startling and overwhelming. It was the first time that I had ever been in a
town where the working class was in the saddle… . Every shop and cafe had
an inscription saying that it had been col ectivized; even the bootblacks had
been col ectivized and their boxes painted red and black. Waiters and
shopwalkers looked you in the face and treated you as an equal. Servile and
even ceremonial forms of speech had temporarily disappeared.26
The year 1989 was a historic year in the history of both communism and anticommunism.
The Soviet Union, under the leadership of an extraordinary reformer, Mikhail Gorbachev,
began a radical transformation of its society, encouraging freedom of the speech and press,
sponsoring contested elections, even surrendering the idea of a one-party state and the
monopoly of power by the Communist party.
221
At the same time, in the countries of the Communist bloc in Eastern Europe, mass
movements for nonviolent radical change swept through country after country—Poland,
Czechoslovakia, East Germany, Bulgaria, and Rumania. Huge demonstrations led to the
toppling of the old Communist leaders. Communists and noncommunists seemed to be
joining in new coalitions looking to a society with democratic freedoms and mixed socialist-
capitalist economies.
It seems that the human costs of fanaticism, of holding on to a rigid ideology, had become
too great, and that Gorbachev and other Communist leaders recognized this. They saw it in
bottled-up discontent and in failing economies. They saw the enormous waste in military
expenditures burdening their countries. The surrender of fanaticism became a practical
necessity for leadership, a powerful demand by the people of the Communist countries.
As the United States entered the 1990s, its leadership was lagging behind the dramatic
changes in Eastern Europe. President George Bush and the members of Congress were stil
voting for an enormous military budget of $290 bil ion dol ars, while mil ions were homeless
and more mil ions lived in slums and while poverty led to crime, drug addiction, alcoholism,
and violence. The environment was deteriorating—the pol ution of air and water and the
poisoning of the planet—but this was being met with the most puny of measures, while
enormous resources were stil being expended for space ships and nuclear delivery systems.
On the very day (February 6, 1990) that the Central Committee of the Communist party
was meeting in the Soviet Union and deciding to give up its monopoly of power—an
astounding event—President Bush was watching American soldiers fight "Soviet tanks" in a
mock battle of World War III in California. His speech that day to the troops was a sign that
the old anti-communist fanaticism was stil alive in the highest circles of American politics.
The New York Times reported:
"It's especial y encouraging to see anything which might bring the day of true
democracy a bit closer for the Soviet people," Mr. Bush said. But he
cautioned, "It is important not to let these encouraging changes, political or
military, lul us into a sense of complacency… . God bless our country. Thank
you colonel, and now, back to war."27
Even if the political leadership of the United States has been slow to give up the long-held
anti-communist fanaticism, so costly to human rights in this country and abroad, perhaps
the American people have learned something from the events of the past decades, from
watching the extraordinary developments in the Communist world, watching people there
surrender their fanaticism.
The coming of a new century may be the right time for people al over the world to discard
old orthodoxies, frozen dogmas, simple definitions. It may be a time to welcome thinking
outside the customary boundaries; to look with fresh eyes at communism, socialism,
capitalism, liberalism, and anarchism; and to seek out good ideas wherever they are,
because we desperately need them.
When Bertolt Brecht was cal ed before the House Committee on Un-American activities, he
wanted to read a statement, but they would not let him do so. Part of his statement was as
fol ows:
We are living in a dangerous world. Our state of civilization is such that
mankind already is capable of becoming enormously wealthy but as a whole is
stil poverty-ridden. Great wars have been suffered. Greater ones are
imminent, we are told. Do you not think that in such a predicament every
new idea should be examined careful y and freely?28
222
1 Boston Globe, May 17, 1987. (It is hard to understand why McFarlane was hesitant to
speak to Reagan, considering a statement he made to the New York Times: "I had countless times with the President when I felt he wasn't absorbing what I was tel ing him.")
2 Congressional Record, Jan. 25, 1949, pp. 542-43.
3 Ronald Radosh and Joyce Milton, in their book The Rosenberg File (Holt, Rinehart &
Winston, 1983), separate themselves from the left defenders of the Rosenbergs, and insist
the Rosenbergs were members of a spy ring. However, even Radosh and Milton point to the
unimportance of whatever it was the Rosenbergs may have passed to the Russians. They
quote (p. 449) the statement by Groves, and agree with I. F, Stone's comments, written in
1956, that "the way the Douglas stay [of execution] was steamrol ered [the Supreme Court
rushed back to Washington to overrule Douglas so the executions could go ahead on
schedule] was scandalous; the death sentence—even if they were guilty—was a crime" (p.
453). See also Walter and Miriam Schneir, Invitation to an Inquest (Doubleday, 1965)..
4 Washington Post, Nov. 20, 1954.
5 Many of the absurdities of that period are recorded in David Caute, The Great Fear (Simon
& Schuster, 1978).
