does the eventual risk
bother me: rather it fills me with feverish excitement as one waiting for his
lover. Nor does the pain of my adversary affect me. . . .”
His status as a convicted felon doubtless added to the attractions of the
book, seen as he has was by his admirers as a fearless man of ideas as well as
action. Rather than ignored as an expression of discredited revolutionary fan-
tasies, Empire has “come as close to becoming an international best seller as
a university press book . . . is likely to get,” Alexander Stille noted in the New
York Review of Books.
The shallow and muddled utopianism probably added to the appeals of the
book as it promised “a revolution no power will control—because bio-power
and communism, cooperation and revolution remain together, in love, sim-
plicity and also innocence. This is the irrepressible lightness and joy of being
communist.”
Among other self-proclaimed former revolutionaries Bill Ayers is note-
worthy. His memoir, Fugitive Days (2003), is a comprehensive record of the
radical beliefs of his generation of activists. But he differed from many for-
mer radicals who, with the passage of time, retreated from their most virulent
youthful commitments and convictions. Ayers recalled the bombing of the
Pentagon with undisguised nostalgia: “Everything was absolutely ideal on the
day I bombed the Pentagon; the sky was blue. The birds were singing. And
the bastards were finally going to get what was coming to them.” Che Gue-
vara was among his role models, who “spoke to us every morning from a
huge poster above our bed.” He was among the privileged youths coming of
age in the 1960s who found middle-class life unbearably stultifying and in-
authentic: “I think back to my childhood, to the houses in trim rows and the
identical lawns and the neat fences. . . . Where we lived . . . the grass was al-
ways green, the moms were always smiling. . . . Our kitchen was sparkling. . . .”
To overcome such suburban, middle-class inauthenticity, he declared that
“the personal is political, and we meant that . . . everything was part of a
grand experiment in liberation. . . . I felt suddenly transported . . . swept along
by the dream of peace and the captivating idea of social change. . . .” The dis-
 Public Intellectuals and the God That Failed 251

appointments of private and family life converged with the discovery of

social-political injustices such as racism and the Vietnam War; these injus-
tices vindicated the smoldering alienation from the suburban, upper-middle-
class life that preceded the war and the discovery of racial inequalities.
Following his emergence from the underground, Ayers became a tenured
professor of education at the University of Illinois at Chicago. While his cur-
rent way of life is not compatible with setting off bombs or hurling rocks at
policemen or shop windows, his old beliefs and commitments remain cher-
ished and the enduring basis of his moral identity. The persistence of these
commitments is underscored by his expressions of admiration for Jamil al-
Amin (Rap Brown), Kathy Boudin, David Gilbert, Mumia Abu-Jamal, An-
thony Ortiz, and Leonard Peltier—most of them convicted murderers.
While the “Old Guard” sought historical justification for the sufferings im-
posed by communist systems and movements, the young radicals were en-
amored and energized by heartfelt, authentic political violence in the service
of lofty ends.

THE ISLAMIC FACTOR

It is among the peculiarities of the present-day cultural-political climate in the

United States and other Western countries that old-style leftist sympathies for
various communist states and movements have to varying degrees been trans-
ferred to the radical Islamist movements and adversaries of the United States.
This development has been paradoxical, since the progressive, secular beliefs
of both the old and new Left are not easy to reconcile with Islamic funda-
mentalism and the religious fanaticism of Islamic radicals. Nonetheless, the
Arab-Islamic adversaries of the United States have become new objects of
sympathy and solidarity for some figures on the left, and enlisted among the
many “victims” of American policies vindicating their hostility to the United
States. Lynne Stewart, a radical lawyer best known as the unsuccessful de-
fender of Sheik Omar Abdel Rahman, the spiritual leader of the global jihad
(sentenced to life in prison in 1996), exemplifies this position. Like the late
William Kunstler, she became “a movement lawyer” who “didn’t just defend
the legal rights of her clients; she also advocated their politics,” as George
Packer noted in the New York Times Magazine. She became Rahman’s lawyer
at the urging of Ramsey Clark, who also deserves our attention on similar
grounds. Subsequently, Stewart was indicted and sentenced to prison for
helping Rahman communicate from prison with his followers. In Stewart’s
eyes, Packer wrote, Rahman was “a fighter for national liberation on behalf
of people oppressed by dictatorship and American imperialism. She came to
252 Chapter Thirty-two

admire him personally too. . . .” As other radicals, she was irresistibly at-
tracted to the enemy of her enemies. She was propelled, she said, by her true
goal to always be “on the right side of history.” That entailed an abiding hos-
tility toward capitalism, which she described as “a consummate evil that un-
leashes its dogs of war on the helpless; an enemy motivated by insatiable
greed. . . .” She also said, “I don’t have any problem with Mao or Stalin or
the Vietnamese leaders or certainly Fidel locking up people they see as dan-
gerous.” Her radical sympathies and support for convicted terrorists, domes-
tic and foreign, did not make her an outcast in the legal or academic world.
Ramsey Clark, the U.S. attorney general under Lyndon Johnson, has in
common with Lynne Stewart an avid interest in defending the adversaries of
the United States, domestic and foreign, but the evolution of his political at-
titudes is more complex. After his career as attorney general, he joined
William Kunstler to represent two of the so-called Attica Brothers, accused of
killing a guard during the prison uprising. He provided legal assistance to
Radovan Karadzic, the Bosnian Serb general indicted for war crimes, and
gave legal advice to Slobodan Milosevic. Clark also joined the legal team de-
fending Saddam Hussein, of whom he made warm remarks while he was still
in power: “I’ve met with him four times, probably averaged two to three
hours at a time. . . . [H]e is reserved, quiet, thoughtful, dignified, you might
say, in the old-fashioned sense,” as he was quoted in the New York Observer.
In a Face the Nation interview, Clark refused to describe Saddam as an evil
force. “I don’t judge people as good or evil,” he said. He showed no such ret-
icence in his judgments of American policies and politicians.
It is not self-evident why Clark became an embittered critic of the United
States. During the Vietnam era he prosecuted prominent war protesters such
as Dr. Spock, William Sloane Coffin, and Muhammad Ali, and he might have
come to regret this, given his emerging political convictions. Also significant,
soon after becoming attorney general, he dropped the case against Judith
Coplon, who was charged with passing secrets to a Soviet lover. It was none
other than Clark’s father who brought the case against Coplon when he was
attorney general. Approaching eighty, it is safe to predict that Ramsey Clark
will persevere in his beliefs.

WHY THESE BELIEFS ENDURED

Several conditions may be identified that contribute to the preservation of the

deeply held political beliefs and ideals here discussed. Most important is that
it is always easier to retain familiar, internalized beliefs, held over long peri-
ods of time, than to discard them. The more time is invested in a political
 Public Intellectuals and the God That Failed 253

cause or movement, the more difficult it becomes to abandon it. Many of the
well-known representatives of these enduring beliefs are of advanced age or
are deceased. What they have in common are core convictions about the cor-
ruptions and injustices that, in their view, define American society. Hatred of
the enemy—the United States—prompts solidarity with the enemies of that
enemy, who could be communist dictators, third-world autocrats, Islamic fa-
natics, or domestic terrorists.
The other major factor in the durability of these beliefs is their centrality
to the sense of identity of the individuals concerned. When political beliefs
and actions satisfy important emotional needs and bolster a favorable self-
conception, they are likely to endure. Resisting political disillusionment was
important to Western intellectuals whose sense of identity rested in large mea-
sure on their self-conception as fighters for social justice and righteous crit-
ics of the corruptions of their society. Favorable disposition toward commu-
nist systems and movements often complemented this role. While the latter
has greatly diminished, the aversion toward their society did not. This aver-
sion seemed more profoundly determining their attitudes than the alternatives
embraced.
Political beliefs are also more likely to endure when they are shared with a
group or subculture, and when abandoning the shared beliefs would result in
the loss of important human bonds, social connections, and friendships.
Of further importance, Western intellectuals who resisted reappraisals of
their leftist ideological convictions were spared the personal experience of
living in communist societies. For those in the West, the unappealing attrib-
utes of communist systems—even when acknowledged—remained abstrac-
tions that could not compete with the more intimate knowledge and personal
experience of the flaws of their own society. Nor was the limited awareness
of the defects of communist systems sufficient to undermine high expecta-
tions nurtured by leftist ideals and ideologies.
The single most important factor that enables the individual to retain radical
leftist (or other radical) beliefs is the capacity to dissociate ends from means,
theory from practice, ideals from realities. Such a capacity rests on what Arthur
Koestler called “the doctrine of unshaken foundations”—the overwhelming,
superior moral importance attributed to the ends, which allow the individual to
overlook, or altogether dismiss, the human costs of their pursuit.
 V

IN CONCLUSION
 Chapter Thirty-three

From a “Builder of Socialism” to

“Free-Floating Intellectual”: My
Politically Incorrect Career in
Sociology1

FROM BUDAPEST TO THE LONDON

SCHOOL OF ECONOMICS

It is always interesting to ponder one’s choice of a particular occupation or

profession, assuming that it was a matter of choice. Choosing an occupation
is approximately as important as choosing one’s spouse, possibly more so
since—at the present time at any rate—people are more likely to stay with
their profession than spouse. There are several pathways to occupational
choice. It may be, or used to be, a matter of following in the footsteps of par-
ents, or, it may be inspired by the desire to do something different, interest-
ing, exciting, or creative—that is, to find fulfillment in the occupation cho-
sen. Another determinant may be an appetite for wealth and power or high
status, recognition or fame compatible with the desire for money, and a lux-
urious way of life. American society, more than most, encourages such high
aspirations. The desire to do good and help others is another motive for
choosing a profession; it too can be combined with interest in making a good
living and high status, as in the case of physicians and lawyers. One may also
drift into an occupation, seizing particular opportunities, perhaps the fate of
most people. The higher the skills or qualifications an occupation or profes-
sion requires, the less likely that entering it will be a matter of such drift.
There seem to be two major motives for people who become sociologists
in the United States. The first is to do good, to change society or particular
institutions by grasping how society and its institutions work and by discov-
ering the roots of social problems, inequality, conflict, and human misery; it
is hoped that new information and proper methodology would lead to the ap-
plication of sociological insights to better lives. Any such application of the

