Library:The Bogey of Revolution

The Bogey of Revolution
Author	Michael Parenti
Publisher	Commonweal
First published	1968-06-21
Type	Magazine article

The Bogey of Revolution is an article by Statesian political scientist Michael Parenti, published in Commonweal on 21 June 1968.

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Whether the various Communist nations in the world work in unison or independently of each other is less important to the cold-war true believer than whether or not they are Communists. for those opposed to "the horrors of Communism" it is small consolation to discover that a Communist insurgency is indigenous rather than foreign controlled. Here we are confronted with the view that ten devils—even ten who contest each other—are at least as bad as one. And whether or not Satan takes on new appearances, he is still Satan.

No matter that the revolutionaries in some country enjoy popular support and represent nationalistic sentiment, or that they are willing and eager to pursue a neutralist course in East-West relations, thereby posing no threat to the security of the United States; no matter that neither Moscow nor Peking can control them or profit from their revolution—at least no more than we; what matters is that they have been labelled "Communists" and even if we need not save them from the Russians or the Chinese, it appears that we need still save them from themselves.

Yet the contention that we are prepared to do battle with Communism in all its appearances is itself not quite accurate, for, in fact, Yugoslavs and Poles have tasted the advantages of American subsidies and trade, and Washington signs treaties and enjoys cultural exchanges with Moscow. It would seem that some Communists are not such devils after all, at least not to the extent that we need be chronically antagonistic towards them. The acceptable Communists are those who, by the U.S. view, are reconciled to the ongoing world, while the unacceptable ones are those presumed to be antagonistic towards this world, the propagators of violence and revolution. "Revolution," rather than "Communism" per se, seems to be the crucial factor. General Maxwell Taylor, when a close advisor to Lyndon Johnson, saw a world beset by actual and potential "troublemakers," whom he defined as follows: "Most of them are presently Communist, but this is not an essential characteristic." The essential characteristic was that they are disruptive of "world stability."

From opposing Communists because they might be revolutionaries, it became a short step to opposing revolutionaries because they might be Communists. For all our talk of a better future for mankind, we have become increasingly apprehensive about the world to be and increasingly dedicated to the world as it is. Thus have we surrendered to Communism the sponsorship of revolution everywhere.

American policymakers insist that they accept and even encourage peaceful change; their opposition is to violent change. World politics is viewed as a contest between the forces of orderly evolution and the forces of subversion and aggression. This position assumes (a) that the U.S. has the right to define the limits and methods of change within other nations, (b) that our own security interests necessitate an American counterrevolutionary role, (c) that revolutions in various countries are a greater evil than the violent oppression employed by the ruling groups to maintain their privileged positions, or a greater evil than the cumulative ongoing deprivations suffered by the people, and (d) that social revolutions can be peacefully accomplished within the established order of most third-world nations.

Let us start with the last assumption. It is contended by many liberal policymakers that they are not so much opposed to the objectives of social revolutions as the methods, and that they too favour the elimination of the wants and abuses extant in poorer countries. But these transformations must be effected slowly and peacefully, a qualification which sounds reasonable enough to affluent Americans who, experiencing none of the miseries that afflict the masses in other lands, are capable of an admirable forbearance.

But the appeal to non-violent gradualism bears little relation to the reality faced by severely deprived peoples. The simple fact is that in most countries social revolutions cannot be peacefully accomplished. "Revolution by peaceful means is an historical rarity," Senator J. William Fulbright reminds us. "It requires the optimism of Dr. Pangloss to expect Asian and Latin American nations, beset as they are with problems of poverty and population unknown in Western Europe and North America, to achieve by peaceful means what nations with vastly greater advantages were able to achieve only by violent revolution."

