The Survival of the Adversary Culture, a new collection of Paul Hollander's essays, makes a timely appearance. As anyone who reads the news carefully can attest, there is widespread blindness to continuing leftist influence throughout American society. The Reagan years were supposed to have signaled an end to all that in national life, but is the leftist cause, though quieter, significantly diminished?
No modern scholar has better documented the reasons for vulnerability to Marxism and its western analogues among large numbers of otherwise intelligent people in our universities, government, press, and even churches than Hollander. Key advisers and supporters of the Jackson campaign, for example, have figured prominently in Hollander's earlier work Political Pilgrims: They have been apologists, witting and unwitting, for the Soviet Union, Communist China, Cuba, Vietnam, and most recently Nicaragua, and they press on. In only a slightly more benign vein, presidential candidate Paul Simon has revealed so fervent a belief in the benefit of direct contact with other peoples that he has asserted that if "Ronald Reagan had once been an exchange student in Moscow... we would be living in a different world today."
The Soviet Union was praised by Westerners during the 1930s just as the forced collectivizations, show trials, and Stalin-created Ukrainian famine (which killed at least five million people) were in full swing. China, too, was touted in the West while it carried out the butcheries of the Cultural Revolution. More recently, Americans have approved Vietnamese "reeducation" camps.)
Without Hollander's patient documentation of these and other aberrations over the years, and without his original work in discerning the patterns that lie behind the seemingly unrelated pilgrimages to socialist meccas, these phenomena would strain belief. His chapter "Model Prisons and Political Tourism Under Socialism" [see 342-75] uncovers a pattern of deception--and willingness to be deceived--that gives the lie to the often repeated cliché that better communication is making the world smaller, and by implication more familiar. From Siberia to Havana, there is striking evidence that modern technology has enabled propagandists to keep reality farther out of sight than ever.
Willingness to be deceived
As Nietzsche once observed, every idea has its autobiography. In The Survival of the Adversary Culture, Hollander provides various explanations for why Westerners who pride themselves on skepticism toward their own government are so gullible toward any regime claiming to be socialist.
According to Hollander, anti-American feelings lead almost inexorably to grossly uncritical acceptance of America's enemies. Sympathy for countries like the Soviet Union and passionate denial of their obvious evils stem importantly from attitudes deeply hostile to the United States. Only by understanding this, says Hollander, can we hope to account for the fact that communist regimes have enjoyed the highest prestige in the West at the very moments they were most ruthless.
This hostility is at least partly explained by Peter Berger's analysis of the "socialist myth" which Hollander invokes. Berger argues that the social situation of modern intellectuals poses a
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