257
258 Chapter Thirty-three

findings of sociology (and the other social sciences) rests on a conception of

good society, of what constitutes social justice and human fulfillment, even
of legitimate human needs. Secondly, there is the pursuit of knowledge for its
own sake, the desire to become a scientist of society, to master and accumu-
late knowledge of human interactions, social institutions, change, and conflict
but not necessarily in order to improve the world. Astronomists do not dream
of altering the universe, and social scientists need not believe that their work
will find application.
My own case does not quite fit these motivational patterns. The choice of
sociology as a field of study and profession was certainly not the culmination
of carefully nurtured aspirations, of the desire to be of some service to hu-
manity; I aspired neither to become a virtuous critic of social injustice nor a
hard-nosed scientist discovering the social facts and the imperatives of social
life. But, there was a modest, lurking hope that in choosing sociology, I could
eventually shed some light on some puzzling and discouraging aspects of so-
cial existence, including the painful and depriving conditions one faces in
life. I was especially interested in better understanding social and political
conflicts such as I experienced firsthand in my native country, Hungary, dur-
ing World War II and afterwards when the country was occupied and forcibly
transformed by the Soviet Union. There were finally the experiences of the
crushed Revolution of 1956.
When at the ripe age of twenty-four in January 1957 I was enrolled as a
first-year undergraduate at the London School of Economics (part of the Uni-
versity of London), I had just learned about the existence of the sociology I
proposed to study. My interests in high school (gymnasium) and afterwards
while in Hungary were literary. Had I been admitted to a university in Hun-
gary and had I been free to make a choice, I would have chosen English lit-
erature, perhaps English and Russian or English and Hungarian. Upon arrival
in England it seemed presumptuous and a misplaced aspiration for a Hungar-
ian with a limited (though rapidly growing) knowledge of the English lan-
guage to specialize in English literature in England. I was also interested in
history, psychology, political science, and anthropology—though the latter
three barely existed as academic disciplines in communist Hungary. Sociol-
ogy was also unknown; although in its stead we had something called
“tarsadalomtudomany” that translates as the science of society, an apparent
incarnation of sociology. In reality this “science of society” was Marxism-
Leninism applied to the prevailing political purposes and policies of the
party-state in Hungary.
I learned of the academic existence of sociology shortly after my arrival in
London in December 1956 on a visit to the London School of Economics. An
English student took me there and showed the catalogue that described the
 From a “Builder of Socialism” to “Free-Floating Intellectual” 259

programs of study, that listed specific courses, and even the readings assigned
to them. I was in the privileged position to shop around, as it were, for a suit-
able course of study. The arrangements were flexible and generous; all of us,
three hundred Hungarian student refugees flown to the U.K. from Austria in
a special little airlift, were given ample choice, assistance to learn the lan-
guage, and comprehensive financial support by a consortium of British uni-
versities and special funds.
The degree program in sociology entailed courses in sociological theory,
social philosophy, ethics, social psychology, criminology, sociology of reli-
gion, economics, English social history, and others, all of which looked in-
teresting in their own right though it was not clear what they all added up to.
Studying sociology at LSE also allowed me to stay in London, which was an
important consideration. Having grown up in a city (Budapest), but forcibly
removed from it at age eighteen and compelled to spend close to five years in
rural areas (more of this later), big city life had a great attraction. I had no de-
sire to go to an English provincial university, not even to Oxford or Cam-
bridge.
This somewhat haphazard involvement with the discipline helps to explain
why being a sociologist has never been an important, defining part of my in-
tellectual, professional, or personal identity. I believe that I could just as well
have chosen political science, social psychology, cultural anthropology, so-
cial or intellectual history. In any of these fields in all probability I would
have gravitated to the same professional interests that came to preoccupy me
as a sociologist, addressing them presumably with different concepts and
terminology.

SOCIOLOGY AND “FREE-FLOATING” INTELLECTUALS

If sociologists are considered intellectuals, and emerge from the requisite so-
cial context Karl Mannheim had specified as the breeding ground of intellec-
tuals, I was an appropriate candidate for the sociological calling. I was “de-
tached” all right, and quite “free-floating,” having left my native country and
been removed from family, friends, and a familiar subculture, without clear-
cut membership in a social class, lacking organizational ties, sustaining reli-
gious beliefs, and financial security.
Similar connections between exile and the calling of the intellectual were
proposed by Edward Said: “What we have here . . . is exile as metaphor, to use
Said’s phrase: exile as the typical condition of the modern intellectual—indeed
as the only condition that should command respect. This is not an original the-
sis. Said’s hero . . . Theodore Adorno, who was for a time a real exile, claimed
260 Chapter Thirty-three

that a sense of alienation, of not feeling at home even in your own home, was
the only correct attitude for an intellectual to adopt. Adorno was in this respect
heir to a German romantic tradition.”2
I do not have much sympathy with the Said-Adorno position sketched above
since I associate it (as did Ian Buruma, whose article I quoted from) with a cer-
tain amount of posturing. Many, if not most, of the self-consciously and boast-
fully “alienated” intellectuals who cherish the idea of being in exile of some
kind (as Said did) are in fact all too well integrated into their social setting,
showered with social and academic honors, command impressive incomes, and
enjoy total job security (tenure), political and expressive freedom, and access to
every conceivable media of communication. These pleasant conditions are dif-
ficult to reconcile with the original idea of “alienation” that conveys not merely
a state of mind and a social-critical disposition but certain tangible deprivations
associated with particular social conditions. Said and those of his disposition
seem to suggest that their alienation entails something original and heroic, in-
cluding willful risk-taking and victimhood. But the social criticism Said and
others of similar mindset articulate does not entail any risk, it is in fact highly
rewarded and respected within the intellectual-academic subcultures in which
they live—and well tolerated by society at large. Moreover, the type of social
criticism here referred to (I called it elsewhere “adversarial”) has become
highly standardized and unoriginal, a form of conventional wisdom among ac-
ademic intellectuals and those left-of-center outside academia. I do not count
myself among these alienated intellectuals (whatever the nature and degree of
my “detachment” from American society).
In my case the “free-floating” condition preceded, to some degree, my de-
parture from Hungary. It is hard to think of any collectivity to which I be-
longed in Hungary that contributed to a strong sense of identity. I came from
a largely assimilated Jewish family; my parents were neither practicing Jews
nor involved in Jewish community life. The same was true of my maternal
grandfather who lived with us, though not my grandmother who, while alive,
made the family observe the major Jewish holidays. Being Jewish for me
meant mainly well-preserved memories of life-threatening persecution (in
1944) and a vague pride in belonging to a group that had an above average
interest in learning and produced many individuals of considerable intellec-
tual, scientific, and artistic distinction. I have somewhat similar positive feel-
ings about my Hungarian roots when I contemplate the accomplishments of
Hungarians, in and outside Hungary.
While growing up (during the postwar years), my family was steadily los-
ing social status and financial security due to political circumstances. After
finishing what was an elite high school (gymnasium) in Budapest in 1951, my
 From a “Builder of Socialism” to “Free-Floating Intellectual” 261

parents, grandfather, and I were exiled (deported, really) to a village in East-

ern Hungary. This was followed by two years of military service, much of it
in the so-called construction battalions (epitozaszloalj) set up for those de-
fined as politically unreliable by the authorities. After exile and military ser-
vice I worked (as an unskilled laborer) in construction in Budapest since such
an occupation entitled one to live in the city (as a former exile I needed a spe-
cial permit to live there). Most of my classmates and friends managed to at-
tend university and I felt singularly marginal and unfortunate being deprived
of the same opportunity. (I had good grades and was initially admitted, but the
exile made it impossible to attend.) Between 1948 and 1956 I ceaselessly fan-
tasized about getting out of Hungary but it was not possible, either legally or
illegally.

HISTORICAL EVENTS AND SOCIOLOGICAL INTERESTS

Three major political-historical events and experiences influenced my socio-

logical interests by their impact on my life. They were the Jewish persecution
in 1944, the period of communist repression between 1948 and 1956, and the
Hungarian Revolution (and its defeat) in 1956. Each impressed on me the en-
demic nature of conflict, and the part played by lethal violence in human af-
fairs. The latter ceased to be an abstraction when at age twelve (during the
siege of Budapest) I saw corpses lying on the streets and later (after the war)
when I paused on my way to school to stare at bodies exhumed from a mass
grave in a park where they were buried temporarily during the siege. There
were more corpses to be seen during the Revolution in 1956 when I spent
most of my time as a participant observer of sorts on the streets of Budapest.
These experiences are likely to have implanted seeds of skepticism about
theoretical schemes in sociology which emphasized consensus and normative
integration and the rational settlement of disputes central to “conflict resolu-
tion.” Not that I did not regard such possibilities praiseworthy, but they
seemed historically and geographically limited to a handful of (Western) so-
cieties that managed miraculously to institutionalize the rule of law, political
pluralism, and respect for the individual.
The defeat of the Hungarian Revolution was another all too obvious lesson
that “might is right,” that brute force can settle conflict with durable results
and ideas can be silenced by naked power. To be sure, seen from the vantage
point of the last decade of the twentieth century, the crushing of the revolu-
tion did not bring lasting benefits for the oppressor. Gradually the forces
pressing for greater political choice and freedom and a realignment with
262 Chapter Thirty-three

Western values had reasserted themselves in Hungary and elsewhere in East-

ern Europe. At last, in 1989 the communist system in Hungary dissolved as it
did in the Soviet Union in 1991—both developments totally unanticipated on
my part and most experts on such matters. The collapse and its aftermath fur-
ther contributed to my skeptical view of American sociology as this momen-
tous historical development failed to inspire any serious analysis, discussion,
or stocktaking in the sociological profession that had a long record of mas-
sive indifference toward communist systems.
I should also note here that surviving Nazism did not implant any “survivor
guilt” many survivors of the Holocaust are said to suffer of. To the contrary I
felt lucky and privileged; the survival and the subsequent escape from Hun-
gary became a source of optimism, and imparted the feeling that I was in con-
trol of my life, or at any rate that I am capable of “bouncing back” after hard-
ships.
My family and I survived the Jewish persecution because we acquired doc-
uments stating that we were gentiles and Transylvanian refugees, and these
papers passed the muster of the Hungarian Nazi storm troopers looking for
Jews in hiding. Getting out of Hungary and escaping communism (in No-
vember 1956) was another matter. By then I was an adult and made an en-
tirely conscious decision to try to get out, willing to face the risk of getting
caught, and if so, imprisoned. I remain convinced that it was the best decision
I ever made. The following helps to understand why.

DOWN AND OUT IN HUNGARY

The five years (from June 1951 to November 1956) between finishing the
gymnasium and escaping from Hungary are especially helpful explaining the
interests that permeated my academic work and found expression in my pub-
lications. At the time I felt that these were totally lost, wasted years, when
nothing useful was accomplished, a period of considerable physical discom-
fort (especially while in the army), intellectual derailment, and overall stag-
nation.
The exile was an old Russian-Soviet form of punishment imported to Hun-
gary from the Soviet Union. It entailed enforced idleness combined with occa-
sional bouts of heavy manual labor, crowded and primitive housing conditions,
loss of social status and property, political stigmatization, and literal uprooted-
ness. The exiles (or deportees), having been removed from Budapest, were left
to fend for themselves in the villages but were not prevented from getting help
from relatives. We were allowed to vegetate more or less undisturbed by the au-
thorities, our movements restricted to a six-kilometer (four-mile) radius from
 From a “Builder of Socialism” to “Free-Floating Intellectual” 263

