datelines

 DATELINES

NICARAGUA LIBRE

TOWARD THE CLOSE of his Memoirs of a Revolutionary, Victor Serge contemplated the fate of the “socialist experiment.” Faced with a miserable Mexican exile and oppressed by the spread of totalitarian ideas, he reflected on the ideas of the betrayed Russian revolution and wrote:

It is often said that “the germ of all Stalinism was in Bolshevism at its beginning.” Well, I have no objection. Only, Bolshevism also contained many other germs—a mass of other germs—and those who lived through the enthusiasm of the first years of the first victorious revolution ought not to forget it. To judge the living man by the death germs which the autopsy reveals in a corpse—and which he may have carried in him since his birth—is this very sensible?

I went to Nicaragua, as I had gone to Cuba, Angola, Zimbabwe, Grenada, and other such focos, not as a tourist of revolution but as a very amateur biochemist. How were the bacilli doing? Which were becoming the dominant strain? In other words, would Nicaragua turn into another frowsty barracks socialism, replete with compulsory enthusiasm and affirming only the right to agree?

I tried deliberately to screen out all the pseudointellectual special pleading about “double standards” with which my hometown of Washington is awash. In that town, the conservatives (who do not believe that there are laws of history) believe that the law of history is that all revolutions evolve into totalitarianism. For them, Nicaragua is a macho test of Western “will” versus cretinous appeasement. The liberals change the subject by talking of human rights in the here and now, and by arguing in rather a wheedling manner that the business community in Managua is still free and we mustn’t “drive them into the arms of Moscow.” The Left, or what remains of it, has a tendency to change the subject too. Surely Nicaragua is better than the abattoir states of El Salvador and Guatemala, which enjoy American imperial patronage? If there are “problems,” do they not result from blockade, sabotage, and the hiring of mercenary thugs by the CIA? And anyway (raising the voice a little), what right have Western commentators to pass judgment on the struggling poor who are trying to cancel generations of underdevelopment? It is both striking and depressing to see the three main “schools” still frozen in their Bay of Pigs or Tonkin Gulf attitudes. A tribute, anyway, to the persistence of ideology and tradition.

I don’t affect to be above this battle (and I still think that the Left comes out best of the three). But I was looking for the worst and was determined not to come away saying things like: “You have to remember the specific conditions.” The Sandinistas make large claims for a revolution in liberty, for socialism with a human face, for a new kind of American state, for the fusion of the best in the two opposing world systems. This time, they seem to say, will be different. It didn’t seem patronizing to take them up on it.

They don’t tell you what an extraordinarily beautiful country it is. Managua, of course, is a famous hell-hole, combining the worst of the Third World and the tackiest of the New, with its sprawling barrios (where Reagan’s sanctions will tighten already exiguous belts) and its crass, nasty Hotel Intercontinental. In between—nothing much. Until the FSLN cleared the earthquake rubble from 1972, there were the beginnings of an urban jungle in the real sense. Lianas and creepers were spreading everywhere, and along with them the exciting prospect of snakes, parrots, and pumas in midtown. How like Macondo that would have been, and what stirring copy.

In the interior, though, ravishing Castilian architecture, cool colonial verandas and courtyards, mountain resorts, lava plains, riotous jungles and forests. Nicaragua is a caesura between the Atlantic and the Pacific; built on an earthquake fault and precarious to a degree. The great volcano at Masaya, with its enormous crater full of swirling green parrots, makes such a hypnotic inhaling noise that the Spanish conquerors put up a huge cross to ward off the breath of the Evil One. Miraculous virgins have appeared recently in this land, and the most frantic rumors are small change. The only calm spots are to be found on the shores of the giant inland ocean of Lake Nicaragua. Here Pablo Antonio Cuadra wrote his Songs of Cifar and the Sweet Sea, which represents the lake as the Aegean of his Odyssey, and here the fishermen do their millennial stuff. Here, also, various American adventurers of the last century planned to build the first isthmian canal and to recruit Nicaragua as a slave state into the Union. Not far from the lake and the volcano is Monimbo, an Indian town where, in legend and in fact, the insurrection against Somoza and the Americans began.

Nicaragua is a country where writers have always been impelled into politics, or exile, or both. Rubén Darío had to leave the stifling backwardness of the country in order to conduct his experiments in modernism. Sergio Ramírez spent much of his life as a Berliner. The poet Rigoberto López could see no future at all, and killed the elder Somoza in what he must have known was a suicide attack. The last Somoza had such utter contempt (perhaps as a result) for the literary and intellectual life of the country that he helped to fuse the intelligentsia into a unanimous front against his rule. But, with his dynasty abolished, the unifying effect has disappeared also. Taking the writers of Nicaragua as the specially sensitive register of the country’s affairs, I spent most of my time talking to two men, former friends and still mutual admirers, who exemplify the depth and the intensity of the breach in the Nicaraguan revolution.

Sergio Ramírez is the nation’s leading novelist and one of the few nonuniformed members of the Sandinista directorate. He serves as vice-president to Daniel Ortega and was the founder of Los Doce (the Group of Twelve), which mobilized civilian and intellectual support for the revolution. His novel Te dió miedo la sangre? is published in English as To Bury Our Fathers, because the translation (“Were You Scared of the Blood?”) sounded too much like a thriller.

Pablo Antonio Cuadra is a poet known well beyond the confines of his own country. He publishes the review El Pez y la serpiente (“The Fish and the Snake”) and edits the literary supplement of the right-wing anti-Sandinista news sheet La Prensa. A disillusioned ex-supporter of the Somoza family, he counts himself a supporter of the 1979 “Triumph,” which he now regards as a revolution betrayed.

Sergio Ramírez was acting president on the night that I saw him, because Daniel Ortega had winged off to Moscow. Our five-hour conversation was punctuated only three times—twice by calls from Ortega and once by an earth tremor which first removed and then replaced the smiles on the faces of the guards. I, who knew no better, decided to take their relative insouciance at face value. Ramírez, on the other hand, sprang to his feet and ordered the doors thrown open. In an earthquake zone, you are ever ready for the moment when you may have to stand under the lintel. Also, a door temporarily shut can become a door permanently jammed.

Our discussion was bounded by these two analogies. Like every Sandinista, Ramírez expects that one day the yanquis will bring the roof in by invasion. And, like most visitors, I wanted to know whether “temporary expedients” like censorship, informing, and conscription would harden into a permanent system.

It was not the first time, evidently, that Ramírez had been confronted by the second line of questioning. Considering that he was speaking on the record as acting president, in a week when the White House had announced economic sanctions, he displayed considerable candor and skepticism about the course of the revolution. So, sometimes, does Fidel Castro (who also likes late-night sessions with foreign guests). So I tried my best to be unimpressed.

Before the “Triumph” there were many discussions about writing and culture. We felt that we might have the first opportunity to test ourselves in a society where writers have always had a role. But there was a temptation to develop a “line”—and I call it temptation because of the old idea that art should “serve.” We knew of the negative experiences of other socialist and Third World countries. But we decided on a policy of complete creative freedom.

At our first assembly of writers in the National Palace, I made, and later published, a speech. I warned that we don’t need a recipe or a line. I don’t mind experiments by our “workshop” poets, though there is a risk of doggerel. The result of an individual’s intimate work, though, must not be despised.

One sees what he means about the workshop poets. I came across a stanza by Carlos Galan Pena of the Police Complex Workshop, who writes to his beloved Lily:

You and I are the Revolution

and I am filled with my work

and you spend hours and hours

…in the Office of Propaganda.

The best that can be said here is that Ernesto Cardenal’s Ministry of Culture is encouraging people who have never thought of themselves as writers before.

I ask Ramírez about the dismal state of writing in Cuba and the persecution of authors like Heberto Padilla. He responds rather cautiously that it is “necessary to be present” in a revolution and that those who defect have in essence surrendered. But he says that Padilla is “not a bad poet—and there are rights which everyone involved in criticism must have.” For the first five years of the revolutionary government, says Ramírez, he himself did not write at all for fear of producing politicized or didactic prose.

I suggest to him that there is an axiomatic connection between writing and pluralism, and mention Orwell’s remark about the imagination, like certain wild animals, being unable to breed in captivity. I’ve always thought that the observation has its weaknesses, because of the long tradition of clandestine and “opposition” literature, but that it definitely expresses a truth. Ramírez agrees with enthusiasm. “We don’t censor the cultural section of La Frensa,” he claims (incidentally admitting that they do censor the rest of it). He shows a knowledgeable admiration for Milan Kundera and says that he cannot blame him for choosing exile over military occupation. But he criticizes him as “simplistic—totalitarianism doesn’t come only from the East.”

To Bury Our Fathers deals with two generations of Nicaraguan life under the ancien régime. Ramírez claims that every incident in it actually took place, at least in the sense that oral history has established certain episodes as having “actually happened.” Nicaragua is a country alive with myths and rumors. The brain of its greatest poet, Rubén Darío, for instance, has gone missing. Its dimensions were reputedly enormous; a “fact” which greatly impressed the provincial minds of the time. Possession of the preserved cerebellum seemed important, but somehow it got mislaid, and every now and then a fresh piece of gossip about its whereabouts goes humming on its rounds. And nobody knows where Sandino is buried. His body was interred hugger-mugger by the American-trained Somocistas who betrayed and murdered him. Strenuous, fruitless efforts have been made to locate his grave (which may well be under the runway of the Managua airport), but perhaps it’s a relief that no embalming of that corpse will ever take place.

In many ways, rumor and myth are the enemies of the Sandinistas. The CIA manual that was written for the right-wing terrorists is obviously strong on such matters as assassination, the use of local criminal networks, and the techniques of economic sabotage. But it also places a heavy accent on the spreading of slander and alarm. Stories about Sandinista orgies or the nationalization of the family are staples. And, whether you believe the Graham Greene or the Mario Vargas Llosa version, there is the Virgin of Cuapa.

Cuapa is a nothing town in Chontales province, where on May 8, 1981, a local sacristan named Bernardo found himself in conversation with the Virgin Mary. In a succession of appearances, she told him that “Nicaragua has suffered a great deal since the earthquake and, if you do not change, Nicaragua will continue to suffer and you will hasten the coming of the Third World War.” Our Lady showed a shrewd grasp of contemporary politics when she described the Sandinistas as “atheists and communists, which is why I have come to help the Nicaraguans. They have not kept their promises. If you ignore what I ask, communism will spread throughout America.”

This is higher than the usual standard of the Christian Democratic miracle. In its pedantic toeing of the State Department line (especially the artful bit about the FSLN not keeping its promises), it outdoes Fatima in 1917 or the repeated counterrevolutionary uses of the blood of San Gennaro. Despite official downplayings and denunciation of “bourgeois Mariolatry” by the liberation-theology faction, the Virgin of Cuapa, in some sense, lives. She is a decisive weapon in the campaign to get peasants to join a Vendée run by their former masters.

Ramírez, who describes his whole literary endeavor as a conscious struggle against the seductive, fantastical influence of Gabriel García Márquez, smilingly says that “as a writer, of course, I believe in the Virgin of Cuapa.” But the Sandinistas possess what they consider to be a more potent icon. There is nobody in Nicaragua who dares oppose the spirit of Augusto César Sandino. Even his former enemies pay homage to him in their pamphlets and broadcasts, and one presumes that they would not bother to counterfeit a bankrupt currency. Disgruntled stall-holders who dislike the regime will tell you that, in spite of everything, they feel prouder to be Nicaraguan these days. One is, in vulgar terminology, either a Sandinista or—one of Sandino’s favorite expletives—a vendepatria: seller of the country. In conversation, Ramírez discloses how this mythology, too, can make you a captive.

I had asked him what he thought to be his government’s greatest mistake. He replied that I was drawing on a large repertoire, but he chose to illustrate his answer by way of an episode from his forthcoming book about Julio Cortázar:

On the day that we took over the American-owned mines on the Atlantic coast, Julio was with us. I wanted to show him what we had found. There were files on every worker. One, for example, was the file of a man who had labored there from 1951 until one week before “the Triumph.” He was listed as having been fired. Under the heading “Cause for Dismissal” was the entry “killed in an accident.” I can show this surreal file and many others like it. They would sack dead workers in order to avoid paying compensation. And we also captured the records of the “personal tax” that the owners paid to Somoza in order to get away with it. His regime had a carnal, sensual relationship with the United States.

The mines themselves were worthless—another piece in the Somoza museum of horrors. The machinery was useless; fit only to be worked by the cheapest labor. Nationalizing gained us nothing. But we did it to show that an era had ended. It was an act of love as much as hatred. Maybe it was a mistake.

In Chile and Argentina, he says, the middle and upper classes are a real social force, powerfully organized and with a real presence. In Nicaragua, they are a mere shadow thrown by foreign influence, an “appendage of the United States.” Vendepatrias, in fact? “I don’t like such simplistic phrases.”

Oh, doesn’t he? Pablo Antonio Cuadra sits in his dingy office at La Prensa literaria, talking about his old friend Sergio Ramirez (“un buen hombre de letras”) and saying that anti-Americanism is a local contagion. The hemisphere, admittedly, is dominated by the United States, but there is too much inclination to blame the yanquis for everything. “And radicalization is like the lianas in the jungle—it swallows you up. Sergio should be writing, not trying to be a politician. The FSLN have thrown away the revolution—the most magnificent moment that Nicaragua ever had.” Cuadra is prepared to say that the situation is actually worse than it was ten years ago under Somoza—“if you omit his last few weeks of terror and bombing,” when he ordered his own capital strafed from the air.

I ask Cuadra what his attitude would be to a United States invasion. This, he says, is “a horrible question. The Americans might negate even the original revolution. But to imitate the Soviet Union is the most macabre thing of all.” More macabre than a Somocista restoration? “Sí. It is more difficult to remove.”

Cuadra is not a particularly expert political commentator—as I said earlier, there was a time when he professed a nationalistic enthusiasm for the Somoza dynasty, and he has that worst of qualifications in a revolution: the reputation of being a late joiner. Toward the end of the Somoza terror, he wrote a defense of Ramírez’s literary faction Los Doce, which got him into hot water. La Prensa is a vulgar, sensational, superstitious, right-wing propaganda sheet, which publishes lies and distortions on a scale that even Western diplomats find embarrassing. Cuadra’s name, under the sonorous title of “Don Pablo Antonio,” appears on the masthead as its director, together with that of Jaime Chamorro. The Sandinista party paper Barricada used to be edited by Carlos Chamorro, his brother. Nuevo diario, the other leftist daily, is edited by Xavier Chamorro, another family member. Chamorro, Chamorro, and Chamorro… .

In spite of his links to the shabby politics of the main paper, Cuadra’s defense of his own section, La Prensa literaria, is soundly based. I ask him whether there is not something inescapably political about Latin American contemporary writers—Neruda, Fuentes, Márquez, Cortázar, Vargas Llosa, even Borges? Is this automatically unhealthy? Not at all, he replies. Every one of us has been politicized, and life itself (la vida) is political. But very few of these writers have mixed their literary work with their politics—except for Neruda, whose downfall as a writer it was. Even Márquez keeps his polemics in a separate compartment. It is, in other words, not politics but politicization that must be avoided.

To Ramírez’s claim that the first assembly of Nicaraguan writers repudiated a “line” or a “recipe,” Cuadra replies that he remembers it well. “Cortázar was there and so was I. There were great proclamations about artistic freedom from Sergio and Ernesto Cardenal. I even had Cuban friends who said that this might have a good influence in Havana. But within a year, Ventana was publishing Fidel Castro’s notorious speech to the intellectuals, saying that “within the Revolution, complete freedom; against the Revolution, none.” Ventana is the Sandinistas’ literary and cultural magazine. I suddenly recall Ramírez saying that it was “boring.” It is edited by Daniel Ortega’s wife.