6 Sterling Hayden, Wanderer (Knopf, 1963).
7 Eric Bentley, Thirty Years of Treason (Viking, 1971), contains extensive transcripts of the Hol ywood hearings.
8 New York Daily News, Dec. 6, 1949.
9 Howard Fast, The Naked God (Praeger, 1987), 114.
10 Ibid., 115.
11 Martin Duberman, Paul Robeson (Knopf, 1989).
12 Martin Esslin, Brecht: The Man and His Work (Doubleday, 1060).
13 Between 1947 and 1952, over 6 mil ion Americans were investigated by Truman's Loyalty
Board, and 500 people were dismissed from their jobs.
14 Tom Hayden, Rebel ion and Repression (World, 1069).
15 New York Times, Nov. 4, 1988.
16 Thomas McCann, An American Company: The Tragedy of United Fruit (Crown, 1976).
17 Treverton's statement appears on p. 15, and Inderfurth's on p. 11 of U.S. Senate,
Hearings before the Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations With Respect to
Intel igence Activities, Vol. 7, "Covert Action," 1976.
18 Boston Globe Magazine, Mar. 20, 1983.
19 New York Times, Sept. 16, 1981.
20 New York Daily Tribune, Feb. 18, 1853.
21 That the revolution itself was a real social revolution from below and not simply a
Communist party coup, is argued in Marc Ferro, October 1917: A Social History of the
Russian Revolution (Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1980).
22 Maxim Gorky, Untimely Thoughts (Paul Eriksson, 1068), 123-124.
223
23 Novaya Zhizn, 207-208.
24 See Elzbieta Ettinger, Rosa Lux
emburg: A Life (Beacon Press, 1987).
25 New York Times, Dec. 10, 1986. One of the more famous victims of psychiatric abuse was
the Soviet scientist Zhores Medvedev, who, with his historian brother Roy Medvedev, wrote
about his own experience in A Question of Madness (Knopf, 1972). Roy Medvedev wrote a
comprehensive history of Stalin's brutal leadership in his book Let History Judge (Knopf,
1972).
26 George Orwel , Homage to Catalonia (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1952), 4-5.
27 New York Times, Feb. 7, 1990.
28 Eric Bentley, Thirty Years of Treason, 223.
224
Eleven
The Ultimate Power
As the twentieth century draws to a close, a century packed with history, what leaps out
from that history is its utter unpredictability. Who could have predicted, not just the Russian
Revolution, but Stalin's deformation of it, then Khrushchev's astounding exposure of Stalin,
and in recent years Gorbachev's succession of surprises?
Or that in Germany, the conditions after World War I that might have brought socialist
revolution—an advanced industrial society, with an educated organized proletariat, and
devastating economic crisis—would lead instead to fascism? And who would have guessed
that an utterly defeated Germany would rise from its ashes to become the most prosperous
country in Europe?
Who foresaw the shape of the post-World War II world: the Chinese Communist revolution,
and its various turns—the break with the Soviet Union, the tumultuous cultural revolution,
and then post-Mao China making overtures to the West, adopting capitalist enterprise,
perplexing everyone?
No one foresaw the disintegration of the old Western empires happening so quickly after the
war, in Asia, Africa, and the Middle East, or the odd array of societies that would be created
in the newly independent nations, from the benign socialism of Nyerere's Tanzania to the
madness of Idi Amin's Uganda.
Spain became an astonishment. A mil ion had died in the Spanish Civil War and Franco's
fascism lasted forty years, but when Franco died, Spain was transformed into a
parliamentary democracy, without bloodshed. In other places too, deeply entrenched
regimes seemed to suddenly disintegrate—in Portugal, Argentina, the Philippines, and Iran.
The end of the war left the United States and the Soviet Union as superpowers, armed with
frightening nuclear arsenals. And yet these superpowers have been unable to control
events, even in those parts of the world considered to be their spheres of influence. The
United States could not win wars in Vietnam or Korea or stop revolutions in Cuba or
Nicaragua. The Soviet Union was forced to retreat from Afghanistan and could not crush the
Solidarity movement in Poland.
The most unpredictable events of al were those that took place in 1989 in the Soviet Union
and Eastern Europe, where mass movements for liberty and democracy, using the tactic of
nonviolent mass action, toppled long-lasting Communist bureaucracies in Poland,
Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Rumania, Bulgaria, and East Germany.
Uncertain Ends, Unacceptable Means
To confront the fact of unpredictability leads to two important conclusions:
The first is that the struggle for justice should never be abandoned on the ground that it is
hopeless, because of the apparent overwhelming power of those in the world who have the
guns and the money and who seem invincible in their determination to hold on to their
power. That apparent power has, again and again, proved vulnerable to human qualities
less measurable than bombs and dol ars: moral fervor, determination, unity, organization,
sacrifice, wit, ingenuity, courage, and patience—whether by blacks in Alabama and South
Africa; peasants in El Salvador, Nicaragua, and Vietnam; or workers and intel ectuals in
Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union. No cold calculation of the balance of power should
deter people who are persuaded that their cause is just.