the center of the village. There were occasional visits from the police to make
sure that nobody made an unauthorized trip (given the system of personal iden-
tity documents, or internal passports, that listed residence and required regis-
tration with and permission from the police when one wanted to move, there
was little practical possibility or incentive to try to escape.)
There were major sociological lessons or insights implicit in the experience
of the exile and in that of the Jewish persecution. One was that human beings
regardless of their individual qualities and behavior can be assigned to broad
racial, ethnic, class, or political categories and treated accordingly. In effect,
the authorities, both Nazi and Communist, practiced a form of applied soci-
ology, using sociological criteria to predict individual behavior from the at-
tributes assigned to the group the individual belonged to, or was assigned to.
As the Nazis saw it, Jews were by genealogical or racial definition evil, and
the good of society (and mankind) required their elimination. As to being
classified as politically unreliable (or a “class enemy”) by the communist
regime on account of the former socioeconomic status of my maternal grand-
father—in this regard the causation was more indirect. It involved the notion
that class and class-consciousness is transmitted through more than one gen-
eration: if my grandfather was a capitalist with all the socially determined
harmful attitudes, the latter were bound to be transmitted to his offspring, in-
cluding grandson.
The deportations were an attempt to weed out groups of people seen as
supportive or potentially supportive of the precommunist social-political or-
der and hostile toward the new one; the deportations were officially justified
as part of the class struggle. They also helped to alleviate the chronic housing
shortage in the capital, Budapest.
The second learning experience of growing up under the communist sys-
tem was that people can live for long periods of time under a political system
they abhor but are capable of wearing the mask of conformity without show-
ing signs of their dissatisfaction or hostility.
The very nature of the communist system and its massive, ongoing cam-
paigns of propaganda and the attendant institutionalization of a gap between
theory and practice (or between the official promises and reality) also made a
lasting impression. It may be conjectured that the latter stimulated my subse-
quent interest in and awareness of the many discrepancies between appear-
ance and reality perpetuated by both political propaganda and commercial ad-
vertising. More generally, I have retained a morbid fascination with the
various institutional, cultural, as well as personal attempts at misrepresenting
reality, and such interests found expression in my work.
The military service too might have contributed to my sociological in-
terests, by illustrating the nature of hierarchies, power and powerlessness,
264 Chapter Thirty-three

bureaucracy at its worst, and the ability of the individual to adapt to adversity.
It was an experience of deprivation, regimentation, powerlessness, and
involuntary obedience to authority. Life in the army (both in the labor battal-
ion and later in the infantry) revolved around a profusion of mindless regula-
tions, crude as well as subtle inequalities and status distinctions, and the use
of naked power. It is likely that these experiences sensitized me to the perva-
sive abuse of power, political inequalities and the ease with which people can
be intimidated; they also contributed to my professional interest in the con-
cept and manifestations of totalitarianism.
The Hungarian armed forces in the early 1950s combined the military tra-
ditions derived from the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy (and its Prussian as-
pects) and Soviet-style punitive authoritarianism with its commitment to the
minute regulation of the conscripts’ lives. Our hair was completely removed
at the moment of induction and we remained totally shorn for an entire year.
(Having a shaved head or crewcut was far from fashionable in Hungary at the
time and was associated either with service in the army or incarceration.) No
leaves were given during the first six months and even afterwards it was a rare
privilege. The food was far worse than what inmates of maximum-security
prisons or the homeless get in this country. In the labor battalion the work was
quite hard and there was a great deal of harassment by the NCOs and the po-
litical commissar.3 Our bed covers and the “mattress” (a coarse sack stuffed
with straw) were almost daily thrown off by NCOs for not approximating the
shape of a matchbox or brick, the official ideal. People would get up an hour
before the wake-up call to have enough time to smooth and sharpen the edges
and attain the ideal symmetry demanded. There were also alarms or inspec-
tions (of specks of dust under the bed, for example) in the middle of the night
and nocturnal drills.
Such and other hardships were barely cushioned by group solidarity since
we were intimidated and atomized. This was accomplished in part by penal-
izing the unit as a whole for the alleged misbehavior of an individual mem-
ber (accused, for example, of not pulling his weight at work) and by encour-
aging his fellows to beat him up—which occasionally happened at night at
the urging of the commissar.
Both the exile and military service provided opportunity to encounter a
much wider range of people (i.e., peasants and other manual laborers) than
would otherwise have been the case. These circumstances and encounters
stimulated questions about the nature of the social and political world, the
relationship between individual and society, and the part played by personal
choice (or free will) versus social and political forces in one’s life.
The same questions had been raised far more starkly in 1944 when my
family and I stood a very good chance of being killed, and at age twelve I was
 From a “Builder of Socialism” to “Free-Floating Intellectual” 265

well aware of the possibility and discussed it with my father who, in response
to my inquiries, assured me that being shot is not painful. I never ceased to
reflect on the fact that a person, because of his or her membership in (or ar-
bitrary assignment to) an ethnic, racial, social, or religious group could be
subjected to life-threatening measures, and these measures could be imple-
mented on a large scale. Nonetheless, the experiences of Nazism and the Jew-
ish persecution found no discernible expression in my work as a sociologist,
for reasons discussed below.

POLITICAL PREOCCUPATIONS IN MY WORK

Rather than reflecting the truly traumatic experiences noted earlier, much of
my work focused on Soviet totalitarianism, communism, and the attraction
the latter held for Western intellectuals. This is all the more counterintuitive
since the communist regime was not life-threatening—I did, however, live
under it far longer. But the major explanation of these contrasting preoccu-
pation lies elsewhere.
Already at an early age (in my teens), it seemed to me that the issue of
Nazism had been settled historically and morally. No sane, decent, re-
spectable, or moderately intelligent person would defend Nazism or try to
minimize its misdeeds. After leaving Hungary and becoming an academic I
noted that nobody studying or writing about any aspect of Nazism was cau-
tioned about the danger of making value judgments (unlike those writing
about communist systems or movements); refugees from Nazi Germany and
former inmates of Nazi concentration camps were not considered unreliable
witnesses (unlike those from communist states).4 The condemnation of
Nazism seemed, and still seems, virtually universal and unconditional (young
neo-Nazis and crackpot Holocaust revisionists notwithstanding). “Nazi” be-
came a synonym of evil, and the Holocaust its unique expression. Not only
was Nazism disavowed, its evil was well documented; information of every
kind—visual, statistical, documentary, eyewitness—was widely available. It
did not take great intellectual discernment or moral courage in the Western
world to condemn Nazism. Not only was Nazism discredited, largely due to
the Holocaust, it had also been conclusively defeated on the battlefields and
destroyed as a political system. This made it possible to investigate and doc-
ument its misdeeds, whereas the survival of communist systems until the
early 1990s contributed to their legitimacy and made it impossible to docu-
ment their misdeeds.
In contrast to the moral assessments and condemnation of Nazism, the de-
bate over the nature of communist systems and their supporting ideologies
266 Chapter Thirty-three

has persisted even after the collapse of Soviet communism. At the time of this
writing many Western intellectuals and academics still have some good things
to say or think about certain communist regimes (though rarely about the for-
mer Soviet Union). Castro’s Cuba (an especially hellish place for critical in-
tellectuals) retains a measure of sentimental support, and if its defects are re-
luctantly acknowledged, they are usually blamed on the United States.
Marxism is still dominant in many departments of humanities and social sci-
ences on American (and Western European) campuses and its relevance to the
character and defects of communist systems (existing or defunct) is vigor-
ously denied by those on the left.
For such reasons, through much of my professional career I was motivated by
an impulse to enlighten my academic colleagues, and the educated public in this
country about “actually existing” socialist systems, and disabuse them of illu-
sions and the error of perceiving them as morally equivalent or superior to West-
ern democracies. I also argued repeatedly that there was a connection between
“theory and practice,” that Marxism bears some responsibility for the form these
systems took, and that it had inspired their political elites up to a point.5
It is indeed the case, as my late friend Stanley Milgram pointed out, that I
was intellectually “energized” by what seemed to me the obtuseness, igno-
rance, self-deception, and wishful-thinking I encountered among many West-
ern intellectuals and their audiences. Had there been more widespread rejec-
tion of contemporary Marxist-Leninist regimes, movements, and ideologies I
would have been less likely to write about them, especially if there had also
been the kind of moral consensus about them similar to that regarding Nazi
Germany, apartheid-era South Africa, or various right-wing dictatorships
around the world.
To this day these issues remain unsettled, morally as well as intellectually.
Large numbers of Western people of good-will and idealism remain seriously
uninformed about the character of communist systems (surviving or extinct)
and the relationship between the ideologically inspired, if perverted, idealism
that guided their rulers in undertaking the political transformations that cre-
ated so much political violence and mendaciousness.
All the events, experiences, and attitudes discussed earlier also made me
more aware of the significant role irrationality and aggression play in social
and political affairs and human behavior.

ON BEING A “ROOTLESS COSMOPOLITAN”

The connections between being an intellectual (and the professional activities

associated with it) and one’s sense of identity bear further discussion. It is in-
 From a “Builder of Socialism” to “Free-Floating Intellectual” 267

disputable that uprootedness, marginality, or the outsider status were the

background to (if not the direct inspiration of) my becoming a sociologist.
A specific example of the connections between life and work was a study
of the process of adjustment of Hungarian students to life in Britain I under-
took while still an undergraduate at LSE, which eventually became my mas-
ter’s thesis at the University of Illinois, Urbana, in 1960. It was obviously in-
spired by personal interest and made possible by the University of London
underwriting the modest expenses. This was one of the very few quantitative
studies I ever undertook since it was based on mail questionnaires and tabu-
lated with the help of an early version of the computer. I only recall one find-
ing (which certainly applied to my own case), that the best adjusted among
the students were those who had good language skills and suffered some kind
of political deprivation in Hungary.
The term “rootless cosmopolitan” was coined by Andrei Zhdanov, the
high-ranking Soviet party functionary in charge of matters ideological and
cultural in the late 1940s. It was introduced in the course of a campaign to ha-
rass and repress artists, writers, and assorted intellectuals who were, suppos-
edly tainted by Western ideas and cultural influences, hence were “rootless
cosmopolitans.” The other unexpressed meaning of the term was simply
“Jewish.” Most of those repressed during that period were Jews and calling
Jews “rootless cosmopolitans” had some historical plausibility since they
were often forced to escape from one country to another. Over the years I
sometimes applied the term humorously to myself. I was largely rootless,
Jewish, and “cosmopolitan” in the sense of being possessed of a European
cultural orientation. That is to say, I am unashamedly “Eurocentric” without
being closely identified with any particular country and its culture or tradi-
tions. The rootlessness here conveyed did not prove to be particularly bur-
densome or problematic.
My sense of being an outsider (whether in Britain or the United States) did
not prevent me from feeling sympathetic toward the social-political system in
which I was able to build a new life. Freedom, or the free world, for me was
not a concept placed in ironic quotation marks.6 I could tell the difference be-
tween the presence or absence of political freedom and found ideas such as
Marcuse’s “repressive tolerance” irritating and unconvincing.
These political sympathies notwithstanding, I have remained largely an
outsider, close to what Mannheim meant by free-floating. But, contrary to
Mannheim, these circumstances did not endow me with great powers of “syn-
thesizing” or a greater objectivity. But there were other intellectual benefits
derived from growing up (and having spent my youth) in one country, my col-
lege years in another, and the rest in a third. These circumstances made me, I
believe, a somewhat better observer of the social settings I lived in; I took
268 Chapter Thirty-three