Ramírez says that Cuadra is a great poet who doesn’t understand revolution. Cuadra says that Ramírez is a great novelist who has become intoxicated by politics. Ramírez and Cardenal say that restrictions on liberty result from the exigencies of war and blockade, arid from the threat of invasion. Cuadra says that they result from a dogmatic, ideological tendency inherent in the FSLN. Ramírez says that Nicaragua will not become “like Bulgaria.” Cuadra grants that so far there is no imposed socialist realism, but says that many of his contributors are asking to be published anonymously and that there is a general tendency toward “the correct.”

It is possible to conclude rather glibly that both men are right and that Nicaragua is becoming a hybrid or a compromise. Mario Vargas Llosa, for example, takes the view that the Sandinistas will become like the ruling party in Mexico, the so-called Institutional Revolutionary Party, which retains the lion’s share of power and patronage without acquiring a total monopoly. This sort of diagnosis treats a very volatile present as somehow static. Ramírez doesn’t want conformity and Cuadra doesn’t want the forcible reimposition of right-wing dictatorship. Both men may be optimists.

In spite of the brave and, I believe, genuine aspirations of Sergio Ramírez, there are symptoms of an encroaching orthodoxy in Nicaragua. During our conversations, for example, he used the terms “one-party society” and “closed society” as synonymous. Today’s Nicaragua is, at least in the cities, a multiparty society. The posters and emblems of the Conservatives (who really are conservative) and the Liberals (who really are not liberal) are everywhere. Likewise those of the Communists (who really are communist). But it is a one-party state. All the power worth having belongs to the FSLN; the broadcasting station and the armed forces are both officially called “Sandinista.” In foreign policy, despite some anomalies, the “line” is pretty solidly Warsaw Pact–oriented. And, in cultural matters, a sort of dull utilitarianism is creeping in. Even Ramírez is not proof against it. Denial of newsprint to the opposition, for example, is due to “the rationing of scarce resources.” The unavailability of books and magazines, except from the East, is due to “the lack of foreign exchange.” There is an important half-truth in these claims. But they are just the sort of euphemisms that led, through many false dawns, to the Zhdanovization of culture in Cuba.

The Sandinistas say that they welcome honest criticism, and I did notice that they were irritated by Western sycophancy, of which there is a plentiful supply from some of their visitors. So I’m happy to have a “concrete” test to apply. On April 6, 1984, Father Ernesto Cardenal wrote to his friend Lawrence Ferlinghetti from the Ministry of Culture, promising that censorship of opposition newspapers would end the following month when the elections began. It didn’t. Father Cardenal is a devout Catholic and was a friend of Thomas Merton (two qualifications he shares with Pablo Antonio Cuadra). These facts are often cited, by observers like Graham Greene, as proof of the good Father’s commitment to freedom and pluralism. Why not as proof of his readiness to believe anything—like his wide-eyed admiration of the austere absence of materialism among the Cubans?

In numerous respects, the Sandinista revolution is its own justification. Despite some exaggerated claims, the achievements in social welfare and education are spectacular and moving. So is the fact that, after a half-century and more of tutelage, the country is no longer a ditto to the wishes of the United States. But the only way to justify the gradual emergence of a party-state is by continual reference to the neighboring fascisms and the menace of imperialist invasion. And I would rather leave that job to the cadres of sincere, credulous, self-sacrificing American youth who are everywhere to be found in Nicaragua. (“Look, man, the people care more about full bellies than about freedom in the abstract.”) Their motive is generally religious, and likewise their method of argument. I have seen this movie before, most recently in Grenada, where Maurice Bishop abolished such independent media as there were and then had no means of appealing to the people when his own turn came.

The contortions and ambiguities of the Left are familiar. What about those of the Right? Pablo Antonio Cuadra told me, almost visibly squirming, that the worst thing the CIA had ever done was to finance and train the Somocista terrorists in the north. It seems that counterrevolutions consume their children too—nobody who has seen the Contras’ work can doubt that they would emulate Guatemala and El Salvador if they got the chance. And regimes like that are just as hard to remove as Stalinist ones. In addition, they don’t even claim to be trying to raise the economic “floor” on which most people have to live the one life that is allowed to them.

This is why no conversation with a Sandinista lasts for more than a few minutes before coming up against the name of Salvador Allende. By murdering him, and by collapsing Chilean society into a dictatorship, Kissinger and his confreres educated a whole generation of Latin American radicals. Pluralism is now seen by many of them as a trap or a snare; an invitation to make yourself vulnerable; a none-too-subtle suggestion of suicide. Stand in the middle of the road, and you get run down. Did not Sandino surrender to his murderers and under a safe-conduct? The fact that this argument can lead to disastrous conclusions (as it did with Maurice Bishop, who used it all the time) does not diminish its force or its relevance.

And the Nicaraguan opposition does not believe in democracy. Its leaders will tell you so. The cardinal dislikes the revolution because it promises free education and teaches Darwin in the schools (“atheist indoctrination”). The rightist parties, and most of the centrist ones, are mostly organized around one caudillo and say openly that they would be happy to come to power by force or with the aid of a foreign power. Most deplorable in many ways are the American liberals, who have now voted to aid the Contras in the hope of avoiding the accusation of “appeasement” from Ronald Reagan. These people never thought of Central America as “critical” when it was a sweltering, superficially tranquil serfdom. To deem a country worthy of your attention—possibly, of your military attention—only when it explodes from misery and neglect: this is the highest and most callous form of irresponsibility. North American bien-pensants have more to apologize for than they can ever realize. As Victor Serge put it:

A feeble logic, whose finger beckons us to the dark spectacle of the Stalinist Soviet Union, affirms the bankruptcy of Bolshevism, followed by that of Socialism… . Have you forgotten the other bankruptcies? What was Christianity doing in the various catastrophes of society? What became of Liberalism? What has Conservatism produced, in either its enlightened or its reactionary form? If we are indeed honestly to weigh out the bankruptcy of ideology, we shall have a long task ahead of us. And nothing is finished yet.

What, then, of the bacilli? The healthy ones are still alive and still circulating. As Ramírez said to me, “Without the confrontation with the United States, we could put Nicaragua under a glass bell and experiment in freedom.” And, as Cuadra told me, without some of the pressure from abroad, things might be proceeding further along the Castroite path. Both men are still free to speak, and both of their futures will be significant monitors. The critical, forensic finding seems to me to be this: Nicaragua has logged six years of revolutionary government after half a century of the Somozas and more than a century of humiliating colonial subordination. It has done so with hardly any vengeance or massacre—capital punishment has been abolished, and some Sandinistas now say they wish they had shot the Somocista Old Guard instead of releasing it to reincarnate in Honduras and Miami. It has not avoided all the mistakes and crimes of previous revolutions, but it has at least made a self-conscious effort to do so. The Stalinist bacilli are at work all right, but they do not predominate as yet, and there is nothing that says they have to. Perhaps one should beware, anyway, of biological analogies. On the shirts and badges of the American “advisers” in Honduras is a monogram that predates Marx and Lenin, and, probably accidentally, has an echo of an earlier Crusade. Emblazoned with a skull and crossbones, it reads: Kill ’Em All—Let God Sort ’Em Out!

(Granta 16, 1985)

THE CATHOUSE AND THE CROSS

THE CATHOUSE

GLORIA CÉSAR’S is open for business behind a fortified door off the Avenida Roosevelt in San Salvador. The guard on the door is surly and torpid, the crone who brings the meanly poured drinks is unsmiling and pretends not to have heard of a Cuba Libre, the moneyed Salvadoran men at the bar do not give newcomers any grin of complicity. When the joint is plunged into candlelight by a blackout from a guerrilla bomb attack, there is no blitz humor on offer. Our little party—made up of one randy American, one undecided American, and my purely anthropological self—does not get the “number one Johnny” treatment that Americans in Saigon or Bangkok were and are accustomed to. Yet this sourness and reserve has nothing in it of national pride. It is a compound of the simultaneous servility and resentment that this country’s Establishment has had to internalize.

“For the first time in the history of U.S. foreign aid, the level of U.S. aid now exceeds a country’s own contribution to its budget… . U.S. funding for fiscal year 1987 stands at $608 million, equal to 105 percent of El Salvador’s $582 million contribution to its own most recent budget.” So runs a recent report to Congress. You can read the same relationship on the faces of the army public-relations men, the soldiers at the checkpoints, and the management of Gloria César’s. It is the expression worn by people who know that their paymasters are slightly ashamed of them. They need the North American subvention. But they don’t need the attention that comes with it—the fact finders, the journalists, the missionaries, the troublemakers. These little groups make about an inch of difference in the vast design that is being scrawled across the country. Yet it is in that inch that many, many Salvadorans live—and die.

One of the younger whores comes to our table and demurely accepts a drink. She doesn’t in the least mind submitting to a few questions, despite glares from the other girls. In El Salvador, she says, little shame attaches to her profession. Too many women have to resort to it, for la vida. She herself does it to support three children. And, if there is no shame, how does the children’s father feel? She doesn’t know, she says, quite where her husband is.

It isn’t possible, in El Salvador, to make any further inquiry. The man might be working in the United States, or he might have moved to another province. But a banal discussion about la vida can too swiftly become a harrowing revelation about la muerte. In every conversation there lurks the memory and the present reality of terror. You do not need a very vivid imagination to detect a whiff of “the unmentionable odor of death.” And imagination receives continual, incongruous promptings. There is a buzzard surplus in this country, for instance. Many a gallows joke is made when these circling beauties, elegant from a distance, are spotted. After one grueling interview with a survivor, I was jolted to see a cinema advertising the film Los Muchachos perdidos. A few blocks away was another cinema, this time featuring an imported nerd movie under the translation La Universidad del desorden. Was I being solemn in thinking at once of the National University, closed by an army massacre, and of ORDEN, the old acronym for the death squads? I must have had the Lost Boys somewhere in mind when I was arrested for a full minute by the illuminated sign of a Chinese restaurant near the cathedral. There were the neon words CHAP SUEY. The implications seemed impossibly macabre.

It must be unhealthy to keep returning to the subject of the death squads and to the site of El Playón, the gulch on the outskirts of town where the bodies were dumped, with all the flagrant, hysterical pride in display that a lunatic might take in exposing himself, by some of the more primitive recipients of American aid. Obviously, it’s unwholesome to keep on about that. And of course it’s morbid to dwell upon the disappeared, who were denied even the dignity of a last appearance at El Playón. It isn’t for nothing that the Hotel Camino Real hosts Dale Carnegie conferences, or that Jimmy Swaggart opens a large office and rents the local football stadium. What El Salvador needs is to put the past behind it and to break with the sickly introspection that comes with bereavement. The embassy of the world’s greatest amnesiac is on hand, replete with every manifestation of uplift and goodwill, to urge a concentration on the future. Its employees and representatives are celebrated for their attitude to bygones, which, they affirm, should be bygones.

There are two means by which a nightmare like the Salvadoran massacres can be assimilated and forgiven, if not forgotten. The first is by a full investigation and hearing, which can requite the victims and punish the murderers and the torturers. This was the road taken by the Argentine authorities when they established the Nunca Más (“Never Again”) Commission in 1983. And the second is a concerted effort at denial, euphemism, and evasion. In this option, the perpetrators agree to forgive themselves and to leave the forgetting to others. This was the method adopted by the Salvadoran ruling class—in 1932. The best condensed description of the events of that year may be found in Jeane Kirkpatrick’s celebrated book Dictatorships and Double Standards:

General Maximiliano Hernández Martínez, who governed El Salvador from 1931 to 1944, had been Minister of War in the cabinet of President Arturo Araújo when there occurred widespread uprisings said to be the work of Communist agitators. General Hernández Martínez then staged a coup and ruthlessly suppressed the disorders—wiping out all those who participated, hunting down their leaders. It is sometimes said that 30,000 persons lost their lives in the process. To many Salvadorans the violence of this repression seems less important than the fact of restored order and the thirteen years of civil peace that ensued. The traditionalist death squads that pursue revolutionary activists and leaders in contemporary El Salvador call themselves Hernández Martínez brigades, seeking thereby to place themselves in El Salvador’s political tradition and communicate their purposes.

This tradition and these purposes have, it must be said, been communicated extremely well. A few days after a fresh paroxysm of murders had taken place in the city, I sat talking with Ricardo Stein, one of the country’s few Jewish intellectuals and a development worker who has the faculty of commanding respect among all political factions. I put to him the obvious journalistic question of the hour: Were the traditionalists starting up again in earnest? He answered laconically that he suspected otherwise. “The carnage,” as he called it, had made its point. “The carnage” had terrified those it had not killed. “The carnage,” he said in a striking phrase, had had “a pedagogic effect.” All that was necessary these days was an occasional well-chosen reminder.

In Chile in 1973, journalists and deputies loyal to the Allende government started to receive anonymous postcards in their mail. The cards bore the single inscription Djakarta. Many of the recipients threw the cards away, unaware of the intended hieroglyphic purpose. Chile had no memory of massacre and torture; it was not until later in the year that the supporters of Unidad Popular realized that their local traditionalists had been studying the Indonesia of 1965.

When billets-doux started arriving from the Hernández Martínez brigades in 1979 or so, no Salvadoran had any difficulty in recognizing the traditionalist code. A body that has once felt the current will twitch at the sight of the cattle prod. It may or may not be coincidence that the most commonly cited figure for the carnage of 1932 is the same—thirty thousand—as the estimated toll of 1982. During the latter carnage, many reporters and diplomats wrote as if covering the irrational. This campaign of death, it seemed, had no shame. Were there no wiser heads? Didn’t they know how it looked? How it played? This was naïve. The traditionalists were well aware of their audience, and well rehearsed for their performance, too. And who were the squeamish going to call? The police?

I don’t think it quite hit me until I went to call on María Julia Hernández, the stout, cheerful, stoic woman who runs the farcically overstretched human-rights office at the archbishopric. In her battered quarters, daily swamped by petitioners, we were discussing the case of two campesinos who had turned up, beaten to death and with the initials of a leftist party scrawled on their chests. Some people, said María Julia, had claimed that this was a common rural crime masked as a political one. She herself was not of this opinion. The killing bore the signature of los escuadrones de la muerte—the traditionalists. How, I inquired, did she decipher this signature? Well, the deaths had taken place at a time of night when civilians have to be off the roads. And there was a barracks very near the scene of the crime. The local people had said … As she accumulated the circumstances, I realized that the nearer the forces of law and order, the more experience had taught her to look for an official culprit. So, add one more condition for the proper investigation and assimilation of a trauma of mass murder. In order to be summed up and dealt with, it must stop. The Salvadoran murder mill has not stopped. It has only, for pedagogic purposes, taken to grinding a little more slowly.

Induction can give one the same reeling sensation. The Reagan Administration says that traditionalist murder must cease, or at any rate decline noticeably, before military aid can be given. Oliver North and other officers testify before Congress that “pressure” has been employed to reduce traditionalist murder. The only people Oliver North or Ronald Reagan can “pressure” are the armed forces of El Salvador. Traditionalist murder then declines noticeably. Yet nobody is ever convicted of, or charged with, a traditionalist murder. Military aid from the United States thereupon rises to a level of nearly $2 million a day. You can state these unchallenged facts in any order you please, and what they say is this: in return for admitting publicly and generally to the murder of thirty thousand civilians, the traditionalist armed forces are rewarded with $608 million per annum. As at Gloria César’s, this transaction is one that degrades both parties while leaving them both, in contrasting ways, temporarily better off.