Perhaps in very prosperous nations where the poverty is relatively limited compared to the available resources, and where reallocations can be made without jeopardising the essential interests of the ruling classes, then peaceful changes of limited scope might be achieved by political means. But in the poor nations, as Conor Cruise O'Brien points out, the oppressed are not minorities but masses; the resources are not bountiful but scarce. For the landowners, large merchants, military chieftains, usurers, sweat-shop owners, and top bureaucrats whose existence depends on maintaining a tight control on the limited wealth, social revolution, whether peaceful or violent, threatens their raison d'être. The admonition, "If you don't carry out reforms then the Communists will," makes little sense to the native rulers for whom the voluntary implementation of basic structural reforms would be nothing less than an act of class suicide, as fatal to their privileged existence as any violent change.

The failure of peaceful reform is usually ascribed to the "corruption" and "mismanagement" of the ruling functionaries. But agrarian reform programmes are technically simple affairs, certainly when compared to the herculean feats performed on behalf of war and military build-up, and even rulers of the calibre found in Saigon, with minimal U.S. assistance, could implement a realistic land programme in a short time. Not innocent ineptitude but deliberate intent has been behind their inertia. If anyone is shortsighted it is those Americans who seem unable to understand that oligarchs have no interest in jeopardising their positions by introducing substantive innovations, and feel no compulsion to "mend their ways" as long as we remain willing to expend American wealth and American blood in their defence. Repeated appeals to anti-Communist ideology are usually sufficient to induce escalated U.S. military efforts, and native elites soon learn to speak in the idiom of American anti-Communism, producing the kind of testimony that best feeds Washington's own demonological view of the world.

Here we have reached a curious state of affairs: what began as an American commitment to peaceful non-violence change ends as an American commitment to violent defence of the status quo. Violence may not be employed for change but it may be utilised to prevent change. Throughout such ventures, the anti-Communist double standard is rigorously maintained: the Soviets or Chinese may not send troops to support the revolution but the United States may send forces to suppress the revolution. We ourselves are quite capable of perpetrating violent changes—as demonstrated in Guatemala and Santo Domingo—on behalf of reaction[ism]. By buttressing "stability" in various countries, the U.S. frequently helps to destroy whatever conditions exist for peaceful change. The pattern is something like this: Small numbers of social reformers—usually urban intellectuals, trade unionists, and professional politicians—seek to break the hold of reactionary forces but remain unwilling to base themselves in a revolutionary movement of workers and peasants. Lacking mass support, yet soon becoming the objects of government repression, these reformers must either turn towards revolution or retreat into quietism. As Lynd and Hayden observe, "While American Peace Corpsmen and aid officials ply their Sisyphean labours in the villages, other Americans work among the oligarchs and generals to prevent a radical force from emerging. The reformer falls."

It is said that we cannot renege on our commitments to other peoples, but to my knowledge our commitments are not to other peoples but to governments that most often represent some special faction of the populace. When we support a government, we must ask ourselves what faction, what particular interests are we helping? The question leads to some dismaying discoveries about those to whom we have pledged ourselves. But whatever their grave shortcomings, do not these rulers represent something better than the kind of tyranny that "revolutionary Communism" would impose?

Understandably, American sensibilities are offended by certain features of social revolutionary governments such as one-party rule, zealous propaganda, and the use of coercion to implement revolutionary changes—including the forceful suppression of elements that openly challenge the legitimacy of revolutionary goals. But what is significant is not that we find these practices undesirable but that the people who live under these new social systems find much that is preferable to the old regimes, much that they seem prepared to defend. The Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba was a fiasco not because of "insufficient air coverage" but because the Cuban people, instead of rising to join the counterrevolutionary forces, as anticipated by the CIA, closed ranks behind Castro. Another "captive people," the North Vietnamese, have acted equally strangely. Instead of treating the severe social and material dislocations caused by the American aerial war as a golden opportunity to overthrow Hanoi's yoke, they have rallied to the support of their beleaguered government.

In the South, the Viet Cong continued to enjoy all the tactical guerrilla advantages of concealment, supply, inaccessibility, and surprise, largely because they have the active support of most of the people in the countryside—something they could not get by intimidation alone. (If coercion and intimidation brought support, then by now we should have easily won the populace to our side.)