fewer things for granted than the natives and was inclined to compare and re-
flect on the ways of life, institutions, attitudes, and beliefs found in different
societies.
This outsider status and state of mind is perhaps best illustrated by noting
that to this day, after having spent most of my adult life in the United States,
I cannot say without hesitation and qualifications that I am “American.” My
Hungarian accent, if nothing else, reminds me that I am not. Not even an
American wife and daughter born here can complete the acculturation pro-
cess, although they help. I have close American friends but perhaps the clos-
est are those who share my background, Hungarians of my generation who
left in 1956, some of whom I have known since my teens or childhood, and
some other foreigners who settled here.
It does not follow, however, that I have a strong sense of being Hungarian.
Having spent the first twenty-four years of my life in Hungary has not been
an indestructible foundation of such an identity given the difficulties I had in
Hungary. At the same time, I still speak Hungarian fluently and without an ac-
cent and feel a certain pride that I can pass as a native when in Hungary. But
I do not write and think in Hungarian. When I visit Hungary, which I do every
year since the early 1980s, I do not feel that it is the place where I “belong.”7
On my only visit to Israel in 1968 I felt the same or an even greater distance;
there was no surge of a sense of solidarity with my fellow Jews; moreover, I
could not speak the language and neither the landscape nor the climate was
congenial.
On my visits to Hungary as I interact with the natives I do not feel that we
share important, binding ties given my long absence from Hungary, but I can
still effortlessly communicate with them. I am in a country that is at once fa-
miliar and strange. I like Hungarian food, the music of Bartok and Kodaly,
and the many great works of Hungarian literature untranslated and unknown
outside Hungary.
When all is said and done, I feel on these visits as a well-meaning and well-
regarded outsider; I do not have a love-hate relationship with Hungary and
Hungarians. People I come in contact with are friendly and polite, my rela-
tives affectionate. My parents died a long time ago; what remains is a half-
sister, her son (my nephew), close cousins and a few old friends, and some
newer ones as well. I never fantasized about moving back, not even after the
fall of communism, although my retirement income (adequate here) would
make me outright affluent there.
Being an outsider in this country is a different matter, and compatible with
feeling comfortable and at home; Americans are tolerant of accents, strange
food preferences, and of a certain amount of foreignness. In the academic set-
ting such foreignness may even confer a slight advantage (less than a darker
 From a “Builder of Socialism” to “Free-Floating Intellectual” 269

skin color). I often speculated that my freely expressed political incorrectness

over the years was perhaps overlooked or excused to some degree by my col-
leagues as the eccentricity of a foreigner.
Apart from the accent, my outsider status is further testified to by my
sketchy knowledge of American history and ignorance of popular culture. I
do not know the names of famous athletes and the idols of mass entertain-
ment; I have never been to a football, basketball, or baseball game. By con-
trast, my knowledge of American geography greatly exceeds that of most na-
tives. I have been to most states, most national parks, driven across the
country four times, and have a good knowledge of where major cities and ge-
ographical features are to be found. My knowledge of New England is even
more impressive as I have been exploring it ever since I moved here in 1963.
As to the narrower geographic confines of Western Massachusetts where I
have lived since 1968, my knowledge is even more extensive and the source
of some pride. I have explored most dirt roads, mountain trails, lakes, ponds,
and waterways of this area by car, kayak, on foot and cross-country skis, re-
spectively. As a matter of fact, the strongest ties that bind me to this country
are geographic: cherished landscapes and the outdoors. No amount of senti-
mental recollection of Hungarian lands can compete with my attachment to
the mountains, lakes, and seacoasts of New England.

SCHOOLS, TEACHERS, ROLE MODELS

Discussion of my intellectual development and aspirations prompts some ref-

erence to my high school, the gymnasium I attended in Budapest. By the stan-
dards of most American high schools it was a demanding and elitist institution,
which (when I began) students entered at age ten and attended for eight years.
At the end of the eighth year we took a much-feared comprehensive written
and oral examination over several days that covered several years’ work. The
curriculum had virtually no electives; requirements included eight years of
Latin, several years of Russian (as well some other foreign language before
that was abolished), several years of mathematics, algebra, geometry, physics,
biology, chemistry, zoology/botany, mostly Hungarian literature, art history,
physical education, and choir. Homework was plentiful; we were given num-
ber grades. Most graduates of the school went on to university. While not
everybody in my class was bookish, there were enough of us who were and
who took pride in reading books well beyond what was required in school. My
interests and those of my friends were literary-humanistic-philosophical but
also political. In those days Hungarian schools were segregated by sex and this
probably contributed to a certain intellectual male bonding and seriousness
270 Chapter Thirty-three

that otherwise might not have been present. We missed the company of girls
badly but their absence probably made us still more bookish. My friends and
I had no interest whatsoever in sports and especially team sports. While our
school did have its “jocks,” they had no monopoly on status and popularity,
unlike in most American schools.
While the gymnasium exerted lasting influence by creating or stimulating
a broad predisposition to and respect for some type of intellectual activity, the
type of training I had in sociology also made a difference. It seems that hav-
ing attended first a British university and later Princeton helped to make me
more of a humanistic-qualitative sociologist than might otherwise have been
the case, although training in sociology at LSE had a substantial positivist-
empiricist component and members of the faculty were far from dismissive
of quantitative methods. I think that British sociology at the time differed
from American by being less polarized along the extremes of “grand theoriz-
ing” on the one hand and the pursuit of methodological refinements on the
other, both famously scorned by C. Wright Mills.
From the earliest days of my sociological career I was attracted to what
struck me as significant questions of social-political existence—never mind
the methodological apparatus available for investigating them. I also realized
over time that such an approach can degenerate into mere speculation,
polemics, or journalism. At the same time, “grand theorizing” left me cold be-
cause of its abstract nature and lack of connection with concrete, substantive
historical matters and situations
The teaching of sociology at LSE at the undergraduate level was more like
teaching it in this country at the graduate level. Several courses were taught
in the seminar format, others as medium-size lectures. There were also tuto-
rials, better known as venerable fixtures at Oxford and Cambridge. In each
year I had a different tutor (Norman Birnbaum in my first, Hilda Himmelweit,
the social psychologist, in the second, and Thomas Bottomore in the third).
These were indeed informal occasions; the paper and discussion topics were
largely inspired by the tutor.
Most amazing from the American perspective, there were no grades, no
grade-point averages, and no exams until the finals, which was the culmina-
tion of the three-year program. We did write papers for the seminars as well
as for our tutor. I do not recall if those were actually graded or not but there
were always written and verbal comments. The final exams were graded (or
given points), which determined the type of degree received: First Class, Up-
per Second, Lower Second, Third, and Pass. (I got a lower second. This
mediocre performance may be assessed against the fact that I did the three-
year course in two-and-a-half and began with a limited knowledge of the
English language.)
 From a “Builder of Socialism” to “Free-Floating Intellectual” 271

Also of some interest (and illustrative of the differences between British

and American academic procedures at the time) is that my admission to LSE
was exceedingly informal, based on a single interview with the economist
Joan Robinson. I did not (and could not) even produce proof of having com-
pleted high school and with what results. I believe that my relative fluency in
English at the time carried much weight.
Princeton at the time I attended graduate school (1960–1963) had an un-
usually permissive sociology department as far as requirements were con-
cerned. There were no course requirements, neither regarding their number
nor the kind to be taken, although it was strongly recommended we take
some. I took two each semester during my two years in residence, some in po-
litical science. But we had a language requirement, reading knowledge of two
languages. There was also a methods requirement but it was mercifully
waived on account of my having taken such a course at LSE. The faculty
members were accessible, perhaps in part because the number of graduate
students in residence was small (about a dozen). My teachers at Princeton in-
cluded Morroe Berger, Allen Kassof, Marion Levy, Charles Page, Mel Tumin,
and Harry Eckstein in political science. I disappointed Levy on the occasion
when he asked me, would I, if I had a choice, be a great scientist or creative
artist/writer? I chose the latter. His seminars on theory were notable for his
encouragement of comparative papers allowing us to range over the globe
and almost any topic. (I recall comparing political institutions in Yemen and
East Germany on one occasion, and in Tasmania and the Dominican Repub-
lic on another.)
At a time when the concept of role model enjoys great popularity, I ought
to say something about particular individuals outside academia as well,
whose work and ideas I admired and who significantly influenced my think-
ing. I knew some of them personally, others only through their writings.
Chronologically speaking, my intellectual awakening (and exposure to the
ideas of the people discussed below) began upon my arrival in England, when
I became a student and gained unobstructed access to anything I wished to
read. While in England, the discovery of Arthur Koestler, George Orwell, and
Raymond Aron were the most memorable. I was drawn, among other things,
to their thoughtful anticommunism and their understanding of what was dis-
tinctively wrong with these systems, and I resonated to their analysis of the
perverted idealism these systems embodied. I was also impressed by the lives
and adventures of Koestler and Orwell. In subsequent years I regularly used
their writings in my teaching political sociology, sociology of literature, and
the sociology of ideas and intellectuals.
Another English author that made a great impression was Isaiah Berlin, the
social philosopher. Besides his style and erudition his major appeal lay in
272 Chapter Thirty-three

making a strong case for the importance of ideas in human affairs and in his
anti-utopian and antideterministic message. He made me more fully aware of
a key aspect of the human condition: that we all are prey to conflicting goals
and desires that cannot be reconciled with one another.
Among my teachers, beginning with the London School of Economics, I
benefited most from the lectures of and contact with T. B. Bottomore, Hilda
Himmelweit, and Ernest Gellner; at the University of Illinois I had memo-
rable graduate seminars with Joseph Gusfield (political sociology) and Ben-
nett Berger (sociology of knowledge). At Princeton it was Harry Eckstein in
political science whose course impressed me most. Alex Inkeles at Harvard
was a senior colleague (not teacher) and exemplar in his disciplined pursuit
of learning about important matters, such as the nature of Soviet society and
global modernization. He embodied confidence in reason and systematic,
hard intellectual work. I had similar admiration for the work of my late friend
Stanley Milgram, one of two people with whom I ever co-authored an article.
I also met and admired the work of Barrington Moore without sharing his
contempt for American society, tempered later by his recognition that there
were others quite a bit worse. George Kennan, whose books I repeatedly re-
viewed, was another figure I admired from a distance while also critical of his
succumbing to notions of moral equivalence (between the United States and
the Soviet Union) and of his romantic antimodernism (although I shared some
of it). Sidney Hook (whom I knew) impressed me more by his personality
than his philosophical writings; I admired his polemical vigor and willingness
to take a public stand critical of communist systems and ideologies at a time
when such a position was judged to be in poor taste and was virtually pro-
scribed among most academic intellectuals.
Outside academia Saul Bellow (whom I visited occasionally in Vermont
and Brookline, Massachusetts) was a major influence and inspiration and my
favorite contemporary writer. His writings helped to understand American
culture and society, including the counterculture of the 1960s; two of his nov-
els (Herzog and Mr. Sammler’s Planet) I regularly used in my sociology of
literature course and three of my books begin with quotes from his writings.

