Word: communisms
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Nothing provokes a brouhaha in the intellectual circles of the left like a stirring mea culpa from a compatriot who is audacious enough to denounce Communism. What usually happens next is a highbrow equivalent of mud wrestling, as colleagues question the defector's motivation and fire off gratuitous insults. In the eye of the latest tempest, which blew up in response to the suppression of freedom in Poland, is Social Critic Susan Sontag (Styles of Radical Will, On Photography), whose past essays have sung the praises of revolutionary movements from Havana to Hanoi...
...Communism is fascism," Sontag told a New York City rally called last month to demonstrate left-wing support for Poland's Solidarity movement. "Not only is fascism and overt military rule probably the destiny of all Communist countries, but Communism is in itself a variant, the most successful variant, of fascism. Fascism with a human face." The left "did not have ears" for this truth, she told the sometimes booing and hissing crowd-composed of about 1,300 left-wing activists, among them Singer Pete Seeger and Novelist E.L. Doctorow-because of its haughty reluctance to be associated with...
...commitment but the validity of American foreign policy in general and indeed of American society. They saw the war as a symptom of an evil, corrupt, militaristic capitalist system. They treated the Viet Cong as a progressive movement, North Viet Nam as a put-upon, heroic revolutionary country and Communism as the wave of the future in Indochina, if not in the entire developing world. They were outraged by our incursion into Cambodia less because of the alleged extension of the war than because they feared it might lead to success. Concern for the future of Vietnamese, Cambodians and Laotians...
...President Reagan's prediction that future historians will look back on Soviet Communism as an aberration of history: I was certainly impressed by that statement. But I don't think the President advocates historical inevitability. He does not mean for us to sit and wait for Soviet Communism to disappear of itself. If that's going to happen, free people will have to help make it happen...
...Faisal the imperatives of conviction and tactical expediency merged; he both believed in what he was doing and did what served his purposes. The speech on Communism and Zionism, however bizarre it sounded to Westerners, was deeply felt. At the same time it reflected precisely the tactical necessities of the kingdom. The strident anti-Communism helped reassure America and established a claim to protection against outside threats (which were all, in fact, backed by the Soviet Union). The virulent anti-Zionism reassured radicals and the P.L.O. and reduced their incentive to undermine the monarchy...