The traditionalists in El Salvador were actually more adventurous in the 1980s than they had been in the 1930s. In the 1930s, the targets were mainly peasants and those of Indian provenance, the latter ceasing to be a feature in several provinces. And after the slaughter, the newspapers and records of the period were destroyed, removed even from libraries and museums. (The illiterate, it must have been assumed, had already got the point.) In the 1980s, the carnage was flaunted in the face of what is sometimes called the international community. There seemed to be a certain relish in the idea that nobody was safe. The archbishop of San Salvador shot down at the service of Mass; four American nuns raped and murdered; two conservative American trade-union officials shot to death in the San Salvador Sheraton coffee shop. But if it hadn’t been that bad, would the perpetrators have earned so much American aid?

“Class” in El Salvador, as one rapidly discovers, means two different things. It means class all right, as we might find it in a Marxist primer. There they all are: the superexploited land-hungry peasants, the strikehardened proletarians of the foreign-owned factory belt, and the fifty percent or so chronically unemployed. Then we have the underdeveloped middle class, which seems to produce revolutionary doctors, lawyers, and poets in some profusion. And—yes—the upper class as scripted by Buñuel. On an ordinary day, perhaps two dozen pages of El Diario de hoy, one of the capital’s few surviving newspapers and an arm of Roberto d’Aubuisson’s ARENA party, are consecrated to la vida social. The lights must never go down. The music must always play. You may go to the Paradise restaurant in the chic Zona Rosa and see the alligator-infested shirts and the terminally bejeweled women. As far as I could discern, the specialty of the casa was always lobster thermidor, as if any other crustacean would be a sign of appeasement and weakness. I had to pass a conspicuously armed guard to get at it, all the same. In the rincón across the road, a huge picture of Franco adorns the back wall, together with an illuminated panel giving his last testament to the people of Spain.

The other declension of the word class is derived from the Spanish word tanda, which means a class at the military academy. It’s as well to know about military gradations because El Salvador is, as used to be said of Prussia, not a country that has an army but an army that has a country. For generations, long before the Russian and Cuban revolutions, the national product was usurped and annexed by a military caste with no external enemies and no raison d’être save enrichment and perpetuation. In the Casa Presidencial is a vast portrait of the founder of the Salvadoran army. He clutches a scroll of paper which reads: “The Republic shall live as long as the army shall live.” Every position taken in domestic politics depends on some interpretation of that claim, which certainly implies the menacing and weird notion of an army actually outliving its host.

A vignette of the predatory character of this class was supplied by the 1986 case of the army kidnapping ring. A number of Salvadoran businessmen found themselves taken hostage and held for ransom by Leninist guerrillas, and they parted with millions in American dollars to save their own hides. Their ire was great when they discovered that the “guerrillas” were actually senior officers in the armed forces. The standing of the victims was high enough to secure that rare thing—a judicial inquiry. And a startling confession by one of the members of the extortion racket led to the direct implication of Lieutenant Colonel Roberto Mauricio Staben, along with a number of graduates of his “class.” Himself no mean traditionalist (he used to mount guard over El Playón), Staben flatly refused to report for questioning even when summoned by a military commission. Three witnesses against him thereupon expired in prison. The American Embassy was moved to issue a statement deploring this turn of events and noting that the said witnesses “may have had valuable information that could have shed more light on the case.” But in spite of testimony against him by Isidro López Sibrian, who happens to be the prime suspect in the murder of the two American trade unionists, Lieutenant Colonel Staben stayed free. It would be misleading to say that he went unpunished. He has since been reinstated to the command of the elite American-trained Arce Battalion, which spearheads the counterinsurgency campaign in the area of San Miguel. Staben’s associates are known as the tandona, or big class. They are—Colonel Mauricio Vargas, Colonel Emilio Ponce, and the rest—the recipients of American medals and Fort Benning grooming. They stand to inherit command and control of the Salvadoran armed forces. For its mild and short-lived expression of distaste over this affair, the American Embassy was attacked on the front page of El Diario de hoy for “intervening in the internal affairs of the country.” It is that hilarious coda which breathes with the unmistakable ambience of Gloria César’s.

THE CROSS

I had another opportunity to experience the pedagogic effect of fear while traveling on a cross-country bus from San Miguel. The windscreen of the vehicle was covered with cheap religious decals and adorned with a big sign that proclaimed, with conspicuous absence of humility, ¡ES GLORIOSO SER CRISTIANO! Splendid to be a God-botherer, is it, I muttered as the bus was pulled to the side of the road and the passengers began to cross themselves. Every hand at once flew to the pocket containing the cédula, the life-saving ID card available only to those who can prove they have swelled voter turnout and thus defied the guerrillas. As I lined up with the men on the edge of a ditch, I found the smiles were the worst. The placatory ones on the faces of the passengers, that is, and the beaming ones of the soldiers. It was unpleasant to be a prisoner of their forced bonhomie. It was humiliating to have to fake a grin of one’s own in return. The traditionalists are at their most menacing when they are most polite.

I like my Christianity straight, as in this instance: a false comfort to the poor and a morality for the forces of order. All the traditionalists are fanatical Catholics, of course, in the Franco style. Here and in Nicaragua and Guatemala, they often call themselves the Warriors of Christ and inscribe mysterious icons on their banners and insignia. They all rally to the Virgin of Guapa—Our Lady of the Contras. Like their Phalangist cousins, they make useful reinforcements.

When Marcel Neidergang wrote his famous report “The Twenty Latin Americas” for Le Monde at the close of the sixties, he found that the continent was dominated by a quartet of forces: the army, the Church, the Americans, and the Left. The first and the third used to be able to defeat or to neutralize the fourth with the help or at least the indulgence of the second. But some years after the end of the Second Vatican Council, the bishops of the region met in Medellín, Colombia, and began to change their reactionary tune. It became possible to speak from the pulpit about oppression, to organize “Christian base communities,” and to stress something called “the preferential option of the poor.” Out of this crucible came the oxymoron of “liberation theology.”

For all its secular sacraments and jolly ecumenicism, and its manifestation of “witness” and piety, liberation theology rested just as heavily upon credulity as did the traditional stuff. Some of its “interfaith” manifestations in the United States were barely to be distinguished from consciousness-raising cults or from Salvation Army proselytizing in generations before. But in El Salvador, it has to be acknowledged, the blood of the martyrs has again been the seed of the Church. Liberation theology in this country has been consecrated.

One of the first of the post-Medellín experiments took place in the parish of Aguilares, near San Salvador, under the patronage of the Jesuit Father Rutilio Grande. For his efforts to organize dignity for the campesinos, he was murdered by the traditionalists in March 1977.

Two other landmarks in the history of the repression are provided by the fate of religious people. In March 1980, Archbishop Oscar Romero was shot through the heart as he raised the host at Mass. A few days earlier, he had appealed to Salvadoran soldiers to disobey unjust orders. His murder was arranged by a holy alliance of the traditionalists: Major Roberto d’Aubuisson, Colonel Ricardo Lau, and Mario Alarcón Sandoval. D’Aubuisson, the leader of the Salvadoran Right, was at that time appearing on national television, flourishing the CIA files on local dissidents. Lau is a former Somoza guard officer, the founding head of “security” for the Nicaraguan Contras. Sandoval is the leader of the “White Hand” death-squad movement in Guatemala and was a guest at Ronald Reagan’s inauguration. Romero’s murder was commissioned by d’Aubuisson and contracted to Lau; its perpetrators were sheltered by Sandoval.

Then, in December 1980, four American religious were butchered. A collector’s item here is the Report to the Secretary of State by William Bowdler and William Rogers. The secretary of state in question, the devout Catholic General Alexander Haig, had given it as his opinion that the women were leftists who had been trying to run a roadblock. The report left him to answer why it was, in that case, that “all four women had been shot in the head. The face of one had been destroyed. The underwear of three was found separately. Bloody bandanas were also found in the grave.” As the two U.S. officials also reported, the local justice of the peace had been forced to make a hugger-mugger interment, with his secretary, “following procedures they said had become standard at the direction of the security services. They told the Ambassador that two or three such informal burials of unidentified bodies occurred every week.”

This, then, was the relationship of forces between Catholics, in a tiny country named for the Savior, at the moment at which I attended a Mass in a refugee camp. It was on a Sunday afternoon, in a miserable barrio outside the capital. The inhabitants had been evicted from the region of the Guazapa volcano in a punitive military sweep grotesquely entitled Operation Phoenix. The very first person I met was a Franciscan nun from Iowa, who told me that every family in the encampment had lost at least one member and that the women still cringed whenever soldiers came near. I sat through the service of the eucharist, which was conducted, as it happened, by the Jesuit who had succeeded Father Rutilio Grande. I was reasonably unmoved by his popular style, by the guitar music, and by his practice of passing the microphone around for communicants to give their views on the day’s text (the Parable of the Talents). I had to shake myself a bit when the congregation sang, by heart, the “Corrido a Monseñor Romero” from the official hymnal of the archbishopric. Its penultimate verse runs:

Al pueblo le queda claro

Que tu muerte no fue aislada

Fue actión del imperialismo

Junto con la Fuerza Armada

[It’s clear to the people

That your death was not an isolated event

You can say it was the result of imperialism

Joined with the armed forces.]

Then came the kiss of peace, which if I had had time to reflect upon it would have led me out of the crowd and into the trees for a cigarette. Instead, and without warning, I found my hands being taken by ragged strangers, and the word paz intoned. A lifetime of Protestant reserve and later atheist conviction seemed compromised by my smile. But it was not the sort of smile I had been obliged to affect on the road from San Miguel. Nor, and much more to the point, were these people’s smiles feigned. Their bishop—the one prelate who had ever cared about them—had been foully murdered. So had the good priest Rutilio Grande. That Franciscan from Iowa—who was I to patronize her for her “good works”? It was women of her type who had gone to the province of Chalatenango and been found, in that most dangerous province, in the obscene circumstances relayed with such tact to the uncaring Alexander Haig. The case for a little modesty seemed very strong.

As the Mass broke up and night came on, I noticed a middle-aged European standing apart. He had been seated in a place for honored guests and, although dressed for safari, had the curious, offputtingly childish look that one often sees in those who have led the priestly life. Introduction established him as Hans Küng, down here on a visit from his Texas teaching retreat. In earnest tones, he inquired if I thought the United States had major economic interests in El Salvador, and whether these might explain its commitment to the country’s bizarre social arrangements. I replied that El Salvador’s problem was that nobody much needed its meager produce, and that even its delicious coffee was part of a mounting glut. The United States, I averred, needed to inflict a defeat upon Leninism, to show itself and others that revolution was not inevitable.

“Well, if it is Leninism they are against,” said Küng, “then I am with them. Leninism is terrible. I have seen too much of it. Did you read The New York Times recently, where they said that the real Russian revolution was a liberal one, and that Lenin made a coup against it?” I hadn’t read that New York Times, but I had heard the argument. And Lenin comes up a lot in El Salvador, as he tends to do in all class wars. He may never have heard of El Salvador, but a lot of Salvadorans have heard of him and taken up quite firm positions for and against. The best oral history of the 1932 massacre (“Oral history,” said a Salvadoran academic bitterly, “is the only history we are allowed”) comes from Miguel Marmol, who survived it. Miguel Marmol lay wounded under a pile of his friends’ corpses and shammed death. He went on to found and lead the Salvadoran workers’ movement, instilling Leninist precepts at every opportunity. We owe his memoirs to the poet Roque Dalton, a Leninist romantic who transcribed them, in Prague of all places, in the 1960s. From this painful account one can learn, among other things, how very hesitantly and belatedly the Salvadoran communists decided on armed struggle.

Roque Dalton was brave and ironic and talented. He seems to have been precisely the sort of young militant whom it is said that the revolution will devour first. Asking for trouble, one sees in retrospect, was his poem “On Headaches”:

To be a communist is a beautiful thing,

though it causes many headaches.

And the problem with the communist headache

is, we assume, historical:

it will not cede to analgesic tablets

but only to the realization of Paradise on earth.

That’s the way it is.

Under capitalism our head aches

and is torn from us.

In the struggle for the Revolution

the head is a delayed action bomb.

Under socialist construction

we plan the headache

Which does not minimize it, quite the contrary.

Communism, among other things, will be

an aspirin the size of the sun.

Asking for trouble. In his famous essay in Dissent in the winter of 1982, the Mexican writer Gabriel Zaid took the case of Roque Dalton as his metaphor for the dogmatism and fratricide that infect the Salvadoran revolution. Dalton was murdered in 1975, on suspicion of being a CIA (and, oddly enough, a Cuban) agent, by the leadership of the People’s Revolutionary Army (ERP), whose commander, Joaquín Villalobos, remains one of the main chieftains of the Salvadoran guerrillas. Zaid went for the heavily sarcastic in his account of the death:

Roque Dalton was slain by a comrade who beat him at the use of his own arguments, in an internal power struggle. Terrible enough; neither the most thorough accord between thought and action, nor the most absolute and unconditional surrender, nor even taking to the mountains, strapping on arms and offering himself up to kill the Chief of Police saved Dalton from the final spit in the face at his death; accused by his comrades as a bourgeois. Just as if he’d remained a writer signing manifestos and eating three meals a day.

In the discourse of reason, the winner is the one with reason. In the discourse of guns, the winner’s the one with the gun.

New readers should not begin here. Zaid is a veteran who is confidently repeating an old and well-tried lesson. His closing epigrams may be a touch glib (reason doesn’t always win even in a rational discourse, and, in the discourse of guns, surely the winner is one of those with the gun?), but he is sure in his general import, which is: a Salvadoran revolution would transform the country into another dreary Sparta. The favorite slogan of the Salvadoran left is “If Nicaragua won, El Salvador will win!” Ricardo Stein pointed out to me that there are two unintended pedagogic effects of this battle cry. First, many of the Salvadoran middle class would not choose to exchange the oligarchy for a Sandinista system. Second, if Nicaragua won, then Nicaragua was immediately subjected to a long war of murder and attrition by the United States. How many people will have the stomach to endure a war of liberation and a long war of defense? And what would happen to liberty along the way? The Dalton affair suggests that the attitude of the guerrilla leadership would not be a sentimental one. (Just to show that they, too, study the dialectic, the U.S. Embassy in San Salvador passed out hundreds of copies of the Zaid article during the height of the traditionalist frenzy in 1982.)

Well, if this is the choice, then let us not forget who posed it. The shock of the Cuban revolution was enough, after 1960, for the United States to embrace limited reformism through the Alliance for Progress. Its showcase politician in those days was Eduardo Frei rather than Augusto Pinochet. Unfortunately, in El Salvador the “reform” bit got left out. The counterrevolution bit did not. The founder of the traditionalist movement in the country was General José Alberto Medrano, who set up ORDEN—the rural paramilitary death squad and informer network—and ANSESAL, the national political police. In a 1984 interview, he said proudly that “ORDEN and ANSESAL grew out of the State Department, the CIA and the Green Berets during the time of Kennedy.” We will never know how many thousands of peasants lost their lives to this initiative, which kept the country as a miserable, sweltering backwater until the “reformist” coup of 1979. And the reformist coup of 1979 led directly to the terror mounted by the Treasury Police, the National Guard, and the National Police—all of them trained and equipped and protected by the United States. Thus, the record of liberal reformism in El Salvador actually inverts Lenin’s admonition by following the pattern of one step forward and two steps back. And it wasn’t the Leninists who opened “the discourse of guns.”

The brute fact is that there would have been no reform at all if it were not for the force exerted by the Farabundo Martí Liberation Front—itself named for an early victim of the traditionalists. Despite numerous inducements to do so, the public leaders of Salvadoran social democracy will not disown the FMLN. And, though the Americans and their allies are almost certainly strong enough to prevent the FMLN from winning, they are not strong enough to enact half the reforms the FMLN proposes and thus cannot rob the frente of its claim to have saved the honor of the country.