MY CAREER AS A SOCIOLOGIST

My teaching experience began as a teaching assistant at the University of Illi-

nois in Champaign-Urbana, Illinois, where I led discussion groups and graded
exams in a large introductory course. The quality of students was a bit of a
culture shock compared with those at LSE. I was inspired to give them a test
of my own invention, which consisted of a list of the names of (what I con-
 From a “Builder of Socialism” to “Free-Floating Intellectual” 273

sidered) well-known artists, writers, scientists, statesmen, plus some capital

cities around the world and asked them to identify them in a few words (or in
case of the cities note their location). The results were comic and dismaying
(I remember Bertrand Russell identified as a basketball player). At Princeton
I was a TA in the social problems course known at the time as “nuts and sluts”
taught by Edward Tiryakian. In the summer of 1961 I had a summer school
job at Queens College, New York, teaching “crime and deviance.”
My first full-time job (at Harvard) materialized while working on my dis-
sertation at Princeton. The Department of Social Relations wanted somebody
who could teach a course on Soviet society, such as Inkeles used to teach but
no longer did. The other courses I taught at Harvard were the sociology of lit-
erature and crime and deviance. I was hired as a nontenured assistant profes-
sor and research fellow at the Russian Research Center.
Not surprisingly, my research and writing interests found expression in
my teaching. Beginning at Harvard in 1963 I regularly taught a course on
Soviet society until the end of the Soviet Union. I also taught a course at
UMass entitled “Social Problems Under Socialism,” which examined these
problems in the Soviet, East European, Chinese, and Cuban settings. It might
very well have been the only such course offered in the whole country. “Po-
litical Sociology” was another of my regular course offerings with emphasis
on totalitarianism (Nazi, Soviet, and Chinese), political propaganda, the
“cult of personality,” political violence, and other unpleasant topics. My
fourth regularly taught course was “sociology of literature and mass cul-
ture.” It consisted, for the most part, of analyzing novels ranging from well-
known classics such as Robinson Crusoe, Madame Bovary, and Oblomov
and works of contemporary American authors like Saul Bellow and Norman
Mailer to far more obscure but important authors students were unlikely to
encounter in any other course. The books were treated as sources of infor-
mation about matters social and historical. The “mass culture” part had a
similar focus: how it reflects, intentionally and unintentionally, social reali-
ties. This was purely a teaching interest; I published nothing related to liter-
ary topics except an article (very early in my career) derived from my doc-
toral dissertation that was entitled “The New Man and His Enemies: A Study
in the Stalinist Conceptions of Good and Evil Personified,” which was based
on socialist-realist novels.
At Harvard there was a congenial group of junior, nontenured faculty I was
friendly with. It included Tiryakian (whose teaching assistant I used to be at
Princeton), Charles Tilly, Murray Melbin, Gerald Platt, and Stanley Milgram,
who became a close, lifelong friend until his untimely death in 1983. Platt has
also remained a close friend and colleague having joined the Department at
UMass, Amherst, two years after I left Harvard. I also met at Harvard David
274 Chapter Thirty-three

Riesman, George Homans, and Talcott Parsons. Communicating face-to-face

with Parsons was no less difficult than reading his books. Homans and Ries-
mans were another matter. I corresponded with Riesman for decades and oc-
casionally visited him in Cambridge and later at his retirement home in Win-
chester.
In those days Pitirim Sorokin was still alive (in retirement) and lived in
Belmont when I met him at a dinner party. He shared with me his conviction
that Parsons was responsible for his being ousted as chairman of the depart-
ment at Harvard and compared Parsons’s alleged machinations to those of
Stalin who packed the Central Committee (of the Soviet Communist Party)
with his people to accomplish his designs.
I also met many people at the Russian Research Center where the lunch-
room was the center for socializing that also took place during the morning
coffee hour, presided over, usually, by Adam Ulam. Mrs. Helen Parsons (Tal-
cott’s wife) was the de facto head of the Russian Research Center, attending
to all administrative matters; her title, if I remember correctly, was adminis-
trative secretary. When the rooms were repainted she asked what color
scheme I preferred; I was deeply impressed that even a lowly nontenured as-
sistant professor’s taste was taken into consideration.
In the Center I also met Barrington Moore and had occasional conversa-
tions with him (maybe two or three times a year, which was above average as
far as most of his colleagues were concerned and was considered an accom-
plishment given his legendary reclusiveness). I also met another young Hun-
garian of the 1956 generation, Peter Kenez, a graduate student in history who
became a professor at Santa Cruz and has remained a very close friend.
Another Harvard experience is worth recalling. In 1963–1964 there was a
visiting Soviet scholar (Yuri Asaev) in the Social Relations department. I
knew him slightly through Jerry Platt, who knew him better as both worked
with Parsons. At one point Asaev decided that he did not wish to return to the
Soviet Union. The resulting emotional turmoil and pressures brought on him
by the Soviet authorities led to two suicide attempts. In the first instance he
jumped out of the window of Platt’s apartment whom he was visiting, and,
amazingly, injured and dazed, climbed back on a fire escape (I was present
since Jerry called me for help and advice). He spent many weeks or months
in the Harvard infirmary recovering. Later he tried to throw himself on the
subway tracks under Harvard Square. Finally he was sent back to the Soviet
Union by the State Department and those at Harvard who felt that his defec-
tion would undermine the cultural exchange programs. It was an unseemly af-
fair, as I saw it; American authorities caved in to intense Soviet pressure (that
included visits by other Soviet exchange students to his hospital room, an-
guished phone calls from his wife, and calls from the embassy).
 From a “Builder of Socialism” to “Free-Floating Intellectual” 275

At Harvard my teaching was largely limited to undergraduates, though at

one point I was in charge of an interdisciplinary seminar for graduate students
which featured invited speakers (one of whom was Barrington Moore).
If one may believe the Crimson Confidential Guide to undergraduate
courses, my teaching efforts were not altogether fruitless. The following was
written regarding my course on Soviet Society:

SocRel 105 is packed with information about Soviet society and doesn’t require
command of the field’s jargon. . . . Lecturer Paul Hollander might best be char-
acterized as a “sleeper.” His manner is quiet and his delivery at first seems sop-
orific. His impeccable organization, however, was greatly appreciated last year,
and after a few lectures the quiet charm of this one-time Hungarian refugee in
his green plush sweatshirt and steel rimmed spectacles was most engaging.
However, don’t plan on Hollander to rouse you for the day.

Student evaluations at UMass were less favorable. There were complaints

that the classes were dull, the readings too long and demanding, and the grad-
ing strict. There remained, over the years a striking and persistent contrast be-
tween students who found my courses interesting and well organized, and the
exams fair, and many who thought otherwise.
Throughout my career as a sociologist, I had misgivings about both major
currents informing the field: (1) the scientific, quantitative, “hardnosed” data
gathering one, and (2) the idealistic, “do-gooding” orientation and its endless
optimism about the perfectibility of social institutions and human beings. I
had more sympathy toward the latter since at least it tended to be preoccupied
with what I regarded as more important questions rather than methodological
refinements. (My ineptness regarding statistics and quantitative methods also
influenced these preferences.) As political correctness became pervasive in
sociology and much of academic life beginning in the late 1960s and early
1970s, I became more sympathetic to the “number crunchers” who did not
pursue ideological agendas.
The limitations of my professional identity as a sociologist had implica-
tions for my attitude to teaching. I never felt that the teaching of sociology or
any of its subfields imparted blinding insights or that sociologists were in a
position to communicate great truth to their captive audiences—shortcomings
not limited to sociology. My greater interest in research and writing presum-
ably had something to do with a lesser interest in teaching. Finally there was
the matter of personality. I am not a big talker; I do not relish holding forth
on social occasions, I do not enjoy performing to an audience, which is an im-
portant ingredient of being a good teacher; I told few jokes in my classes and
when I did, they were rarely understood; being popular among large numbers
of people has not been a high priority. In our times, when students expect to
276 Chapter Thirty-three

be entertained, I fell short. None of this means that I disliked teaching but
only that I found it far less engrossing and stimulating than writing. The qual-
ity of the students also had something to do with these attitudes; there were
rarely more than five to six students in my “advanced undergraduate” classes
(of thirty to forty juniors and seniors) who were responsive, articulate, and in-
terested in the subjects discussed in class. It was difficult to have any dialogue
despite my routine entreaties to the students to ask questions, express opin-
ions, and contribute to class discussion.
My contact with graduate students throughout my teaching career was
quite limited. I regularly offered a seminar on “the sociology of knowledge
and intellectuals” but often there were no takers and those who took it often
came from other departments. The number of students I was advising about
their dissertation was even smaller. The explanation is no mystery. The grad-
uate students fell into two broad groups: there were the quantitatively ori-
ented ones, and, in increasing numbers, those interested in feminism, gender
studies, minorities, postmodernism, and Marxism—topics I had no interest in
and could not contribute to. Presumably my politically incorrect reputation
did not help either to attract students who had these interests and the political
attitudes that went with them.
Following the 1960s my identification with and attachment to the disci-
pline was further weakened as American sociology became increasingly dom-
inated by left-of-center beliefs and agendas. During the 1970s I let my mem-
bership in ASA lapse and stopped attending (with rare exceptions) the annual
meetings dominated by various leftist caucuses and topics and routinely pass-
ing political resolutions I objected to.
Although, as described earlier, I drifted into sociology in a casual and
unpremeditated way, my commitment to certain values provided motivation
for sociological work. My writings express beliefs I never tried to hide but I
also believed that one can aspire to and approximate a degree of impartiality
and that there is a social reality independent of our perceptions and prefer-
ences. Unlike so many of my fellow sociologists concerned with and deter-
mined to uncover the injustices and defects of American society, I was more
interested in exploring and exposing the injustices and deformities of other
political systems, notably those of Soviet-communist inspiration or design.
Such an orientation followed not only from my background but also from my
Western experiences. I could understand why so many Western intellectuals,
including social scientists, disturbed by the inequities of their own societies
paid little attention to what struck me as greater moral outrages around the
world but the discrepancy still bothered me. So did the fact that they took for
granted and had little appreciation of the intellectual and political freedoms
they enjoyed and the political institutions and practices that sustained them.
 From a “Builder of Socialism” to “Free-Floating Intellectual” 277

Having come from a part of the world where repression and intolerance were
endemic and where the standards of living were low, I failed to appreciate
concerns with repressive tolerance and the evils of consumerism. At the same
time, I am an ardent environmentalist and have a strong aversion to SUVs and
the attitudes I associate with their popularity8—suggesting that I am not in-
different to the excesses of consumption. Nor have I remained uncritical of
many other aspects of American society and culture—an attitude most re-
cently expressed in changing the subtitle of my book Anti-Americanism from
“critiques at home and abroad” to “irrational and rational.” Doubtless, many
critiques of American culture and society are not irrational, as is discussed at
some length in the second edition of that book.

CONCLUSION

I do not regret having become a sociologist because it has allowed me to write

a few books and express ideas on some subjects of importance, modest as
their impact might have been. I also found academic life generally congenial
especially given the abundance of free time that goes with it.
Although, as these reflections show, my background and early experiences
exerted a great deal of influence on my subsequent life and work, I was never
drawn to a rigorous social, or social-psychological determinism. I believe,
and prefer to believe, that ideas matter as much as the standard sociological
variables in shaping social and personal life and their influence often cannot
be derived from these variables and from the “interests” they allegedly re-
flect. To be sure, ideas have social, cultural, historical, or situational sources,
they do not descend from heaven. As a sociologist of knowledge, I would be
the last to dispute this. Nonetheless both the origins of and affinity to ideas
are much harder to pin down than, say, the relationship between delinquency
and the broken family.
I always preferred and sought to link (in the spirit of Isaiah Berlin) socio-
political events and processes to “the wishes and purposes of identifiable
individuals” rather than to the impersonal forces of history, economic inter-
est, or the grip of short-lived situations in which individuals find themselves—
not that I would dismiss the importance of the latter. My predilection for em-
phasizing the importance of ideas doubtless has something to do with the
alternative: if ideas matter little, then what matters or ought to matter? As
soon as we abandon the notion of ideas being important influences over our
lives, we are led to some far more deterministic scheme: the physical or ma-
terial environment, the mode of production, some sort of group interest, our
genes, or some combination of heredity and environment.
278 Chapter Thirty-three

Taking ideas seriously and including them among the major influences on
our life does not mean that we can endlessly and limitlessly reinvent our-
selves or the societies we live in but it does provide a more open-ended per-
spective on human life and destiny.