225
The second is that in the face of the obvious unpredictability of social phenomena al of history's excuses for war and preparation for war—self-defense, national security, freedom,
justice, and stopping aggression—can no longer be accepted. Massive violence, whether in
war or internal upheaval, cannot be justified by any end, however noble, because no
outcome is sure. Any humane and reasonable person must conclude that if the ends,
however desirable, are uncertain, and the means are horrible and certain, those means
must not be employed.
We have had too many experiences with the use of massive violence for presumably good
reasons to wil ingly continue accepting such reasons. In this century there were 10 mil ion
dead in World War I, the war "to end al wars"; 40 to 50 mil ion dead in World War II to
"stop aggression" and "defeat fascism"; 2 mil ion dead in Korea and another 1 to 2 mil ion dead in Vietnam, to "stop communism"; 1 mil ion dead in the Iran-Iraq war, for "honor" and other indefinable motives. Perhaps a mil ion dead in Afghanistan, to stop feudalism or
communism, depending on which side was speaking.1
None of those ends was achieved: wars did not end, aggression continued, fascism did not
die with Hitler, communism was not stopped, there was no honor for anyone. In short (as I
argued earlier in the book) the traditional distinction between "just" and "unjust" war is now obsolete. The cruelty of the means today exceeds al possible ends. No national boundary,
no ideology, no "way of life" can justify the loss of mil ions of lives that modern war,
whether nuclear or conventional, demands. The standard causes are too muddy, too
mercurial, to die for. Systems change, policies change. The distinctions claimed by
politicians between good and evil are not so clear that generations of human beings should
die for the sanctity of those distinctions.
Even a war for defense, the most moral y justifiable kind of war, loses its morality when it
involves a sacrifice of human beings so massive it amounts to suicide. One of my students,
a young woman, wrote in her class journal in 1985, "Wars are treated like wines—there are
good years and bad years, and World War II was the vintage year. But wars are not like
wines. They are more like cyanide; one sip and you're dead."
Internal violence has been almost as costly in human life as war. Mil ions were kil ed in the
Soviet Union to "build socialism." Countless lives were taken in China for the same reason.
A half mil ion were kil ed in Indonesia for fear of communism; at least a mil ion dead in
Cambodia and a mil ion dead in Nigeria in civil wars. Hundreds of thousands kil ed in Latin
America by military dictatorships to stop communism, or to "maintain order." There is no
evidence that any of that kil ing did any good for the people of those nations.
Preparation for war is always justified by the most persuasive of purposes: to prevent war.
But such preparation has not prevented a series of wars that since World War II have taken
more lives than World War I.
As for the claim that massive nuclear armaments have prevented World War III, that is not
at al certain. World War III has certainly not taken place, but it is not clear that this is
because of the massive arms race. The logic of that claim is the logic of the man, living in
New York City, who sprinkled ye
l ow powder al over his house, explaining to his friends that
this was to keep elephants out, and the proof of his success was that no elephant had ever
appeared in his house.2
226
There are many reasons why an al -out war between the Soviet Union and the United States has not taken place. Neither nation has anything to gain from such a war. Neither nation
can possibly invade and occupy the other. Why would the Soviet Union want to destroy its
great source of wheat? The atomic bombs necessary to annihilate the other superpower
would create an enormous danger, through radioactivity and nuclear winter, to the
attacking power. The conflicts between the United States and the USSR have, therefore,
been in other places, and those places have had wars, undeterred by the arms buildup of the superpowers.
Deterrence is the favorite word of those who urge the buildup of weapons, both in the
United States and in the Soviet Union. But it seems that the only thing that has been
"deterred" (World War III) is deterred by other factors, which makes the enormous buildup of weapons on both sides a total waste. No politician on either side of the cold war has had
the courage to make this statement, which is a matter of the most ordinary common sense.
The chief reason consistently given for spending thousands of bil ions of dol ars on weapons
has been that this prevents a Soviet invasion of Western Europe. Probably no American
knows more about Soviet policy than veteran diplomat and historian George Kennan, former
ambassador to the Soviet Union and one of the theoreticians of the cold war. Kennan insists
that the fears of Soviet invasion of Western Europe are based on myth. This is corroborated
by a man who worked for the CIA for twenty-five years, Harry Rositzke. Rositzke was at one
time the CIA director of espionage operations against the Soviet Union. He wrote, in the
1980s; "In al my years in government and since I have never seen an intel igence estimate
that shows how it would be profitable to Soviet interests to invade Western Europe or to
attack the United States."3
Common sense suggests that the Soviet Union has enough problems at home, has had
trouble control ing Eastern Europe, and was unable to defeat Afghanistan, a smal backward
nation on its border. Would it invade Western Europe and face the united opposition of 200