As the mass in that refugee camp was dispersing, I spoke to the Jesuit about what I refuse to call his flock. He told me of the open contempt with which they viewed the Duarte government and its pretended new face for the old system. He spoke with warmth about the prolonging of the war. But surely, I said, it takes two sides to fight a war. Isn’t your congregation just sick of the fighting? Aren’t the people indifferent as between the two sides? The priest looked at me pityingly. “These people,” he replied, “are not neutral in the least.” If they can resist the temptations of moral equivalence, then so can I.

(Grand Street, Spring 1988)

HOBBES IN THE LEVANT

ABU JIHAD is an Arab name meaning “father of Jihad.” Jihad means “holy war.” As a choice of nom de guerre, then, it suggests a very serious fellow. And Khalil al-Wazir, the man who affects it, is indeed deputy commander of Al Fatah. I spent an evening in his flat in Beirut last week (in an area of the town since pounded to rubble), discussing the chances of an Israeli invasion. I suspect him of rather liking the impression he produces on visitors. He receives them in the bosom of his very large and happy family. Jihad himself, the eldest son, turns out to be a polite, plumpish, and cheerful youth with a serious interest in politics. Much time is spent in recounting the sorrows of the clan: the exile from Ramleh in 1948, the wretched years in the Gaza Strip, the indignities visited upon relatives, the second exile, and the gradual burgeoning of the Palestinian revolution. Tea is brought, hands are pressed, cheeks are pinched. Presiding over all is the jovial paterfamilias, as if to say, “What, me a terrorist?”

Yet, when the talk turns to the impending attack, the atmosphere alters. I mention the extreme vulnerability of the Palestinian forces in the south. “Look,” he says, “I remember when the Israelis invaded in 1978. General Mordechai Gur was publicly criticized in Israel for not being harder and tougher, and for not seizing Tyre and Sidon. He replied that he didn’t want to risk his men against fighters who wanted to die. So maybe they will kill all our forces there—but we will be back again. See for yourself….”

Miles to the south, in Sidon, I carried a dog-eared Hachette guide to Lebanon, published in the early fifties. Describing the town, the battered volume had this to say: “Like most of the ancient Phoenician cities, it is built on a promontory faced by an island. It is surrounded by pleasant gardens where oranges, lemons, bananas, medlars, apricots and almonds are successfully grown. It has some 40,000 inhabitants including 15,000 Palestinian refugees.”

Three decades later, that laconic charming description would need a few amendments. The lush crops rot on the ground because thousands of cultivators long ago fled from Israeli bombardment to live, in doubtful security, in the filthy bidonvilles of Beirut. The old buildings and streets are charred and furrowed with the evidence of previous raids. For the surviving inhabitants, Phantoms and Mirages long ago became reality.

The Palestinians who remain there, not just from the 1948 exodus but from many subsequent ones, were as insouciant about the prospect of an invasion as their deputy commander. The only sign of nervousness was a blank refusal to permit a visit to Beaufort Castle, off limits to the press since 1978. In the event, this shrug at the inevitable has proven militarily deceptive. The Israelis in 1978 were satisfied with driving the PLO forces northward—with forcing them to fold their tents and flee. This time, they have tried to encircle and destroy as many trained Palestinians as possible. Mr. Begin may claim that the object is to create a twenty-five-mile strip between his northern border and the Palestinian positions in order to protect the Galilee. But it’s more revealing to attend to General Sharon, who has been saying in public for weeks that the objective must be the physical destruction of the guerrillas and their infrastructure. By this means, he hopes to buy five years of peace and perhaps to drive the Palestinians into their designated Transjordanian “home.”

So much is becoming clear from the hourly and daily bulletins. But travel a little farther south from Sidon and Tyre, and you come to the border of Major Haddad’s ministate: a strip six miles wide garrisoned by a rough militia and armed and victualed by Israel. Here can be seen one of the outlines of the emerging partition of Lebanon. Paradoxical as it may appear, there is now a tacit agreement between Israel and Syria on spheres of influence. Ever since Joseph Sisco’s 1978 shuttle from Damascus to Jerusalem, it has been understood that Syria holds eastern Lebanon and the vital Bekaa Valley (historic route of invasion thrusts toward Damascus), while Israel controls the southern zone and exercises the right to blitz the Palestinians without Syrian reprisal. There are advantages to both sides in this makeshift, unspoken deal. The principal advantage is that it neutralizes and quarantines the PLO—neutralizes it militarily from the point of view of Israel, and quarantines it politically from the point of view of Syria. Neither party wishes to see a really independent Palestinian state, though Syria is hampered by having to pretend that it does. This explains the refusal (rather than the reluctance) of Syrian forces to engage Israel during the crucial first few days, even in Beirut airspace. There may be, for the sake of honor, some slight breaking of lances. But the keystone state in the “Arab front of steadfastness and confrontation” will be sitting this one out.

Numerous considerations, however, make the arrangement precarious. American annoyance at Israel’s unilateral annexation of the Golan Heights stemmed from a fear that it would destabilize the unwritten accord by touching Syrian territory. Abu Jihad said rather sarcastically that many Arab countries want to “protect” the Palestinians—to monopolize and manipulate them. And currently the Syrians are feeling rather frisky because of the humiliation of their Iraqi foes by the Iranians. They may take revenge on American policy in some more indirect way as a salve to Arab pride. Philip Habib, who must fill the shoes of Mr. Sisco, represent Mr. Reagan, conciliate the Israelis, and appease the Arab League, will find his brow getting dewy before he wings gratefully home. The Fahd plan for a Palestinian ministate, so named after Crown Prince Fahd of Saudi Arabia, was still somewhere near the table a few weeks ago and commanded a certain amount of State Department support. It must be reckoned among the terminal casualties of the Israeli invasion.

Two areas of Lebanon remain outside the “spheres of influence” compromise. Beirut may be full of Syrian soldiery directing traffic and manning roadblocks, but it is otherwise still the Hobbesian city of the war of all against all. During my stay, the nights were being made late by the gun battle between supporters of Iran and partisans of Iraq. They hardly broke off when Israeli sonic booms rattled windows. On any other night, it might be any other group. The city has become a free port for every kind of militia and faction. The French embassy was blown up, and nobody knew whom to blame because there were so many obvious candidates. A secretary at the British embassy was raped and told to deliver a warning to the embassy, and speculation was only slightly more concentrated. In a few months a general election is due, and a selection by the subsequent parliament of a new president. A poll taken by the excellent Beirut magazine Monday Morning found that there were only ninety-two surviving MPs out of the proper complement of ninety-nine. Of those interviewed, only five were imprudent enough to state the name of the presidential candidate they were backing.

The other region of Lebanon which escapes inclusion in the Syrian-Israeli accord is the Christian belt north of Beirut, which has its own access to the sea and its own relative autonomy. The Christians both need partition and reject it. They ruled the country for so long that they cannot ever fully acknowledge the end of their own dominion. But mastery in a kind of Crusader ghetto may be the best they can now achieve. To get to their capital of Jounieh, you have to cross the appalling central belt of Beirut, where for street after street and block after block everything is scorched and desolate. This was the business and banking quarter—Beirut is one of the few cities where a civil war has been fought in the opulent areas rather than in the suburbs and shanty towns. Remember the Battle of the Holiday Inn.

When you reach Jounieh, you can see where the banks and the businesses have gone. The place is full of semi-chic and pseudo-French effects, with new building and investment in evidence everywhere. The militia of the Phalange Party is always on view, and is much better groomed than its Syrian or Palestinian counterparts. The craggy face of Pierre Gemayel, the old fascist leader who has now ceded power to his two sons, glares from large hoardings like some forgotten patriot of the Fourth Republic. In every palpable way, you have entered another country. Here, sympathy for Israel is widespread, but it’s unlikely to take, as it once did, the shape of a formal military alliance. As long as the Christians stay well out of regional politics, the Syrians are inclined to leave them alone. Christian spokesmen say privately that the Americans have told them this is a smart policy.

So Lebanon will continue to exist on the map, and Beirut will continue to be a place d’armes for every quarrel in the region. But gradually Greater Syria is living up to its dream of recovering lost territory, and Greater Israel is asserting its sovereignty too. In between are the Palestinians, now loved by almost nobody. I would very much like to know who shot Ambassador Argov. Usually, these things turn out to have been done by the Al Fatah renegade Abu Nidal, who used to operate from Baghdad in his campaign against the “sellout” leadership of Yasir Arafat. He has now moved his headquarters to Damascus in the course of the Byzantine feud between the two capitals. You can start to believe anything after a week or two in Beirut, so I will say no more except that I hope Mr. Argov will recover and will consider himself properly avenged.

(The Spectator, June 12, 1982)

DEAD MEN ON LEAVE

IN EARLY MARCH 1976, I sat in a bare office in Baghdad, contemplating my good fortune. Across the desk from me was the lean and striking figure of Masen Sabry al-Banna, leader of the renegade extremist faction of Al Fatah and a man sought for murder and conspiracy by both the Israelis and the PLO. He didn’t give many interviews, and there was no decent extant photograph of him (the one since circulated in books about the “terror network” seems to me to be of the wrong man). Under his nom de guerre of Abu Nidal, he had set himself against any attempt at binational or intercommunal accord over the Palestine issue. By way of opening proceedings, he had just invited me to visit one of his camps and perhaps to undergo a little training. How could one refuse without risking a change of mood, or, at least, the termination of the interview? My lucky assignation was turning sour.

Things got worse as our talk progressed. He took my declining of his offer quite calmly, but then shifted mercurially in his approach. Did I, he wanted to know, ever meet Said Hammami? Hammami was then the PLO envoy in London, who had, in a celebrated article in The Times, advocated mutual recognition between Israel and the Palestinians. I knew him and liked him and agreed with him. “Tell him,” said Abu Nidal, “to be careful. We do not tolerate traitors.” I delivered this billet-doux back in London, and Said shrugged. He had been threatened before, but saw no alternative to an “open-door” policy. A few months later, a man walked through his open door and shot him dead. Abu Nidal “claimed credit,” as the argot has it, for the deed.

Still, the idea of a dignified composition of the quarrel between the Zionist movement and the Palestine national movement did not die with Said. The most zealous exponent of the principle was Dr. Issam Sartawi. His own story was a very instructive one. Born in Acre under the Mandate, he ended his education as a heart surgeon in Ohio. After the shattering events of 1967, he returned to the Middle East and to his family—now displaced to Amman, Jordan. Like many other young Palestinians of the time, he joined a radical combatant group and fought to erase the stain of defeat. It was this experience which led him, in his own words, to see things differently:

Perhaps the most dramatic evolution in contemporary Palestinian thinking is that moment when Palestinians started looking into the question of the existence of Israel. For me, it came in 1968 after the battle at Karameh [where PLO forces engaged Israeli armor directly for the first time]. It enabled me for the first time to see Israel. Prior to that, when I closed my eyes to escape from the misery of non-nationhood, I could only escape to the Palestine of my dreams, to the Palestine of my childhood fancy, to the open spaces, to the green meadows. I really, truly did not see the new Palestine, the Israeli Palestine with its avalanche of immigrants, the destruction of those green, peaceful meadows, the rise of the skyscrapers, the growth of the megalopolis… . It raised in my mind Article Six of our National Covenant, because Article Six said only those Jews who came before the Zionist invasion will stay in Palestine. I remember what went through my mind: Who do we send away? The Polish Jew who came in 1919? It was at this point that it dawned on me that we have to seek justice for our people without inflicting any suffering on others.

This interview was given to a friend of mine only a few months after the Palestinians had been hounded out of Beirut. At the time, Dr. Sartawi was still Yasir Arafat’s envoy to Western Europe, establishing warm contacts with Bruno Kreisky of Austria, Willy Brandt, Andreas Papandreou, and others. He even set up a meeting in Tunis between Arafat and three senior Israeli doves, including reserve general Mattiyahu Peled. He did not, in short, confine his peaceful rhetoric solely to sessions with Western correspondents.

He had, after three assassination attempts from Abu Nidal’s gunmen, become slightly insouciant about the likelihood of his death. But his real disappointment came in February at Algiers, when Arafat forbade him to defend his “recognition” policy from the platform of the Palestine National Council. He resigned from the PNC the next day, criticizing the official view that the siege of Beirut had “objectively” been a victory for the Palestinians, commenting sardonically that many more victories like that would see the leadership meeting in Fiji.

Abu Nidal must have smiled at that observation. It was his group which had shot the Israeli ambassador to London, Shlomo Argov, and thus given General Sharon his green light or red rag for the assault. Things, from his point of view, were going nicely. The conditions for compromise were being physically destroyed. It only remained to stop the mouth of Dr. Sartawi himself. (At the Lisbon conference where Sartawi was murdered, it was Shimon Peres of the Israeli Labor Party who kept him from the microphone.)

All in all, it’s been a pitiful year for those who hope for a solution short of colonization, annexation, or irredentism. In July, three senior Jewish figures, with the encouragement of Issam Sartawi, signed what became known as the Paris Declaration. Pierre Mendès France, Nahum Goldmann, and Philip Klutznick called for Palestinian independence, mutual recognition between the two contending parties, and direct negotiations. They were, of course, snubbed and ignored by the Begin government—despite the fact that Nahum Goldmann had nearly been the president of Israel and was certainly the most distinguished living Zionist. Since the statement was signed and published, both Mendès France and Nahum Goldmann have died, and Issam Sartawi has been murdered. Israeli dissent is being swamped in a sea of chauvinism, but any future Palestinian advocate of self-criticism will have to consider himself a dead man on leave.

(The Spectator, April 16, 1983)

A MORNING WITH RABBI KAHANE

I WOULDN’T SAY that a morning spent with Rabbi Meir Kahane was exactly an enlightening experience, but it was certainly an educational one. Kahane possesses a horrid energy. Over the past year he has survived numerous clumsy attempts to silence him and to circumscribe his party. These measures have included a stupid bureaucratic challenge to his U.S. passport, a pretty obvious ban by Israeli television and radio, and a bill against racism in the Knesset that was so diluted by the religious and right-wing parties that Kahane voted for it. On all this harassment Kahane thrives, enjoying the controversy and addressing rallies five nights of the week.

The annual survey of Israeli opinion, which is carefully carried out by the magazine Monitin, was published in May. It showed that only 46 percent of the population found the views of Kahane and his Kach Party “totally unacceptable.” Of the remainder, 23 percent found the Kach program “mistaken in general but partly right”; 17 percent found it correct in general but partly wrong; and 6 percent agreed with Kahane outright. (In the last election, Kahane gained a parliamentary seat with 1.2 percent of the vote.) The writer of the Monitin report, Eliyahu Hassin, concludes that the political message of Kach is “supported in full or partially by 23 percent of the adult Jewish population, spread among all social groups.” This, he says, “we must assume is the scope of potential support for Israeli fascism, which need not necessarily be represented in the future only by a dubious rabbi of American origins and a gang of revolting hooligans.”

In conversation, the object of all this obloquy does not rave or babble. His madness lies only in his logic, which is cool and vicious. He, too, distinguishes Kahane from Kahanism. “I get the applause,” he says, “when I tell them, ‘I say what you think.’” There is clearly a latent audience for his view that “the Arab problem and the Sabbath problem are the same.”

“Judaism is a totality and can never recognize the separation of synagogue and state,” he says. “We need a state based on Judaism; a Jewish state and not a state of Jews.”

Now, it is a fact that, despite a torrent of criticism and outrage from liberal Zionists in Israel and America, Kahane has never been condemned or disowned by the rabbinate. I can’t test his claim, made to me in conversation, that the Orthodox leadership has privately assured him of its sympathy. That is the sort of thing that demagogues say. But one cannot fail to notice the utter silence of the chief rabbis about his proposal for mass expulsion of Arabs and enforced conformity for Jews. And because Kach is a religious party, it can easily make nonsense of any “bill against racism” by quoting the relevant sections of Holy Writ.