NOTES

1. I have indulged in autobiographical writing on three previous occasions. The

first was an “Epilogue” in the volume The Survival of the Adversary Culture (New
Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction, 1988). The second occasion came when the editor of
Modern Age asked me to contribute to a series of articles in which authors traced the
major intellectual influences over their life and work (“Models and Mentors,” Mod-
ern Age, Summer 1995). The third item focused entirely on matters political and was
entitled “Growing Up in Communist Hungary” in Red Star, Blue Star, ed. Andrew
Handler and Susan V. Meschel (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997).
2. Ian Buruma, “The Romance of Exile, New Republic, February 12, 2001, 33.
3. He was an officer in charge of political-ideological matters, in practice of every-
thing. Even the building battalions designed for the socially-politically corrupt were
given low-level ideological indoctrination in the form of political seminars. The com-
missar, barely literate, often asked me to summarize (and type out) the main points of
the political pamphlets he was to use for enlightening us.
4. For example, in the early 1970s Noam Chomsky warned against believing the
horror stories of Cambodian refugees who fled the massacres of the Pol Pot regime.
In 1996 Nicholas Kristof, correspondent of the New York Times wondered if North
Korean refugees’ accounts of concentration camps were to be believed.
5. The connections between Marxist theory and communist repression were bril-
liantly summed up by Andrzej Walicky: “The habit of conceiving human liberation as
a long, cruel historical process in which entire generations and classes have to be ruth-
lessly sacrificed for the sake of the unfettered development of human beings in the fu-
ture is perhaps one of the most characteristic, although sometimes conveniently for-
gotten, features of Marx’s thought . . . possessors of the only correct knowledge of the
meaning and laws of history have a right, even a duty, to ignore the opinions of the
ignorant majority; if they are in power, they have the right, the duty, to realize histor-
ical necessity, even against all, with the help of police, bayonets and tanks.” (Marx-
ism and the Leap to the Kingdom of Freedom: The Rise and Fall of Communist Utopia
[Stanford University Press, 1995], 16, 205–61).
6. It may be argued that considering myself free is also a form of “false conscious-
ness” induced by my Western social status and material comforts far superior to those
in communist Hungary. If so, my “existence” determined my “consciousness” as the
Marxist formulation would have it. While there is an element of truth in this, it should
be pointed out that I became a critic of the communist system in Hungary well before
I had any personal difficulties on account of my grandfather. I actually was an activist
 From a “Builder of Socialism” to “Free-Floating Intellectual” 279

in the communist youth movement and withdrew from it on my own accord well be-
fore my family or I suffered any economic setback or political discrimination.
7. See “Hungarian Paradoxes” in Paul Hollander, Decline and Discontent: Com-
munism and the West Today (New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction, 1992). For an earlier
(1979) travel report, see “Public and Private in Hungary” in The Many Faces of So-
cialism (New Brunswick: Transaction, 1983).
8. I speculated about the social-cultural sources of the popularity of SUVs in
American society in the introduction to Discontents: Postmodern and Postcommunist,
2002.
 Index

Abu Ghraib, 49 anti-Semitism, 6, 12, 34, 41–42, 129,

Aczel, Tamas, 178 134–38, 144, 146, 148, 223
Adorno, Theodore, 260 Applebaum, Anne, 14, 18
adversary culture, 16, 22, 48, 50, 87, Aptheker, Herbert, 248
201, 203–15, 227 The Aquariums of Pyongyang, 164, 168
advertising, 15–16, 22, 61, 63, 71, 75, Arendt, Hannah, 225–26
88, 102–17, 118, 125, 174, 192, 263 Aron, Raymond, 175, 271
affirmative action, 82–83 Asaev, Yuri, 274
Afghanistan, 39, 46, 53, 77, 206, 208–9, Ashcroft, John, 17, 51
213, 222, 228 Atala and Renee, 94, 96
Ahmad, Eqbal, 212 authenticity, 7, 15, 19, 72, 74, 76, 82,
Albania, 150, 156, 244 95, 108, 112–16, 142, 189, 196, 199,
Aldridge, John, 92 205, 207, 213, 221, 226–27, 231, 251
Ali, Ayaan Hirsi, 185–86 authoritarianism, 10, 264
Ali, Tariq, 21 Ayers, Bill, 16, 212, 250, 251
alienation, 15, 33, 40, 48, 69, 94, 140,
186–87, 205, 210, 213, 231–35, 244, Baader-Meinhof Gang, 37, 228
251, 260 Baker, Nicholson, 14
Al Qaeda, 52 Balzac, Honore de, 94, 97
American Friends Service Committee, Barnett, Richard, 50
39, 208 Baudrillard, Jean, 14, 44
Americanization, 45, 47 Belafonte, Harry, 212
Andropov, Yuri, 145 Bellow, Saul, 234, 272–73
anti-Americanism, 1–30, 33–35, 36–40, Berger, Bennett, 272
41–48, 49–55, 68, 173, 186, 217–18, Berger, Morroe, 98, 271
228, 277; domestic anti- Berkeley (University of California), 52,
Americanism, 44, 46, 48, 218 207, 213, 242
anticapitalism, 20, 42, 45, 204 Berlin, Isaiah, 271, 277
anticommunism, 51, 223, 271 Berman, Paul, 67, 206

281
282 Index

Berrigan brothers, 20, 66, 212; celebrity, 2, 13–16, 59–69, 72, 81, 209,
Berrigan, Frida 20; Berrigan, Philip 247, 249; cult, 13, 63; worship, 16,
20 61–64
bin Laden, Osama, 4, 10, 17, 52, 65, censorship, 53, 93, 96
207 Central Committee (of the Soviet
Birnbaum, Norman, 270 Communist Party), 141, 147–48, 274
Black Liberation Army, 37 CEO, 2, 22, 66, 124
Black Panther Party, 237, 240 Chandler, David, 51
blacks, 19, 34, 36, 49–50, 69, 77, 81–84, Chateaubriand, Francois-Rene, 94, 96,
89, 139, 169, 204, 239–40, 248 190, 192
Bloom, Harold, 88, 90–92 Chavez, Hugo, 20–21
Boorstin, Daniel, 47, 60, 63 Chernyaev, Anatoly, 143
Borenstein, Audrey, 91, 98 Chiapas (Mexico), 204, 213
Bottomore, Thomas B., 270, 272 China, 6, 78, 150–52, 159, 164–66, 188,
Boudin, Kathy, 251 204, 218, 221, 243, 273
Bradhser, Keith, 72 Chol-hwan, Kang, 164, 168
Brawley, Tawana, 81–84 Chomsky, Noam, 9–11, 44, 50, 67–68,
Brent, William Lee, 237–41 168, 206, 208, 212, 216–24, 249
Brezhnev, Leonid, 238 CIA, 50
Britain, 3, 8, 14, 39, 74, 104, 147, 172, Citizens Exchange Corps (CEC),
194, 196, 198, 233–36, 259, 267, 123–37
270–71 Clark, Ramsey, 52, 212, 251, 252
Brodsky, Joseph, 145 class enemy, 155, 263
Brooks, David, 3 classics, 89–93, 273
Budapest, 36, 172, 257, 259, 261–63, “classism,” 81
269 class struggle, 155–56, 172, 244, 263
Burdick, Eugene, 126 Cockburn, Alexander, 209
Buruma, Ian, 185–87, 260 Coffin, William Sloane, 212, 252
Bush, George H. W., 203 Cohen, Eric, 24
Bush, George W., 20, 22, 47, 51; Bush Cohn, Werner, 217, 223
administration, 20, 209 Colburn, Forrest, 150, 161
Byron, George Gordon, 190 Cold War, 9, 17, 41, 50, 52, 123,
125–26, 204, 212, 217, 230
Calvino, Italo, 93 collectivization (of agriculture), 154,
Cambodia, 51, 168, 218, 249 168, 174, 222
capitalism, 6–8, 12, 20, 22, 38, 42, Combs, Sean, 59. See also Puff Daddy
44–46, 50–51, 89, 153, 172, 174, Committee for the Defense of the
178, 180, 204, 217, 223, 230, Revolution (Cuban), 238
234–35, 243–44, 247, 248, 250, 252, communism, 3, 9, 46, 51, 142–44,151,
263 156, 166, 173, 178, 184, 204, 208,
Carter, Jimmy, 118, 164 223, 243, 47–48, 250, 262, 266,
Cass, Leon R., 25 268; Communist Manifesto, 46;
Castro, Fidel, 21, 67, 159, 204, 234, man, 182; movement, 231, 236;
246; Castro’s Cuba, 67, 204, 237, party, 130, 151, 154, 234, 242, 248,
266 274; regime, 164, 167, 171, 174,
 Index 283

179, 221, 248, 263, 265–66; society, Dostoevsky, Fyodor, 92, 156–57
24, 173; states, 4, 7, 37, 41, 74, Dow, Mark, 49–50
86–87, 142, 150–61, 167, 176–77, Dowd, Maureen, 203
181, 228, 243–48, 251, 265; system, Dreiser, Theodore, 95
1, 46, 74, 86, 92, 141, 142, 143, Duke University, 81–84, 263
150–52, 158–61, 168, 173, 174,
183, 223, 230, 244, 246, 249, 251, Eagelton, Terry, 88
253, 262–63, 265–66, 272; Eastern Europe, 10, 39, 151, 174–75,
totalitarianism, 3, 55 180, 182, 209, 222, 243, 246–49,
computer dating, 102, 106 273, 262
Cong (Vietnamese Political Police), East Germany, 150, 174, 179, 271
151 Eckstein, Harry, 271–72
conspicuous compassion, 83 egalitarianism, 15, 18, 54, 61, 75, 180,
convergence, 16, 45, 51, 67, 84, 132, 246, 247; rhetoric, 180, 247
175, 206, 212, 251 Ehrenreich, Barbara, 204, 212
counterculture, 102–17, 212, 247, 272 Eichman, Adolf, 225
Csurka, Istvan, 38 Eliot, George, 90
Cuba, 7, 21, 67, 89, 152, 159, 204, elitism, 6, 12–13, 54, 61–63, 67–68,
218, 230, 237–41, 243 266, 273 79, 89, 91, 103, 105, 132–34, 142,
cult of personality, 164, 168, 273 146, 156, 158–61, 166, 178, 180,
cultural diversity, 86, 189, 232, 235 211, 216, 236, 238, 249, 261, 266,
Cultural Revolution, 6 269; anti-elitism, 13, 15, 63; ruling
Cumings, Bruce, 49–50, 165, 167–69 elites, 89, 142, 159, 161, 180
Czechoslovakia, 150, 174, 181 Ellis, John, 89
Empire, 211–12, 249–50
Daniel, Robert V., 145 Engels, Frederick, 130, 147, 152
dating services, 102–3 Enlightenment, 42, 45, 186, 190, 235
Davis, Angela, 212 entertainment, 12–17, 21–22, 42, 47,
Debray, Regis, 231 59–61, 63, 65–66, 75–76, 100, 103,
decadence, 8–9 109, 113, 119, 269; orientation,
deconstructionism, 12, 14, 88–90, 204 12–13, 17, 47, 66, 113
Defoe, Daniel, 96 Eorsi, Istvan, 179
Dellinger, David, 212 equality, 18, 22, 54, 80, 155, 176, 213,
determinism, 53, 207, 277; social 240,
determinism, 53, 98 escapism, escapist, 119, 94
Diamond, Stanley, 83 Ethiopia, 150, 153, 159
Dickens, Charles, 94 ethnocentrism, ethnocentric, 79, 187
disillusionment, disillusioning 142, Eurocentric, 11, 92, 267
146, 178, 238, 241, 248–49, 253
dissidents, 152, 206 Fahrenheit 9/11, 65–68
Djilas, Milovan, 142 Falk, Richard, 206, 212
Doctorow, E. L., 17, 212 false consciousness, 2, 64, 68, 250
Doctrine of Unshaken Foundations, fanaticism, 1, 4, 35, 86, 185–86, 232,
179, 253 251
Dorfman, Ariel, 17 Fanon, Franz, 231
284 Index

