Poland and the US Left

Christopher Hitchens

Town Hall on West Forty-Third Street has been the favourite meeting place of the New York Left for many years. A few nights ago there was a gathering there which showed how deeply scattered and split the local radicals have become in the age of Reagan. The evening was dedicated to S olidarity, and the advance cast list was impressive. From the Sixties there came Allen Ginsberg and Dick Gregory. From the world of letters came Kurt Vonnegut, E. L. Doctorow, Susan Sontag, Studs Terkel and Gore Vidal. There were spokesmen from union reform groups, from the sacked air traffic controllers, and from Solidarity itself. There were even Pete Seeger and Paul Robeson Junior, never before seen on a Platform critical of the Soviet Union. The crowd was capacity.

All seemed to be going well. Most of the American Left feels itself on the side of the Poles but some comrades are a bit — how can one say? — embarrassed. All those Catholics, for one thing. And such a harvest of raw propaganda for Reagan and Haig. The standard speech for the evening was a declaration of outrage about events in Warsaw, followed by a rather longer diatribe about the hypocrisy of Washington In crushing strikes, bullying El Salvador and weeping crocodile tears for the Poles.

This was pushing along quite well, until Susan Sontag got up. She was once con- sidered for prosecution for giving aid and confort to Hanoi, and has graced most of the literary and political barricades in the last decades. So it came as a shock when she ended her condemnation of Reagan and began to say this: I have the impression that much of what

is said about politics by people on the so- called democratic Left, which includes many people here tonight, has been governed by the wish not to give comfort to reactionary forces. With that con- sideration on mind, people on the Left have willingly and unwillingly told a lot of lies.

The hall became restive on a sudden. Nor

did Ms Sontag spare anybody. She went on: I can remember when Czesaw Milosz's book The Captive Mind was published in this country in 1953... I regarded the book as an instrument of cold war pro- paganda, giving aid and comfort to the rising tide of McCarthyism. That is, I read the book and was utterly uncon- vinced by it. I put it on my student's bookshelf.

Hubbub in the hall, rising to boos and shouts at the following:

Imagine, if you will, someone who read only the Reader's Digest between 1950 and 1970, and someone who in the same period read only the Nation or the New Statesman. Which reader would have been better informed about the realities of Communism? The answer, think, should give us pause. Can it be that our enemies were right?

After this, it was almost an anti-climax when she referred to Communism as 'Fascism with a human face' and left the platform. Applause and jeers just about equalled one another as she did so. The cocktail and weekly magazine circuit has been humming ever since. To have been at the meeting was to recognise that a 'moment' had occurred.

The dominant reaction was that Ms Son-

tag had exaggerated the deformity of the Left, but that what she had said was not quite untrue enough. The Left has not, as a whole, supported the Polish workers as a movement in their own right. Rather, it has seen events as part of the wider 'cold war' pattern, and has sought to deny moral authority in the matter to the Right.

Indeed, apart from the hard Left and the hard Right, Poland has been almost forgot- ten by Americans. The turn-out for government-sponsored Let Poland be Poland rallies was an embarrassment, even in areas of traditionally high Polish population. At all the foreign policy think- tank meetings I have attended, the prevail- ing mood has been one of relief that the martial law crisis passed off at such little cost to the West. Most dismal of all have been the liberals — the men who say that the Cold War is an invention but who always use it as an excuse for inaction. Writing in the New York Times George Kennan had this to say:

What has now occurred is bad — of course. But it could be worse. General Wojciech Jaruzelski has given his assurance that if and when public order is restored, martial law will be removed and democratic reforms instituted. This is, actually, a course almost dictated by circumstances. General Jaruzelski is, after all, a Pole surrounded by Poles, and a return to the old order is un- thinkable. How successful he will be in this undertaking remains to be seen. Something, certainly, will depend upon the extent to which he is able to restrain the more aggressive members of his own army and police and to prevent the sort of brutalities already rumoured to have taken place. But perhaps it is best that he should be given a chance to show what he can do.

'Could be worse', 'rumoured to have taken place' — all it lacks is 'wiser counsels will prevail'. Nor was Kennan alone in his Panglossian analysis. The real Establish- ment dreads the cost of a grain boycott, and money does talk.

There is also a school which might be called the 'Solidarity went too far' faction. Some distinguished liberals are mustered under that umbrella too — among them Ronald Steel, who thinks that all would have been well had Solidarity moderated its demands. The answer to this was given by Daniel Singer, who opened the meeting at which Susan Sontag spoke. He pointed out that Solidarity had been offered only one seat on the committee of national unity which the party was going to set up, and that the party would rather surrender power to the army than the workers.

Susan Sontag is still a paid-up member of the 'better red than dead' party. She has not really abandoned her old allegiances. But, like a growing number of American radicals, she is not to be intimidated by the fear of war into making allowances for the Russians. It will be interesting to see if this house-cleaning takes place in higher political echelons as well.