A lurid manifestation of Kahanism without Kahane was proffered just before I met the man himself by Rabbi Shmuel Derlich. Rabbi Derlich is the Israeli army’s chief chaplain in Judea and Samaria, and had sent the troops in his area a thousand-word pastoral letter in which he urged them to apply the biblical injunction to exterminate the Amalekites to the last man, woman, and child. The letter went unremarked until it was challenged by the army’s chief education officer, who demanded to know Rabbi Derlich’s working definition of Amalekite. The rabbi disingenuously replied that the Germans would be a good latter-day example. So he had only been urging the Israeli soldiers to kill all Germans—a people conspicuous by their absence from the Bible and from the West Bank of the Jordan River. The matter was referred to the Judge Advocate General, who ruled that Derlich had committed no offense. This was also the view of no less than forty military chaplains who came to his support in public.

Kahane is, if anything, more moderate. He told me with unblinking seriousness that he did not think there were any Amalekites these days, adding that of course if there were, the commandment to extirpate them would be valid. While I reeled from this, he hurried on to say that Kach did not want to kill the Palestinians, only to make them clear out from Eretz Israel. They may stay on two conditions: either they convert, according to halakhah (Jewish law) and with no Reform or Conservative nonsense; or they abandon all civil rights and remain as hewers of wood and drawers of water. (The actual words of his proposed law stipulate that “a foreign resident must accept the burden of taxes and servitude.”)

It’s been pointed out often enough that Kahane-type scriptural propaganda is racist and potentially genocidal so far as it concerns the Arabs. But it occurred to me as we talked that before he could get at the Arabs, he would have to settle accounts with many, many Jews. He agreed to this as soon as I raised it, claiming that his left-wing enemies wanted a civil war in Israel and would get it if they refused to accept the verdict of the people. I should have asked him how this tallied with his view that “Zionism and Western-style democracy are in direct contradiction.”

Read Kahane’s writings on the Jews. Here is his depiction of American Jewish life today:

The massive, gaudy mausoleums that dot the landscape of every Jewish suburb. The temples.The temples whose senior rabbi is the caterer. The temples that perform human sacrifice rites each Sabbath morning, and they call it the Bar Mitzvah … the Bar Mitzvah, that obscene cult of ostentatiousness, the ultimate in Jewish status-seeking, where materialism runs amok in the guise of religion, where drunks and half-dressed women dance and give praise to the Lord, with African dances, American tunes and universal abominations.

This rather makes “Hymietown” pale. You should also read Kahane on “the loving Jewish mother who took off her golden nose rings and made a golden calf which she worships avidly” and “the Jewish father whose values are those of the garment center and the race track.” The man is an Arab-hater, and he has that in common with a large and growing number of Israelis and gentile Americans. But he is also—and at last one finds a proper and apposite use for this amorphous term—a self-hating Jew.

(The Nation, August 16–23, 1986)

GOING HOME WITH KIM DAE JUNG

KIM DAE JUNG could have spent his sixties living comfortably in Virginia, where I met him first. He might have been publishing a newspaper for the Korean-American community or perhaps leading a nominal South Korean “government in exile.” He might have spent his later years giving college lectures, as he had been doing since his arrival in the United States in 1982, and accepting annual human-rights awards. He would have been a significant but not unexceptional figure in those New York and Washington intellectual circles where people congregate who, for political reasons, cannot live in their own countries.

But Kim Dae Jung is a rare man. What makes him exceptional is not his politics or ideas, which are moderate and democratic, but the fact that he would not compromise his principles to preserve his personal safety in America. With flimsy assurances from the Seoul government and the Reagan Administration, Kim went home and took his stand. As far as he could see, there was no alternative.

“I really think,” said Kim, “that if you had not come with me, I would not now be sitting here in my home.” He was paying this quiet compliment, in his small house in Seoul, to a number of Americans who had accompanied him back to Korea. Events in the streets and lanes outside seemed to bear him out. The area had been sealed off—as the saying goes—by sentry boxes and guard posts. Making a courtesy call required at least two inspections by hefty guards from the Korean Central Intelligence Agency (KCIA), backed up a short distance off by trucks full of riot police and soldiers. While I was in the house, there was yet another unpleasant confrontation as these guardians of the peace refused entry to a pair of clergymen, a Roman Catholic for Kim and a Methodist for his wife, thereby dashing the hope of a Sunday ecumenical service. The explanation for the ban—that the two priests were Korean and therefore were excluded under the terms of Kim’s house arrest—only underlined the contempt displayed by the regime of General Chun Doo Hwan for its own people.

I talked a fair bit to Kim Dae Jung in the weeks and days before he left the safety of America to take the risk of rejoining his people. I talked to him as we flew over the Pacific to Tokyo, and on the final leg to Seoul itself with Mount Fuji receding beneath us. He seldom expressed concern for his own safety, changing the subject whenever it came up. But he did talk about the other reception he might get—the reception by the people of Seoul. He had heard, he told me, that there might be fifty thousand or more people to welcome him at the airport. Was I mistaken, or did he seem a touch worried? Exile, imprisonment, age (he’s sixty-one), a decade-long ban on the mention of his name: might all these have conspired to make people forget him?

Of all the allegations thrown at Kim recently by the Chun regime—“revolutionary,” “communist,” and other epithets—only one had stung him. That was the suggestion, which is also carefully spread by American officials when they think they are speaking off the record, that Kim Dae Jung is passé. “Passé,” he would repeat angrily, his brow wrinkled, “passé?”

In 1983, when Kim was on a fellowship at Harvard, he had lunch with Benigno Aquino (we have often spoken of the meeting). Aquino told Kim, in effect, that he was going home because exile led to impotence, to becoming passé. Many things could be borne, but not that. Particularly not by two men who were both barred by the stroke of a dictator’s pen from becoming president of their respective countries. (In spite of the widespread fraud in the 1971 elections, Kim got forty-six percent of the popular vote.)

But if Kim was a little worried over what kind of welcome to expect from his fellow Koreans, the South Korean regime was far more concerned than he. In anticipation of his arrival, all public transportation to the airport was closed for the entire day. Yet, at the airport, and all the way into town, there were throngs of people. By my count, at least half of them would have been in their teens when Kim first ran for president and a good number of them would have been younger. And all of them had walked. They must have been determined, too, because side streets leading to the poorer districts and quarters were blocked by teams of leather-helmeted men, and the stink of tear gas (that special essence of dictatorship) was pervasive.

I learned later from a leading Presbyterian clergyman, the Reverend Moon Ik Hwan, that congregations burst into spontaneous applause whenever Kim’s name was mentioned. Forbidden to quote him or refer to him directly, candidates for the heavily circumscribed opposition New Korea Democratic Party drew vast crowds and huge ovations for veiled references to him. (This was the party that became legitimate only three months prior to the February 1985 election, in which it burst upon the scene as the leading opposition group in Korea’s National Assembly.)

Identified by some scouts as having been on Kim’s plane, my American friends and I were mobbed in the friendliest way: beseeched for information and gossip. A Japanese newspaper with a picture of Kim’s forbidden features was torn from our hands and passed frenziedly through the crowd. How was he? Most of all, and most urgently, where was he?

These last questions were embarrassingly hard to answer. The phalanx formed by Representatives Ed Feighan of Ohio and Thomas Foglietta of Pennsylvania; Jimmy Carter’s El Salvador ambassador, Robert White; and Pat Derian, Carter’s Assistant Secretary of State for Human Rights, had been kicked, punched, and shoved out of the way by a pack of KCIA professionals. It may have looked like a mere scuffle on television, but from close up it was very chilling. A premeditated “wedge” attack split Kim’s immediate party from the press, then split him and his wife from the other supporters, and finally whisked him away from his four chosen escorts and into an elevator. Kim, who walks with a stick as a result of a KCIA assassination attempt in 1971, when a truck ran his car off the road and killed three people in the car behind his, was in no position to resist. As I was trying to get into a better viewing position, I was seized and thrust down a moving stairway. At the bottom I found an agitated U.S. Embassy official demanding to know what the Christ was going on.

He might well have asked. As Kim Dae Jung said, “No one ever dared challenge the will of the nation as brazenly as Chun did, and no one ever rose to power by such a bloody and cruel path.” Yet, observed Kim in 1983, “It is the feeling of the Korean people that the United States has never supported a Korean government as strongly as it is currently backing the Chun Doo Hwan regime and that this support is the umbilical cord which keeps the Chun regime afloat.”

Even before we left Washington, we had been treated to a statement by Elliott Abrams, who holds the paradoxical title of Assistant Secretary of State for Human Rights and Humanitarian Affairs. He told everybody who would listen that Kim Dae Jung was in danger only from the North Koreans, who might kill him in order to sow dissension in General Chun’s otherwise untroubled Eden. This statement was incredible in two ways. First, it ignored the two occasions on which the KCIA was caught in the very act of trying to murder Kim. Second, it gave Chun’s police license in advance to blame any mishap on the communists. Not even Ferdinand Marcos, who tried to pin Benigno Aquino’s death on the Philippine Communist Party, had had such a green light from the Reagan Administration.

Further impetus was provided to Chun by the Heritage Foundation, Reagan’s think tank of choice, which selected the week of Kim’s departure to describe the Korean leader as a troublemaker and to praise the stability conferred on South Korea by the military dictatorship. Ambassador Richard “Dixie” Walker, Reagan’s appointee in Seoul, is close to the Heritage Foundation and was among the twenty-one ambassadors who signed a letter last fall endorsing the reelection of Jesse Helms. Any KCIA man worth his salt and able to review evidence and place bets would have concluded that the agreement between the State Department and the Korean Foreign Ministry that Kim’s return would be “trouble-free” could be overidden. The State Department could be overridden by the conservatives who really determine White House policy, and the Korean Foreign Ministry by the usual dictates of “security.” It was a case of like speaking to like—or nodding to like—with no conspiracy required. Even so, Dixie Walker became angry and pompous when he saw the bad press he got from the U.S. journalists who had been at the airport. He blustered about the “internal affairs” of South Korea, as if no visitors from the U.S.A. other than those who had accompanied Kim had ever gotten involved there. “This country,” he said, “is not an American colony.”

Oh, but it is.

In President Chun Doo Hwan’s long mercenary past, his success came in always putting the baser interests of the United States above the best interests of Koreans. He first achieved notice in Vietnam, commanding the 29th Regiment of the White Horse Division, a detachment of soldiers that tortured the very few prisoners it took. In May 1980, while still Acting Director of the KCIA, Chun had to deal with a popular revolt in the city of Kwangju, which is in Kim Dae Jung’s home region of South Cholla. No reputable source puts the death toll from that “pacification” at under a thousand, and many estimates are closer to two thousand.

As in Vietnam, General Chun had American “back-up” in Kwangju. A U.S. general is always at the top of the South Korean military’s co-command structure; his permission is required for any significant movement of troops within the country. In 1980, the commander was General John Wickham, who approved Chun’s use of paratroopers against the civilian uprising in Kwangju and then issued statements saying that Korea was not yet ready for democracy. Thus encouraged, Chun blamed Kim Dae Jung for the uprising and had him sentenced to death. Intense international pressure was needed to secure his release on medical grounds in 1982. The sentence was commuted to twenty years and then suspended, but it is still in effect.

The Korea of Generals Wickham and Chun will never be “ready” for the democracy they fear so much. But the Korean people are more than ready for it, as they proved once again in the February 1985 election. They were promised democracy at the end of the long and brutal Japanese occupation, in 1945. Instead, not having been even a minor combatant country in World War II, they got military occupation by the United States and the Soviet Union. Then, in the south, they got the outrageous dictator Syngman Rhee, who was finally swept from office by a bloody rising in 1960.

After one year of tentative but decent civilian rule by Chang Myon (whose official spokesperson was Kim Dae Jung), the Koreans were subjected to another rightist coup and eighteen bitter years of Park Chung Hee. Official texts refer to events of that era as “the malpractices of the past accruing from a prolonged one-man rule” (the echo of classic Stalinist apology is presumably unintentional). General Park died in October 1979 at the hands of his own secret police chief—there has not yet been a peaceful or democratic transfer of power in this “stable client state”—but the “Korean spring” that followed his death was brief. Kim Dae Jung, in his first appearance since his detention began in 1972, spoke to huge and receptive crowds, but the risk of free elections was considered too great by the real masters of the country, and perhaps also by their mentors in Washington.

Too much of the press comment after the airport incident tended to focus on the wounded amour propre of the accompanying Americans. This was not the fault of the media, because the ambassador chose to characterize the event in a way that could only prolong the controversy. But that ought not to obscure the crucial matter, which is the fate of Kim Dae Jung and the collusion of the United States with those who disfigure his country.

Given that South Korea is sown with perhaps two hundred fifty American nuclear warheads, and given that the United States is committed by forty thousand troops to going to war for South Korea at a moment’s notice, the proper concern is with the internal affairs of this tripwire country. Yet Korea receives almost no mention in the American press. There is still no national monument in the United States to the dead of the Korean War. Nor is there—aside from a few revisionist works by I. F. Stone and Bruce Cumings—any literature of any depth or merit about the American commitment there.

Even a short visit to the country can illustrate the sheer scale of that commitment. I attended a briefing given by the very affable General M. G. Ellis at the headquarters of the U.S. Eighth Army at Yongsan. The usual slide-and-pointer show was on offer, showing truthfully enough that North Korea spends a crippling proportion of its surplus on weapons. But the general was able to show an “imbalance” only by restricting the map of forces to the Korean peninsula, although the Eighth Army is in fact deployed far more widely. As is customary, he refused to discuss the presence of nuclear weapons. And, under questioning, he admitted that the North Korean leader Kim Il Sung, presented as a Russian stooge in the slide show, was in fact maintaining a balancing act between the Soviet Union and China.

The real point was made by accident later the same day, when I visited the DMZ at Panmunjom. Here, too, it is Americans who give the orders and who patrol and police the perimeter. My guide, who was stationed at the M*A*S*H-like Camp Kitty Hawk, at the foremost extent of the American line (motto: Out in Front of Them All), pointed to the famous tree where American officers were slain by North Koreans wielding axes in an “incident” in 1976, as they were supervising an attempt to lop off the branches and clear a view of a nearby American outpost.

“When we came back to finish that tree trimming,” said my escort with pride, “there were six hundred martial-arts experts in the woods. We had a fleet of B-52s flying to and fro south of the border. South Korean and U.S. forces were both on full alert. And we had the USS Midway right off the coast. Most expensive tree trimming in history.” Reassuring for the tree trimmers, I suppose, but the idea of going on full alert for a disputed poplar is one to give anybody, however anticommunist, pause for thought.

Kim Dae Jung is as anticommunist a politician as you could meet in a day’s march. He was nearly killed by the North Koreans in the war, kept fairly quiet about his opposition to Korean troops in Vietnam, sets great store by his contacts with the Christian Democratic International, and repeatedly gives West Germany as his example of the model society. Why, then, is he considered to be such a dangerous person? The answer to that question probably lies in the origins of the South Korean state.

The Republic of Korea, or ROK, began by claiming to be the rightful government of the whole of Korea. This claim was immediately met by a counterproclamation, to the same effect, from the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, or North Korea. These positions set the stage for the incredibly destructive war between 1950 and 1953, which left the partition line very much where it had been drawn in 1948. But it did not settle the question of legitimacy.

The ROK armed forces and high command remained indelibly compromised by the collaboration of their senior cadres with the Japanese occupier and by their continued dependence on American arms and aid. This problem of puppetry—as it might be defined—remains acutely sensitive. The regime, despite its monopoly on force, feels insecure and has never been able (even to the small extent once achieved by Marcos in the Philippines or Suharto in Indonesia) to demonstrate a popular mandate. Faced as it is by the world’s most regimented and leader-oriented communist state, Chun & Co. must regard this failure as a large one.