fascism, 10, 11, 17, 92, 138, 148, 206, Guevara, Che, 7, 65, 235, 250
210, 223, 226, 235 Gulag, 36–37, 49, 54, 164–69, 188,
Faurisson, Robert, 218, 223 235
feminism, 18, 33, 53, 78–79, 90, Gusfield, Joseph, 272
110–11, 115, 204–5, 209, 211, 233,
276; radical feminists, 53, 204, 233 Halfin, Igal, 150–51
Fish, Stanley, 12, 212 Hall, Gus, 248
Flaubert, Gustave, 94–97, 99, 190 Hamas, 3, 34
Foley, Barbara, 210 Hampshire College, 208–9
Foner, Eric, 34, 208 Hardt, Michael, 212, 249
Forbes, Malcolm, 51 Harvard University, 11, 18, 21, 33, 172;
Freud, Sigmund, 94, 123 Educational Review, 222, 272–75
Frey, James, 13–14 hatred, 1–9, 34–38, 44, 66–69, 88, 160,
Fuentes, Carlos, 51, 91, 231 184–85, 204, 204–7, 218, 220,
fundamentalism, 3, 11, 53, 55, 68, 251 225–27, 249, 253
Fussell, Paul, 190–91 Havel, Vaclav, 222
future orientation, 157 Haverford College, 210
Hayden, Tom, 212
Gallaudet University, 19 Hegedus, Andras, 179
Galloway, George, 14 Heine, Heinrich, 190
Gellner, Ernest, 272 Heller, Agnes, 178–79
genocide, 38, 40, 52, 54, 127, 156, 208, Hendel, Samuel, 127
222, 226, 246 Hertzberg, Hendrik, 205
Gere, Richard, 39, 208 Hilton, Paris, 63
Gestapo, 51, 226 Himmelweit, Hilda, 270, 272
Gimes, Miklos, 179 Hitchens, Christopher, 17, 206
glasnost, 143, 180 Hitler, Adolf, 10, 14, 51
globalization, 12, 35, 38, 52, 189, 205, Hobsbawm, Eric, 11, 248
223, 229, 243, 246; antiglobalization, Ho Chi Minh, 159
35, 204, 213, 243 Holocaust, 6, 14, 35, 40, 69, 91–92,
Goethe, Johann Wolfgang, 94, 96, 190 126, 208, 216–18, 223, 225, 262,
Gonzales, Elian, 67 265; Holocaust deniers, 216–18, 223;
Goodheart, Eugene, 99 Holocaust revisionist, 223, 265
Gorbachev, Mikhail, 141, 143, 156, 180 Homans, George, 274
Gordimer, Nadine, 21 Hook, Sidney, 272
Gornick, Vivian, 39, 208 Hungarian Revolution of 1956, 138,
great books, 88, 100 170–73, 261
Greece, 189–99 Hungary, 36–38, 91, 109, 138, 159,
Green Guide, 194. See also Michelin 170–82, 198, 258–69, 274–75
Guide Hussein, Saddam, 20–21, 52, 68, 73, 76,
Green Party, 207 252
Grenada, 218
Grossman, Vasily, 176 identity, 4, 12, 19, 20, 33, 54, 66, 78,
Guantanamo, 49 83–84, 89, 92, 94, 97, 107, 187, 191,
 Index 285

205–6, 211–12, 218, 227, 240, 251, Kadar, Janos, 159

253, 259, 260, 263, 266–68, 275 Kakutani, Michiko, 14
identity politics, 12, 19, 78 Kassof, Allen, 128, 271
inauthenticity, 45, 204, 212, 227, 250 Kelly, Michael, 205
individualism, 2, 12, 15, 45, 61, 112, Kenez, Peter, 274
160, 190–91, 230; radical Kennan, George, 8–9, 52, 272
individualism, 2, 12 Kernan, Alvin, 88
inequality, 18, 22, 44, 52, 54, 82, 95, 98, KGB, 37, 50, 130, 151, 155, 174
153, 175–76, 206–7, 244, 251, 258, Khrushchev, Nikita, 50, 138, 140, 143,
264 146, 147, 180, 248
Inkeles, Alex, 272–73 Kim Il Sung, 7, 21, 159, 165
Inquisition, 155, 181 Kim Jong Il, 168
intellectuals/intelligentsia 5, 7, 10–15, Kirkpatrick, Jeane, 50
21, 38–39, 41–44, 53–55, 83, 105, Klare, Michael, 208
143, 145, 160, 167, 169, 186, 190, Koestler, Arthur, 179, 253, 271
198, 203, 211, 219, 222, 225, Kolakowski, Leszek, 242–45, 247–48
229–33, 242–43, 246–53, 259–60, Koran, 19, 85–86, 188
265–67, 271–72, 276; academic, 11, Kozol, Jonathan, 212
39, 53, 83, 105, 167, 169, 211, 229, Kramer, Hilton, 160
260, 272; public, 14–15, 218, Krauze, Enrique, 247
246–53; Western, 7, 11, 21, 143, 167, Kunstler, William, 212, 251–52
230–31, 247, 253, 265–66, 276 Kushner, Tony, 17
Internet, 102, 106
Iraq, 20–21, 46, 52, 65, 68, 73–76, 187, Laguna Woods (California), 23
229 Lapham, Lewis, 10, 11, 51
Iron Curtain, 39, 171, 174, 209 Laqueur, Thomas, 52, 207
Ishiguro, Kazuo, 95 Lauren, Ralph, 61
Islam, 4, 6, 9, 19, 21, 35, 37, 43–44, 46, Leisure World (California), 23–24
52–53, 55, 68, 79–80, 85–87, Leites, Nathan, 157–58
184–88, 206–7, 225–29, 232, 251, Lenin, Vladimir, 51, 130, 144, 147–48,
253; Islamic fanaticism, 1, 4, 44, 87, 152–54, 157
253; Islamic radicals, 184, 251 Leninism, 142, 151, 156, 158, 178, 181,
Israel, 3, 6, 11–12, 20, 35, 37–38, 44, 258, 266
52, 78, 157, 204, 212, 216–24, Leonhard, Wolfgang, 179
227–31, 249, 268; anti-Israeli, 6, Lessing, Doris 233–36
11–12, 44, 204, 228 Levine, Robert, 216–17, 220
Levy, Marion, Jr., 271
Jackson, George, 50, Leys, Simon, 151
Jacoby, Russell, 205, 211 Lifton, Robert Jay, 52
Jameson, Frederick, 207, 212 Litvan, Gyorgy, 177, 181
Jews, 6, 11, 35, 44, 77–78, 89, 91–92, Llosa, Mario Vargas, 90–91
108, 116, 129, 145, 156, 178, London School of Economics (LSE),
217–18, 229–30, 260–68 172, 235, 257–59, 270–72
Johnson, Chalmers, 52 Lon Nol, 51
286 Index

“lookism,” 110 Mills, C. Wright, 231, 270

Lukacs, George, 178 Milosevic, Slobodan, 204, 252
Minogue, Kenneth, 247
Maceda, Jim, 73 mirror image, 50
MacFarquhar, Larissa, 117, 220 Mishra, Pankaj, 4
Madame Bovary, 96, 235, 273 modernity and modernization, 2, 4, 7,
Magic Mountain, 94 16–17, 20, 23–25, 35, 37, 43–47, 63,
Mailer, Norman, 15, 53, 207, 212, 231, 77, 78, 80, 94, 97, 102–3, 108, 112,
273 117, 119, 133, 153, 160, 188–92,
Mandel, Michael, 39, 208 197–99, 206, 213, 225–26, 259, 272
Mann, Thomas, 94 Modern Language Association, 17
Mannheim, Karl, 259, 267 Molotov, Vyacheslav, 145
Mao Zedong, 159, 204, 221, 252; Mao’s Moore, Barrington, Jr., 272, 274–75
China, 165, 218 Moore, Michael, 65–70, 220
Maoism, 188, 204, 213, 246 moral equivalence, 10, 39, 41, 49–55,
Marcuse, Herbert, 10, 267 126, 169, 208–9, 222–23, 230, 266,
Margalit, Avishai, 185 272
Markovits, Andre, 11 Morales, Evo, 7
Marx, Karl, 24, 37, 86, 108, 130, 147, moral indignation, 7–8, 34, 54, 66, 95,
156, 188, 228, 243, 247 142, 175, 207, 220, 229
Marxism, 4, 27, 42, 45, 86–87, 97, Morgan, Robin 33
141–43, 181, 187–88, 204, 228, Mother Jones, 67
242–45, 246–53, 258, 266, 276 multiculturalism, 11–12, 18–19, 42,
Marxism-Leninism, 151, 156, 158, 266 53–54, 78, 80, 87, 92, 204
mass culture, 1, 42, 45, 47, 52, 66, 90, Muslim, 3, 4, 5, 9, 43, 79–80, 185–86,
112, 119, 273 188
mass media, 13, 15, 37, 54, 60, 63, 93,
96, 168, 176, 217, 218, 227 Nader, Ralph, 67, 209, 212
mass murder, 35–37, 39, 43–44, 158, The Nation, 104, 209, 218, 249
225–28, 246 national character, 42, 196
mass society, 225 National Review, 104
matchmaking, 102–3 Navasky, Victor, 212
McCarthyism, 54 Nazi Germany, 10, 41, 51, 53, 223, 226,
Mead, Russell, 39, 209 246, 265–66
Melbin, Murray, 273 Nazism, 3, 14, 51, 147, 155–56, 158,
mendacious, 142, 164, 167, 171, 177, 173, 184, 187, 220, 223, 225–26,
266 228, 246, 249, 262–63, 265–66, 273
Mendelsohn, Daniel, 14 NBC, 13, 73
Mengistu, Haile Mariam, 159 Negri, Antonio, 212, 249–50
Meray, Tibor, 178 new socialist man, 176
Merkin, Daphne, 24 Newton, Huey, 239
Michelin Guide, 193. See also Green New York Review of Books, 103, 250
Guide Nicaragua, 67, 150, 204, 208–9, 218,
Middle East Studies Association, 210 249
Milgram, Stanley, 225, 266, 272–73 Niebuhr, Richard, 53
 Index 287

