TIME: Almanac 1990/1990 Time Magazine Compact Almanac, The (1991)(Time).iso/time/060589/06058900.000

Text File | 1990-09-18 | 5.9 KB | 116 lines

ESSAY, Page 90

Reflections on the Revolution in China

By Charles Krauthammer


    Living as we are through the greatest global democratic
awakening in history, it is hard not to feel the thrill Wordsworth
felt when contemplating the French Revolution ("Bliss was it in
that dawn to be alive/ But to be young was very heaven!"). Of
course Wordsworth lived to regret it. But there will be time for
that later. Now is the time to thrill.

    At the stunning uprising in China, of course. But it is only
the latest event in the democratic demarche, which began with the
Philippines and Korea and has now reached wondrous proportions.

    In Lithuania the Soviet-installed, Communist-controlled,
erstwhile puppet parliament votes for independence from the Soviet
Union.

    In Hungary the two wings of the Communist Party are fighting
over whether upcoming multiparty elections mean the Communists will
be voted out of power in six years (the hard-line position) or
sooner (the moderate position).

    Argentina is about to witness the first transition of power
from one popularly elected President to another since 1922, though,
by electing a Peronist, the Argentines have proved once again that
democracy is a people's license to act stupidly.

    In Chile a 15-year-old dictatorship holds a referendum on
itself and loses, proving once again that democracy is a people's
license to act enlightened.

    Poland will not only hold free elections for the upper house
of parliament this month but, in a little noted provision of its
pact with Solidarity, will also have a popular election for
President in six years.

    With such goings-on, it's hard not to get gushy and to feel it
a privilege to have lived to witness such a dawn.

    I admit to feeling a gush or two of Wordsworthian euphoria.
Though a drawing of Yuri Andropov graces my office wall (a warm
reminder of the good old days when The Enemy looked the part), I
am a cold warrior who does not mourn the passing of the great
twilight struggle. The cold war made thinking simpler in a "four
legs good, two legs bad" (the Animal Farm axiom) sort of way. But
simpler doesn't mean better. There could be no happier outcome for
the cold war than for us to win it and for old cold warriors to
face the invigorating challenge of rethinking from the ground up
what America's role in the world, if any, ought to be.

    But some of the gushing is getting out of hand. The most common
bit of mush, endlessly repeated, whether the reporting is from
China or the Soviet Union or Lithuania, is that once the genie of
freedom is out of the bottle it can never be put back in. This is
rank sentimentalism. The idea that somehow, if people have tasted
freedom, the taste cannot be wrung out of them is a fallacy so
large it is embarrassing just to hear it. Think only of this
century. Russia tasted freedom in February 1917 and by October had
lost it for 70 years. Weimar Germany tasted democracy for 14 years;
it took Hitler and his storm troopers a few months to eradicate it.
(Had Hitler not started World War II, the taste might to this day
not have returned.) Hungarians let the genie out in 1956; five days
and 5,000 tanks later, Khrushchev had stuffed it back in.
Twenty-one years ago, the Czechs tasted freedom for an afternoon.
Tell the Czechs that today's "Moscow Spring" is irreversible.
Nothing is irreversible.

    I admit that the genie cannot be put back in the bottle
forever. Oppression and extermination can repress the will to
freedom for decades, sometimes generations, but inevitably it
reappears. That is the lesson we learn from the earthquakes in
China and the Soviet Union and Lithuania and Poland and Hungary.

    The past decade has taught that the classical totalitarian
theory of the '40s and '50s was wrong. That theory, based on Stalin
and Hitler as models, made the then quite reasonable assumption
that modern totalitarianism, harnessed to high technology and
mechanized power (Stalin was once called Genghis Khan with a
telephone), had the capacity not only to suppress freedom but also
to eradicate it. Classical theory postulated the brainwashed mind,
utterly enslaved through terror and manipulation. It supposed the
shattered society, its mediating structures and competing
allegiances (family, church, union) destroyed, leaving an atomized
individual enslaved to the all powerful state.

    Not so. We learn that totalitarianism can terrorize individuals
and shatter civil society, but it cannot change human nature. The
will to freedom can be suppressed, but inevitably it returns.

    But to say that the will to freedom cannot be suppressed
forever is not to say that it cannot be suppressed for a very long
time. And from the point of view of the individual with a finite
life-span that is the same as forever. There are many Soviets who
have lived and died in this century and never known freedom of any
sort. Yes, the suppression of the Prague Spring did not forever
abolish the Czech hunger for freedom. But it did crush the life of
an entire generation.

    No one knows where the Chinese revolution is leading. But the
notion that once a million people have marched in the streets, some
carrying effigies of the Statue of Liberty, things cannot be undone
is wishful thinking. History has provided a generous supply of
Bonapartes and Lenins. Maos too. This is not China's first
revolution. And even if this one does succeed, it will not be the
last.

    The will to freedom is, of course, a constant of human nature.
But so is the will to power. And power is intolerant of freedom.
The drama of today's revolution in China is the contest between the
two. Neither will is absolute. All victories are temporary.

    Hail freedom! But precisely now that it is ascendant, do not
assume that it cannot be sent into long exile. Iran and Nicaragua
and Cuba are now the exception. But only a minute ago they were the
rule. They can be again.