This would explain the marked chauvinism with which the regime attacks Kim Dae Jung, calling him “a Westernized Christian.” This also explains the astonishing rudeness and demagogy with which it received his American friends, telling the populace through a controlled press that “American” interference in Korean internal affairs could not be tolerated. And this explains the hysteria with which it greets his mildly expressed challenge to Chun’s right to rule.

There is a dirty secret at the root of South Korea’s economic and political “miracles,” and the repression of that secret has created a neurotic system, one that seems compelled to bite the hand that feeds it. An oligarchy that is parasitic on America grows enraged when it is criticized as such and appeals to anti-Americanism. An oligarchy that resorts to official hatred of the Japanese was obliged to rely on Japanese collusion to cover up its 1973 kidnapping of Kim from his Tokyo hotel. The names of the kidnappers were well known and are on file with the Tokyo police. But the Japanese government apparently cares more for good relations with a docile South Korea than it does for democracy. So the Seoul authorities find themselves, to their suppressed rage, depending on a version of Japan’s discredited Greater East Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere.

Kim is amazingly restrained in his approach to this thicket of contradictions. He never resorts to anti-Japanese rhetoric, though his grievances against the Japanese authorities are genuine. He never goes in for cheap anti-Americanism, though he has been betrayed by the American government and though there is undoubtedly an audience in Korea for propaganda of that kind. He never overstates his case against the South Korean regime, saying even after the squalid scene at the airport that, although he could feel pain and bruises, he could not swear that they had been inflicted by any one cop. At the slight risk of sounding sentimental, I would observe that history is very often made, even if only by accident, by men and women who draw a line beyond which they will not be pushed. It was a privilege to fly home with one such man.

(Mother Jones, May 1985)

LIBERTÉ À LA POLONAISE

IF THE POLICE in Poland ever feel the necessity to enter and search the home of a citizen, Polish law obliges them to have an impartial witness present while the weighty duty is discharged. A man in Warsaw who has been prominent in opposition circles for years told me that the most recent inspection of his books and papers had been fairly routine, but that he and the cops had haggled for almost an hour over who the impartial person should be. It is always nice to have a metaphor when attempting to describe a situation rather than an event, and in Poland at the moment the problem is very much one of who can hold the ring. The poet Miron Bialoszewski once wrote:

The elect are few

Everybody in the last resort

Elects only himself.

Poland has a non-elected government and a self-appointed opposition. It is, as a matter of fact, the only communist country with any permanent semipublic and quasi-legal opposition at all. The coexistence between the two may not last very long, but if it did, it might spare the country one of the huge and violent lurches—1956, 1968, or 1970—by which it has managed to alter course since the war. As it is, the state dare not crush its critics and many Party officials would probably like to use them as a means of finding out what the population thinks. But nor can it really tolerate them, however scrupulously they keep their activities and petitions within the law. In addition to which, Gomulka made the mistake of forcing so many bright Poles into exile after 1968 that there is now a fairly flourishing network of international contacts and publications in existence, and the task of imposing silence would be a tough one.

Sitting in the same recently searched flat with my new friend—his name is Jacek Kuron and he is an ex-Marxist dissident with a prison record for political activity—I learned a certain amount about the inches of leeway within which critical activity is carried on. At regular intervals his telephone would ring, and “spontaneous” abuse would be anonymously delivered. There was a death threat, too, which had started at a countdown of a hundred days and stood at 65 to go on the day I was there. This left him unmoved. He kept returning to the main subject of political conversation in Warsaw, which is the trial of workers involved in food-price riots last summer. These disturbances, in which Communist Party property and several stretches of railway line were severely damaged, led to the rescinding of the price rises, the deaths of some rioters, and the imposition of a collective charge on all those known to have been involved in the protest. As a result, money has been collected, bulletins issued, lawyers approached, and petitions launched. The latest and most ambitious plan is to lobby the Sejm—Poland’s Parliament—for an inquiry into the conduct of the police and militia. All this has been going on, harassed certainly but not halted, for several months.

A feature of the abuse to which Kuron was subjected, and an index of the nervousness of the atmosphere (and the authorities), is anti-Semitism. Things are not as bad as they were in 1968 (when the “cosmopolitan” origins of student leaders were sneered at in the newspapers). But they are nasty. One man who wrote an insulting letter to Kuron by registered mail sent another letter by hand saying that the anti-Semitic innuendos in the first one had been dictated to him in a police station. Nobody to whom I told this story (unprovable by me firsthand though I saw the letters) seemed a bit surprised. It is, of course, an utterly deranged method of dealing with dissent; first because Kuron himself is not Jewish, and second because much of the vulgar postwar anti-Semitism in Poland originates in the fact that so many of the Communist Party apparat were. For a communist government to use, or tolerate the use of, a racial prejudice which has been used against itself is a kind of cynicism which suggests more than temporary unease.

Indeed, cynicism is a common currency. Although many of the Committee to Defend the Workers (K.O.R.) are ex-members of the Polish Socialist Party (and, interestingly, mention the fact in the short biographies they have produced), the general boredom with political rhetoric goes incredibly deep. True, the dissidents set great store by the support of Western Communist and Socialist parties. But they are careful to de-emphasize politics when approaching Polish public opinion. One girl who worked as a sympathizer of the Committee told me that she found herself believing things she knew not to be true or reasonable, just because the government media kept telling her the opposite. Kuron himself, whose prison sentence was largely incurred for a near Trotskyist critique of the ruling party in the sixties, said rather sadly that he did not feel the next wave of popular opposition would be very socialist in character because the very word had been brought into disrepute by the authorities.

The treatment of news, ideas, and information is, indeed, revealingly bad. Bad, for the obvious reason that it is monotone and boring. Revealing, because any intelligent Pole can get the book or paper he requires, listen to the radio, or correspond with friends abroad. It takes a little effort and, in the case of Radio Free Europe, a little skepticism, but it can be done and the government knows it. Why, then, does it persist in acting as if it did not? It almost suggests that those in charge of propaganda do not care whether they are believed or not. One example. Everybody knew that the much hailed Corvalán release in exchange for Bukovsky was due to a deal and not to the trumpeted “international solidarity.” Another example. The second shipyard strike at Stettin in 1971 was virtually provoked by workers reading in the Party paper that they had volunteered to work longer hours in the interest of production. How could the editor have imagined anybody believing him? There were promises of more press freedom at the start of the Gierek administration, but these have receded.

Sometimes the papers behave like an extension of the police force. Recently, visiting and domiciled Polish dissidents in London were called on by the Special Branch and asked if they intended any protest against the visit of Prime Minister Jaroszewicz. (This is routine in the case of state visits to London and probably ought not to be as much taken for granted as it is.) The newspaper Zycie Warszawy then reported on its front page that Adam Michnik and others had been held by the British police for anti-British activities, defining anti-British as anti-Polish and linking the two with the spirit of international cooperation. Michnik is quite well known in Poland as a historian and political activist. He proposes to return there soon. The falsity of the report will become obvious to all. It is hardly surprising that the Polish government lacks sympathy and understanding among the intelligentsia.

It is quite impossible to gauge the likelihood of the upsurge that some people have gleefully or gloomily predicted. The only certain thing is that opposition has become markedly more bold at all levels, and police methods more jumpy. People are arrested and released again very quickly, as if minds were changing every minute. Interference with the distribution of the K.O.R. communiqués is sporadic and random. The international telephone system is a great boon, and so is the internal one. Workers are prepared to go on strike, and to sign open petitions for the rehiring of sacked employees. Students are prepared to collect money and organize other forms of support and discussion. There is also the prestige of the Church, which publicly criticizes the violations of human rights, without falling into the trap of Cardinal Mindszenty’s rabid reactionary line. Indeed, its record on anti-Semitism is better than that of many Western Catholic leaderships. (Again on the press, Cardinal Wyszynski made a strong statement on repression in his Christmas sermon, in a country not much less than 90-percent Catholic, and there was not a word of it reported.)

When I spoke to Adam Michnik, he was guardedly optimistic. The long Spanish struggle for liberty had impressed him very much by its determination and its solidarity. He felt that there were ways of enlarging the area of pluralism in the here and now, but that there was always the possibility of an outright conflict with no real winners. As for socialism, he favored it in spite of its discredit. “After all, freedom and democracy are words that have been discredited by governments as well, but we do not abandon them. The real struggle for us is for citizens to cease being the property of the state.” There must be a fair number of Polish and Russian bureaucrats who wish they did not own this particular troublesome freehold.

(New Statesman, January 14, 1977)

CONVERSATION WITH DJILAS

THE VICTIMIZATION of Milovan Djilas is the outstanding blot on Tito’s claim to sturdy independence within the communist world. A revolution which cannot deal honorably with its own historians, which forbids them to publish in their own country and then traduces them as unpatriotic when they publish abroad, is in some important sense deformed. When I saw him in June 1977, Djilas was resigned to obscurity in his native heath. Not only was he forbidden to sell his political work in Yugoslavia and subjected to various limitations on his movements in and out of the country, but he also found himself prohibited from marketing his translation of Paradise Lost into Serbo-Croat. And, as he remarked ruefully, there is no other translation which could serve in its stead. Party leaderships commonly distrust and dislike the heretic more than they detest the common enemy, but the streak of peasant vengeance which has been vented on Djilas has deprived young Yugoslavs of the chance to find out where they really came from.

Because, with his new book Wartime, Djilas has undertaken to describe the birth of a nation. Total war came early to Yugoslavia, made all the more terrible by the fact that the Nazi invaders considered their victims to be racially inferior. This license to kill led to such atrocity, and such resistance, that by the end Churchill and Stalin were vying for the favors of the communist leadership. The fact that both scrounging imperial paws were severely bitten goes to show something that is still true—and still denied by imperialists of all hues. Put simply, whole peoples do not wage bitter struggles for liberation in order to become the creatures of another power. Yugoslavia was really the first country in this century to prove that point, and to uphold it in the face of the travesty socialism of other lands “liberated” by the Red Army alone.

The scope and intensity of Wartime is such as to defy paraphrase. For example, here is Djilas recording an incident in the hideous winter of 1943:

The Italians in the little town surrendered, and we took over the outer fortifications. All the Italian troops—the entire Third Battalion of the 259th Regiment of the Murge division—were put to death. We put into effect the conditions they had rejected, and vented our bitterness. Only the drivers were spared—to help transport the munitions and the wounded. Many corpses were tossed into the Rama river. Several got caught among the logs, and I shared with our officers a malicious joy at the thought of Italian officers on the bridges and embankments of Mostar stricken with horror at the sight of the Neretva choked with the corpses of their soldiers.

It seems useful to quote this at length because it shows total callousness: such prisoners as are spared are specifically described as being spared for the performance of menial tasks. Also because Djilas does not just describe the gloating of others at the deed, but specifically includes his own schadenfreude.

Unlike all previous Balkan hostilities, the fight of the Yugoslav partisans was not just for national emancipation but for a parallel social revolution. Thus it was a civil war as well, and some of Djilas’s most effective passages describe the cruelty and coldness of the battle between Tito’s men and the pro-fascist forces and their collaborators. If anything had been missing from the description of total war, this last dimension supplied it. It also, and of necessity, internationalized the conflict. Tito and Djilas looked to Moscow as the motherland of all oppressed classes and nations. Djilas sets down here, as he has in a different context elsewhere, his initial misgivings about the great despot. Stalin in these pages radiates cynicism and cunning, and another feature which is less often remarked: he did not seem to care what even his most devoted foreign admirers thought of him. This glimpse of untrammeled, arrogant, pure power is valuable even if it is not surprising in retrospect. One has to imagine a man like Djilas, who has fought the Wehrmacht for scorched earth over several years, has lost almost all his family and many of his friends, has fought not in somebody else’s country but in his very own, and who then takes a precarious airplane flight to discover disgust in Moscow. The sequence of events makes up a genuine fragment of twentieth-century experience.

Eurocommunism these days is presented as a bland and sophisticated business. There is the Gucci socialism of Enrico Berlinguer or the petit commerçant compromise of Georges Marchais, both redolent of the main chance but both partially sanctified by the resistance records of the parties concerned. Djilas is one of those uncomfortable presences who remind us of the pioneers and of the utter ruthlessness required in order to have a revolution and to preserve it. He concludes:

Revolutions are justified as acts of life, acts of living. Their idealization is a cover-up for the egotism and love of power of the new revolutionary masters. But efforts to restore pre-revolutionary forms are even more meaningless and unrealistic. I sensed all of this even then. But choice does not depend only on one’s personal outlook but also on reality. With my present outlook, I would not have been able to do what I had done then.

There is a testament of ambiguity worth having, from a man who knows. When I saw Djilas last, he had not degenerated into cynicism. He described himself as a democratic socialist (“Please, not a social democrat. They want to reform capitalism; I want to reform communism”). So I asked him whom he admired. The answer was swift and provocative. “If you mean current thinkers, I most admire von Hayek and Karl Popper.” Hayek? “Yes, though I cannot agree with him about property.” It seemed at first sight like Hamlet without the prince, but when one of the leaders of the revolution has to keep his mouth shut, and when the right to hold an opinion is more important than what opinions you hold, perhaps it isn’t so surprising. After Wartime, it would be difficult to be surprised by anything.

(New Statesman, September 9, 1977)

A SENSE OF MISSION: The Raj Quartet

THE APPROACH TO Bombay over the Arabian Sea is both more and less stirring when made by Air-India than when taken as a passage on the P&O Line. You miss the commerce of Port Said, the charms of the Canal, and the stunning heat of Steamer Point at Aden. But, if you are lucky enough to arrive in early evening, you see the gorgeous Bombay water-front from the air. It reveals itself as a string of pointed brilliants along a fine and curvaceous corniche. “See—we are calling it Queen Victoria’s necklace,” said my Indian neighbor with more pride than irony. Once on the ground, the first-time visitor has an Aladdin’s cave of choice. There is the Gateway to India, a grandiose arched monument to the visit of Their Majesties King George and Queen Mary in 1911. Beside it stands the Taj Hotel, one of the finest in the Orient and a place of resort which was, in colonial times, what Shepheards was to Cairo or Raffles to Singapore. A boat ride from the steps will take you to the Island of the Elephants, to inspect the cave art of prehistory. In the other direction, a horse-drawn taxi will deposit you at a respectful distance from the Towers of Silence, where the Parsees expose their dead to the reverent and efficient vultures. Many of the inhabitants of this ancient quarter are recent arrivals from Iran, where the new Islamic Republic has no time for their rare and exclusive beliefs. It was in Bombay, too, that Mohammed Ali Jinnah was born, practiced law, and began to conceive of the first modern state to be consecrated to Islam. He wanted to name it for the provinces of Punjab, Afghanistan, Kashmir, and Sind. The acronym Pakistan, thus happily formed in the Urdu tongue, means “Land of the Pure.”

Behind the imposing British-built law courts, railway station, museum, and civil-service buildings, there is as fine a stew of misery and deprivation as you could wish to find. This area of the city sends its envoys up to the corniche, each one accredited with the appropriate sores, deformities, and amputations. I used to think that the story of “organized begging”—of urchin godfathers and ghetto Fagins—was a callous invention by British tourists who wanted to rationalize their own parsimony. It isn’t. Offer a parched and filthy child a sandwich and a glass of milk after he’s followed you along the street pointing at his stomach and his open mouth, and see what happens. He looks almost terrified. He must furnish the handful of coins at the end of the day, or woe will betide him.