noble savage, 192, 230 political jokes, 178

nomenklatura, 143, 146, 179 political pilgrims, 21, 230
North Korea, 7, 21, 49, 145, 159, Political Pilgrims (Hollander), 74, 125
164–66, 167–69, 243, 246, 248; political police, 151–52, 174
North Korean Gulag, 164–66, political violence, 37, 42, 79, 87,
167–69 150–63, 188, 225–28, 229–32, 244,
North Vietnam, 20, 221, 231 249, 251, 266, 273
nuclear war, 50, 123–26 Pollitt, Katha, 33, 209
Pol Pot, 51, 168, 218, 222, 249
obedience to authority, 36, 225, 264 popular culture, 6, 14, 16, 54, 61, 88,
Oblomov, 273 92, 269
Ochab, Edward, 157 positive hero, 176
October Revolution, 153, 249. See also Postal, Paul, 216–17, 220
Russian Revolution postcommunist, 12, 41, 46, 136, 143–44
old age, 25, 75, 79, 117, 119, 120 postmodernism, 5, 12, 14, 42, 89, 204,
Orwell, George, 211, 271 211, 276
propaganda, 6, 10, 21, 46, 50, 67,
Packer, George, 33, 205, 251 73–74, 89, 137, 141, 148, 156, 167,
Page, Charles, 271 171, 174, 176–78, 180–82, 263, 273
Palestine, 6, 7, 35, 37–38, 44, 157, 187, publicity, 15–16, 61, 63, 81
208, 210, 227, 229–32 Puff Daddy, 59–61. See also Combs,
Parenti, Michael, 212 Sean
Parsons, Helen, 274 purge trials, 35, 37, 54, 154, 171
Parsons, Talcott, 274
party functionary (communist), 171, 267 racial profiling, 79
Pasternak, Boris Leonidovich, 145 racism, 34, 41–42, 69, 79, 81–83, 89,
perestroika, 141, 143–44 168, 187, 204, 240, 251
Peretz, Martin, 229 radical left, 9, 104, 227, 230, 237, 247,
personals, 102–17 249, 253
Pinter, Harold, 9–11, 21 radicals, 6, 184, 226, 236, 250–52
Pipes, Richard, 54 Rahman, Omar Abdel, 251
Platt, Gerald, 273–74 Rakosi, Mathias, 159
Poland, 174, 242–43, 157, 178 Rapoport, Anatol, 126
Politburo (of Soviet Communist Party), Reagan, Ronald, 47, 51, 67
141 Red Brigades, 37, 228, 250
political conflict, 1, 6, 153–54, 226–27, Red Diaper Babies, 236
258 Riesman, David, 274
political correctness, 16, 18, 51, 53, relativism, 13–15, 18–19, 61, 204;
78–80, 85, 87, 89–90, 92, 104, aesthetic, 60, 61, 63; cultural, 20, 35,
110–11, 187, 236, 275 60, 92, 185; intellectual, 61; moral,
political crimes, 36, 151–52, 159 5, 8, 12, 53, 60–63; selective, 12
political culture, 3, 5, 15, 37, 154, 160, relativist, 18, 185
225–28 The Remains of the Day, 95
political disillusionment, 146, 253 repressive tolerance, 10, 267, 277
political elite, 146, 156, 178, 238, 266 reverse discrimination, 83
288 Index

revolutionary violence, 213 self-esteem, 83, 198, 211

Richmond, Yale, 128 self-realization, 23, 112, 234, 236
Rigoulot, Pierre, 164, 168 September 11, 2001, 33–35, 36–40, 44,
Rilke, Rainer Maria, 45 203–15, 227
Robinson, Joan, 271 sexism, 34, 41–42, 79, 81, 89
Robinson Crusoe, 95–96, 273 Shakespeare, William, 88–92, 155
role models, 16, 92, 250, 269, 271 Shapiro, Raymond, 104
Rolland, Romain, 145 Sharia (Laws), 86
romanticism, 23, 45, 47, 94, 96, 102–3, Sharpton, Al, 83
109, 112, 116, 147, 189, 190, 192, Sheehan, Cindy, 20–21
196–97, 243, 249, 260, 272 Sheehy, Gail, 24
root causes, 4, 34, 39, 44, 52, 87, 153, Shelley, Percy Bysshe, 190
206–8, 227, 228, 230, 232 Shining Path, 213
rootless cosmopolitan, 173, 266–69 show trials, 36, 151, 155, 179
Rosenberg, Ethel, 17, 235 Sinyavsky, Andrei, 145
Rosenberg, Julius, 17, 235 social criticism, 10, 12, 15, 18, 48,
Roszak, Theodore, 212 65–66, 68, 83, 99, 132, 205, 212,
Rushdie, Salman, 53 216, 218, 226, 260
Russell, Bertrand, 273 socialism, 4, 21, 46, 50–51, 92–93, 145,
Russia, 9–10, 46, 52, 77–78, 91, 147, 150–63, 165, 170–73, 176, 178,
123–40, 141–49, 156, 158, 165, 181, 182, 204, 218, 220, 222, 234, 238,
208, 222, 246, 249, 258, 262, 269, 240–41, 243, 246, 248, 257, 266,
273–74 273; state, 46, 51, 204; system, 153,
Russian Research Center (Harvard 204, 222, 266
University), 273–74 social isolation, 45, 64, 103, 112, 117
Russian Revolution, 181, 208. See also socialist realism, 92–93, 176, 273
Russian Revolution Solzhenitsyn, Aleksandr Isaevich, 140,
Rwanda, 6, 157 145, 155
Sontag, Susan, 15, 52, 69, 206–7, 212,
Said, Edward, 17, 40, 208, 212, 231
259–60 Sorokin, Pitirim, 274
Sandinista Nicaragua, 67, 150, 204, 218, Soros, George, 51
249 The Sorrows of Young Werther, 96, 190
Sandinistas, 67, 150, 204, 218, 249 Soviet: bloc, 239; communism, 9, 46,
Sartre, Jean-Paul, 231 143, 154, 166, 173, 204, 243, 248,
Savio, Mario, 213 266, 274, 276; Communist Party,
scapegoats, 35, 38, 160; scapegoating 154, 274; dissidents, 140;
impulse, 5–6, 9, 34, 43, 224, 227 experiment, 142, 234, 248; purges,
Schucking, Levin, 97 54; regime, 142; society, 24, 173;
secularization, 4, 7, 9, 24, 25, 43, 66, system, 1, 46, 74, 86, 92, 141–43,
80, 91, 117, 159, 176, 180, 184–85, 150–52, 158–61, 168, 173–82, 223,
193, 224, 242, 251 230, 244, 246, 249, 251, 253,
secular religion, 242, 184 262–66, 272, 278; totalitarianism,
selective perception, 168, 220 265; Union, 4, 8–10, 17, 39, 41–42,
 Index 289

46, 50–51, 53, 69, 92–93, 123–40, Thompson, E. P., 247–48

141–49, 150–63, 175, 180, 204, 222, Tilly, Charles, 273
230, 238, 246–48, 258, 262, 266, Tiryakian, Edward, 273
272–74. See also USSR Tolstoy, Leo, 94
Spivak, Gayatri, 231 totalitarianism, 3, 7, 44, 53, 55, 67,
Spock, Benjamin, 252 133, 139, 152, 155, 159, 166–69,
spontaneity, 46, 74, 90, 103, 108–9, 112, 177, 181, 209, 264, 265, 273;
116, 127, 138 mentality, 181; regimes, 155;
Srebrenica, 6 systems, 44
Stalin, Joseph, 35, 37, 51, 96, 130, 138, tradition, 4, 11, 13, 21, 23–24, 35,
144–45, 147–48, 154–59, 165, 41–45, 52, 83, 89, 92, 112, 119, 144,
173–74, 242, 246, 252, 274 150–51, 159–60, 167, 169, 175, 180,
Stalinism, 3, 142, 177, 188, 248, 273 187, 189–92, 197, 198, 204–5, 230,
Stasi, 151 260, 264, 267
state security, 130, 151, 155 traditional societies, 23–24, 35, 43–44,
status seeking, 2, 13, 33 52, 119, 169, 175, 190–92, 198
status symbol, 72 Trilling, Lionel, 203
Steele, Shelby, 84 Trotsky, Leon, 142, 148, 158
Stendhal (Henri-Marie Beyle), 94, 97 Trotskyites, 145, 204
stereotyping, 8, 42, 47, 77–80, 117, 131, Trout, Paul, 11
187 true believer, 220, 235, 248
Stewart, Lynne, 251–52 Trump, Donald, 16
Stewart, Martha, 61 Tumin, Mel, 271
Stille, Alexander, 250 Twentieth Party Congress (Soviet
Stone, I. F., 212 Communist), 143, 146–47, 180
Stone, Oliver, 208
Stotsky, Sandra, 51 Ulam, Adam, 274
superpower, 4, 8–9, 46, 51–52, 143, University of Massachusetts, Amherst,
207, 246 33, 172, 209–10, 273, 275,
SUVs, 22, 71–72, 277 University of North Carolina, 3, 19,
Sweezy, Paul, 212 85–87, 210
Updike, John, 92
Taliban, 23, 53, 204, 208–9, 222 USSR, 52, 128, 130, 132, 137, 148,
Terkel, Studs, 16 154, 223. See also Soviet Union
terrorism, 2–4, 6, 10, 17, 19, 21, 33–35, utopianism, 51, 157, 160–61, 180, 186,
36–40, 44–45, 51–52, 68, 78–80, 233, 243, 247–48, 250, 272
85–87, 145, 150–62, 174, 187, 203,
205–15, 217–18, 221–22, 228–30, Van Gogh, Theo, 185–87
250–53 Venezuela, 20–21, 246
Thackeray, William Makepeace, 94 victimization, 82, 144; victim culture,
theocracy, 80 17; victimhood, 18–19, 82, 260
third world,12, 41, 46, 52, 118, 151, Vietcong, 20, 221, 227, 231
169, 218, 221–22, 230, 232, 234, Vietnam, 20–21, 38–39, 127, 159, 205–6,
253, 218, 221, 226, 235, 243–44, 251–52
290 Index

Vietnam War, 20, 39, 206, 218, 226, Windschuttle, Keith, 221
235, 251 withering away of the state, 153, 244
Vidal, Gore, 10, 15, 45, 52, 206–7, Wolf, Naomi, 17–18
209 Wolfe, Alan, 249
Wolin, Richard, 12
Walker, Alice, 208 Wordsworth, William, 190
Walzer, Michael, 206 World Trade Center (WTC), 34, 37,
Wat, Alexander, 178 207, 209
Watt, Ian, 95 World War II (WWII), 14, 51, 116,
Weathermen, 16, 37, 212, 228 145–46, 151, 179, 220, 233, 258
West, Cornel, 14, 16, 247
Western Europe, 4, 9, 22, 46, 189, Yakovlev, Alexander, 141–49, 156
195–96, 266
Wharton, Edith, 95 Zhdanov, Andrei, 173, 267
white guilt, 82–84 Zimbabwe, 236
Wieseltier, Leon, 15 Zinn, Howard, 212–13
Willis, Ellen, 206 Zola, Emile, 95
 About the Author

Paul Hollander is professor emeritus of sociology at the University of Mass-

achusetts at Amherst and a center associate of the Davis Center for Russian
and Eurasian Studies at Harvard University. He lives in Northampton, Mass-
achusetts. Hollander attended high school in Budapest, college in London
(London School of Economics), and graduate school in the United States
(Princeton University). His books include Soviet and American Society: A
Comparison, Political Pilgrims, Anti-Americanism, Political Will and Per-
sonal Belief: The Decline and Fall of Soviet Communism, and The End of
Commitment: Intellectuals, Revolutionaries, and Political Morality.

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