Revealing explanations as to why people side with the Communist revolutionaries come from some rather unexpected sources: "For years now in Southeast Asia," Ambassador Henry Cabot Lodge admitted, "the only people who have been doing anything for the little man—to lift him up—have been the Communists." In a similar vein, James Reston wrote, "Even Premier Kỳ told this reporter today that the Communists were closer to the peoples' yearnings for social justice and an independen lie than his own government." More specifically: (a) the peasants want land; the Viet Cong distribute the land to them; (b) the Saigon authorities and the American forces with their massive and indiscriminate fire power alienate far more of the populace than do the Viet Cong. (c) Vietnamese nationalism, mobilised for many decades, responds more favourably to the liberation fighters than to a French-supported or American-created government in Saigon.

There are anti-Communist liberals who conclude that anyone who utters a good word for leftist-authoritarian revolutions must himself harbour anti-democratic or "Maoist" sentiments. But to applaud social revolutions is not to oppose political freedom. To the extent that social revolutionary governments construct substantive alternatives for their people, they increase human options and freedom. There is no such thing as freedom in the abstract; there is freedom to speak as one chooses, freedom of opportunity in getting an education and pursuing a profession, freedom from want, freedom to worship or not worship, freedom to construct and enjoy certain social benefits, et cetera. Social revolutionary governments extend a number of these freedoms without destroying those which never existed; they foster conditions necessary for national self-determination, economic development, the preservation of health and human life, the end of class oppression and foreign exploitation and perhaps eventually the expansion of political freedoms which an educated populace begins to demand.

The official anti-Communist axiom is: "any revolutionary victory for Communism anywhere represents a diminution of freedom in the world." The concern for freedom is admirable but the assertion is false. The Chinese revolution did not crush democracy; there was none to crush. The Cuban revolution did not destroy freedom; it destroyed a hateful police state. The Algerian Revolution did not abolish national liberties; none existed under French colonialism. Neither the Viet Minh nor the NLF abrogated individual rights; there was precious little of that for the peasant masses under Bao Dai, Diem, or Ky. No one today worries excessively about the political oppressions suffered in South Korea, Thailand, Taiwan, Paraguay, Peru, et cetera. The heartfelt American desire to bring the forms of political democracy to Chinese, Cuban, and Vietnamese peasants ("Are they able to read more than one opinion? Do they have realistic choice when they vote?") rarely extends to the non-revolutionary regimes.

Is the pain of revolution worth the gain? Cost-benefit accounting is a complicated business when applied to social transitions. But have we ever bothered to measure the violence of revolution against the violence that preceded it? "I do not know how one measures the price of historical victories," Robert Heilbroner said, "or how one can ever decide that a diffuse gain is worth a sharp and particular loss. I only know that the way in which we ordinarily keep the books of history is wrong." We make no tally of the generations claimed by that combination of neglect and brutalisation so characteristic of the old regimes, the hapless victims of flood and famine in the Yangtze valley of yesterday, the child-prostitutes found dead in the back alleys of old Shanghai, the nameless muzhiks stricken by cold and starvation. And what of today? "No one," Heilbroner reminds us, "is now totalling up the balance of the wretches who starve in India, or the peasants of Northeastern Brazil who live in swamps on crabs, or the undernourished and permanently stunted children of Hong Kong or Honduras. Their sufferings go unrecorded and are not present to counterbalance the scales when the furies of revolutions strike..."

Let us mourn those who fall in the whirl of revolution yet keep in mind the millions elsewhere who are slowly being obliterated by reactionism without drama, glory, or purpose. Even were we successful in repressing all revolts today and forever, the violence against humanity which is the common condition of status quo reactionism would still be with us. If our concern is for the freedom and wellbeing of mankind then we should consider supporting, rather than opposing, social revolutions.