All this is temporarily eclipsed for me, however, by an incident on my very first day. I have come to write a film script for the BBC, so I am met by an English travel agent and a driver. The agent is a veteran; parchment-colored and carefully dressed; one of those who “stayed on” after independence instead of legging it to Kenya, to Rhodesia, or to Cheltenham. He smokes and so do I, so I offer him an English cigarette (“from home,” as he puts it) and pass the packet in front of the Indian driver. The driver takes one, too, and stores it somewhere. I’m at once aware of a certain “as it were” in the atmosphere. As soon as the driver has left us, my protector says, in a moderately avuncular way, “Look, old boy, you’re new here. A word of advice. It doesn’t do to be too chummy. Only encourages them.”

I ought really to be angry or impatient. But I am delighted. So it is true! They really did talk like that. Here is a direct, anthropological link with a past that seems, over a mere forty years, to have receded into antiquity. The tones of the Raj, so often caricatured and lampooned, still have their continuity. Except that, today, their proprietor would not care to employ them in front of the driver.

My grandfather was a ranker in the Indian army, and his retirement bungalow was named for the hill station of Coonoor. Gurkha kukris and a bound history of the Mutiny were the centerpieces of its decoration, together with a scattering of ivory elephants and a Benares brass tray as if ready for a round of Kim’s game. My father’s naval and military club was hung with prints, more than half of them commemorating battles like Chillianwallah or Gandamack—bloody shows in which the outnumbered British (how few there always were, in truth as well as in legend) fought off the gaudy warriors of the Mahrattas or kept watch on the hopeless defiles of the Khyber Pass.

One grew up knowing about it. Today, in every English town there is at least one restaurant called the Star of India, and in London the mixture of Bengali, Gujerati, Punjabi, and Tamil recipes has produced one of the world’s finest cuisines—a staple for lower-income Brits as well as, at its most exalted, a luxury and an indulgence. Sikh temples and Pakistani mosques have broken the near-monopoly of the Church of England; men with turbans and women in saris are a common sight, though, as in their home country, they are too often relegated to sweepers’ jobs. In everyday language there is an Indian presence in the vernacular, ranging from innocuous words like veranda, bungalow, and gymkhana to more ominous ones such as juggernaut, goon, and thug. The Raj is all around us, still.

If English history divides into the imperial and the postimperial, then the only really important date in the transition is 1948, when the subcontinent became simultaneously partitioned and independent. India was not just the Jewel in the Crown; she was the crown. All other imperial commitments—in Egypt, Mesopotamia, Aden, Cyprus, Somalia, and elsewhere—were undertaken with the idea of safeguarding or shortening the route to India. Even the Cape of Good Hope was seen as a staging post to Bombay. Once India had “gone,” you could predict with certainty that the rest would wither. There was no point. No one had the heart or the stomach to keep them up. For many English people, the shock has never worn off. As they look back on India, the British feel that odd and stirring mixture of guilt and pride that is the essence of the postimperial. Paul Scott’s quadrilogy is without competitors in the skill with which it distills this essence further into literature.*

These antinomies—of pride and guilt in having “civilized” India and exploited the Indians—have their ancestry in the Victorian era. The two greatest historical commentators of the period both expressed themselves vividly on India and “the Indian Question.” One way of introducing Scott’s achievement is to compare and contrast the writings of Marx and Macaulay.

When Ernest Jones, the Chartist leader, first heard the imperialist phrase about the dominion “on which the sun never sets,” he added scornfully, “and on which the blood never dries.” Marx and Macaulay would have found the first phrase fatuous but the second simplistic. Even when I was a stripling, English schoolchildren were still being taught, and sometimes made to learn by heart, Macaulay’s famous encomium to British rule in the East. He enthralled the House of Commons, on July 10, 1833, with a long and majestic defense of the India Bill, the locus classicus (for once the term is unaffected) of what lesser Britons could hardly have articulated for themselves. What he articulated was the sense of mission. India before the advent of the East India Company had been, he declared, “the rapid succession of Alarics and Attilas passing over the defenceless empire.” With this brisk dismissal of past millennia, Macaulay went on to evoke the British engagement in “a great, a stupendous process—the reconstruction of a decomposed society.” He stressed the unselfish optimism with which this project was being executed:

I observe with reverence and delight the honourable poverty which is the evidence of a rectitude firmly maintained amidst strong temptations. I rejoice to see my countrymen, after ruling millions of subjects … return to their native land with no more than a decent competence.

This was certainly the self-image in which the servants of the East India Company were wont to bask. But, as Macaulay wrote to his sister, Lady Hannah Trevelyan, on August 17 of the same year:

I must live; I can live only by my pen, and it is absolutely impossible for any man to write enough to procure him a decent subsistence, and at the same time to take an active part in politics. I have never made more than two hundred pounds a year by my pen. I could not support myself in comfort on less than five hundred, and I shall in all probability have many others to support. The prospects of our family are, if possible, darker than ever.

However, there was a gleam of light in this Stygian prospect—the offer of a post as Law Member in India. As he went on:

The salary is ten thousand pounds a year. I am assured by persons who know Calcutta intimately and have themselves mixed in the highest circles and held the highest offices at that Presidency, that I may live in splendour there for five thousand a year, and may save the rest of the salary with the accruing interest. I may therefore hope to return to England, at only thirty-nine, in the full vigour of life, with a fortune of thirty thousand pounds. A larger fortune I never desired.

He got the job a year later and did indeed return from Calcutta with something more than “a decent competence.” We are all the richer for it, so it might seem churlish to draw attention to this example of the higher British hypocrisy. There was, at any rate, something of magnificence about it.

The striking thing about Karl Marx’s view of the matter is not its hostility to that of Macaulay but its similarity. In a penetrating series of articles in the New York Daily Tribune, published in 1853, he naturally excoriated the greed and the callousness of the British system of extraction. But, in a passage that almost recalls Macaulay on “Alarics and Attilas,” he wrote:

Sickening as it must be to human feeling to witness those myriads of industrious, patriarchal and inoffensive social organizations disorganized and dissolved into their units, thrown into a sea of woes, and their individual members losing at the same time their ancient form of civilisation and their hereditary means of subsistence, we must not forget that these idyllic village communities, inoffensive though they may appear, had always been the solid foundation of Oriental despotism, that they restrained the human mind within the smallest possible compass, making it the unresisting tool of superstition, enslaving it beneath traditional rules, depriving it of all grandeur and historical energies… .

We must not forget that this stagnatory, undignified and vegetative life, that this passive sort of existence, evoked on the other hand, in contradistinction, wild, aimless, unbounded forces of destruction and rendered murder itself a religious rite in Hindustan.

We must not forget that these little, communities were contaminated by distinctions of caste and by slavery, that they subjected man to external circumstances instead of elevating man to the sovereign of circumstances, that they transformed a self-developing social state into never-changing natural destiny, and thus brought about a brutalising worship of nature, exhibiting its degradation in the fact that man, the sovereign of nature, fell down on his knees in adoration of Hanuman, the monkey, and Sabbala, the cow.

In a very candid and blunt fashion, Marx affirmed that “the British were the first conquerors superior, and therefore inaccessible, to Hindu civilisation.” Not content to treat India as a mere satrapy, they had penetrated down to village level in pursuit of gain, and their introduction of cotton-milling machinery and of a network of railways had begun the transformation of the country even though, as one governor general reported in the year that Macaulay took up his post, “The misery hardly finds a parallel in the history of commerce. The bones of the cotton-weavers are bleaching the plains of India.”

Marx identified five tendencies, all of them derived from British dominion, which gave promise of making India what it had never been before—a country in its own right. The first was “political unity … more consolidated and extending further than ever it did under the Great Moguls”; a unity which was to be “strengthened and extended by the electric telegraph.” Second was the existence of a “native army,” disciplined and owing allegiance to a central power. Third was “the free press, introduced for the first time into Asiatic society.” Fourth was the creation, however grudgingly, of a stratum of educated Indians, “endowed with the requirements for government and imbued with European science.” Finally, and rather obviously, comes “regular and rapid communication with Europe” through steamships. All of these developments, given time to mature, would enable Indians to transcend the colonial power which had, for its own purposes, conferred the benefits.

I haven’t the least idea whether Paul Scott (who died in 1979) ever read these tentative but prescient articles. His Quartet, nevertheless, illustrates their point to an extraordinary degree. By the time that we are introduced to his characters, British and Indian, and to their context, it has become obvious that India has outgrown Britain. “We don’t rule this country anymore,” says the resentful policeman Ronald Merrick to the thoughtful Sarah Layton. “We preside over it.” Only the most myopic and farcical characters in these four novels fail to see that this is true. Of those who do see it, each achieves the realization in a different way and with differing degrees of good grace. But the novels are unique in their genre, in taking the end of Empire as imminent, or for granted, from the very first page.

In the four successive novels, though, the British as a class are still reclining on their credit without fully realizing that a term has been set to it. “Political unity,” especially in contrast to the venality and instability of the Moguls, is endlessly celebrated as the justification for Empire. So is the wonder of the electric telegraph and the railway. The “native army,” in the shape of the Pankot Rifles and the Muzzafirabad Guides, is practically the raison d’être of the British military caste, the existence of an Indian host under the British flag affording the most adamant proof of the durability of their “mission.” Hari Kumar, in his Anglicized incarnation as Harry Coomer, exemplifies both the “free press” and the emergence of the educated governing class. He is so English and sophisticated that he irritates even the non-public-school Brits (like Ronald Merrick). When he has annoyed so many of them as to make himself unemployable, he finds a job on one of the local papers—the Mayapore Gazette. Though the British censor the paper in time of emergency, they can never quite bring themselves to close it down.

As World War II begins, the authorities are becoming queasily aware that even their favorite Indians are turning against them. There is passive resistance when the viceroy declares war on the Axis, on behalf of India, without even the pretense of consulting the Indian National Congress. Passive resistance turns to riot and mayhem when the leaders of the Congress Party are arrested for urging noncooperation with the war effort. In the course of this disorder, the British find that it is the most advanced and refined Indians who are the political leaven. Worse still, there are rumors from the war front with Japan. It seems that soldiers and officers of the Indian army have deserted and joined the enemy, preferring even Hirohito to continued British rule. Of what avail are the telegraphs and the railway networks when the natives have become convinced that theirs is to be the last unfree generation?

In almost every chapter of the quadrilogy there is some reference, however slanting, to one or other of two historical events. The first is “Bibighar” and the second is “Jallianwallah,” or Amritsar. Bibighar is the name of the public garden where Daphne Manners, an awkward, gentle, decent English girl, is set upon by a gang and raped during the “disturbances” above. The injustice which results from this outrage, and the perverted motives of those who perpetrate and perpetuate the injustice, is the nemesis of the whole Quartet. It is the single incident that binds all the characters, and all the action, together. “Bibighar” happens also to be the name of the place in Cawnpore where English women and children were done to death by the sepoy mutineers of 1857. “Jallianwallah,” in apparent contrast, was the bazaar district of Amritsar where, on April 13, 1919, General Dyer gave the order to fire on a protesting crowd, killing over three hundred and maiming over one thousand Indians.

These two “incidents” became part of the British imperial psyche. The Bibighar massacre at Cawnpore was essential in providing a righteous justification for the crushing of the Indian Mutiny—a crushing that was not without its own sadistic aspect, with prisoners blown from the mouths of cannon and others flogged nearly to death. (Marx and Macaulay both, incidentally, agreed that the British were justified in suppressing a revolt aimed at the restoration of the Mogul system. It was the events of 1857 that decided the British to replace the East India Company with direct rule by the Crown—a conspicuous “advance.”)

Amritsar/Jallianwallah was more complex. Officially, General Dyer’s action was condemned. But the view of most of the colonial Establishment, who clubbed together for an appeal fund in his name, was that he was an honest soldier betrayed by the usual pusillanimous bureaucrats. Mabel Layton, the honorable military widow in Scott’s narrative, risks ostracism by sending her subscription instead to the families of the massacred Indians. Toward the end of her life, when she talks in her sleep and appears to be asking for someone named “Gillian Waller,” nobody can make out her ramblings.

It’s not too much to say that these two symbols form the counterpoint of The Raj Quartet. On the one hand is the fear—in part a guilty fear—of treachery, mutiny, and insurrection; of burning and pillage in which even one’s own servants cannot be trusted. On the other is the fear of having to break that trust oneself; of casting aside the pretense of consent and paternalism and ruling by terror and force. The persistence of these two complementary nightmares says a good deal about the imperial frame of mind.

Scott works on this counterpoint in a long, clever section entitled “Civil and Military,” in which he gives two accounts of the same Indian uprising in 1942. The first is by Brigadier A. V. Reid, author of the unpublished memoir “A Simple Life.” The second is by Robin White of the Indian Civil Service. Reid is one of those brilliantly uncomprehending fellows who just haven’t got the point about the end of Empire and who are inclined to “leave all that to the politicians” while they “get on with the job in hand.” For him, law is law and order is order. Like Dyer, he can make history only by accident. White sets him off perfectly by saying:

I honestly believe that the Indian is emotionally predisposed against violence. That would explain the hysteria that usually marks his surrender to it. He then goes beyond all ordinary bounds, like someone gone mad because he’s destroying his own faith as well. We on the other hand are emotionally disposed towards violence, and have to work hard at keeping ourselves in order. Which is why at the beginning of our wars we’ve always experienced a feeling of relief and said things like, “Now we know where we stand.”

Having caught, with such economy, the British attitude to fighting (We didn’t start it but we can finish it… . We lose every battle but the last), White also makes the following dry observations:

I would take as my premiss that the Indians wanted to be free, and that we also wished this, but that they had wanted to be free for just that much longer than we had felt or agreed that they should be; that given this situation the conflict arose partly as a result of the lack of synchronisation of the timing of the two wishes but also because this, in time, developed into a lack of synchronisation of the wishes themselves.

This must be Scott speaking. In 1857, the British knew they were right, and may have been. In 1919, they had to bellow that they were right in order to drown out the suspicion that they might be wrong. By 1942, the only justification for remaining in India was, at least ostensibly, the defeat of the Japanese. But, by then, Indians had lost interest in all justifications, however righteous. The simplicity of Gandhi’s slogan—Quit India!—was ideal in its pith and pungency. Unfortunately, he also added (as his admirers tend to forget) that the British should leave India “to God or to anarchy,” which was a false antithesis in view of what lay ahead, as well as a very permissive view of Japanese imperialism.

THIS IS THE POINT at which to introduce Scott’s second main theme. Even while the British were thumping their chests about preserving India, they were preparing to amputate and dismember it. The Raj Quartet fore-shadows and prefigures partition from its earliest chapters. Hari Kumar writes, as Harry Coomer, to his old friend from public-school days in England, Colin Lindsey. The year is 1940, and young Lindsey is back from Dunkirk:

I think there’s no doubt that in the last twenty years—whether intentionally or not—the English have succeeded in dividing and ruling, and the kind of conversation I hear at these social functions I attend—Guides recruitment, Jumble Sales, mixed cricket matches (usually rained off and ending with a bun fight in a series of tents invisibly marked Europeans Only and Other Races)—makes me realise the extent to which the English now seem to depend upon the divisions in Indian political opinion perpetuating their own rule at least until after the war, if not for some time beyond it. They are saying openly that it is “no good leaving the bloody country because there’s no Indian party representative enough to hand it over to.” They prefer Muslims to Hindus (because of the closer affinity that exists between God and Allah than exists between God and the Brahma), are constitutionally predisposed to Indian princes, emotionally affected by the thought of untouchables, and mad keen about the peasants who look upon any Raj as God… . But isn’t two hundred years long enough to unify? They accept credit for all the improvements they’ve made. But can you claim credit for one without accepting blame for the other? Who, for instance, five years ago, had ever heard of the concept of Pakistan—the separate Muslim state? I can’t believe that Pakistan will ever become a reality, but if it does it will be because the English prevaricated long enough to allow a favoured religious minority to seize a political opportunity.

Kumar has seen the irony, one that encompasses his own position. The British are now negating their very own justification for being in India and are allying themselves with exactly the forces of feudalism, of faction, and of superstition which it was their original mission to depose. But, with the coming of the Japanese threat, there is one last excuse. Even the liberal Brits, like the selfless and dotty missionary Edwina Crane, take down their pictures of Gandhi. With characteristic sympathy, Scott portrays their hopeless position too:

The upright oblong patch of pale distemper, all that was left to Miss Crane of the Mahatma’s spectacled, smiling image, the image of a man she had put her faith in which she had now transferred to Mr Nehru and Mr Rajagopalachari who obviously understood the different degrees of tyranny men could exercise and, if there had to be a preference, probably preferred to live a little while longer with the imperial degree in order not only to avoid submitting to but to resist the totalitarian. Looking at Clancy and Barrett and imagining in their place a couple of indoctrinated storm-troopers or ancestor-worshippers, whose hope of heaven lay in death in battle, she knew which she herself preferred.

Which is finely wrought stuff, but which does not prevent Miss Crane and Miss Daphne Manners from being coarsely handled when the Indians rebel against their actual oppressors. The point is that Britain’s right to decide these questions of preference and degree is no longer acknowledged even when, or perhaps especially when, the British themselves may have a point. This is Robin White’s paradox about timing and synchronization. Scott illustrates the problem by showing how Edwina Crane and Daphne Manners are made the excuse for reprisal by the very type of Englishman they least admire. In this apparent contradiction, of humane argument being made the license for an inhumane policy, Scott catches the end of Empire. It is the cultivated Hari who is framed for the assault on Daphne, and framed by men who loathe his educated bearing and detest the thought of interracial “carrying-on.” The whole contradiction is put, with ferocious understatement, in the early chapters of The Towers of Silence:

If you look in places like Ranpur for evidence of things these island people left behind which were of value, you might choose any one of several of the public works and installations as visible proof of them: the roads and railways and telegraphs for a modern system of communication, the High Court for a sophisticated code of civil and criminal law, the college for education to university standard, the State Legislature for democratic government, the Secretariat for a civil service made in the complex image of that in Whitehall; the clubs for a pattern of urbane and civilised behaviour, the messes and barracks for an ideal of military service to the mother country. These were bequeathed, undoubtedly; these and the language and the humpy graves in the English cemetery of St Luke’s in the oldest part of the cantonment, many of whose headstones record an early death, a cutting off before the prime or in the prime, with all that this suggests in the way of unfinished business.

But it is not these things which most impress the stranger on his journey into the civil lines, into the old city itself… . What impresses him is something for which there is no memorial but which all these things collectively bear witness to: the fact that here in Ranpur, and in places like Ranpur, the British came to the end of themselves as they were.

Here is the elegiac echo of the annual Remembrance Day service (“And some there are who have no memorial”). Here, also, we can find a reminiscence of Macaulay (“the prime or in the prime” sits well with the “full vigour of life” with which he hoped to enjoy his spoils) and more than an echo of Marx, who saw that the imperial edifice was built to change but not to last. He did not anticipate, as he celebrated the technical and administrative innovations of the British, that they would lose to a man who revered the spinning wheel and the stifling village culture.

The British began by raping and plundering India, then developed a sentimental conscience about it, only then conceived of themselves as “civilizers.” At the start, an officer was supposed to be the father of his native troops—thus the concept of “Man Bap,” which carried with it the responsibility to die for them if need arose. One of Scott’s officers actually does live up to this code, expending his life in a pointless attempt to retrieve some deserters. But the image that remains is that of his brother officers, who never even put on their shoes without first rapping them on the floor for fear of scorpions. By the very end, they were full of pretended astonishment and hurt at the base ingratitude of their subjects. As Brecht once put it:

And even in Atlantis of the legend,

The night the seas rushed in—

The drowning men still bellowed for their slaves.

Like E. M. Forster, Scott saw the ways in which illustrations of sex and character could bring these dilemmas alive. His most scrupulously drawn figures are sometimes the ones who take up the least apparent space. Among these, the brave and gawky Daphne Manners is the most salient. She realizes quickly, even from her protected background, that the sex thing and the race thing have a kind of sickly connection:

I thought that the whole bloody affair of us in India had reached flash point. It was bound to, because it was based on a violation. Perhaps at one time there was a moral as well as a physical force at work. But the moral thing had gone sour. Has gone sour. Our faces reflect the sourness. The women look worse than the men because consciousness of physical superiority is unnatural to us. A white man in India can feel physically superior without unsexing himself. But what happens to a woman if she tells herself that ninety-nine per cent of the men she sees are not men at all, but creatures of an inferior species whose colour is their main distinguishing mark? What happens when you unsex a nation, treat it like a nation of eunuchs? Because that’s what we’ve done, isn’t it?

The matter of “character,” always so decisive in a colonial enterprise, is given great prominence by Scott’s narrative. Daphne’s aunt, Lady Ethel Manners, is by her rank and station invulnerable to the climbers and the bigots who infest the British community. Nobody can accuse her, the widow of a governor, of being low in moral fiber. So, when she says

the creation of Pakistan is our crowning failure. I can’t bear it. They should never have got rid of Wavell. Our only justification for two hundred years of power was unification. But we’ve divided one composite nation into two and everyone at home goes round saying what a swell the new Viceroy is for getting it all sorted out so quickly—

she is hard to contradict.

Scott disliked hypocrisy, and his novels are pitiless about self-deception. He even admires those who are honest in their prejudices and prepared to take risks for them. Ronald Merrick, the chip-on-the-shoulder cop who proposes to Daphne and who frames Kumar, has no time for Daphne’s agonies of embarrassment for the gelded Indian male:

That’s the oldest trick in the game, to say colour doesn’t matter. It does matter. It’s basic. It matters like hell.

Mohammed Ali Kasim, the Muslim Congress activist who knows that Congress is becoming a Hindu sectarian movement but who will not betray his party to the British and spends the war in prison, is another man who gets points for character. He tears a strip off his own son for defecting from the Indian army to the Japanese—not just because it was a politically repulsive act but because it involved the breaking of an oath and the betrayal of friends. The son, of course, opts for Pakistan when the time comes.

Scott’s Quartet is the only work in English, moreover, which is serious or thoughtful about Subhas Chandra Bose. The neglected and forgotten hero of Bengali resistance to British rule, Bose became the leader of the pro-Japanese deserters during World War II. Streets and squares in Calcutta are still named for him, setting a puzzle for those who believe that India was liberated by Gandhian nonviolence. The figure of Gandhi emerges from Scott’s pages in his full and deserved colors: as ambiguous and evasive, and as prepared to compromise with violence only when he could plausibly disown it. The British colonialists seldom appreciated this point, and the English and American liberals never. Scott clearly favors the Indian side but sees no occasion to romanticize it or to conceal the real cost of its victory. This enables him to hold out the realistic promise of genuine friendship between Indians and Englishmen, and to name its price, which was the abolition of hypocrisy and condescension. The condition for that, in turn, was the realization that the glory had departed.

This realization was, in its literal sense, unavailable to Forster. When he was visiting India, and later writing about it, there seemed every likelihood that the Raj would endure for many generations to come. This is one of the many contrasts between his work and that of Scott. The two have been much compared lately, because of the renewed interest in India generated by Richard Attenborough’s hagiography of Gandhi and because both A Passage to India and The Jewel in the Crown have been adapted for the screen.

The prospects for the film version of Forster’s masterpiece look dire, if the reported remarks of its director, David Lean, are anything to go by. “As far as I’m aware,” he says, “nobody has yet succeeded in putting India on the screen” (The Times of London). Too bad for Mrinal Sen and Satyajit Ray. Then he reveals, in an interview with The Observer, that

Forster was a bit anti-English, anti-Raj and so on. I suppose it’s a tricky thing to say, but I’m not so much. I intend to keep the balance more. I don’t believe all the English were a lot of idiots. Forster rather made them so… . I’ve cut out that bit at the trial where they try to take over the court.

As for Aziz, there’s a hell of a lot of Indian in him. They’re marvellous people but maddening sometimes, you know… . He’s a goose. But he’s warm and you like him awfully. I don’t mean that in a derogatory way—things just happen to him. He can’t help it. And Miss Quested … well, she’s a bit of a prig and a bore in the book, you know. I’ve changed her, made her more sympathetic. Forster wasn’t always very good with women.

One other thing. I’ve got rid of that “Not yet, not yet” bit. You know, when the Quit India stuff comes up, and we have the passage about driving us into the sea? Forster experts have always said it was important, but the Fielding-Aziz relationship was not sustained by those sorts of things… . Anyway, I see it as a personal not a political story.

One rubs the eyes at such a find. What a trove of pristine, boneheaded artifacts! Beside this Compleat Philistine, my Bombay guide is a poet and a dreamer. There is no sense of mission here, no risk taking. Nor yet any grandiose engagement with India. All that is left is a banal sense of superiority and a desire “to keep the balance more.” Add the distinctly inexpensive remark about Forster and women, and you have the whole tepid, vulgar mixture at the right temperature.

It’s almost enough to coerce one into agreement with Salman Rushdie, the clever author of Midnight’s Children and Shame, who has emerged as a sort of professional scourge of the postcolonial stereotype. But he fails, with his slightly obvious sarcasm, to wipe the foolish smirk of complacency off the face of David Lean. And, in the course of his essay “Outside the Whale,” he also attempts a great injustice against Scott;

The rape of Daphne Manners in the Bibighar Gardens derives just as plainly from Forster’s Passage to India [sic]… . Where Forster’s scene in the Marabar caves retains its ambiguity and mystery, Scott gives us not one rape but a gang assault, and one perpetrated, what is more, by peasants. Smelly persons of the worst sort. So class as well as sex is violated; Daphne gets the works. It is useless, I’m sure, to suggest that if a rape must be used as the metaphor of the Indo-British connection, then surely, in the interests of accuracy, it should be the rape of an Indian woman by one or more Englishmen of whatever class… . Not even Forster dared write about such a crime. So much more evocative to conjure up white society’s fear of the darkie, of big brown cocks.

This is so crude as to seem intentionally unfair. It is hopelessly wrong, for a start, in point of the action. What happens to Daphne Manners in the Bibighar is that she is observed, making love to her Indian boyfriend Hari, by a gang of louts who she later says (partly to protect Hari, and partly in order to prevent a court hearing) could well have been British soldiers in disguise. How much more different could she be from the spoiled, vapid Adela Quested (made “more sympathetic” by Lean), who only aborts her hysterical frame-up by a last-minute failure of nerve. Not to be too dogmatic about it, Adela is not raped and Aziz is not punished; Daphne is raped, though not by Hari, and Hari is punished.

Indeed, the whole drama of Scott’s Quartet is that the wrong people are arraigned and viciously punished, for a crime that is not imaginary, by the supposedly civilizing and impartial British. More, that even those who know the circumstances are unable to alter the process. The gradual realization of this injustice, and of its varied implications, is what gives the four books their unity and provides a nexus between the disparate characters. Hari Kumar is himself sexually assaulted by Merrick in the course of his interrogation. Does Rushdie say that “not even” Forster would dare to describe that? If not, what is the force of his point? As for the “big brown cock” factor, surely Rushdie knows that the British were not especially paranoid on this point (at least not in India). And Daphne seems hardly to have been afraid of the idea at all. One senses a gallery being played to here.

Scott actually uses his rape and its aftermath as a metaphor of divide and rule. The Hindu boys who are flogged, fondled, and framed by the British are also given beef disguised as mutton by their Muslim jailers. The ramifications of this blasphemy (which recalls the British- sponsored dietary violations leading to the 1857 Mutiny) would not be attempted by an author who sought merely to counterfeit Forster.

Yet it is true, in a more generous sense than the one intended by Rushdie, that Scott is in debt to A Passage to India. I think that the debt is handsomely paid and that the lines which connect the two works are not plagiaristic but form authentic continuity and descent. Some phrases, for instance, are common to both. “Bridge Party” occurs in both Forster and in The Day of the Scorpion. It means not a card game, but an official, sponsored mingling of English hosts and Indian guests. It conjures up appalling scenes of obligatory hospitality and contrived politeness, but it was obviously common colonial argot and therefore available to both authors.

Like Scott, Forster was preoccupied by the Amritsar massacre, which actually occurred between the time of his trip and publication of the novel. Phrases such as “He wanted to flog every native that he saw,” “Call in the troops and clear the bazaars,” “They ought to crawl” were all inserted as evocations of precisely what General Dyer had actually ordered. It has even been speculated that the name of Aziz’s counsel, Amritrao, is intended to recall the Jallianwallah massacre to the inner ear.

In the case of Amritsar, it was the rough treatment of the missionary Marcella Sherwood which brought out the beast in General Dyer and made him command the floggings and the shootings, as well as issue the order that all Indians traverse the street where it happened on their hands and knees. Edwina Crane, the missionary lady who is ill used by the rioters in The Jewel in the Crown, is told by their leader that he will not rape her because he would not “waste his strength and manhood on such a dried up old bag of bones.” Daphne, too, is unmistakably depicted as plain and awkward. This must owe something to the famous court scene in A Passage to India where the prosecutor, Mr. McBryde, gives his opinion that the dark-skinned desire the fair, but never vice versa. An anonymous interjector says, to the horror of the British, “Even when the lady is so uglier than the gentleman?” Alas, what he says is true and undeniable.

Those who employ rape as a literary metaphor for dominion must remember not to take it too far out of its sexual context. Forster and Scott bear this in mind, whereas I think Rushdie overlooks the obvious. Turton, the Collector of the District, remarks in A Passage to India, “After all, it’s our women who make everything more difficult out here.” He implies that they will ask naïve questions about justice, besides making themselves vulnerable to unpleasantness. In his portrayals of Sarah and the Layton family, as well as in his careful depiction of Daphne, Scott is faithful both to Forster and to history on this point.

The political context of The Raj Quartet is strikingly more modern than that of A Passage to India, but here again Scott has borrowed in order to build. He actually sets himself to answer the question that Forster poses on his penultimate page, where Aziz exclaims, while he and Fielding ride past a statue of Hanuman the monkey:

“Clear out, all you Turtons and Burtons. We wanted to know you ten years back—now it’s too late. If we see you and sit on your committees, it’s for political reasons, don’t make any mistake… . Clear out, clear out, I say. Why are we put to so much suffering? We used to blame you, now we blame ourselves, we grow wiser. Until England is in difficulties we keep silent, but in the next European war—aha, aha! Then is our time.” …

“Who do you want instead of the English? The Japanese?” jeered Fielding.

The “jeered” there is perfect—Fielding fancies he has asked a clever and unanswerable question. Scott has now managed to answer it.

For a book published in 1924, that was not a bad prefiguration. So many of its themes are taken up in the Quartet—the restless feminines, the English distrust of the educated class in which they are supposed to take pride, the paltriness of their justice when their own caste is threat-ened—that it must be said to stand on Forster’s shoulders. Where is the shame in that? Scott took the English experience in India up to the conclusion that Forster could only anticipate. In the course of doing so, he created some imperishable moments and characters which, if read with the honesty with which they are written, make all the pathetic efforts at “Raj revisionism” superfluous. He also, in describing how “the British came to the end of themselves as they were,” made a point that is easily overlooked. In its postimperial mode, Britain is often described by reformers as “living on borrowed time.” For all its attempt at conveying a sense of urgency, the phrase has rather a comfortable ring to it, redolent of some dowager in Brighton with expensive ailments and an income from a principal which, however depleted, will nonetheless last her time. The achievement of Scott is to have shown how much of that “borrowed time” belonged to other people.

(Grand Street, Winter 1985)

* The four books in The Raj Quartet are The Jewel in the Crown, The Day of the Scorpion, The Towers of Silence, and A Division of the Spoils.